Repriortizing Life

I have had some very horrible and stressful weeks lately. Things seem to be blowing up all over the place here and I have come to realize I need to settle down some and refocus. There are some things raising up with my extended family again that are hard to deal with right now and my marriage has hit a bump in the road. Yes, you heard me right. Even Godly people can struggle living together. Remember we vowed "For better or for worse". So here we are, in the midst of the worst at times.

You see when you marry, you bring your baggage and he brings his. At first you keep it hidden deep in the closets of your heart hoping to lose it all and start a fresh. Then slowly but surely the baggage falls out of the closet and you now have a mess to clean up. Not only does your baggage fall out all over the place but your bundle of crap knocks over his bundle of crap too. You both are dazed and confused as you behold the enormous mess all over and think to yourselves "Where did this come from? I thought I loved him and he loved me? Does this mean we weren't made for each other?" Of course the answer is you do still love each other but you need to stop stuffing your pain and allow each other to unload your baggage with the Lord.

My Knight and I have unloaded a lot of crap to the Lord. We were actually doing really well when suddenly someone knocked us off our pedestals and we are back to being dazed and confused. I actually got mad at the Lord this time and yelled at Him last week "We were doing great! Why are you doing this to us?!" I know dumb question but when your in pain you lose your mind from time to time. So we are picking up the pieces of more fallen baggage hidden deep in our hearts. We are not separating or anything like that but it was quite volatile. It can really hurt when you think everything is going swimmingly and you take a blind hit, it can really throw you for a loop.

So for right now we have both prayed about what we need to step out of. We have filled our lives with things to do and not given ourselves enough quality time to seek each others hearts and God's. The kids have been amazing through all of this. They even prayed with us one evening after a bad (bad is an understatement but I don't know what word would fit) day of arguing. The Lord revealed so much truth about us through the kids I was blown away.

We now need to spend more time together, less time just doing & more time in the Father's presence. So if you don't hear from me for a while via phone, email, cyber space it's because our family needs to heal more. The Lord did answer me about why He was doing this. He gently whispered "Where I need you to go and what I want you to do as a family I need this stuff out of you, so yes it was I who knocked you off your pedestals and brought this to the surface. I need you whole and I desire you to have peace but to bring the peace sometimes I need to stir the waters into a storm. Just remember how quickly I can calm that storm too."

That's where we are right now. Not perfect and definitely not "there" yet but constantly moving forward.

OOPS! How Old Am I Again?

I went to the doctors for that lovely "yearly" check up. The Nurse Practitioner than began asking me a long list of questions like "Do you smoke, drink, do drugs, have problems breathing, have diabetes..." & so on. She then finished with "How old are you?". The thought briefly flew through my head "Just look at my chart and figure it out" but I obliged and responded with "Twenty-sev......", Oh wait that's not my age! I quickly coughed a few times so as to disguise my mistake and then added "31!"

I thought she might have missed it with my brilliant coughing disguise but to my dismay she turned smiling and asked "So dear are you 27 or 31?" Dejected I said 31. I have no idea why I tried blurting out 27 or why that number was in my head. I actually don't mind being 31 but maybe I feel 27, I don't know. Well I am going to go and stare at my birth certificate for awhile and hopefully burn my birth date into my memory so I can recall my proper age.

The Cast is OFF!!!

Yippee!!! Freedom!!!! and Rockers excited too. :)

Mr. Roboto

I had a little fun with my cell phone, 2 of the boys & a greeting card( one of those music greeting cards) ! :)
Did it take you back to the 80's?

The Top 100 Reading List

I saw this on Where's the Box site. It is a list of the top 100 books that the majority of us have never read or something like that. Go to her site for more details. :) So here it is....

Look at the list.
Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read.
Underline the books you LOVE.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. 1984 - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92.The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So there you have it. #59 I have not actually read but because I copied and pasted the list from Where's the Box it wouldn't let me erase the underline so they aren't all my favorites either (I am very un-technological). So I have read 48% of the list I guess I made it past the average adult. I have read a lot more books that are not on this list by many of the same authors but I guess that doesn't count, I mean if they include Dracula by Bram Stoker they need to include Frankenstein by Marry Shelly.

That was fun!!! Thanks Trish, I would have never considered myself an avid reader but after going through the list I realized I do like to read often enough.

I Am Officailly a Misfit!!

I have always wondered why I never fit in. All my life I was on the outside looking in. Last night I found my destiny as a misfit. We had an amazing man of God over for supper. He is Mr. "D" and he is a missionary from Nepal. We had a great time sharing food and fellowship with him and listening to his heart. He asked poignant questions that hit the nail on the head many times throughout the night. His heart stirred my Knight's and my heart to our calling.

The most profound statement was how he described missionaries. He said the majority of people called to the missions field feel like misfits all their life. They can never seem to fit in with the status quo because the Lord has called them to be extraordinarily different from others. My heart lept and I knew he was talking about me. It released me from so much anxiety of always wondering what was wrong with me. It is actually who God has made me to be. So now I look forward to being a misfit for Jesus. Someone who can be extraordinarily different from others because all they see is Jesus shining through me.

Myrtle Beach 08'

I tried my hand at our iMovie program in producing a video clip of our vacation. We had a great time and wore ourselves out more than relaxed. We visited Alligator Adventure, Brookgreen Gardens, Huntington State Park, Ripley's Aquarium, 3-D IMAX & Broadway at the Beach. It was so much fun with the boys and I mean all four of them!!! I hope the pictures turned out OK. Some our mine and some our Scott's. Enjoy!

Finished Projects!

The boys wanted me to show off their finished projects before we head out on vacation. We completed them today so here they are...
Shaggy's Camo, tank applique pillow. He even
stuffed and sewed it himself.

Rockers Christmas door sign. He did a great job with
learning basic embroidery and using the
sewing machine. Awesome Job Boys!!! You
make your mama proud!!!!

Getting Away!!!

I won't be posting for awhile because we are heading out on vacation. Going south to sun and sandy places. I am so looking forward to dropping off the radar for a while. No phone calls, no appointments, no deadlines and no computer with email piled high. So if you don't hear from me don't panic I am just leaving it all behind for a week. :)

Hopefully I can also update some of my pictures on my profile with new ones, since my hair isn't so long any more!

More Summer Fun Pic's

Sewing 101

Rocker & Shaggy asked me to teach them how to sew. They
both picked out and designed their own project.

Rockers is more embroidery. He learned how to blanket stitch
and sew a backing on with the sewing machine.

Shaggy chose to make a pillow and learned to use the
sewing machine.


Return of the Jedi (Livin' Style)

Got bubbles?

Got Lightsabers?

Then you got summer Star Wars fun!

I think they all qualified the Jedi Master tests.


Forget Movies & Popcorn

We had a Star Wars marathon day with all 6 movies.

Instead of popcorn I made pancakes for lunch with bacon.
It was yummy and fun.


Homemade Marble Course

It actually worked! :0 :)