Perspective

I'm feeling like Eeyore today so I'm going to write a post of 12 GOOD things I can think about and be thankful for. What better way to pull myself out of a funk?

1. My whole family is HEALTHY! This is huge y'all. At least one of the kids is usually sniffling or something, but right now we have a whole house of healthy people. Can I get an amen?!?

2. Spring is here! While today that means storms and sideways rain, it also means t-shirts and kids getting to play outside! Woohoo! It also means baby birds tweeting and ducks to feed at the park. :) We're saving our bread heels.

3. BOTH the kid rooms are clean. Yes, you read that correctly.

4. We are BLESSED beyond measure as evidenced by all the clothes I need to fold. Most of them I didn't even have to pay for. They're either handed down or gifted to us. Super awesome.

5. Chris was able to fix the blinds in the girls room that I thought were broken. I had SUCH a bad attitude when I saw them. I thought they were hopeless but Dad comes to the rescue every time.

6. I HAVE A HOUSE! While I may grumble about it from time to time, all I need to do is flash back to apartment (or even duplex) living and voila! I'm cured! Having my own house is such a blessing. I can paint if I want to and you know what? I want to.

7. We aren't a TV centered household. My kids are smart and funny and creative. They make things and play pretend instead of asking to watch TV. You should see some of the games they invent. They're actually pretty good.

8. My husband has a good job. He isn't on the chopping block worried about if he'll have it next month. He has awesome hours, awesome benefits, and awesome coworkers. Him being happy at works makes me happy. I remember what it was like to hate a job and still have to go in every day because you needed the money. So thankful that isn't a daily reality for him.

9. I'm in school! I can't wait to go to class every week and learn more about the field I love.

10. I live in a fantastic area. There is super low crime. The schools are good. There are 57 protestant churches in the city limits. There are tons of good people and good causes centered here. We love it.

11. I'm having a baby! EEEEEEEK! I don't think anyone really realizes how much this baby was wanted and prayed for. While we may get the occasional, "ANOTHER ONE?!?!" We know we are richly blessed and can't WAIT to welcome this little one into our home.

12. I have the most solid marriage out of anyone I know. Due mainly to my amazing husband who really is my rock. He's way more than I could have asked for and definitely more than I deserve.

Sickies

Isla has been really sick lately. She has run a fever and near about coughed up her ever-lovin' lungs.

I've figured out that if I wake up and keep her medicated, she sleeps a lot better. Poor thing is miserable if I let her fever flare back up. I've been known to make a midnight run to Walgreens when I don't gauge how much ibuprofen we have very well.

Still, as long as we have books to read and another round of ABCs to sing we're doing alright. God bless the library.

Duct tape baseball

At the suggestion of my GENIUS mother-in-law, I took a piece of string and tied a duct tape ball to one end. I looped the other end around a nail in a doorway, gave my toddler a kitchen utensil and told her to go to town! My 2-year-old and 3-year-old absolutely love this. It keeps them occupied for quite a while. This comes in super handy when I'm trying to cook dinner or help their older brother with homework. :) 

The best part is when they're done, you just wrap the string around it and throw it in a drawer to pull out another time! It's like they've never seen it before every time and it's just as much fun.

What love is

I love the quote about fathers that says, "The best gift a father could give his children is to love their mother." The truth contained in that statement is phenomenal. A father loving his daughter's mother teaches her that she is worth loving and models how she should be treated in a relationship. A father loving his son's mother shows that boy how to be a man and how to treat a woman. Wow.

My Dad traveled a lot for work and sometimes we didn't go with him. The model wasn't there. I think I looked to my grandparents by default. I remember my Grandad being my whole world. Any time he and Granny went on vacation, they picked me and my cousin up on the way out. Granny was an iron fist. She would paddle me if I needed it and she'd give you a swat too if she felt like you could benefit from it. She really fit more into a mothering role than a grandmother. Grandad never said a harsh word to us kids. He was the one waiting there with a piece of candy to mend our broken hearts after Granny had pulled a switch from the tree (which we totally deserved, by the way.)

Summer of 1999 (I think?) they drove down to see us on the Texas coast. We decided to jog over to Galveston for a few days so as not to break the Summer vacation streak we had running. We walked the strip I was all too familiar with until time to have dinner. We passed this warehouse looking building that was an Italian restaurant called Mario's. It was Granny's idea to eat at "Mary-o's" that night. My cousin and I being the NES champs that we were promptly corrected her. "Granny, it's Ma-ree-oh's." This happened a couple more times through out the evening just in conversation. Then, out of nowhere, our world got rocked. 

"You kids stop correcting your Granny! If she wants to say it that way, she will! You shut your mouths about it!" 

I spent the next hour crying quietly into my sleeve and my cousin spent it sick in the restaurant bathroom. Talk about heart break. That is the only time in my life I can ever recall him saying a harsh word to any of us kids and I still remember the sinking feeling in my chest that came with it. I would rather Granny had picked up a switch there on the side of the Galveston strip and let me have it. 

Know what that taught me? (Other than to keep my mouth shut, thank you very much.) I know for an absolute fact that my Grandad loves me more than anything in this world. That didn't change that Summer, but what he made sure we knew was that Granny is his WIFE, and favorite kids in the world or not, you mess with her, you get the wrath of the man who loves her. That planted a seed in me way back then that means so much more to me now. It's really amazing. They've been married for 51 years. I know for a fact, to this day, if you tried to confront my Granny, you'd have to go through him first. You know, that's just the way it should be.

My grandparents on their 50th wedding anniversary last year. <3

Something your Mama would say

Know what I love? Saying something over and over and over. Trying to get my point across about something and no one is listening. Then someone else comes by and whispers the same. exact. thing. and everyone says, "Oh! What a great thought/idea/solution/opinion!" Yeah... that's always nice. Especially when you're pretty sure the whisperer took it from you in the first place. Even if they didn't, LISTEN UP, PEOPLE! Quit ignoring the people in your life. It was OBVIOUSLY something worth hearing if you were so jazzed to hear it second hand. Just imagine if you had been on the wagon when it originally came though! Please, don't drown out people who are talking to you. It's so frustrating (obviously) and demoralizing - not to mention painfully obvious. Please just treat people the way you would like to be treated.

Bob! Don't marry that harpy!

Al: Hey, you know how it is when you see someone that you haven't seen since high school, and they got some dead-end job, and they're married to some woman that hates them, they got three kids who, like, think he's a joke? Wasn't there some point where you stood back and said, "Bob, don't take that job! Bob, don't marry that harpy!" You know?

Dirk: Your point?

Al: Well, we're in the desert, looking for the source of a river pollutant, using as our map a cave drawing of a Civil War gunship, which is also in the desert. So I was just wondering when we're gonna have to sit down and re-evaluate our decision-making paradigm?

Sahara has got to be one of my very favorite movies. 

I have a super short attention span lately... or so it seems. I can watch an infinite number of consecutive Bones episodes, but if you ask me if I want to sit and watch a movie, I shy away from a commitment of that magnitude. An hour and a half of sitting in the same spot I've BEEN sitting for the past hour?! Lets not go crazy.

I love a good movie. Shoot, I've sat through ALL THREE Lord of the Rings movies with my Hubs. I'm not sure why a movie in the evening spooks me. It's not like I have anything else to do at 10pm on a Monday, right?! Must be the hormones.

He didn't say "some things."

Recently I've been thinking a lot about Romans 8:28. It says, "all things work together for good for those who love God for those called according to his purpose."

Last week at church our pastor did a whole sermon about that verse. One of the points he made was that the verse doesn't say we'll be able to see it all come together for good in the end. We just have to know that it will. He also said that sometimes God lets us see it come together in hind sight.

When I was about 2-years-old we had a gas stove with a mind of it's own. It gave my mom grief trying to light the pilot on it every now and then. My mom is smart. She knew the basic things you need to do to be safe and she certainly knew how to use a gas stove. Nevertheless, the stove turned in it's notice one day and blew up in her face as she tried to light it. It sent a fire ball out that covered the entire top half of her body. It burned her hands, neck, and face really badly. My Dad is a safety engineer and immediately jumped into action. He threw a blanket over her to put out the flames and then held her kicking and screaming in a cold shower for 15 minutes. She said being in that shower was more painful than being on fire. She didn't stop cursing him for a week - or so he says. I was 2, remember? Him holding her under that water saved her from SERIOUS, long-lasting injury. Because he acted so quickly, you can't even really see any scars on her. She came out of that horrible situation as well as could be hoped.

My Mom loves God. She knows Romans 8:28 by heart but struggled with WHY that had to happen to her. Nothing good could come out of being a human fire ball and then tortured.

When I was in 8th grade, we moved for the umpteenth time (Safety engineers move more often than the military I swear.) to a little town outside of Fort Worth, Texas called Decatur. We'd been in the house all of a week maybe. My Dad was off working crazy long days at his new project site when my baby sister, Natalee, who was just a toddler at the time pulled a pot off the stove and spilled boiling soup all over the front of her naked-except-for-a-diaper body. Her skin started falling off her stomach in sheets like it was melting. It was so horrible and gruesome. I couldn't do anything but stand there in shock. Without missing a beat, my Mom scooped her up and carried her up the stairs as fast as she could. She stood in the freezing cold shower with my sister, fully clothed, water running everywhere for a good 15 minutes while I called 911.

I can still remember the sounds of my sister screaming and my mom crying as she had to hold her down.

Since my Dad wasn't home, I rode in the ambulance with Natalee while my mom and other sister followed behind us in the van. My Dad met us at the hospital where I remember hearing the doctors telling my parents how badly Nat had been burned. The one part of the conversation I remember perfectly clearly was the doctor saying if my Mom hadn't held her under that cold shower to stop the burn from moving deeper into her tissues, she may not be alive. All of her vital organs were directly in the path of that burn.

My Dad wasn't home. This isn't something couples sit around and talk about in the evenings. Had that stove not blown up in my Mom's face, she wouldn't have known how to save my sister's life.

"ALL THINGS work together for GOOD for those who love God for those called according to His purpose."

Thank you so much Lord for giving us little glimpses into your plan. Thank you for the opportunity to see it come together and see how a tragic event was your mercy in disguise.

Me and my sister, Natalee.