Good evening, and a very happy Sunday to you.

After a few days partying and celebrating Soph’s birthday, I’ve had a good week, which has ended with a cracking Sunday, including a baptism this morning and Open Table this evening!

This week involved prayers with a colleague, confirmation prep, pastoral visits, lunch with some ladies from church, communion at a nursing home, Sweaty Mamas, helping to build the playground at the back of church, helping conduct an interview for our church nursery because another trustee was delayed and time in the Hub!

The highlight of the week, much to my surprise, was attending a Viking Festival on the Wirral yesterday with Nathan and Sophia. As you may have gathered, it’s not my kind of thing on paper, but it was fab! Nathan liked all the archaeology stuff, I thought the play fighting was great and Soph loved her first donkey ride!

My Ta-Dah moment was… sorting out Nathan’s expenses.

The challenge was finding out that Sophia has officially moved out of baby room and into toddler room at nursery. Yes, I knew it was coming, yes, she’s technically been walking for ages, yes, she has just had her birthday. But we didn’t know exactly when she would be moving up. I’ve been stupidly emotional about it. But it wasn’t me who went for a pick-me-up starbucks listening to slipping through my fingers all the time, crying all the way there. Cough, no, cough, not me at all!

God moment: I’m going to have to be annoyingly vague, I’m afraid. But due to a new prayer list system I’ve been using (I can hear your eyes rolling, but trust me on this one!), a number of things that had been stuck or causing some pain, aren’t as bad as they have been. And there’s a direct correlation between the things I’ve been praying about and the things that I/we are managing to cope with. Thank you, God.

I’m especially grateful for a church community who go with it when their vicar has daft ideas. See the photo at the top of me spraying people with a supersoaker during my sermon this morning!

Mum moment: Sophia is starting to understand prayer. This might sound crazy, but I always pray in the car when we drive to church on a Sunday morning. A couple of months ago, she started chipping in with requests like ‘Bubba‘ and ‘Nanny‘. Then she moved on to wanting prayer for things like ‘nana‘ (banana) and ‘resses‘ (dresses), for which I gave thanks.

Now, over this weekend, she’s scratched her hand and bumped her chin. Today, on the way to church, she wanted to pray for her hand and her chin! That’s clever, I thought! But then she said ‘Mama chin… Dada chin… TizTiz chin… RaRa chin… Aber (the dog) chin… Mable (the cat) chin‘. So, close family and friends, if you find yourselves with a particularly strong or shiny chin, it might be because Sophia was praying for you!

New words really ought to be New Sayings now! This week we’ve had ‘Mama, wayyo doeen?’ (Mama, what are you doing?), ‘rat-sing eye-on’ (which is a request to watch the ‘dancing lions’ on Strictly Come Dancing when the cast of the Lion King came to visit), ‘ess oo Mama’ (when I sneezed), and, cutest of all, ‘Mama, sey’ (Mama, stay).

Next week I’m looking forward to seeing my cell group for a night and two parties on Sunday after church!