What a beautiful day!!!

Today was just an absolutely beautiful day!  It was georgeous outside, the sun was shining, the pancakes were flowing and the bees were buzzing.  Let me back up and explain. 

This morning, we took the family to Spiral Diner in Ft. Worth. 

For those of you who don't know, it is a vegan restaurant, the food is pricy, but it is worth it because it is GOOD.  Everything they serve is organic, most is local grown and everything is vegan.  We don't go there often because it is like an hour drive from us, and like I said it is kinda pricy when you are a family of our size.  But today we decided to splurge, every Sunday they do all you can eat pancakes for $5.95, so we hopped in the car this morning and headed to Ft. Worth.  When we got there the line took forever, but after about 45 minutes of waiting, we finally got to sit down (same table we always seem to get...hmmm.  Seeing as we went to have pancakes, that would be what you would think we would order right?  Nope, Sierra and Ella got the pancakes, Tae got broccoli and tofu, Jimmy got a nut burger, Haley got a portabello patty melt burget and I got a portabello burger.  So good!!!  Just not enough of it, but it wasn't as bad as we thought it was going to be.  So since we were already it Ft. Worth we decided that since it was such a beautiful day, that we would go to the Botanical Gardens, after all they were only like 5 minutes away, and it is much better than being cooped up in the house.

So we piled into the car and headed to the Botanical Gardens.  It was a great choice.  The fall colors were absolutely breathtaking.

Breathtakingly beautiful

Have you ever seen an evergreen tree not be green???

Sierra had to pose for this one, she picked which flower she wanted to smell in the picture

 

Ella wanted to smell the purple one because it was my favorite color.

Trying to get some good pics of the girls

I snuck this one when Haly wasn't looking

Sierra took a family picture, not bad for a 4 year old

After the Botanical Gardens we went to Coldstone Creamery and got some ice cream and then came home.  All in all today was a great day, no one took any phone calls (our phones were dead most of the day thanks to the newest iPhone update, and I am curerntly downloading what is supposed to fix it, hopefully it will because my battery is dying like crazy and I know I am not using it THAT much), and we just had a great family day.  Sometimes that is so needed, we get so busy in our day to day lives with work, ministry, school, housework that we forget how important it is to work on our family life.  Without our family life, nothing else matters.  It needs attention too, and I am so glad that we did that, it was needed.  So now the kids are in bed, Jimmy is on the computer in the office, I am finishing this up and then, I just might watch a scary movie (since all of my tv shows were reruns last week :( so I don't need to catch up on them) all by myself and pig out on some veggie straws (sooo good get them if you can find them).  Night all, see you soon!

Friendships

Today's blog started out being about what we did today, but I think I am going to post about that tomorrow when I have all the pics uploaded, because it just won't be the same without all the awesome pics.  Instead this post is going to be about friendships.  The reason I changed it last minute is because something just came to me (one of those moments I talked about yesterday that usually comes during the day when I am away from my computer, or when I am falling asleep).

I have a lot of friends, some are close, some are not, some are best friends and some are more like family.  When I moved from Texas to California when I was 11 it was really hard on me.  I was leaving my entire life behind, all my lifelong friends.  Everyone told me I would make new ones, but it would never be the same as the ones I was leaving behind.  Everyone told me I could keep in touch with my old ones, but with time came the new friends, still not as good as the old ones, but they kept me busy enough that the letters and phone calls to the old ones (one in particular) became further and further between and to this day I don't remember who was the last one to call or write to one another.  It is a little easier now with Facebook and email and texting and things like that, but things will never be the way they were when we were 11 (and thanks to Facebook we are talking again, and we even see each other in person on occasion).  I don't expect things to be the same, almost 20 years of growing up has happened since then, but it is still great to catch up, look at old (really old) pictures of us when we were 2 playing in the snow, and old dance pictures and watching our kids play now who are the age we were is just to cool (to bad we never went to University of Texas in Austin together and became dorm buddies while I majored in music, but I think our lives turned out great anyway, God had a better plan for us, I just regret all the years we missed out on).

Once I moved to California, I found it really hard to make friends, I had this "stigma" attached to me, it was called "I'm from Texas, and apparently I talk different than all of ya'll so let's make fun of me" anyone else have this one or one like it that followed you?  Well I did and I didn't like it.  I made a few friends and soon by high school I had the biggest and best group of best friends anyone could ever have.  Still to this day I love each and every one of them, they became family, my mom was their mom, their mom was my mom, we did EVERYTHING together, we were inseperable.  I hope that when all of my kids grow up that they will have a group like mine, even though they will never be as cool as we were, but they can sure try. 

Then, it happened again, my senior year.  Time to move again.  Military life really stinks when you are 17.  I once again had to leave all of my friends, my best friends, my family of friends.  My world came crashing down around me once again.  My saving grace...one of my best friends had moved to the same place the year before me.  I had one, just one friend, and that was all I needed.  By then we had email and AOL, but it was dial-up and it just sucked.  Nothing like what we have now, if we had then what we have now, our friendships would have never changed.  We could have facetimed all the time and had sleepovers online and all kinds of stuff (the ideas are endless!!!), but we couldn't.  And by the time all of this stuff came about, 8 years had passed, we had gotten married, had kids, gotten divorced (some of us), gotten remarried.  A lot of actual growing up had happened.  And a lot of growing apart had happened too.  The closeness that was there before, just wasn't there anymore, try as we might, it just wasn't.  I still to this day love them all dearly and wish things could be back the way they used to be, back when we all lived in the same area, went to the same school, but we can't.

I now have new friends again, some are close, some are new, and some are like family that I don't know what I would do without. My friendships with my new friends are different than my old friendships were.  I wish I could combine the two, but that isn't going to happen and I know this.  Sometimes moving on from friendships is really hard, sometimes you feel like your heart is going to rip out of your chest because leaving your old friends behind hurts so bad, even though you know that there are going to be new friends just around the corner, it doesn't make it any easier, if anything it makes it harder because you know that eventually, you are going to love them dearly, and they are going to go and you have to do it all over again.

So here is the question I give to you.  What do you do?  Continue forward, push on and hope that these new friends never leave you, stop making friends all together?  Break all ties with friends when you notice that things are starting to frey between you because of work, family, ministry, or life is just getting in the way? Or just keep moving forward, acting like nothing is wrong and hope they find their way back, technology is an awesome thing after all.

Church and bedtime...

Well today was the first time in a while that we went to church.  Jimmy and I got up early, got ready and rode the bike to visit a local church.  We don't have a church home which will shock a lot of you, our church home is the prison, and our support group.  We have church wherever God leads us to have church at the time, if it is at our kitchen table, so be it, if it is a group on Tuesday nights, ok no problem, and it always always always happens at the prison on Fridays and the 2nd saturday of every single month without fail for the last 5 years.  So while we don't have a "Church home" we have many church homes that love us and welcome us and are excited to see us every week.  So anyway now that we have that out of the way, we went to church this morning and heard an amazing message about being on fire for the Lord, how to many churches are dying because they have become pew sitters by nature and think that they are serving by doing nothing.  That we need to get out there and do some footwork, how do we expect anyone to get saved if we aren't doing anything to show them what it is like to live as a person who is saved?  Are they just supposed to look at someone sitting in a chair about to fall asleep and think "Whoo-Hoo!!!  I so want some of what they have going on!!!!  Let me go ask them how I can do that too!"  NO!  You have to get out there and start showing people how blessed you are, post it on facebook, tweet about it, put it on myspace (if it is still out there, I have heard a rumor that it is), text about it, scream it from the rooftops.  Let everyone know that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, he is the only way!  That a life with Him is so amazing and you don't know how you did it before you found Him.  How is anyone supposed to know if you don't tell them and show them the amazing gift you have been given?  Needless to say, this evening, Jimmy and I went out to pass out fliers about our ministry, to let people know about Him and what He is doing in our lives.  We knocked on doors for about 2 hours, handed out fliers, told them about what we were doing (scared one guy, I guess the biker vests were a little to much for him, he wouldn't open the glass screen door).  Some might show up at group this week, some might not.  Either way, we got the word out there and someone who's door we knocked on, God set that up, they needed to hear that there is something out there for them, someone who won't judge what they have done, who loves them for who they are.  There is a group of people out there meeting every week with piercings, tattoos, bikers, cowboys, old, young, some with bad tempers, some that are quiet, some that are loud, some that cuss then blush, some that cuss and then cuss again because they are sorry, but no one judges one another, we just love one another, and we would love to have them join our group if for nothing else, just to check it out (they almost always come back at least a few times, and some we just can't get rid of no matter what we do j/k we love all of our people).

So on to the other thing in the title of tonights post.  Bedtime, yes I know it is an odd combination, church and bedtime, but tonight God just opened my eyes to something huge!  I have said before that I am working on getting the girls to bed on their own, so far they have been doing really good, Ella the past couple of nights has been throwing fits when it comes time to make easy decisions for the night.  She does really good up until she has to decide which blanket she wants to use and if she wants it wrapped around her or if she just wants to be covered.  It is a major meltdown as if I have just told her that she will be wrapped up in fire ants or no chocolate for the rest of her life or something awful like that.  I ask her first which blanket and she just sits there and looks at me as if I am speaking Chinese or something, so I ask her again, "Ella, which blanket do you want to use tonight?  Poka dots or the red one?"  Last night she decided she was going to choose something that wasn't one of the two choices just to see if I was paying attention, and of course it would be the one that Sierra was using.  That ended up being a 10 minute tantrum.  So tonight I asked her 3 times, she just looked at me so I said, "ok, you think about it, I am going to go cover Sierra and I will be back to cover you (they are in toddler beds like 4 feet away from one another).  Meltdown 1 starts.  I ignore her, ask Sierra which blanket she wants, she wants her heart one, and she wants it around (which is always more fun because it comes with a snuggle and a bounce/throw onto the bed), hug, kiss, I love you's, sweet dreams and she is done (have I mentioned I love that kid).  Back to Ella, I ask her again which blanket she wants and she just melts down, bawling.  I calmly ask again, "Ella, you need to pick a blanket or I am going to have to pick for you because it is going to get really really cold in your room tonight."  Nothing.  So I tell her, "Ok, I am going to cover you with the red and the poka dot kiss and hug and I am going to go in the living room, I have some things I need to do"  so I cover her, she kicks the blanket off, I cover her again, she kicks it off again.  I cover her, hold it down long enough for me to kiss her on the head, hug her, tell her I love her and good night, out the door.  The child sounds as if she has become posessed!!!  Kicking and screaming, who is this kid and what has she done with my sweet Ella who loves to sit on the couch with me and rub my hair and tell me how much she loves me?!  So heartbroken I sit in the livingroom (right next to their room) and try to get lost in facebook (zombies, smurfs and sims), but I just can't get into it.  I wait a few minutes in hopes she will calm down and go back in, ask her again, "would you like to pick a blanket?  I will either cover you, or put it around and we can start over again."  Supernanny would have a FIT!!!  But it turns out all she needed was a few minutes to realize I meant business, if she was not going to pick, I would and I would make sure that she still got her hugs and kisses and her I love you's, but I was not going to mess around.  I guess she either learned Chinese or I started speaking English again because she picked the poka dot one, wanted it around and gave the biggest hugs and kisses and told me that she loved me.  My Ella Bella was back.

The reason I told the long verson was because this is how it was revealed to me.  We are Ella, or Sierra.  God tells us, you can either go this way and pick which one, I can love you through it, hug you, kiss you, tell you how much I love you and we can do it peacefully.  Or you can make the decision to choose the third thing, not what I intend for you to do.  But if you do this, it isn't going to go well, you are going to end up kicking and screaming and mad, throwing a fit like a 3 year old, but I will still try to help you make the right decision, still give you a hug and kiss and tell you that no matter how you act, I will always love you.  Once you decide that you have calmed down, you can come to me, and we will find a way to get you back where you need to be, back to the choices that I laid out before you, the ones that I am blessing for you.  We can either work together or against each other, but it is always easier to work together.

I was sitting on the couch after the last time I went in the room, when my Ella was back and I just had one of those ah-ha moments and it was like, "duh!  How have I never gotten that before?!"  Ever have one of those moments?  The ones where you can just hear God talking to you and telling you, "This is what I have been trying to get across to you."

Remember what is important

Tonight I had the scare of my life.  There are moments where you think the worst, and then there are moments where you fear the worst in the pit of your stomach so strongly that you could throw up just to make it go away.  I had one of the latter tonight.

Jimmy goes to the prison every Friday night to do our bible study with the guys at the unit.  Normally he is done between 9:15 and 9:30 and home by about 9:45 at the latest.  Well tonight, the girls and I are having fun making cookies and just being like girls will be, homework and stuff like that, when 1, 2, 3 cops go flying down the road in front of our house, sirens blazing going no less than 90 mph.  I look at the clock because I know it is getting close to time for Jimmy to be heading home, and it is 9:30.  The cops are flying toward the direction of the prison.  Then a firetruck and ambulance go flying by.  The first thing I think is oh my gosh!  Jimmy is on the bike, and I have his phone!  It is just about time for him to be on his way and there is a very dangerous intersection between here and the prison and the worst flashes into my mind.  Minutes start to crawl by, I am imagining horrible things, and it is taking every ounce of my being not to jump into the car and fly to the prison.  All I can see is him laying in a road somewhere, his drivers license still has our old address on it, he doesn't have his phone, and doesn't have an insurance card on him (still with our old address on it too, I really need to fix that come to think of it).  My heart starts racing, I can feel the nausea setting in.  I start shaking thinking about what would I do if something was to happen to him.  How would I survive without him.  How empty would my life be, how would I explain to the girls that something happened to their daddy, he is their whole world (I am fighting back tears while I am typing this and reliving the entire thing).  I am trying not to panic but time just isn't moving fast enough for me and I have no way of knowing if the person I love more than anything is ok or not.  So I wait...time ticks by more slowly than it has ever ticked by before in the history of time.  9:45 comes and still nothing, 9:50 and I am almost beside myself with worry and I hear a careflight helocopter go by.  Now I am about to loose my mind and just burst into tears.  I calm down, get a glass of water and call the prison to see if he left yet, if they say yes just a minute ago, we are good, if they say he left a while ago, it is time for me to make the longest drive of my life.  They say that all of the volunteers are still there at the unit.  I almost cried with joy, I explained to them that I am not some crazy wife, that all of these cops went flying that way, he was on the bike, no phone and I could tell that she totally understood and reassured me that he was ok and still there, count didn't clear.  Needless to say, I felt so much better, I could have cried with joy at that moment.

I can honestly say that I have never been so worried about someone in my life.  It is moments like this that make you realize just how much you love someone.  How much your whole world revolves around them.  How important they are to you.  So many people worry so much about their posessions and don't really care about the people around them.  In that moment, I realized just how much I really do love him and don't know how I could live without him.  Him and I have a saying, "I love you more today than yesterday, but not as much as tomorrow" (then I found out there was a song that said it, and I said they stole it from me, but it turns out it was written long before I was born, but it is still MY saying).  That saying was never more true than it was tonight for me.

Rain, glorious rain

Who knew that when I posted about how awful and hot, and dry and just yucky it is, that the very next night we would get rain?!  How exciting it is, and how desperately needed.  Of course it didn't rain enough to get us out of the extreme drought conditions we are in, but it was enough to get everyone excited about it.

I have been working at putting Sierra and Ella to bed at a decent hour (yes I know 3 and 4 year olds should already be on a schedule, don't get me started on this subject or we will be here for a looooong time), and by themselves.  Normally the way our night goes is kinda like this. 

10:00pm - Me: "girls, it's bedtime, lets get your pj's on and start getting ready for bed!!"
                 Sierra and Ella: *poof* nowhere to be found
10:30pm - Me: "girls, come on, it is time for bed!"
                Sierra and Ella: acquire the ability to become invisible
11:00pm - Me: "IT IS BEDTIME, GET IN YOUR ROOM NOW!!!!!!!!" find girls, drag them kicking and screaming to their room, read bedtime story after fighting over who's turn it is to read a story and which story to read, read story, decide if they want their blankets covering them or around them, turn on fan, turn off light, I sit on floor of room with my iPad/iPhone watching something on Netflix or playing a game while they go to sleep.

12:30am/1:00am - girls are finally asleep so I can take care of whatever last minute thing I have to take care of and at about 2:00am I drag myself to bed and depending on the day I am either up at 6:00am to take Haley to school, or 9:30ish when the girls decide they are going to be wide awake and ready to run circles around me and our day begins.

So with that being said, 2 nights ago, I decided it was time to transition to them going to sleep in their rooms by themselves, Haley needed help with her homework that was due at midnight that night (college class), I couldn't do it with the girls running around I needed to concentrate.  So I put them to bed, explained that it was time to go to sleep, I had to take care of some things and I would be in the kitchen. IT WORKED!!!!  They went to sleep by themselves without so much as a peep!!!!!  The next night, I did the same thing, and it worked again!  I feel like a pro at this now, no screaming, no fits, no coming out of the room a million times asking for something!  I got this down!!!

WRONG!!!  This absolutely wonderful beautiful storm, destroyed my work...The thunder terrified Sierra, it was to bright with the lightening and the thunder was to loud for Ella (who hates anything louder than someone talking).  They did not want to go to sleep.  My poor babies were scared and it took everything in me not to go back to sitting in their room until they fell asleep because I don't like when my babies are scared.  So I did the next best thing.  I sat down with them and explained how God made the rain, and God only makes good things right?  He made them and me, and then they start getting excited to name off all of the things God makes (including their toys and clothes and pets).  I then explained in a way that only God could have told me to explain it, why it rains, why we shouldn't be scared, how important it is, how the sound of thunder sounds like God clapping or going bowling.  But I didn't explain it away.  I didn't explain how the thunder was God bowling, I didn't take away from what was happening, I just explained it in a way that I have never done before and could never do again.  Before I explained it to them, they were scared of the thunder, afraid of the storm, but when I took that 5 minutes to really explain what was happening and why it was ok, why it was good and why it was important that it was happening, they went right to sleep and weren't afraid anymore.

Leave it to God to teach a lesson using the rain.  A lesson not only to a 3 and 4 year old, but to me as well.  A lesson about how sometimes it is ok to be afraid, and sometimes you can't explain away your fear by making something up, but by holding onto the truth that is so much stronger than the pretty dolled up explanation like "the thunder is God bowling, or the lightening is God taking pictures"  Sometimes, the answer is just that simple, "The thunder sounds like God bowling, and the lightening looks like God taking pictures, but it really isn't.  God made the raid to help the plants grow, they were so thirsty that God made it rain so they wouldn't be thirsty anymore.  The rain is so good, and God only makes good things right?"