Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Recipe

I made the yummiest and easiest thing to go with supper last night! They are called zucchini cakes. I got the recipe off The Pioneer Woman's website. DELICIOUS! Matt, the non-veggie eater, even liked em! Here's the link to the recipe. Let me know if you try them.

Email Chain

Read this on Beth Moore's blog. You may have received the email she is talking about. I know I have. :)

Monday, July 28, 2008

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

23 Months

It is less than a month until our "little" man is 2! WOW! Just typing 2 is weird! For so long it was __weeks, then __months and now it's just plain ole 2.

I believe it was around this time my blood pressure started going up. It wasn't long until I was on bed rest for 3 weeks. Those were hot days. :)

Now our little man is repeating a lot of things we say, sleeps SO GOOD at night, eats well, and plays hard. Before I share his sweet pictures from today I have to tell you a funny story. Somehow he knows cake is for birthdays. I made a cake earlier this week (bad, i know) and gave him a bite. He said, "Happy Day!" Last night our power went out for 2 hours because of the bad storms. It was getting dark and I lit two candles that sit on our mantle. He said, "hot" and then, "Happy Day!" How does he know candles go with birthday cake?!?!? It was so cute and precious. He wanted to blow them out (how did he know THAT?) and I let him. He did a GREAT job! I can't wait for him to blow them out on his birthday cake.

Sweet face!
Hello!
Jib Jab :) He likes to talk!

Running to the slide

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Ponderings on Adoption

"My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways."
Isaiah 55:8

Yesterday I read this verse (along with others) on Kim's blog and it stuck out to me. Today I read a blog I've recently found and low and behold...there's that verse again. I think the Lord is telling me something. :) I hear you, Lord!

One thing that's been on my heart a lot lately is adoption. Matt and I feel the Lord leading us in that direction and have since we were first married. The biggest step of faith in all of this will be trusting Him to provide the finances because it is NOT cheap. In fact, it's crazy expensive.

I have always wanted to adopt. Probably since I was 12 years old. Every time I see a little Chinese girl with her Caucasian parents I want to cry because I think it's the sweetest thing ever. Matt and I really want to adopt from China. This has been "our plan" for about 5 years. There are over 15 million orphans in China. 95% of those are girls. Most of those girls are abandoned because of the one child per family laws.

The reason we haven't actually adopted from there yet is because Chinese law requires you to be 30 years old. Since we are approaching that big birthday, I requested information from several different Christian adoption agencies. We could start the paper work at 29 1/2 years old. That's only 6 months from now. It seems a couple of the laws required to adopt from China have changed since last year. Much to our disappointment! One being you have to have a net worth of $80,000! I don't know many 29 or 30 year olds that have that kind of net worth. I have been very discouraged. Our hearts have been in China for so many years. It's not to say we can't adopt from there one day, but I want to now! :) So, Matt and I were discussing it the other night. Maybe the Lord doesn't want us to adopt from China. Maybe His plan is somewhere else. His thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. We are trusting and leaning on Him to lead us in the right direction. Please pray that we will know His voice and trust Him alone as we follow.

Though we are very sad about not adopting from China at this time, this means we can adopt sooner and have our little one quicker! China is the only country that has an age limit of 30. Other countries, including the US, are much younger.

"Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." Jeremiah 33:3


Saturday, July 19, 2008

Merry-go-round

First I wanted to say that all of your comments on the previous post were so sweet and encouraging. Thank you!

Granna came to visit us for a couple of days. We had a great time exploring, eating, and visiting. One unexpected thing we did was stop at the Galleria. It was a really cool place with lots of stores that I've never even heard of. (I think we lived in a small town for too long. haha) We stopped to let Bryan watch the merry-go-round and every time the frog came around he said "Frog!" Mom and I decided to let him ride and he was so excited to sit on the frog. :) Once the music started and the frog went up, he was a little scared. He would say, "down" one second and "fun" the next. I guess it really was fun because we had to pick him up off the floor to get him back in the stroller.



The last couple of days he has been fighting a fever. We took him to the doctor this morning and he said it looked like a fever virus. He woke up from his nap this afternoon soaking wet. I'm praying that's the end of the fever! :)

Monday, July 14, 2008

Crafts and Projects

As some of you know, I like crafts and crafty things. There are a lot of different things I would like to learn how to do, but don't have a lot of time to do them. Last year, with my mom's help, I learned to crochet. I made Penny (Sug) an afghan and gave it to her for Christmas. I wasn't quite finished with it then, but wanted her to have it to open. We moved and had lots going on, but I've picked it back up and hopefully will get it totally done before this Christmas. lol The length is done, but I have a little more width to go. It's almost there. Here's a picture of the work in progress:



I also like to bake. For Mom's 50th birthday last week I (and Matt) made cupcake pops. You can find that recipe and lots of other fun ideas on Bakerella's website. She's amazing. Here are the pops we made:

Can you say delicious?!?! You should try them.

My latest project that I started this weekend is appliqueing. So far I love it. I'm definitely an amateur. :) The reason I wanted to try this is because I saw a cute shirt on Etsy that I wanted to get Bryan for his birthday. It was a simple navy shirt with a 2 appliqued on. I thought to myself that I could do that. So I tried it and here's it is:



The first shirt I did was for Allison. It's a little off center, but still cute.


(the shirts are wrinkled because I washed and dried them to make sure they wouldn't fall apart. hehe)

My favorite shirt is the one I made for Grant. I wanted to save it and surprise Lyndi with it this weekend, but it's too cute not to share. Surprise Lyndi!


I was thinking yesterday about starting a shop on Etsy. I would sell different colors and sizes of baby/toddler and childrens shirts with numbers, letters, and hopefully shapes. (fish, cars, fruit, etc.)Before I think about selling shirts online, I would like to ask you a few questions. Is this something you would purchase for your child/grandchild? for a baby/child gift? There are endless possibilities with appliqueing. If the shirts did well, I could applique tote bags, pillows, etc. Since I am a beginner, I thought about selling them for $12-15 each. (Others on Etsy start around $20) Any other ideas or suggestions? I'm open to anything.


Thursday, July 10, 2008

Ping.FM

Testing posting a blog via Ping.FM. It allows me to post to many social services at once. Currently I'm using it for Brightkite, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Pownce, and Twitter. :)

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Blast from The Past

I used to be in a band called Goodbye Charlie, here we are back in 2006.


Top Row L to R: Joseph Haefs (drums), John Miller (lead guitar)
Standing L to R: Donovan Broome (sax, lead & background vocals), yours truly (bass guitar, screams, general crazy-go-nuttiness on stage)
Bottom Row L to R: Jay Cannon (harmonica, background vocals), Jonathan Haefs (rhythm guitar, lead & background vocals)

We recorded a CD late 2005 in a doublewide trailer at our church directly from a 16 channel board into Jonathan's computer. It's pretty crappy, especially the drum mix, but we did it for a grand total of about $300, including the software and the sound card with the proper breakout box that had XLR inputs. :P

I've uploaded the songs for you guys to listen to and redistribute if you want:

Different Kind of Beautiful - the first song we wrote together, one of my faves

Give - I can't for the life of me remember the original name of this song, so I'm calling it Give. =( I particularly like the bassline I wrote for this one, it got even better later on as I made it a bit more complicated. If anyone reads this and can remember the name of this song, PLEASE remind me!

It's Over - bouncy, fun song

Prodigal - slower, very serious, I never liked this song much. Good sax in it though! That's sAx! With an A!! Get your mind outta the gutter...

Unfailing - my favorite song we ever did, written by Jonathan (mostly) after I made him mad by saying some new song he'd written sounded just like everything else we did. It's our most rocking song and it's got a 3 beat measure instead of your standard 4. I used to go APE NUTS on stage playing this, usually ending in a sweaty, out of breath collapse that meant we had to play this last as I had nothing left in the tank to play another song afterwords. Jamie can verify this, she's seen it. Also, the opening riff / first solo on this song is actually a harmonica played through a Shure Green Bullet harmonica mike plugged into an Ibanez Tube Screamer and then into our lead guitarists Line 6.

Rambling - why we did what we did, spoken word here, not music

I loved the time I spent doing this, it was great fun.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Thursday, July 03, 2008

4th of July

Now that we live in Alabama we can buy fireworks legally. I just went by a trailer set up in the Wal-Mart parking lot and purchased our first ones as a family! I can't wait to shoot them off.

Tonight our neighborhood is hosting fireworks for our little city. I'm excited to see the show. Matt and I are hoping we'll be able to see them from our house and not have to fight the crowd.

What are your plans for the 4th?