Leaving behind 2008

I stink at New Years Resolutions…actually, I just stink at resolutions period. I try my best but it seems that laziness gets the best of me and I get distracted. This time last year I blogged about my resolutions. You can see it here.

How did I do? Not very well at all! I had a fairly short list and I must tell you that I started with gusto…then I faded. I think my resolutions are still the same this year. Yet, I think they are for far different reasons now.

I still want to be in shape, I still want to get into God’s word, I still want to journal. I want to find joy often. I plan on becoming a more self sufficient mom, too.

But this year, I want to be more purposeful. Sometimes I let friendships fall to the floor or let chores take a back burner. I want to be purposeful with my time. I want to use it wisely as I juggle being a wife and mom with family, friends and my new job. I want at the end of the day to feel like I accomplished things.

Tell me, do you make resolutions? What are they?

Taking a break

It seems I am taking more and more breaks from blogging lately! I really do love writing and love getting your comments even more! I am going to take this week off from writing to spend with my boys. We have two weeks off from school and I am so excited to spend some time with them as well as our families. With three celebrations in one week we will stay busy for sure! Yet, it is always worth the busyness we feel because we love the time with our families. I am sure there will be stories to come from this week! Stay tuned…I will ’see’ you all next week!

Also, I am always looking for ideas to blog about. If you have one, be sure to leave a comment (even if you do not blog) and let me know your idea. I can’t promise that I will get to that topic but I will sure entertain it.

Merry Christmas to you all!

Candid Photogrpah

With Christmas soon upon us my house has been filled with the ‘I wants’ more than anything else. We have been as purposeful as possible to remind the boys that the gifts at Christmas time are great but it is the gift of Christ that should bring us the most joy. The gift of family should be following quickly behind that. I am sure that at 2, 4, and 6 that is still a hard concept to grasp. However, I see in Isaiah that he is beginning to understand it. I must admit that I get wrapped up in the gifts at this time of year too. To be honest, I love gifts. It is my love language for sure. Yet something changed about 9 years ago. Something that would make me realize that Heath was the man that I would marry. At that time I had discovered the album ‘40 Acres’ by Caedmon’s Call. It was really an album that fitted the time I life I was in. My favorite song had been ‘Somewhere North’. It was a beautiful love song about a man and a woman that were apart and the desire to see one another. Yet, it was also about being enough for each other…without all the material things.

The chorus says: And I give you my life and all I am. But what have I to give? So I hand you a candid photograph of this little boy cause I have nothing to my name. But I can give you that

Those words would haunt my thoughts. Slowly God was building in my heart this outlook that would take away the gifts and make the heart worth more. Heath was very familiar with the album and the song. Just a few weeks after we started dating he gave me a picture. A simple picture that I still have in a box that still means more than a thousand other gifts. It was a simple candid photograph. I placed that picture in a box of memories. I have since pulled it out a few times. When we were pregnant with Isaiah and I was scared out of my mind I pulled it out. We were not sure where we were going to live with a baby and we had no idea how we would afford anything for him. I remembered that picture and went to retrieve it. It was comforting.

The best gift I ever received was Heath…completely him. His heart is what has given me comfort more often that I realize. He has seen me through three pregnancies…and every complication during and after them. He has seen me through the death of my grandmother. He has walked with me through hospital corridors as I visited my mother between treatments. He has carried me when I have buckled under the pressure of life. He has pushed me toward God when I sometimes could not even crawl to him. He has held my hand as fear and worry ripped through my body and he has calmed my nerves when the fears took too much control.

The boys may not see it now but I hope to one day express to them how much Heath means to me. Not just as a father to them or a husband to me but as my best friend. I want them to know what love has done to me and how it has forever changed me. I want to encourage them to look for that kind of transforming love in their future wives.

What do you want your children to know?

Green or frugal?

I have this battle that plays out in my head almost weekly. The battle is with being frugal and still trying to live a more ‘green’ lifestyle. Why is it that to buy products that are good for you or good for the Earth seem to go completely against living on a budget? Am I the only one who find this completely frustrating? Add to that all the samples you can receive from companies. The samples are great…if you will use them. I have received all kinds of samples from coffee to toothpaste, from deodorant to granola bars. But of course, there is another box to throw away. The samples are great because they help me decide if the item is really worth purchasing anyway. I just struggle with the idea of living within my grocery budget and still be conscious of the things I bring into my home.

Do you battle with this? If so, what is your solution?

Are you on my list?

Over the last few months I have found so many new blogs to love. Whether it is someone I know personally or someone I simply know through the blogosphere, I am getting to know more and more people.

Which makes my blogroll completely out of date. Some blogs on it I am not reading anymore, some that I read daily are not anywhere to be found.

Today I want to know if you are linking to this blog. If you are, I want to add you to my blogroll. Also, what blogs are a must read for you all?

Your Answer

You girls! Your guesses made me laugh. I have to tell you that chocolate or dinner would elate me!

Here is what he brought home:

I know, I know. It makes you are giddy….with confusion right? A few years ago I would have no clue what this was if I saw it sitting on a shelf. Well, I would have had to notice it first and I am going to guess I would have never given these products a second glance. So what are they? They are Scent Away products…for hunters!

No, I do not hunt. No, I never plan on hunting. I have also given very specific parameters to Heath about hunting…whether it is him or the boys. Those parameters may or may not look something like this:

*Each boy can bring home the first deer and the first buck that they kill. I will be happy to hand him the camera to snap a ‘cute’ picture for their scrapbook. I do not want to see the organs of this animal or any unnecessary blood. You are responsible for what you kill….meaning I do not want to have to clean, gut or process this animal. The hides are yours to deal with. If you kill it and tan it, I suppose you can do just about anything you like. Although I would prefer not to have the coyote hide hanging on the wall…just my opinion. Once the meat is packaged you can place it in my freezer where it will go into regular rotation of dinner meals. I am happy to cook this for our family as long as I do not see any traces of hair, guts or bone.*

So what could make those products exciting for me? If you want the truth I could care less about the spray, deodorant or soap. What does get me excited is the laundry detergent and dryer sheets…actually the dryer sheets are my favorite. When you have two guys (one big, one small) that hunt…in the winter…there are lots of layers. And apparently coyotes and deer can smell (I had no idea) things like Tide Detergent or Bounce Dryer Sheets. And while I think they smell wonderful, apparently our animal friends find this smell to be an alarm that signals to them someone might be trying to hurt them…imagine!

So I would wash all their hunting clothes…coveralls, insulated pants, shirts, hats, socks, etc. in this scent away detergent…and then I would be left with an entire load of wet clothes that can not go in the dryer because (gasp) I would have to use a dryer sheet that obviously was too scented for the wild! Oh ladies…my laundry area would be full of clothes air drying. And believe me when I tell you it takes all day for an adult pair of coveralls to dry!

Insert the dryer sheets and I became a happy woman. Now, I can wash and dry these clothes in no time. And that clear plastic thing in the picture? It is a HUGE bag that you keep the clothes in so that don’t get ‘contaminated’ (totally my word) with other scents. Now all the hunting things can go in one place!

I am a happy woman…my laundry room is happier, too. Now, how to get that dinner and chocolate?

What are some of the oddest things that make you happy?

Give me your thoughts!

In the effort to see who keeps reading this blog and who does not, I am going to pose a question to you.

Recently Heath brought home an item…rather a box of items…that brought delight to my face. He was also happy about them, after all he did purchase them! However, I am sure my relief mixed with excitement outweighed his reactions.

Give me your best clean guess! Even if you have never commented take a minute to do so. I would love to hear from you! I will post tomorrow what it is!

Defining Motherhood

We recently wrapped up a series at church called ‘Dream Job’. God really worked on my heart during this series. There were several reasons. For some reason I do not think I fully embraced ‘being a mom’ as enough…I surely never saw it as my purpose. Yet, God is molding my heart to become more sure of His calling in my life as a mom. I have a lot to get to with this series. Over the next month or so I plan to share with you some of things that I feel God really taught me and revealed to me. I wanted to start with something that struck me fresh. And by fresh I mean left me in tears in the service as I began to repent for some of the ways I have treated my boys…some of the impossible standards I had set in motion in their lives.

It all started with Pete reading 1 Corinthians 13 from The Message. How horrible is it that I almost checked out at that point in the service. I had to take off my ‘I know that passage already’ hat and really dig in. At first it was the same things I knew, love is patient, kind, etc. I felt like I was hearing and old record played. But then, as it usually does with God, something happens. What it is I have no idea but something keeps me listening…something keeps me grasping. We read the rest of the passage and I felt tears well up in my eyes. They came on so sudden that there was no way to hold them back…I just let them flow freely. There were 5 things that stuck out in this passage…5 things that I circled that will forever change me (I hope!).

* Love doesn’t fly off the handle
* Love takes pleasure in the flowering of truth
* Love puts up with anything
* Love always looks for the best
* Love never looks back, but keeps going to the end

Maybe I was just ready to hear those words that day. Maybe I was looking for a definition of what it is to be a mom. Maybe I was just looking for Christ to reveal himself a little more intimately to me that day. I think it might have been all of those things.

Even now, I am fighting back tears. Those 5 things hit me hard as I struggle (almost daily) with those areas. Love is giving my children patience when I feel my quick temper button has been pressed so many times it is broken. Love is encouraging my children to be honest with everything and allowing them the freedom to share that honesty. Love is cleaning up sheets and bathroom covered in vomit and refereeing every battle of toys, food and friends. Love continues to encourage my boys to find their strengths and helping them to pursue their God given talents. Love is constantly aware of the end, the end of toddlers, adolescents and teen years and remembering that God has given me today to be Christ in their life.

For some reason, being a mom became relevant. It had a definition to me. It had a purpose. I had a map almost of what God would want me to instill in the lives of my boys. For the first time, I let being a mom define me…not using the mom as a classification. Here I am 6 years after my first child and I still struggle with this.

Would you add anything to the list what it is to be a mom?

Reliving my teen years

- Ordering our movie tickets weeks in advance for a movie premiere.
- Dinner with about 15 other gals, including my friend Rebekah!
- sitting on the front row of the movie theater (I promise, there were no seats left!)

- Being called out my my pastor, in a sermon, for the ‘bum shot’. We saw Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman at the Theatre that night. In the hope of being discreet ‘someone‘ took this picture with her phone.

It felt like high school all over again…even the being called out by my pastor…at least it was not by name!

A group of us went to see the premiere of Twilight. As we entered the the auditorium, I was quite relieved to see several grown women sitting throughout. Once the movie began the squeels of the teenage girls began. I turned to my friends behind me and said ‘I found the teenage girls!’. It was quite funny.

The thing is I hardly ever read…ever. I can’t even read a magazine article with being interrupted. When my friend gave me the book Twilight I balked. There was no way I would be reading such a long book. However, I found myself really into the book. It is a modern day Beauty and the Beast of that I am sure.

I have read so many different opinions to this book. Some people begin to idolize it and the characters. Others condemn it before they open the cover. The extremes baffle me. I loved the book. I plan to read the others. More than anything it was a night to be a ‘just a girl’ again’. It is hard to find those moments with sickness and events behind every corner.

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Until next time

Breaks…sometimes they are great. Sometimes they are planned out and planned for. Other times, they take you by surprise. This last blogging break took me by surprise. In the last two weeks Isaiah and Joel came down with an awful stomach bug…then passed it onto me…twice! Add into that we had Thanksgiving withe enough drama to keep a soap written for a few months and you can get the picture that life was busy!
The thing is, I really love blogging…and I have so many things rolling around in my head for posts! I plan to get back to blogging today and share some of our stories of the last two weeks.
As always, even in (or maybe more so in) my busy times, God is teaching me. I can not wait to share with you all what He is doing in my heart! Til next time!