Favorite Pictures from the Month:  lil e’s birthday:

Minecraft cake that took hours to make along with nights of staying up late for goodie bag treats.  (All worth it!)

Here are some of my favorite quotes from this month:

“God wants to use ordinary life to shape us.”  Pastor Lou Huesmann 1.12.14

“But I was wrong, for Fred weren’t a complete fool.  Nor was his Pa.  The bigger fool turned out to be yours truly, for thinking they was fools in the first place.  That’s how it goes when you place another man to judgment.  You get stretched out wrong to ruination, and that would cost me down the road.”  p. 33, The Good Lord Bird

Psalms 27: 13, 14:  13 I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. 14 Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.

My paraphrase from Modes of Therapeutic Action by Martha Stark, in chapter 25:

Maturity, and the hallmark of mental health is being able to move beyond needing reality to be a certain way and being able to live with a capacity to know and to accept reality as it is.  Once we are able to make peace with reality as it is, we are able to let go of our relentless hope and move on to a deeper and richer enjoyment of our lives and our relationships.

“The factor Ericsson and other psychologists have identified as the main predictor of success is deliberate practice – persistent training to which you give your full concentration rather than just your time, often guided by a skilled expert, coach, or mentor. It’s a qualitative difference in how you pay attention, not a quantitative measure of clocking in the hours.”  from internet article, Debunking the Myth of the 10,000-Hours Rule: What It Actually Takes to Reach Genius-Level Excellence