these are a few of my unfavorite things.

here is an update on things i am morally opposed to.

1.  hand soap that smells like coffee.

2.  bold comic sans on anything official.  or anything unofficial.

3.  rolls of toilet paper that are facing the wrong way (the flap should go over, not under, people.  were you raised in a barn?!)

4. chocolate and orange flavors together.

5.  people who call you out when you're picking your nose with your thumb.  (you're supposed to pretend you think i'm just itching the inside of my nose.)

6.  microfleece blankets.

7.  people who say 'nucular' instead of 'nuclear.'

8.  burps that smell like food.

9.  limoges eggs and, in general, any home decor made of porcelain.

10.  christmas gifts sprinkled with a heavy coating of cigarette ashes.

i like REALLY big b-tts and i cannot lie. but i can keep a secret.

we've been up to something secret.  i can't tell you what it is at this moment, but i can tell you this:  it involves a 670-square-foot sign that reads, 'hot, tasty b-tts.'*

interest piqued?  i knew it would be, you sicko.  stick around and i'll tell you about it next week.




*you would be shocked at the kind of searches that lead weirdos to my blog.  to avoid random pervert traffic via google search, i should probably stop filling my blog with inappropriate key words.  instead, i have resorted to typing in code.  crack that, pervs.

tweet this.

you may know that i don't have a twitter account.  and that, friends, is on principle.

twitter just gives people license for idiocy and narcissism, and i'm already annoyed by people who abuse their opportunity to update their facebook status with, say, news of their failing health.  call me cold-hearted, but i don't need a play-by-play of your bout with the flu or gangrene or whatever it is.  a simple, 'i caught the common cold and am now on my deathbed' is sufficient for me to learn of your ailments and offer up sympathetic prayers to the heavens.  what does NOT incite me to any remotely compassionate emotion is status updates spaced 2-3 minutes apart that go a little something like this:

*have the flu but decided to eat taco john's anyway.  suspecting this is a bad idea.

*just barfed up taco john's.

*omg, just took my temp and it's like 104.  i'm pretty sure this is not the flu.  i think i have food poisoning.  maybe i should call 911.

*no, my brother came over yesterday and he just called and he has the flu.  i bet it's just the flu.

*i'd go to sleep if it weren't for this darn flu.  now i'm soooo tirrrred.

*my stomach hurts so much from all the puking.  but god is good.

*what do you think:  i've been barfing for three hours and i can't sleep and i have chills and a fever and can't keep down even a single potato ole.  webMD says i probably have cancer.  should i go to the doctor?
insert lots of response comments consisting of webMD diagnoses and adamant "absolutely - my sister thought she had the flu but really it was a parasite and would have died if she didn't get to the doctor in time"s here.

*just made a doctor appointment.  they couldn't get me in to the regular doctor, though, and i have to see the on-call doctor.  life really sucks for me right now.  don't they know i probably have the flu and can only be comforted by my regular doctor?

*just saw the on-call doctor.  he doesn't seem as wealthy as my regular guy; his dockers were starting to wear out at the pockets, but he's not married and kind of cute.  life really sucks for me right now since i look like a barfed-up potato ole, but remember, i have the flu, so that's understandable i guess.  maybe he could see past that and just love me for me and we could get married and i would be Mrs. On-Call Doctor.

*forgot to mention:  i was officially diagnosed with the flu.  anyone want to bring chicken soup and crackers and burn down taco john's for me?  pretty pleeeease?

*my flu seems to be letting up, but now i'm experiencing some joint pain in my shoulder.  but at least i don't have a fever, and god is good, right?  (insert bible verse about enduring shoulder pain.)

*wow, my shoulder really hurts.


at this point, i'm all like, i bet a punch to the face would take your mind off your joint pain.

so, anyway, back to twitter.

now, i've never even been to the twitter site (it is a website, right?) to see if my suspicions are valid, but it's mainly because i don't need to.  i'm guessing that 60% of people who have twitter use it to offer up-to-the-minute doppler on their bathroom habits, favorite foods, and the crazy antics of their pets.  and you know what?  i don't need that kind of crap in my life right now.  or ever.  so no twitter it is.

video vednesday: (something german and cocky.)

mry crizzmizz, foo.

merry christmas from the van vizzorsts, yizz'all.  wishing you many stockings full of solid gold grillz.  we all know that's what you asked for.

merry christmas for when you're sad.

i prayed that god would sanctify me.

i know that's a scary thing to pray, and it's not something that i usually have the cajones to ask for, but i just got to a point where i was all, i don't even care what it costs, god.  all i want is to be truly, deeply in love with you.  all i want is to be like you.  all i want is to bring you enjoyment and glory and happiness.  all i want is you.  so i prayed for it.

and lately, on the heels of that, i've found myself completely overwhelmed by everything going on in our world: the loss of family members, traveling across the state and then across the country for funerals, selling our house, finding todd a new job, leaving our friends and our church and my sister and the only community our marriage has ever lived in, and other things that i haven't even told you about yet.  and all of it during christmas.

and i think about how bittersweet this season has been for us: it has been an advent of truly focusing on the coming christ-child, and waiting for the amazing day when he comes back for us.  it has been an advent of very little talk of presents, and much talk of jesus.  but it has also been a season of great confusion and loss and fear.  and i tell god that this isn't how i thought it would go, and it's not how i thought he would answer my prayer.

but he reminds me that there is plenty of room in the christmas season for confusion and loss.  when mary was told she'd have the son of god, i'm sure she didn't imagine it would involve birthing him in a glorified latrine and later watching his murder.  christmas is bittersweet because the gospel is bittersweet: life can only come through death.

when that baby was born, he was born to die.  god the father sent us his son,  knowing that he would suffer great loss because of our depravity.  oh, there is so much joy in the gospel, that our god paid the exorbitant price for our sin so that we wouldn't have to; that god himself earned our righteousness for us and we are holy in the eyes of our god; that the only one powerful enough to conquer death was also loving enough to actually do it.

but there's sorrow and mourning at our wretchedness, that we reject the god who does this, that jesus went through all he did because he was taking on the death that we had earned for ourselves.  he didn't deserve that.   we did.

and i'm comforted this christmas season, knowing that feeling sad or confused or lost doesn't detract from the true spirit of christmas, but that it turns me toward the god who suffered great loss so that i could gain everything.

'what's up,' bi-weekly ed.

okay.  as you may have been able to tell, this has been a crazy couple of weeks for us.  so crazy, in fact, i didn't post an update last friday.  so this post will involve two weeks.  are you ready?

the kids and i made cinnamon applesauce ornaments, which the kids loved.  they've been carrying them around since, sniffing them.  i even caught penelope eating one the other day. 

the kids hung their ornaments on the tree, which went more smoothly than last year since a) they're older, and b) i spent all of naptime sorting them into piles by owner, and pre-hooking each of them.  no frantic attempts to get hooks on them quicker than our coked-out kids this year.  other than the fact that the very first ornament penelope tried to hang ended up shattered on the floor, it all went well.

we traveled up to northwest iowa for todd's brother's funeral.

we announced that we're moving.

i've been frantically trying to get the house in order to put on the market next month.  i've spent the last week and half scraping wallpaper glue off our bedroom walls so that i can paint them and they can stop looking like this.  then we will have some hope of actually selling our house to anyone other than the directors of SAW.  please don't judge me for how long it has taken me to get around to this, or for the fact that i'm only doing it to sell the house and would have otherwise lived with it for an indeterminate amount of time.

on sunday, we moved finneas to a bottle.  he'd started biting, and his diapers hadn't been as wet, so i suspected he was getting too little to eat.  so i've been adding a few teaspoons of coconut oil to each of his bottles, and not only has he seemed happier, but he's starting to fill out and even go longer stretches through the night.  the only sad part was that, with everything else going on, i didn't even think about the fact that we're done nursing.  that's really sad in and of itself, and it's even sadder that i didn't take any time to grieve it.  but we're both doing well with the transition, so that's good.

monday night, we had made dinner plans with friends whose daughter ended up getting sick, so since i had not planned on cooking, i just popped a huge bowl of popcorn and set out apples and chocolate chips and walnuts and we all ate on the couch and watched elf.  it was magical.

tuesday night, my grandfather passed away.

wednesday night, in celebration of the first big snow of the year, we went out to eat and then drove around looking at the christmas lights.  while at the restaurant, the assistant manager took a liking to our kids and bought them each a little treasure out of the toy vending machines.  atticus ended up with a holographic sticker with the image of a racecar being protected by a guardian angel dragon.  penelope got this:

a bit unnerving, all things considered, but the guy couldn't control which toy came out of the machine, and it was a sweet gesture. 

yesterday, todd's office was closed due to weather, so we stayed at home and played in the snow.

which quickly devolved into this:

so we bribed everyone with some hot chocolate (or, hot candy, as penelope calls it) so they'd come in and stop crying.  atticus only cried harder once inside.  i'm not sure why. 

and those were our crazy weeks.  how are you guys doing with christmas coming up so quickly?

in memory.

my grandpa passed away, somewhat suddenly, on tuesday night.  it's been a rough couple of days.

he came out from south carolina last summer to help us get settled into our current house.  it was the first time he had met the kids, and penelope stole his heart, which is why every.single.picture we have of him from that week also includes her.  she probably could have asked him for a fully-funded college education and he would've been all, sure no probz.  now that i think about it, i wonder why she didn't...

that visit is probably among my favorite memories of him.  that, and this one time that he was visiting us at my mom's, and i had recently become a christian.  he went to drive our car for some reason, and i had some crazy christian music cd BLARING and about gave him a heart attack when he turned the ignition.  he came bolting into the house, asked me to please turn the radio down so he could get in and actually drive, and then he paid me ten bucks for being a christian and told me not to tell lauren.  (about the cash, not the conversion.)  i still laugh out loud about that.

video vednesday: she was like, oh my gosh, i'm going to have the son of god!

they called the baby jesus, and they loved him.

so, here's some news.

if you haven't already heard, we're moving.

like, away.

long story short, about two weeks ago we were asked by paul sabino to help him plant a church in cedar falls.  a week ago, we said yes.  (actually, now that i relay it, i see it was a pretty short story to begin with.)

so, we'll be moving to cedar falls.  i don't know when.  we're hoping to get our house on the market sometime in january, and todd is looking for something to do once we get there - although stay-at-home dadding has become a fad, somebody has to man up and bring home the bacon or we will all starve to death.  so to avoid that, he's looking for a job.

and what do i think of all this?  i have days where i'm really excited to go.  i have other days where i'm totally overwhelmed by the to-do list and tasks to be accomplished in order to get there.  (and believe me, the list is loooong and giving yourself four weeks to get the house sellable when you also have three kids to keep alive is surprisingly difficult.)  and i have yet other days where i grieve the loss of the family we've become a part of here. 

not to mention, i finally have my grocery routine worked out:  i have an egg guy and a honey guy and a grocery order drop-off once a month and i know when our co-op runs deals and i know at which stores everything will be cheapest.  i love that 80-year-old Junior always carries my groceries out at fareway.  i ask the aldi guy how his wife and four sons are doing.  AND WHAT IF CF DOESN'T HAVE AN ALDI?!  oh, i don't even want to consider that possibility; it makes me want to hurl.  yes, hurl.

anyway, yeah.  we had planned to stay here.  we bought a beautiful, 'forever' home that we're going to have to leave behind.  we had committed to co-lead a connection group this spring, and we're leaving our other co-leader to fend for himself.  my sister lives here and i have a hard time imagining living without her.  we have great friends.  we love our church.  i will cry when i have to break the news to my 90-year-old widow-lady neighbor.  there's a lot about this move that is going to bite the big one.

but there's also this feeling of peace that we're doing what god would have us do.  it's the right decision for us, and we both know it deeply.  it costs us something, but we know that obedience in following god is always worth the cost.

i'll probably talk about the move more and more in the coming weeks/months, but that's all i'm able to say for now.  it's a pretty emotional thing, and it's still quite new, and i'm working on wrapping my head around it.  but if you have any questions, i'd be happy to answer them.

in the meantime, anyone have any leads on a job?  anyone have some well-intentioned and wealthy distant relative that has been waiting for a good opportunity to shower cash on total strangers?  anyone?