Be a blessing

This has been a wonderful week despite the health in our household. Keegan is going on his third round of antibiotics to try and kick this infection that moved from his throat to his ears. Bless him. He passed it to his momma (aka, ME) and I'm on my fifth day of medicine and feeling just slightly better. According to the doctor, neither Keegan or I were contagious after 24-48 hours on the antibiotics- so don't worry if you've seen us this week :)

Because of the epidemic in our home we've been laying pretty low. We went up to Grand Rapids on Saturday to visit with family, but I had woken up on Saturday morning feeling pretty junky. Unfortunately I couldn't really enjoy our day because I was just out of it. Sunday and Monday we stayed home all day long and rested up trying to get me and Keegy better. It was actually a very, very relaxing Labor Day. I think if I would have been feeling better I would have been a lot less likely to actually relax!

Now to update... Here are a couple newbies in the Karolkiewicz household that I'm realizing we cannot do without right now!

First, the baby swing is officially in the basement. For some reason Keegan will NOT sit in his swing here at home, but thoroughly enjoys swinging til his little heart's content at school (daycare). So NOW, our new Big Kid toy is his Johnny Jump Up, and he just can't seem to get enough of it:

Second, my cousin, Ellen who has a son about three weeks older than Keegan introduced me to Keegan's new favorite food:

Keegan is chewing on anything and everything, and is always trying to feed himself while we eat baby food- but that's awfully messy and he doesn't understand the whole spoon to mouth thing yet. But he LOVES these! He munches and chews on them like crazy and will finish a whole cracker thing in 5 minutes- all by himself (okay, he needs a little help sometimes. Yesterday he kept trying to put it to his mouth but ended up hitting himself in the forehead over and over. HA!).

There's my boy, enjoyinnnng! 

Today we've had a great day so far. We went to Refresh at Riverview (it's kind of like a MOPS program) and it was great. I love getting to know new people at our church, and love feeling more involved, and developing a community around us. We have been so blessed by Riverview and the people that we've met there.

Today at Refresh the speaker encouraged us to dig into The Word more. She emphasized that even though as moms with young children we would love to get those extra 15 minutes of sleep- or whatnot, to make it a priority to spend time meditating on scripture. She said that if you find something to meditate on in the Bible, it will help us to get through the hard times throughout the day. I'm going to try hard to make and keep that a priority.

God has been SO good to our family, and has given us so many blessings. He's given me a wonderful home, with an incredible husband and son, and a supportive family, and now an incredible family-oriented, Christian run work place. But among all that, come symptoms like exhaustion and illness- that make it easy to put seemingly "little" things like spending time in The Word seem like a hassle.

We have been so blessed as a family, and it really got me thinking about the blessings that I bring to other people's lives. I pray that I bless other people the way that so many of my friends, family members, co workers and even people I don't even know at Riverview have blessed my life.

God is good- and our purpose in life is to bring Him glory. My way of doing that is to be optimistic, joyful always, and to celebrate and acknowledge the gifts he's given us. I'm not perfect, but will continue to celebrate the blessings in our lives to point to the Giver of all good things!