I abandoned breakfast table manners completely this week. My five-year old son is struggling to sit still. Every meal is a brutally painful process. So, instead of continually starting our morning with frustration and fighting, I have reformatted breakfast. I turn on worship music, put his breakfast at the kitchen counter, and he dance-eats while I pack lunchboxes. It has changed our morning story this week…

Our lawyers told us today that they weren’t surprised that Benjamin’s 🇿🇦 visa application was rejected because at least 70% of them are. I had called to understand our options. The options were there was no option except to bring him in this afternoon to the visa processing center to appeal.
We showed up at the end of an already-tricky day and found an over-crowded room that flabbergasted even the center’s staff and our legal representative.

Parenting strategy at the end of a tricky week: Sit down in the soft green grass of one of the most beautiful places on earth and create challenges that involve your children sprinting to a timer and doing their own occupational therapy. 👏Everybody👏Wins👏

I've started compiling a collection of the Friday Calls to Worship for publishing. I never intended for a 300-word message to go beyond a WhatsApp to a few friends. It's been surprisingly encouraging to dip into the archives, walking week by week through a pandemic with a younger version of me, one who didn't yet know she was also in the thick of special needs parenting. It all started because I spent an enormous amount of time lying next to my toddler between 2020 -2022. I had to wait for him to be in a deep sleep and tiptoe out of his room….

I planned a walk in the forest today. Wyatt loves a good nature walk, and Benjamin comes back to himself as we gulp in wonder and fresh air. Benjamin crumbled to the floor in tears when I told him our wonderful plans. My knee-jerk reaction is simultaneous overwhelm and frustration. His personal implosions demands, “Help me. I am unhelpable”.

Just when you start to think you’ve done it all… you take your son in a crop top Spider-Man suit to see ostrich organs in jars! Another adventure in the books! I love watching the boys learn and explore. Let it be known that Benjamin very brave and sat on an ostrich, and he intends to never do that ever again. But the ostrich burger got two thumbs up! 👍👍

I haven’t been online much this week because life has been extra full of normal life stuff. I just haven’t prioritized posting it. I’m pausing this evening before I put down my phone for the night to re-watch, remember and take a deep inhale of this rich, beautiful, sometimes normal and sometimes not life God has given me…

We’re picking some of the BIG topics that we all have to address with our children again and again through every stage of life. It is so, so empowering to sit with other women around God’s Word, share stories, and let encouragement build up in the presence of worship, the Word and women. Please pray for me as I prepare a teaching on body image, purity and pornography. See the video and info below for more details. If you’re in Cape Town, PLEASE COME!

We’ve got a formula. We go to the best places at the worst times. It was cold and windy at Green Point Park this morning. We all had wet bottoms from the slide, and I bought Benjamin TWO steamed milks to keep him sitting still long enough to get dry. We’ve found our way to win in a big, busy city when one of us can’t do crowds. We had the park to ourselves, and the kids felt like kings - with milk moustaches instead of crowns!

Spring is blooming in South Africa! It’s the perfect time of the year to put all fives senses to work in God’s glorious creation. You can’t help but encounter the Creator in the midst of it. I relished in watching and cheering the littlest Ladds on as they did exactly what they were meant to do - found the perfect walking sticks, dug in the dirt, studied footprints and tracks, threw rocks that were way too big, climbed, jumped, balanced, and rolled.

Benjamin crashed my post-workout stretch session this morning... and things progressed from there. A 10-minute kids workout on the iPad unlocked joy, bouncing, bonding and healing movement. Our Jammer has been in a hard-ish season for a while - which is quite a euphemism, really. We’re all giving it our best, and we all sometimes flip out and see our worst. In his hard-ish times, Benjamin struggles with proprioception, interoception... all kinds of -ceptions. The way we spell it out in our house is “having trouble taking control of your body.” The details are not for the Internet, but it’s not easy to watch, parent or live with if we’re being honest.

Welcome to one afternoon at the Ladd house. This might be too much of a generalization, but I’m willing to wager that mothers of boys are one of the most grateful species on the planet when the sun is shining and the people can play outside. In just one hour this afternoon, we found out Wyatt has an impressive ability to hang, lost a soccer ball on the roof, and a red ball got kicked in the neighbor’s yard. The cars went down the slide multiple times, and it became official news that out the Batman suit does, in fact, make you win every soccer game.

Earlier this week, I asked Wyatt if he wanted to run to the soccer field like his “baba” (Benjamin). He kept his pudgy little hand gripped firmly on mine and told me, “No, Mama. Baba’s five. I’m two. Hold my hand.” And that was the most sensible thing I’ve heard all week.

Time is our most precious commodity. It’s the only thing we don’t get back or earn on a success ladder. It’s in the very human concept of time that God creates space for the rhythm of relationships.

Siblings. Absolutely the wildest of all the relationship combinations out there. Body slams and mouth kisses are interchangeable in a moment. Loving and loathing oscillate in milliseconds. Friend and foe AT THE SAME TIME. They are also almost always the longest relationship of your life. That’s probably why you need so much grit, humor, and an occasional Hot Wheel thrown at your head. It’s love built to last long after the bruises fade away. I pray for my kids’ relationships with each other often. Their love for each other is a gift we can leave them as a legacy.

I am speaking to a group of moms this weekend about parenting in this high-tech, digital age. I'll cover the basics of brain development to empower moms to decide how to support their children in each stage of life. Humans are born soft and underdeveloped. Meanwhile, hoofed mammals are walking and baby baboons are clinging to their mother's hair as she swings through trees within hours of birth. Human brains are 25% developed at birth, with just the lower portion of the nervous system "online". The frontal cortex is the is the last part of the brain to fully develop in our 20's and is responsible for judgment, impulse control, decision-making, and insight.

Please pray for this event this weekend!

Southpoint Church is hosting workshops for moms called "Essential Conversations". We're talking Biblical perspective on big topics and taking home practical tools to engage with your kids at every stage of development.

… Cape Town is experiencing some very wild winter weather at the moment. It is nothing close to a hurricane but has impacted thousands of people in our city. The desire in me to help, hold, and hear rises with the floodwaters. Nature has a way of leveling humanity’s playing field and reminding us that we need each other. I’m not in a season where I can give or do much tangibly, but I’m trying to attune my children to the bigger picture like my mom did with me…

We had an extraordinary experience this week at soccer camp. It was Benjamin's most unsheltered, "mainstream" kind of experience with boys of all different ages. It was an awkward, yet completely natural, hokey-pokey kind of experience. We were all the way in, all the way out, and then we did a lot of playing right beside them.

The kids were feeling artistic on this oh-so-rainy Cape Town day, so I took a chance and took them for a walk through a “grown up art museum”. My aim was simply a change of scenery and perhaps an opportunity expose Benjamin to the idea that anything can be art.

Some of my favorite Benjamin quotes were…

Today was 80% temper tantrums, 10% time outs (including the big people putting ourselves in time out!), 5% prep for dress up day at Southpoint Church and 5% a nature shakeout at Kirstenbosch. I worry for Lifa on days like these. I think about his friends who hang out with kids their own age and whose families don't have to accommodate to nap times or special needs.