Living Life Beautifully

It's been a while since I've posted. The last couple of weeks have been mentally stressful, but I'm doing better this week. I even cleaned my floors this week. Not a fun task since I didn't get to them last week. I think I could have made another cat out of the hair I vacuumed up. Blah I am amazed that it's November already. Where did the year go? In a few short weeks we'll be hearing Christmas music on the radio and decorations will start showing up in windows and yards. I love Christmas. I know I've said that before. I'm looking forward to eggnog and ice cream. I hope it cools down. I don't like when it's 80 degrees in December. I have a little of my shopping done. I'm not sure what all I should spend with the economy the way it is. It's hard to buy for my kids at their age. Everything they want is expensive. Justin and Taylor each want a laptop. Yeah...that's not gonna happen. I'd be happy with children that help around the hou...

I never knew raising kids would be so hard. I didn't know that as soon as you have a child, you worry. You worry about everything. As they go through school you want them to make good grades, get along with other children and their teachers. When they start to date, you have all these questions about who they are dating, how that person was raised, what their family is like. You wonder if they will end up married to that person. When they get a job you worry about whether they can do the job well, what they will end up doing for a living, will they be able to support a family. When they start to drive.....OH MY....don't even get me started. You worry them through college, relationships, finances, health. Are they depressed, do they have anger management issues, are they healthy, are they happy, do they really believe in God or are they just trying to shut me up? Placing a child in God's hands and leaving the worry behind is hard to do. Sometimes you can do it for a moment, ...

I was going through some photos today and came across some pictures from a craft show I had, at the house in town, several years ago. I try to take pictures of everything I make. It makes it easier to part with each thing. I keep wanting to do something fun with the things I make, and use, to decorate my own home. I've been brain storming. :) Last night I was up till after 3am, in the morning, thinking of all kinds of things I want to do. I came up with an idea page with doodles of crafts and ideas. I have a passion for making things, which is good, but I don't have the storage space to keep everything I make, or the ability to use everything. So Bruce and I are thinking of trying to get into Gruene Market days, or something like it. That way I can keep making things and maybe they will eventually bless someone else...or at least that's the idea. Anyway....I thought it would be fun to post some of the pictures of the crafts I made back in 2003. It has been years since...

I keep thinking today is Monday. My weeks are flying by and these allergies are crazy. I was so hopeful I would have energy today. I have so much to do. So I got up this morning, took a shower, did the dishes, watched "The View", ate my breakfast, took all my medications and vitamins, Made the bed, put a load in the wash, folded a load from the dryer........etc.....etc..... I can't imagine having a full time job, running a house, managing kids, and taking care of anything else you might have to do. It takes me every bit of my time to manage home, kids, animals, and church stuff...and I don't even do that great of a job at any of those things. I have lots of tricks to make it look like I'm doing a good job. :) I have three of my four cats indoors at the moment. I tell ya, it's a trip. Maggie likes to distress all my furniture. I should rent her out. Mr Gretta likes to crawl up on things he shouldn't crawl up on. (no wonder he broke his leg this last year), ...

I was watching "The Nate show" on tv this morning and it got me thinking about how much fun it is to do an emergency decorating day with a friend who has some big thing coming up. One of my most favorite decorating days was when my cousin Kim called me one morning in a panic because her house was schedule to show to a potential buyer. I threw three kids in a car with two walkers and headed over. The twins were very small, so we put them in the walkers in the dining area and proceeded to go through each room making the most of what was available. Every once in a while we had to run into the dining room and take a collection of artificial flowers from one of the twins because he had pulled them from some arrangement we had displayed perfectly within his reach. It was a fun day. I rememeber a wall she had that they were in the process of removing mirrored tiles and it wasn't replastered yet. We went into a closet and found some long curtains in a burgundy color and ta...

It's so quiet here at home. The husband is working, the oldest is working and the younger three are at school. It's just me and the pets and all the pets are napping. I can hear the AC humming and the clicking of the keys as I type out my post. That's about it. It's funny how we get so used to noise to the point of feeling almost uncomfortable when it's totaly quiet. How cool it must have been to be alive when the world was slower and less occupied. I love to read books with stories from long ago when people cared more about their character and that of others. When children were expected to be respectful of themselves and others. When adults gave a thought to the example they set for their kids. When life was slower and friends were life long. When a barn burning was tragic but the entire town showed up to help build a new one. I'm sure it wasn't all a field of flowers, but you can see where I'm going with this. I want to have a day go by and lo...

I'm looking forward to the fall. I remember when I was little and the leaves would start to fall from the trees. I would run outside and soak it all in. I love to open my old windows, watch the curtains blow in the wind and smell the fresh breeze through the house. At our other house we had a property across the street that was empty and at some point during fall the lightning bugs would be everywhere. Sitting on the porch watching the kids try to catch them and put them in a jar was pretty cool. I've enjoyed this last year in the new/old house. Everything in my home is neutral in color because I have a lot of stuff. I figure it makes it look less cluttered that way. If I had a bunch of stuff in lots of different colors, my home would look like a circus. I learned a trick several years ago. I have very pale skin and learned that painting my walls in warm cream and white colors and decorating in dusty reds, greens, taupe and cream actually makes my skin look nicer. You get this ...

I am happy to report that our little mini kitty Maggie is doing great. Thanks to so many prayers from my fellow animal lovers. Her kidney count is still high but she is acting like normal and seems to be very content. She will have to be an indoor cat from now on, but I'm happy with that. I had to tell a story about something that happened on the day she was doing the worst and we were sure we were going to lose her. I had just gotten off the phone with the vet and wasn't too happy with the news. He was pretty sure she wouldn't make it through. It frustrated me how negative he was. Although after this phone call I was a bit depressed myself. Maggie was born to a barn cat owned by the Saur family. There were originally 4 kittens. The mother cat had disappeared when they were only a couple of weeks old and was never found again. One of the kittens didn't make it but the other three were nursed by hand by my son's girlfriend Kim until she couldn't do it anymore due...

I just don't feel like doing anything today. I got up this morning, got dressed, started some laundry and took Maggie in for her treatment. Now I just can't bring myself to do anything productive for the day. I'm bored and yet, I can't think of anything I want to do. If you were to tell me I can do ANYTHING I want to do. I would look at you like I have not a brain cell left in my head. I have dishes to wash, floors to clean, and bills to pay. All I can think of is, "yeah yeah...whatever". BLAH!!!!!!! I'm not hungry, I'm not thirsty, If you offered me chocolate, it wouldn't excite me. Now that's bad!!!! :) I'm not depressed, I'm not NOT depressed. I'm not bad, I'm not good. Maybe I should just go back to bed, take a nap, and start over in an hour or so.

Ah....the beauty of the mind. So.... The other day I was working on altering a dress from a single one piece item to a skirt and top. It turned out really cute. I wore it to church on sunday . As I was working on it I had to keep trying it on, walk in front of a mirror and try to figure out what needed to be done with it while it was on my body. No easy task. I mentioned to my husband that it would be so cool if I had one of those dress forms, you know, kinda like a headless body that you can pin into. Bruce decided that would be a great thing for me to have and proceeded to look online and see what was available. After some frustrating moments of searching, we found them, and they were out of our price range, of course. So..... I asked him to google "make your own dress form" and wahlah .....duct tape. Ok , so I didn't actually take a picture of my husbands handy work (my upper half wrapped in duct tape) but I have to admit, it turned out rather well. Basically, you put ...

I'm watching "Julie & Julia" while working in the kitchen. I get such a kick out of that movie. When Meryl Streep is in her kitchen cutting a pile of onions the size of a watermelon and her husband walks in only to have the smell of the onions his him in the face. The look on his face...... LOL !! I love it. Just thinking about it makes me laugh. I wish I were better at blogging each day like in the movie. I don't know how many people read my blog, I just enjoy writing. I feel like I'm on a journey in the last several years. I guess we're all on a journey, but how many of us see it? I can see the changes in me. Not sure they're all good. :) I'm doing laundry and cleaning up the house today. It's just too hot to be outside. I worked outside for several days last week to the point that I'm swollen from drinking so much. It's hot out there, and yet not even close to how hot it was last year. I don't think I can put an...

I've started a new book called "Women Food And God". I saw the woman who wrote it on the Oprah show and thought it might be an interesting read. Of course Oprah claims it is the magic pill to weight loss, so that made it much more interesting. I just had to see what was so great about a book of approx 200 pages that claims to be "An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything". I am a little less than half way through and I have to say, it is a thinker. I can just see my husband starting the book and giving up within the first few chapters claiming his brain hurts. I think only a woman would take the time to think out every sentence and try to decipher it's meaning. I'm not a psychology major so it takes me a bit more time than, I'm sure, some people. I had been doing the weight watchers point system for several months and have come to a stopping point on the plan....meaning, I'm at a plateau. I think my body, in it's pre -menopausal stage...

Tuesday May 25th 2010 Going through Alex's school papers this morning I found a story he wrote that was just too funny not to share. I'm going to add his spelling errors just for fun. Alex is 11. Fortion cookies On the way home from school. I passed an old woman selling something. I looked up on a sign that said, "fortion cookies 25 cents." I had chage from lunch money so why not. I bought the cookie ate it, the fortion said, "shape-shift." Once I got to my bathroom, I found a green area on my back, but it was only guacamole, so I went to my dog Brinkley to lick it off. Once he was finished I said, "good boy Brink..." Then absolute siolence filled the room. My brother Taylor walked passed us and said, "Hi Brinks." My brother wasn't smart, so he mostly told me I turned into a dog. For one thing I could have turned into something like a bald eagle, a fishman, big foot, or a frog. After that, I had to get used to fur, fleas, and extream ...

On occasion, it seems God wakes me up in the middle of the night to have a little conversation. Probably because it's the only time of the day that I'm quiet and still enough to listen. Usually it's at about 3 in the morning. Well, it's 3:20 and I'm wide awake. It's funny how things fit together when he's trying to tell me something. I can have an eye opening thought and that is usually followed by several other things I come in contact with to verify it's not just a coincidence. Yesterday I went to get groceries and afterwards I typed out a text to a Friend saying, "I hate getting groceries". As I looked at it I deleted some of it and typed out, "I hate having to bring home and put away groceries by myself". Even that felt kinda odd, but I sent it. About an hour later, as I was waiting in line to pick up Alex from school, I read a chapter in a book I was reading from Joyce Meyer, were she said she had prayed for God to give her...

When I was 5 years old, I used to crawl through the hedge around our back yard and run across the street to visit the neighbor lady. I did it so often that I created a hole in the hedge. I remember after a while there was a metal something or another trying to block my way through. Ha! Like that was going to keep me from getting through that hedge. I had lost my cousin and best friend, just before, to a heart condition that the doctors were unable to correct. Something that is very repairable now. I headed over to Ms Betty's house almost every day I'm sure. When I think about it I can only imagine how frustrating that must have been to have a 5 year old walking into your house almost every day. I remember I used to play with these little animals made of glass or plastic that you could hang on the side of a glass and it looked like they were climbing up. So funny what you remember. Ms Betty taught me how to crochet when I was 7. As you can see by my age, my mother was u...

Today was beautiful outside. Unfortunately I had indoor chores to do that were important. I did, however, take the rabbit out and put him in his large outdoor cage with some paper to play with. He's a happy camper. The garden needs cleaning and probably some planting. I have lots of larkspur that seeding in just about everything. I love larkspur. I still haven't cleaned up all the white powder from the fire extinguisher. I think that will be a forever chore. It seems to have made it's way all the way out of the room I used it in and covers my piano and every light shelf and trinket I own. No fun. The other day, Bruce and I were having a talk about how so many people that I enjoyed getting to see on a regular basis are no longer available to me. It's been really hard. I remember a time when I would spend several days a week getting to see my friends, friends who I knew through school, through my husband, through my children, friends at church. Now it seems my...

Today is the ash wednesday . I've been thinking all day that I want to fast from something for lent. Now I'm starting to think I should DO something for 40 days of lent. I really wish I could read the bible in 40 days. But it would be a bit like speed reading with little benefit , plus, I'm not sure I can do it. My last post I talked about how things have been quite overwhelming, and that I have this need to re-create myself. Since then I've had some ah ha moments. I realized that my prayer life has been....shall we say...just as cluttered as my physical life. Each morning I wake up and have my prayer time with so much in my head that the prayer itself seems to get lost. At different times of the day, when I would pray for something, it seemed I had no words, or ability to focus. I journal a lot, but even that wasn't helping. I usually have a friday morning bible study available to me, but ours has been put on hold for a while. So basically, I'm lett...

Do you ever have those days where you just want to start over, like re-creating yourself, doing everything better? When your passion for whatever your doing in life has become stagnant or unfulfilled ? In the last month I've been doing the weight watchers thing. My beautiful sister-in-law looks amazing, and I thought it would be worth it to give it a try. I'm loving it and hating it at the same time, but it's also making me want to change other aspects of my life. I think I've lost the passion for what I make of my life. Does that make sense. I do the mom thing, cook, maid, accountant, taxi service, laundromat, bathroom attendant, vet, nurse, interior designer, seamstress, etc, etc..... I do the wife thing...I won't go into detail there. I do the church thing. I do the daughter, friend, sister, stranger thing. Each thing I treat with my usual reactions. In my home I am the ship captain. Out of my home I am the dingy boat that is tied to the deck. I run...

Ok....So you probably have a stack of cards from this Christmas and maybe even a Christmas or two back. I was so tired of having to throw away beautiful cards with well wishes and stories of what family and friends have been up to. So I thought it would be fun to scrapbook them. The trick here is that it costs nothing, is fun to do and doesn't look bad. Each card you get has something to work with. The envelope might look cool. It might have stickers, stamps or some cool print to it. The card itself has a front a back and the inside to work with. You can use gift tags, scraps of wrapping paper, tissue paper, ribbon, stickers, and even bits and pieces of boxes and gift bags. The first thing you want to do is decided what your going to scrapbook your cards into. You will need your scrap book of choice, your cards, glue, a glue stick, scissors, a ruler, and a pen to start. All other things are optional. You can use an old or new book that your not going to read again. This is called a...