hood

it's funny still to me, sometimes, to say i'm from fayetteville, arkansas. it's home & it truly is sweet.  we live close to the university of arkansas. even though I will never call swine, i love being in a college town & if we're gonna be a block away from any other stadium than bryant-denny, at least it's an SEC school.

for most of the summer we had an angel named pauline.  now, some people call people like pauline "babysitter", but that title just would never do.  she is amazing.  she serves our family & loves us well & i am honored to call her friend. i tell her often that she answered a specific prayer that when we adopted lena, with hazel & anders still so small, we knew we would need God to provide help.  He gave us pauline. and when she would come & start playing hide & seek with the kids while folding mounds of laundry & filling sippy cups, I would slip in the earbuds & creep out the front door for a walk around my neighborhood.

i love where we live. quirky old ranch houses where professors live, the neighbors whose kids are close in age to ours & who are working on their doctorates & masters, the old man up the hill whose roses are always so beautiful, college rental houses, the journalist neighbor who is always so lovely to talk to...and the trees.  tall beautiful trees & when i'd walk all around for 30 minutes of alone, bethany would sing to me as sunbeams fell through the leaves, lighting my way. i love where we live.  here are some of the houses I walk past.