Busy Weekend!

The boys attended not just one...
not just two...
but THREE pool parties this past weekend! When did a 3 year old and a 7 year old get such busy social lives?

Happy Birthday Papa Mitchel!

This past Wednesday was Papa Mitchel's birthday. Both boys were a little under the weather so they stayed home from school and spent the day with Papa and Ah-ee! Then Wednesday night we had a fabulous birthday supper. How Papa and Ah-ee cooked such a large meal with "little bitty storm" and "little storm" running around is beyond me! But I'm so glad that they did!

Photo Friday: My Sweet Boys

Thank you Lord for blessing me with two priceless gifts!

Saturday Night, August 22, 2009

Wordless Wednesday

Tim & Diane's Wedding~August 14, 2009

Shhhh....

I have a secret...
and I've been keeping it from you...
but only because I couldn't possibly do this post without pictures!


The secret is...
My TreyBear has his very first "girlfriend"!!!

Hannah & Trey

Actually, I think they are "engaged".
They've been talking about what to name the children.
We tried to tell Trey that since he's the "Third" that his firstborn son must be the "Fourth".
But he's not going for it.
He wants to name my grandchildren after Star Wars characters.
He was dead set on naming the boy Anakin until his Daddy gave him a hard time about having Darth Vader as a grandchild. So he switched to Luke. Trey's pick for a girl, Ahsoka. Although he says that Hannah wants something girly like Susie.

My future grandchildren:
Anakin and Ahsoka

Trey is so cute when you ask him about it. He ducks his head, smiles, and BLUSHES!!! I was watching him and Hannah at lunch on Monday. He was being such a gentleman and helping her clean up her lunch trash and waiting on her to get in line. I must admit that I am tickled pink with his taste in girls so far. Although, I'm nowhere near ready for him to grow up, and real girlfriends and dates and all that are wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy in the future, if he eventually winds up with a girl like Hannah his Mommy would be very pleased indeed.

A New Friend

So last Monday was not a great day for Jesse, and therefore not a great day for Mommy either. After school we headed to Wally World and Jesse picked out a new stuffed elephant (yes, I resorted to bribery). Elephant was going to be our new school friend. But, we had to be very good & not cry in the mornings or Elephant would go live with someone else. We had high hopes for Tuesday. Jesse woke up in a GREAT mood and said he was ready to go to school. Then he decided to crawl out of bed by going over the foot board. Or maybe he jumped off the foot board. Either way he hit the dresser and busted his nose and lip. Needless to say his good mood was gone. After snuggling with Mommy, he snuggled on the kitchen floor with Elephant and Bunny.

And yes, Elephant is still here with us:-) We couldn't possibly send away such a good snuggle friend! He went to school on Tuesday and Wednesday. And Wednesday morning drop off went wonderful!!! Wednesday, lunch time, not so much. But that's not Elephant's fault! Thursday and Friday were both all around great days. I'm almost scared to hope, but maybe, just maybe we're over the hump???

Hip, Hip, Horray!!!

Last Friday was our first pep rally of the year, and we were all decked out and ready!!! Vera Kate & Jesse at the pep rally.
Yes, Jesse is in different clothes. His ACA outfit lasted less than hour:-(

My niece Cora Jane, and her kindergarten friends.My class won the spirit stick! YEA!

I want to move to Australia!

Today was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
And I want to move to Australia.
Any of you out there recognize the voice of Alexander???
I used to read that book on the first day of school.
I now know why.
Since school has started my life has been filled with terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, mostly because my 3 year old totally refuses to "adjust" to school. Mornings are a fight and I'm called out of my classroom almost daily to attend to potty problems.
Today was the worst.
Then I came home.
And in my email inbox there were two very important things:

#1...My daily devotional which concluded with this:

Is there a situation you are facing that has made you weary? Are you at a point
where you have nothing more to say? If so, you are not alone. Let's pray today
that our words will cease so that we can make room in our hearts and thoughts to
hear His.

Hmmm....a very important reminder!

#2...An interview in which Rick Warren said:

People ask me, What is the purpose of life? And I respond: In a
nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were made to last forever, and
God wants us to be with Him in Heaven.
One day my heart is going to stop, and
that will be the end of my body-- but not the end of me.
I may live 60 to 100
years on earth, but I am going to spend trillions of years in eternity. This is
the warm-up act - the dress rehearsal.
God wants us to practice on earth what
we will do forever in eternity. We were made by God and for God, and until you
figure that out, life isn't going to make sense.
Life is a series of
problems: Either you are in one now, you're just coming out of one, or you're
getting ready to go into another one.
The reason for this is that God is more
interested in your character than your comfort.
God is more interested in
making your life holy than He is in making your life happy.
We can be
reasonably happy here on earth, but that's not the goal of life. The goal is to
grow in character, in Christ likeness.
This past year has been the greatest
year of my life but also the toughest, with my wife getting cancer.
I used to
think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you go
to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore.
Rather than
life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a
railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in
your life.
No matter how good things are in your life, there is always
something bad that needs to be worked on.
And no matter how bad things are in
your life, there is always something good you can thank God for.
You can
focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems.
If you focus on
your problems, you're going into self-centeredness, "which is my problem, my
issues, my pain."
But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get
your focus off yourself and onto God and others.
We discovered quickly that
in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people, God was not going to
heal my wife or make it easy for her.
It has been very difficult for her, and
yet God has strengthened her character, given her a ministry of helping other
people, given her a testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people.
You
have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life. Actually,
sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past
year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me
instantly very wealthy.
It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never
had to deal with before. I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for your
own ego or for you to live a life of ease.
So I began to ask God what He
wanted me to do with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two
different passages that helped me decide what to do, II Corinthians 9 and Psalm
72.
First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our
lifestyle one bit. We made no major purchases.
Second, about midway through
last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church.
Third, we set up
foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan to plant churches,
equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next
generation.
Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24
years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to
be able to serve God for free.
We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live
for possessions? Popularity? Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt?
Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes (for my
life)?
When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say,
God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love
You better ...
God didn't put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do list. He's
more interested in what I am than what I do. That's why we're called human
beings, not human doings.
Happy moments, PRAISE GOD.
Difficult moments,
SEEK GOD.
Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD.
Painful moments, TRUST GOD.
Every
moment, THANK GOD

I needed both of these reminders today. I needed to remember that I am not walking through these problems alone. I needed to remember that He has a plan in all of this. I needed to remember that it is okay to cry out to Him and say, "please change this!" He may not answer but that's okay too. And most importantly, I needed to remember that there is good in everything. People that I didn't really know at all a month ago came to my rescue today. They comforted me, they allowed me to vent, and they voluntarily took over for me so that I could have time to recover without fourteen 4th graders watching my stress. Yes, I have a lot to be thankful for!

Dear Lord, Thank you for the people that you have placed in my life.
Help me to trust You to work out the problems that Jesse is facing in preschool
and to seek Your counsel and not rely on my own answers. In Jesus'
Name. Amen

Not So Wordless Wednesday: Early Morning

I just can't seem to make my "Wordless Wednesdays" wordless. These were taken about 5:45 a.m. on the first day of school, right before wake up call. Jesse is my child who tells me all the time when I'm putting them to bed at 7:30/8:00p.m. "but the sun is still up". During wake up call on the first day of school, he says, "but Mama the sun isn't up!" You just can't get anything past him!

Life's Twists and Turns

Life is full of surprises and twists and turns and it seems that I never wind up exactly where I was planning on going. When I left teaching in 2002, I always thought I'd go back to it, one day, way down the road. However, I thought that it would be years and years and years because I never dreamed that we'd move away from McDonough and I never in a million years thought that we'd move back to our hometown!!! In my plans, our life would continue on pretty much as was, Phil working a nice 9 to 5 type job that he truly enjoyed and I would be at home raising the babies. What turns my life has taken in the last 7 years! I never dreamed that Phil would wind up owning/working his butt off for four or five different companies. I never dreamed that he would wind up farming thus meaning that I would be a farmer's wife. I mean when we dated I made it perfectly clear that farming was not the life for me!!! The hours, the uncertainty, the highs and lows...that is not something I wanted. Don't get me wrong, I am so very, very happy that there are people out there who love to farm. I mean where would we be without them??? But that's not my life! Well, the Lord has surely shown me that my plans are not HIS plans and that I better get with HIS program. Phil is currently farming hay in our hometown, the job and location that I never would have picked ten years ago. However, I can look back and certainly see God's grace in all the twists and turns that have lead us here and I can say with 100% certainty that there is no place I would rather be. A few weeks ago another new chapter, another turn took place in our lives. I went back to teaching. I know with absolute certainty that I am absolutely where God placed me. I adored being a stay at home mom. It is absolutely the best job in the world! However, now that my children are growing I wanted something more...a connection to people, to feel as though I was making a difference in the world, and most definitely stability. When I first began looking for a teaching position, several people suggested the small Christian school that Trey was attending. I brushed it off because if I was going back to work then I certainly needed to make x amount and we definitely needed insurance, and the list went on. But God was at work in my heart and once I started listening to Him I realized that there was no place that I would want to be other than that very Christian school. It took some time, but I finally landed right where God had intended me to be the whole time. I love the environment, I love the people, and I am really enjoying 4th grade! It is so different than where I was before Trey came along and I am truly happy. However, there are so many feelings of guilt too. Since I am now in the classroom it means that I will miss out on field trips, class parties, and all the "room mom" type stuff. I will miss that and I feel guilty about it. Jesse has not had an easy time making the adjustment from being with Mommy all day to going to school. He cries and whines and says he doesn't like school at all. It makes me feel oh so very guilty. However reading my daily devotions definitely helps. It's so funny isn't it, that they always seem to be speaking directly to me and a situation that I'm facing. One last week stated "As a mom, I have an opportunity to bring out the best in my children. But it consistently means I have to bring out the best in me." Now this particular devotion wasn't talking about me going back to work. It was trying to show how as moms we can't model one behavior, such as impatience, and expect our children to learn an opposite behavior. I must also admit here that I don't always take the time to read my daily devotions and I probably would have skipped right past this one except that my sister-in-law posted the prayer on her facebook page and also blogged about it's impact on her. And folks, lightening struck! Being the best teacher that I can be, surrounded by eager young minds that I can help shape and mold both intellectually and SPIRITUALLY while working with a wonderful, loving Christian staff most certainly brings out the BEST IN ME!!! And that means that I shouldn't be having these feelings of guilt! Okay, all us moms know that the feelings of guilt never truly go away, but if I am exactly where I am supposed to be, fulfilling God's plan for my life and I'm also consistently bringing out the best in me, then doesn't that mean that I am being the Mommy that I am supposed to be??? I think so! So while the feelings of guilt still linger, and are sometimes quite strong (I was in tears before leaving the house this morning after listening to Jesse tell us how much he didn't like school for at least an hour!) I have the power through our Lord and Saviour to move past those feelings and know that I am doing the best possible job that I can for my family and it's the job that God has intended for me all along. I'll leave you today, after my long and windy monologue, with the devotional prayer from that day. It is one that I needed, and I hope somewhere in all of this that I have inspired and/or helped one of you!

Dear Lord, thank You for calling me to be the mother of my children. I confess that at times I fall far short of where I want to be in this area of my life. I know I can't do this high calling of motherhood without Your Spirit within me. Help me to submit my selfish will to Your perfect way. Thank You for loving me and seeing my potential to grow and change. In Jesus' Name, Amen

The Official First Day of School Post

Well, as I said it my last post, Monday was the first day of school. For Trey it was the first day of second grade. Trey loves school and is an old hand at this by now so for him it was mostly anti-climatic. For me it was the first time being in a classroom in 7 1/2 years and I'm still not sure of my feelings about that so we'll just leave it there for now! For Jesse it was a MAJOR milestone...his first time at school ever. I thought there would be tears, at least on my part, but we both handled it pretty well and while I teared up some, I guess I was way to busy to dwell on it, so the flood didn't come. On Monday anyway. The FLOOD came Wednesday. The whole day started bad when I got Jesse up and realized he had flooded the bed. So it was rush, rush to give him a bath and get the sheets on to wash. Then, Jesse didn't want to go to school, said he didn't like it (even though when I picked him on Monday and Tuesday he said that he'd had lots of fun), and was clinging to me and crying when I dropped him off. I left him in Mrs. Hall's lap, with her gently restraining him as he reached out to me. By the time I hit the door of the preschool I was in tears, and by the time I reached the front office the flood had come! Another teacher was dropping off her little one in the preschool when I was leaving and she came to me and told me that by the time she left the preschool (you know, about 3 minutes after me) that Jesse was fine. But it was still heartrending and pretty much ruined my whole day. I was really worried about Thursday, but Jesse got up and said he was ready to go to school and he walked in without any tears. He didn't want to take off his backpack because he was showing it off, but there was no clinging and no tears so I wasn't arguing! Our first week is almost over and I am very thankful about that. I am very blessed to have a job at a fabulous school where both my boys are. I am thankful about that! I just really, really wish that my babies didn't have to grow up quite so fast! Now for the first day of school pictures!

Very excited about the first day of K-3!

Such a big boy walking in!

Hanging up his backpack for the very first time!

Since Trey is such an old hand at this now, and since Daddy took all the "home" pictures this morning and for some reason didn't get any of Trey, and since I was so busy getting all my "stuff" together there aren't too many pictures of him. But we did get the all important first day picture with Trey showing off his backpack so that's what counts, rightTrey's classroom is right beside mine.
I don't know if this is a good thing or not???

Not So Wordless Wednesday: Bye, Bye Summer!

We spent the last day of summer vacation enjoying time with family...church, a fabulous lunch at Papa & Ah-ee's, and a late afternoon swim with Aunt Lauris and Uncle Marty...the perfect end to summer!I seriously think Uncle Marty injured himself throwing Trey over and over. and over. and over. and... Jesse's turn...Uncle Marty faked Jesse out on this one...Jesse jumped in, Uncle Marty didn't!Cannon Ball!!!Uncle Marty also performed handstands off the side of the pool & flips! Jesse tried to mimic the handstand & Trey wanted to master the flip! Trey did learn how to do a cannon ball, can opener, and a toothpick...anyone remember those?

And after everyone had left and it was just me and the boys...Jesse took off his floatie and swam

ALL. BY. HIMSELF!

Another milestone reached, sniff, sniff! But I am so proud!

Swimming from the steps all the way to the beginning of the deep end...you know, where Mama can't stand up anymore.He did it over. and over. and over. and...
He even jumped off the side by himself and swam to the steps!
He's come a LONG way, Baby!

Sniff, sniff...it's the first day of school!

Today is the first day of school! Wow! Already??? My baby boy starts K3 today so I am very, very emotional!!! I can't believe that this day has come!!! Last Monday was my first day back in classroom in over SEVEN years!!! Alas, no pictures of me though. It was a good week for me. While I've been a parent at ACA for over 3 years now, it was much different on this side of the equation. I got to know my fellow staff members and I think that there are some wonderful friendships in the making. It's a very close knit group, and starting each and every day off with devotion and praying together makes everyone feel even closer! Thursday night was open house/orientation and it was very nerve wracking for me!!! I met most of the parents and all of my students, several of whom are already taller than me I might add!!! All in all it seems to be a great group of students! A wonderful and supportive principal, a fabulous staff, and great students and parents...what more could a girl ask for!

Our school has gotten brand new playground equipment for both playgrounds this year!!! My wonderful hubby, who claims that I threw him under the bus with this project, has been working tirelessly for the past 2 weeks trying to get this wonderful new equipment installed. Trey and Jesse have been very excited about the new playground and have asked Daddy each and every night to describe it in detail! So...the very first thing we did when we got to school on Thursday night was go look at the new preschool playground. And...Jesse burst into tears and was totally inconsolable because the new 4-way see-saw was not in yet! Then we went in to show him his classroom and introduce him to his teacher. He was so excited!!! He found his name on his table, his cubby, and his backpack hook. Each time he found his name he'd shout, "Mama I see my name again!" He played with all the toys and didn't want to leave when it was time for Mama and Trey to go to our orientation.

In his seat for the very first time!

See...doesn't he look like he's having fun??? Well, I don't know what happened to him during the next couple of hours. Daddy took Jesse and Trey to Trey's classroom for his orientation, while I went to my classroom to meet all my new students and parents and tell them all about our rules and stuff. (By the way, this would be why there are no pictures of Trey in his class. I will do better today though and get my first day of school pictures of Trey and Jesse.) So, anyway, I don't know what happened between going to his classroom and the ride home but we're on the way home and Jesse says, "Daddy roll up the playground because I'm not going to school!" He says that he doesn't like his teacher, his classroom, or his playground and he ain't going! And he stuck by that story all day Friday too! However, on Saturday, we packed his backpack and got him all ready for Monday, and....he seems to be excited again!!! Although he still says that Daddy needs to roll up the playground, he and his friends can just play in the grass! So fingers crossed that today will go well. I'm going to fourth grade! Trey's going to second grade! And Jesse's going to K3! There will be tears! I just know it! Hopefully though they are just mine, and not Jesse's!

Back to School...Already???

I absolutely can NOT believe that it's that time of year again...back to school...seriously, already??? Wednesday night we held our Back to School party at church. The theme was a typical school day and the kids went to various classes...language arts, math, science, art, etc, and even went to lunch in the "cafeteria". The boys had a blast!!!

Morning Assembly Language Arts...the kids had a wide variety of books to choose from and they got to take them home to keep! Trey got several chapter books and is now all about reading "the New Bobbsey Twins"! He really isn't old enough to be reading chapter books yet, is he??? Where has the time gone!Trey's picture that he made during math class.Lunch Time...During art the kids made their lunch bags, and then were served their lunch in them once they arrived in the cafeteria.Recess got canceled due to rain so the kids had a blast flying the paper airplanes they made during science class & playing with the puppets.