Pray for Japan

After news broke of the massive earthquake and tsunami, I've been thinking of my friend Stardust, not sure where in Japan she and her loved ones live.

God watch over you guys and keep you safe! Hear from you soon!*

Praying for God's protection on Japan and the places with tsunami warnings and alerts.

***

*Update: 

Glad to hear Stardust is well! Take good care, my friend, you, Bear, and Breadcrumbs, and your bro also... stay safe, amen!

Let's be keeping the people and country of Japan in prayer still.

A Blogher blogger has compiled a list of funds here.

Think safety first

Some recent happenings on our end that made me not want to take safety for granted... 


Police have arrested the man who planted the backpack bomb along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr Day march in downtown Spokane. Imagine the deadly impact had city workers not been quick enough to alert the authorities to the ordinary-looking backpack, for the march to be re-routed in time.  


We finally got our first snow day in two winters! Not that the other winterstorms this season were not major.  But so good to know that safety still ranked up there. We didn't drive out in the blizzard and white-out conditions.  Our earlier run-in with ice on a clear day has also made me more conscious about driving slowly and braking early whenever there is snow, slush, ice, sleet, fog or just rain.


In another incident, a total stranger pounced on me with a "BOO!", when my back was turned, buckling the youngest up at a public carpark. It was after dinner, and the 20+ looking gal said she wanted to wake me up for my drive back!  I didn't think that was funny though, it gave me more like a MINI HEART ATTACK + *COLD SWEAT*! The wake-up part for me was the need to watch our backs, and vary my routine while outside waiting with the youngest or younger two for her brothers to be done with their afterschool activities.


Separately, my two boys had their too-close-for-comfort encounters, like being put in a headlock, and plowed to the ground while waiting to take the schoolbus home. The packed schoolbus, I'm glad something is being done about that, as it does save me some to-ing and fro-ing. But it is not the only reason why my sons like me to drive them. They have their rough days and tough moments. 


The schoolmate who picked on my younger boy in the last schoolyear, threatened to do a particular dangerous act to him this time. My elder boy was made aware of how real something like this could be from another incident when a child he asked over to play made slashes on our lounge chair with a pocket knife, that was the parents' gift to her but they denied it. Sigh!


Kids will be kids, but sometimes it could be a fine line between having fun and playing with fire.  My own children are not exempted from us having to tell and remind them again and again to check their actions, the importance of the golden rule, and to play safely. Yet only so much we can do, and pray and hope they'll do the sensible thing -- to keep themselves and others out of danger, including to walk away from it.  As a mom, I love to see my children playing nicely with their friends, and think you do, too. 

Silly, oh so silly

It's Friday, YAY!

From a Friday night weeks ago, when the children were wide wide awake...

I caught this silly (and precious) moment of Meimei giving her brothers not just herself some silly noses!

Don't we love a silly moment, to lighten up the rough and tough ones?  The busyness that life is, and craziness it can be.

I wasn't "hiding". My back acted up -- from lifting boxes, besides the usual laundry loads and vacuum cleaner up and down stairs, and the tot likes to be carried also. My hormones are changing, too -- transiting from nursing to losing prolactin, the happy mood hormone, *sob*. But the very interrupted sleep has been getting to me. And I need to take care of myself also.


More ways my kids like to stall bedtime...
Tonight itself, watching  the "Mars Needs Moms" trailer with them via the ad here, we could relate to the boy Milo trampolining on his bed. And also his wisecrack over how his mom had asked him to go TO bed vs. to get INTO bed!


*GRIN, GRIN*, went the children, getting more ideas there to outsmart this mom -- and could not wait to add their own come bedtime:

- "Go lie down" is not the same as "Go to sleep".

- And surely go lie down on the floor works, too, since I did not say to lie down IN BED.

- The napless youngest had her own retort also: "I'm not a sleeping person!".


It's silly, oh so silly.  But because there is no school tomorrow or lunchboxes to pack, you play along.

Just for silliness sake ;p.


And trust me, these are silly in a fun way compared to their other but-you-said-this-not-that comebacks, day or night, to anything they try to squirm out of. Such punks they can be!  But I have no idea where the younger two got their "mama punk" nickname for me from!