Cleaning....

WOW!! What a start to this new year I have I had so far. I am in my 3rd week of my official status of STAY AT HOME MOM, and I LOVE it!! I love the little things that come with being a SAHM, like cleaning...never liked cleaning before now, but now I love keeping our home clean and picked up. As I was cleaning the children's bathroom, I thought to myself, "this doesn't look too dirty, it could wait one more week to be cleaned." Then God whispered to me, "Your heart doesn't always appear dirty on the outside, but I need to clean it on a regular basis so that you and I have the best relationship possible." OUCH!! This is so true and I love that in the simpleness of cleaning a bathroom God SPOKE to me. Here's how I am now preparing myself to be able to hear what He has to say:

I'm in my 3rd week of Engaging in the Scriptures as well. So far I have read the first 8 chapters of Matthew and the first 9 chapters of Psalms and Genesis. God is speaking to me in so many ways. I find it fascinating that the last two sermons from the Austin Stone have helped solidify what God has been saying to me. That when I start to read God's word and spend time with Him, he is going to reveal the problems in my heart. Guess what...He has!! My heart is full of doubt, untrust, and lack of faith. My mind knows what I need to think and believe, but my heart is 10-20 steps TOO FAR BEHIND!!

Over the last 3 weeks God has been working on me, revealing to me through both the scriptures I have read AND the messages at The Austin Stone, that I NEED to be INTOXICATED with God and spending time with him, a lot like the way I felt when Gabe and I were dating and first married. That my lack of faith, doubt, and untrust is an unbelief in God. Because of my NOT trusting and lack of faith that He WILL provide for us financially, I don't believe that HE IS GOD! This stung to the core when God revealed this to me last week. This week He reminded me that as I learn to read and spend time with Him, then He is going to work on the stuff that is causing me to NOT have the best relationship with Him. And that is EXACTLY what God is doing right now.

God is reminding me on a DAILY basis that I MUST and need to rely on Him every minute of every day.

I feel like the following clip from "Facing the Giants".




God is preparing our family for the next season in our lives and now we must wait on His timing. He is preparing my heart to be ok with whatever is next for our family. Right now, I must prepare for all possibilities and be ok with HIS timing, not mine. I can't wait to find out what/when it is, but until then, I will continue to pray, study, and spend time with Him daily!!

Christmas 2009

I apologize for not getting our blog updated since school started. It's been a crazy 4 months. Here's what's been going on in our neck of the woods!!

Perryn is still doing quite well in kindergarten, she can read, but doesn't like to take the challenge to read on her own without lots of encouragement. It seems like she doesn't have confidence in herself that she knows the words in her brain and they can appear ANYWHERE and she will still know them. We both absolutely love Mrs. Gunn her teacher and she is doing a PHENOMENAL job!!!

Teagan is doing well. He is really trying recognize his name, so anything that he sees that starts with the letter T is his name even if it's the word 'the', it's his name!! He is still very big into trains and cars. In fact, we all pitched in (grandparents) and got him a second hand Thomas the train set and table!!
Gabe is still doing well at Scott and White!! We moved at the beginning of Decemeber and we now live 3 minutes from the hospital!! In my opinion it's the best move we made next to moving back to the Austin area. We get to spend more time with him before he goes to work and he often gets to go get Perryn from school with us and we all take him to work!! His shoulder has been healing from his surgery that happened over the summer, but he is having to deal with some painful scar tissue that has broken off or something..this is making his shoulder very tight and painful.

I'm doing well too. My best Christmas present from Gabe was allowing me the opportunity to quit my job and come back home to spend time with Teagan. God has provided what we need in order for me to do that. I am looking forward to getting back into my card business and expanding to do more of my cakes. I MISS my students terribly, but have already made promises with lots of them to be able to have play dates frequently!!
Our Christmas this year was grand. We focused on Jesus's birthday and even sang to him and had made him a giant cookie cake for the celebration. We did get to do stockings and even got to have breakfast with Santa.
We got to participate in an old tradition at Gabe's grandmother's house of decorating cookies for the first time this year. It was a BLAST!! Perryn (especially) and Teagan really loved getting to decorate the cookies that Omie had made for them. Then the best part was they got to pick some of decorated cookies out to bring home with them to eat...they loved it all around.

We once again gave our annual handmade Christmas ornaments to our families, but we went a step further this year and gave money on their behalf to help orphans and the least of these over in Africa. We have some friends that started the Hopemongers Cooperative so that we can help fund some of the needs in Africa with a little bit of money...meaning we got give what we could afford and see exactly where it was going. We got to choose who we were helping and often see it be delivered before they Hopemongers team left Ethiopia!! That was the COOLEST part ever!! Here's where we helped this year on the behalf of our family:



We got to help give a diaper shower for 35 babies at the Kebebtshey orphanage in Ethiopia.

We helped with hair care and staff supplies at the Kebebetshey orphanage as well.

We also got to help fund a nice Christmas dinner at the Leper Colony.

And...we got to help fund getting mosquito nets for the orphans at Emmanuel orphanage in Ethiopia.

Each of our families got a card and a picture of where we donated, so that they could see exactly where our gift for them was. I am hoping that God will allow me to team up my card business with the Hopemongers team so that if/when people donate and they want to do it as a gift for someone, I can help with a card and a picture.

Please pray that God will continue to bless our family in 2010 and that He will bless my little creations business as well. I would love for it to take off and it be able to fund little things like adopting our next child. Enjoy the end of 2009 and may God bless your family immensely in 2010!!

The First Day of School

So, it's been a day of firsts in our family today....Teagan moved from the Geologists class to the Astronauts class, I moved from the Ecologists class with my students to the Editors class, and Perryn started her VERY first day of Kindergarten!!

I can't even believe that Perryn is going to kindergarten. Any of you who know us, knows that we would much rather be homeschooling, and God wants us to send her off to kindergarten. This has been very hard on both of us (Perryn and me), but as much as I want to do what I want to do, I am hoping to show her the example of obedience.

Yes, I teared up on the way to school, a little bit more walking in the door, and A LOT more on the way out the door. The traffic was INSANE, but we made it!! The highlight of my day, was seeing her smiling face when I went to pick her up in the daycare van and she ran to give me a hug!! Here are the few pictures I was able to capture, yes we were running late with the traffic we encountered, so just deal with these pictures please....

We are in quarantine...AGAIN!!

So, bless Teagan's little heart, he has another run of his staph infection. The second one in 8 weeks. This run seems to be worse than the first with a couple of his spots looking like there is a bigger 'infection' going on. We must watch him carefully and if he is NOT making healing progress by Thursday, we have to go BACK to the doctor on Friday...here's what he looked like last night after his bath..

In unrelated good news...here's what we did at the end of May..Miss Perryn graduated from Pre-K (I don't have any good pictures) and we had her dance recital. She was spectacular. She was quite tired by the end, but all in all she did very well. Here are some pictures from that day...There is a video from photobucket that is one post down from this one...the last picture is BFORE everything started when she was excited..this picture, was part way through the recital when I could tell she was getting a bit bored...