The first week of January, God kept putting this thought in my heart and in my mouth, in English and Russian. I said it to 3 or 4 different people during that week talking about things from fundraising to having more kids or not.

I’m doing a new thing.

I want to remember this. Renewal is essential to growth. And now, the work of years is coming into “a new thing” in several spheres of my life:

• Considering putting the girls into school is a new thing.
• Moving out of childbearing years is a new thing.
• Fundraising to 100% is a new thing.
• Midwifery studying coming back is a new thing.
• Cleaning out my relationships with some people in our church here is a  new thing.

God is doing a new thing in old things.

I looked up that phrase, a new thing, and it’s from Isaiah 43:

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland…..to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.

Yes, that I may proclaim His praise!

And, Lord willing, I’m at an age of maturity in the Lord when I can wait patiently to see the new things come to life in God’s perfect way and time.

So, I’ve had an interesting first 12 days of 2017. I want to record some things. I love having these journal-like blogs.

1. I’ve been praying for an hour a day, and it’s …. so interesting. I combine it with fitness– walking or working out. It’s really becoming more and more transformative.
2. I calculated that since starting to raise support a few months back, we’ve moved from 40% support level to 46%. God is doing a work in this– and it’s not so much about money as about love and sharing and opening my heart. I’ve been asking God to return to me the heart of my teenage self when it comes to passion for missions and raising ministry funds and relationships.
3. The girls are moving into more independent homeschooling. This is good for us all. I was slowing them down.
4. I had a crisis one day, realizing that God is brining midwifery back into my life. I had put it into a tomb. But He’s bringing it back in his way. I’m excited about this. At this point, I’m just looking to follow step-by-step what God wants. I’m interested by this because it was a clear motion from God, that this is HIS will, not just something I love. And He’s making it come in a way that it is the right priority in my life, not some all-consuming thing that it so easily can become….. I have a plan and a time line, subject to God’s intervention, of course. It will not be soon, but that’s OK. If it is to be, it will be in the right time.

Just want to quickly post some birthday memories.

Vitaliy bought me a fitness bracelet– I love it 🙂

Vitaliy and I at Ocean Plaza for my birthday

Skyla made me this card: 

Skyla and Alla (friend) blew up and taped all these balloons to the ceiling of the kitchen early that morning. And they had a pile of presents waiting!

The church gave me this card: — one of the gals in the church, Vika, cross stitched the Bible section!

Vitaliy often says to learn to see where God is working in your life and catch the wave. So I’ve been doing that.

And oh, how I love to dream about things. To imagine. Seeing the awesome potential of things just kills me sometimes. Like I always want to buy something old and broken down because I see what cool potential it could have if I sanded it, repaired, glued, varnished, repainted, stenciled …

But so often, I just bought the thing and never got around to fulfilling that potential 🙂 So I’ve learned to enjoy visionary self and not have to spend that money, for example. Or keep that old thingamabob that I just know I could paintsandrepurpose….

But I’ve also learned just to take ahold of the things that are truly valuable to me, and work on the potential of those certain things. Doing the actual work is hard for me. Once the dream becomes reality, and it’s not all glittery anymore and… fooh.

However … things are worth working on.

So, this year is here!

One thing I’m doing it keeping a DID journal– just in my planner– I don’t like using a planner as an appointments/to-do thing. I’ve decided to record what I DID.

This is what I wrote on Sunday: body brushing, mask, cleaned out frig [I read about a woman who goes through her frig every Jan 1, and pitches all the old stuff, and wow, did I need to do that], what I made for lunch [reverse menu planning, because menu planning for whatever reason, causes my blood pressure to rise, so hey! record after the fact, then I have a planned menu for the next week or month!], “church gave card and cake and prayed for me” [celebrated my 41st birthday!], 1 hour of prayer walking.

From Vitaliy I am learning to love actually doing (and not just dreaming about doing) something with what I have where I am. He is the master of this. He’s a do-er. I’m the dreamer. So hey, I can learn!

Also, because of the nature of my current goals and resposibilities, I’m trying to ruthlessly shave my life down to a very few goals for the next year and a half. I realized that I have lots of time, but I don’t have matching nor endless quantities of emotional energy to do all the things I can.

So…..

Homeschooling. I don’t really look at this as a goal, but I try to create dreams and aspirations around it so that I enjoy it more. I’m also … coming to a point where I can be even a little bit honest with myself, that I don’t really enjoy most of homeschooling. I like having my kids at home. That’s about it. I don’t like being in charge of educating them. I’m 5 years into this deal, so I’m not speaking out of nowhere. And I’ve tried tons of stuff. Part of my issue is that I think I don’t make most of the work independent, which is could be by this point. Part it is one of my children who just is not going to stop suffering through school no matter what we try…. Anyway… lots of analyzation here that I won’t go in to. … We would like to put the girls in school for a year when we’re in the States if we can swing it financially. Just to try out that option, too. Homeschooling, for me, is a major energy drain, so I have to keep it front and center and keep it moving forward.

Fundraising. God has been moving here. My goal is for us to be 100% by Dec, 2017. I finally feel like I have the beliefs, support system, and a plan to make this a reality. I’m devoting a lot of my mental, time, and emotional resources to this for the next year or so. {Dear reader, we need you to pray about supporting us… }

Prayer. Every year my spiritual goals look like this 1) Bible reading 2) prayer 3) Bible memory. … The problem that has evolved is that I love Bible reading and studying, I am very experienced at it– it’s EASY for me. I’m very exercised and proficient in this discipline. So, all my time, emotions, etc, runs to that…. About 4 years ago, God starting telling me that I need to pray more. But He just cooked that idea inside me for about 4 years, and now it’s time, and He’s made a way. So I have no Bible reading plans or goals, and my goal this year is to pray for 1 hour a day. And to memorize a verse of Titus each week– to memorize the whole book. So far, I’m doing it in both Russian and English.

I have a few other smaller goals but those are the major ones.

Allelujah. Amen!

It was about 2 years ago now that I started actively trying to lose weight and get in shape. I started at 195 lbs, and I originally wanted to lose to 135 lbs, but with the Curves food school, and other considerations, I changed that to 145 lbs– I’m still breastfeeding, and it’s a healthy weight for me.

I want to note a few things. I’m shifting into the maintaining phase. It’s a change. But here is what I really like: with Curves stuff, the focus is on losing fat and gaining muscle. My body used to have a higher percent of fat than muscle. That has reversed now— I have a higher percentage of body muscle than fat.

So what I noticed is that I gain weight much slower now, like if I’m “holiday eating” for 5-6 weeks (during Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year), and I lose it faster once I go back to their structured diet.

I still workout at Curves 3 days a week, and I really enjoy that time.

Vitaliy bought me a cool gift for my 41st birthday, which is tomorrow. He loves technology. I am OK with technology to some extent. So this gift was a perfect combo of his tech-savvy-ness and my fitness.

It’s a fitness bracelet. …. I am surprised at myself at how much I like it!

For example, one thing I just did: I set my bracelet for 1 hour of walking (around the third floor of the mall). It timed me, constantly measured my heartrate, counted my steps, how many calories burned, and notified me each time I reached a kilometer– I walked 5 kilometers! (about 3 miles)

And since one of my main 2017 resolutions is to pray for an hour a day, and I’m still experimenting how to work that one hour into my life regularly, I prayed as I walked, and it was really a wonderful way to combine spiritual and physical fitness!

I don’t think I’ll do it everyday, but 2-3 days a week would be fantastic.

Anyway, this bracelet thing does a bunch of fitness stuff– measures my sleep hours and what level of sleep, counts my steps all day, etc. It’s pretty cool, and emotionally it helps me feel “official” as a fitness-type person. (I know, that’s corny, but it’s…. how I feel, and that can be important.)

Now, about aging.

You  know, for many years, I took the bull by the horns, researched and studied all this stuff about health and pregnancy and breastfeeding. But I’ve realized that I have a block about dealing with aging. …. I just want to ignore the symptoms and hope they’ll go away.

…. So… I’m trying to help myself deal gently with these news issues cropping up in my life. Like having to switch to non-caffeinated coffee because caffeinated started causing me blood pressure and heart rate issues. Its’ not necessarily aging, but for me it is.

And I keep putting off going to the doctor about some of my aging things. I personally have a complex relationship with the system of allopathic medicine, so I’m not exactly sure what I want from a doctor visit. I’m still in the process of clarifying that for myself. But I ought to go in the next month or two I think, to at least start talking about some of my other health things.

I’m actually looking forward to grey hair. I think it will look good on me.

Oh, I’ve started a morning routine, too, of taking care of my body. It involves body brushing, hypopressive breathing, a face mask, and a few other details. I usually do not have the patience to pay so much attention to my physical being, but surprisingly, I’m ready to do that now.

Vitaliy and I went on a walk through the beautiful snowy woods today, and I was thinking about how well-suited we are for each other.

Maybe it’s because we choose to focus on the ways we match? Because, sure, there are ways we are different. But we both love analytical talking, theology– and we stretch each other in our thoughts, it’s not just repeating each other or arguing against ideas. It’s a growth in agreement and understanding of deep questions.

We both love mininstry. We both love living in Ukraine. We have grown to love our kids in very similar ways. We have gone through a major spiritual transformation side-by-side.

It’s a really sweet thing that amazes me sometimes.

Here are some probably sideways photos of birds we saw on our winter walk:

Thank you, dear Lord.

I know it sounds cliche, or maybe just nuttyheads, but I actually used to worry about becoming too emotionally attached to Vitaliy. I’m not used to becoming emotionally attached to people in a big way.

But we’ve been together on a trip for 2 days now, and it’s been really sweet just realizing in a new way what an amazing friendship we have.

Yes, there have been times in our marriage when we’ve had “certain issues” we couldn’t calmly talk about (like money), so they became silence areas. But with time, even those issues have become talkable, meaning great talks with no arguments.

We’ve talked about a lot of things. It’s what we do for friendship and relationship. Vitaliy thinks other couples might do other things together to feel closeness, like sports or business, or something. For us, it’s talkingtalkingtalking. We analyze, philosophize, plan, theologize …

It’s become a deep, emotionally-fulfilling reservoir of a friendship. Probably the deepest friendship I have ever experienced.

I just wanted to enjoy and record these realizations.

When home schooling, one makes one’s own milestones. There are no external systemic factors marking and evaluating achievements, really. Especially overseas.

So, I just want “the world” to know that we completed the first 12-week term of Ambleside online’s Year 5!!!

What I like about this year:

1. Last year we learned daily consistency (with video school).
2. This year we are READING ALOUD a lot! and that is one of my dreams come true!!!

Hip, hip, hooray!