Positively (Im)perfect

It has been another crazy week. Full of twists and turns and heart-rending circumstances and unexpected developments that have thrown every single plan we thought we had for a triple loop. I haven't exactly handled it with grace. I've blubbered to friends and railed against God and asked what the heck He means by all this and demanded that He be clear about His intentions...because in my current state of toddler spirituality, my illogic assumes that a tantrum will result in the answers I want. I imagine Him regarding me with the same loving exasperation with which I regard my tantruming three-year-old, sighing and shaking His head at me while smiling wanly, knowing how very long it will take for me to grow up and get it, but loving me fiercely all the same. If I try hard enough, of course, I can acknowledge the truth that my emotional state of affairs will not change reality, and sometimes God just has to wait till it's time to show me the answer. Yet that objective

I turned 30 last week. I’m not sure what my “younger” self thought 30 would be like, but the whole 30 thing definitely happened a lot sooner, was a lot less foreboding, and was much less of a big deal than I think I imagined. As far as “sooner,” I certainly feel a lot younger than I used to think 30 was (although my body's still acting way too old and frail internally for its external appearance). As far as “not foreboding,” I’m actually very happy to finally join the decade in which the rest of my sea of mom-friends exist (although I don’t love the gray hairs that come with the territory). And as far as “not a big deal,” the day involved much less fanfare than it could have, and for that I’m very grateful. At least now. My loving husband asked me a few months ago what I wanted to do for the ‘big’ day, and I had something in mind that was nice, but a little more pricey than our current situation allows—and, after getting all pouty thinking about what I “couldn’t have

Originally Published July 27th, 2012 ...My Investments Are Shot! Well, I learned pretty quickly in Part I of The Contentment Project that when it comes to superficial stuff, it's fairly easy for me to ditch some of the habits that suck the joy out of life. This week, though, I'm diving into something a little more challenging: devoting some real quality time each day to the people in my life. I know, tell me about it. In our society today, time is money, and spending it in ways we don't want can be torture. How we spend our time is vital simply because there's so little of it. Though I get the heebie-jeebies when I think back to any of my college courses that involved numbers, I did seem to internalize two important principles from my economics classes: the more rare something is, higher its value, and the more valuable something is, the smarter our investment is in that valuable item. (Oversimplified, yes...but it works for my analogy. Econ geniuses

Originally published July 20th, 2012 Let me start by saying that we live a very cushy life. It was already pretty cushy when we cut ties with the Army a few months ago. Since then we've embraced a lovely new life and the cush factor has reached an all-time high. We waved goodbye to our world of deployments and war and friends who've laid down their lives for us and stepped easily into the life we've been planning for years. I traded in my uniform for jeans and time at home with the kids; my husband traded in his for suits and ties and nine to five. We gained a house with nearly twice the square footage of our old one, and moved from an isolated community without a support network to a picture-perfect and kid-friendly suburb with grandparents right around the corner. It's priceless to know that we'll never again being separated due to Army missions; even on busy days we still get to see each other at the end of the day. We'd dreamed of this life for so