When I can't write for myself...

Obviously, blogging has become a low priority in my life. But, recently I had an interesting experience at the hairdresser about homeschooling. And since my friend Sarah is amazing and awesome, she blogged about it.
Head over to her blog to find out how I actually got up the nerve to confront someone on their negative view of homeschooling.

This is our Life: A boy and an iPad

In an effort this year to catch our family as we are, in our element, and candidly, here is my Micah, doing what he loves. He loves this iPad and had mastered it by the time he was 18 months. Honestly, this is how I get to sleep a little longer in the mornings, and sometimes this is how I get history and reading done with the "big kids"

 

Christmas card

5x7 Folded Card

View the entire collection of cards.

Tonight I got a little bit of a head start on my Christmas cards through Shutterfly!!

Perspective

It is a sad, sad thing that I have not blogged since June. Oh well.

The past 24 hours have been really stressful for me. Waah,Waah, here is my sob story. A week ago, Caleb tells me that our desktop computer won't boot up. What does he know? I always get it to boot up. So, downstairs I go, and it says it needs to do some type of fix it thingy before it can boot up. I follow the directions and let it work it's magic to get all booted up again. After an hour it says it needs to try it's magic again because it didn't work the first time. "Oh crap," I start to think, "what if, just what if something is wrong." Because it was just the day before I was wondering, "when was the last back up?" It had been a loooonnngg time ago.

The next day Mike took it in to the Computer place and assured me it would be ok. The thing is less than two years old. All I really want at this point is my pictures. That is all, everything else means nothing to me. I must mention that last month I took yearbook pictures for our homeschool group. 125 individual pictures. This is on my mind, as well as most of Micah's life in pictures.

Monday, Mike gets a call that they are pretty sure there is nothing they can do. This was the 10% chance of things, by the way, that they said could happen. They were going to try one more thing. This is where I lost it and began to cry.

How could I have let this happen? I don't know how to back them up on the external hard drive, but I could have asked Mike at any given time. If I am going to be a photographer, I should be more responsible. Just how much of Micah's life wasn't backed up. Christmas', birthday's, Easter?

And then yesterday, I read our devotion with the kids from Jesus Calling. It was about being thankful. "When you come to Me with a thankful heart, it opens up windows of heaven. Spiritual blessing fall freely through those widows and down into your life. A thankful heart opens you up to these blessing, and then you have even more reasons to be grateful."

The scripture to this was Habakkuk 3:17-18

"Though the fig tree should now blossom, nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

and there be no herd in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord;

I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

God, the Lord, is my strength;

he makes my feet like the deer's;

he makes me tread on my high places."

For me I thought "though my computer may fail, and my pictures are gone, I will rejoice in the Lord." While I have lost what are so many of my memories through pictures, the ones I take pictures of are right here with me. God has taught me a lot of lessons these past months with a to of heart break going on around me. I will rejoice in Him.

Today, I got a text from Mike that said, "it is all gone, they don't see anything." Right after that I looked outside to see two of my neighbors walking. One is a physical therapist who is now helping out the other neighbor who just went through brain surgery at the age of 46 because she has brain cancer.

Perspective.

Mike's step mom is battling breast cancer, another family member ovarian cancer. One of my high school classmates lost her battle with leukemia this summer leaving behind four children. I am going to be ok.

I have many phone calls to make to have pictures retaken, and most of my pictures will never make it into a scrapbook. But, I will choose to be thankful for my wonderful life, and to have made so many memories with those I love around me.

What Micah is up to....

This little guy of mine, oh how I do love him!! He is funny and silly, and busy and loves cars!!! He is talking a lot and I wanted to remember some of the things he is saying at this point...so here it is, another Micah post.

His favorite thing in the world is cars. And trucks. And choo choos. When we dirve down the road, he has to point them all out. "Mommy, a car, Mommy a truck, a big truck! Mommy, a bus! Oh, a choo choo, a plane!" When we find a punch bug and call it out, "Silver Punch Bug!" He says, "Moooom", or "Daaadd." Before he could say cars, he said, "hars."

He also says yes and no now. I miss his gesture of tapping his cheek when he said no. And he also says "uh huh" for yes. He calls us "Mommy, Daddy, Bubby, BB, and EE." Grandma and Grandpa are both "Papa." He also says "Jesus" He loves our VBS music and videos and asked to listen to Jesus. He also goes to the statue of Jesus at my Mom's house and kisses it and says, "Jesus."

This weekend he pointed to a spot on his knee where he hard hurt it and said ,"boo boo" and then leaned over and kissed it. If you ask him who is my big boy, or who is cute he says "Me!" He also tells me when he pee pee and poo poos, but hasn't on the potty yet. He does like to flush the potty when I am done and say, "bye bye pee pee!"

Oh, and "mine" is a big word around here. I am working on that. Inside and outside are big words around here too. So is shoes. And he loves his shoes. But only one pair. His blue sandals. Dogs are popular around here too. He calls them "Ruff Ruff's." Cats are "Meow", but you have to stick your tongue out. . Horses are "Nee Nee"

He is growing so fast, as they all have. In about 6 weeks, we will be celebrating two with this precious little miracle.

Hail of a night...

This spring has brought pretty crazy weather around here. When Danielle was here, I told her I had not seen storms like those here and around us since we moved here. Our family was getting ready to head out to Atlanta last Wednesday so we could catch a flight to California on Thursday. We were under tornado warnings all day, so I called mike and told him I didn't want to drive down that night, but get up really early and drive after the warnings were gone. His response was, "I am getting off early, let's go ahead and drive before the worst of it hits."

So, off we went. I think I prayed every minute of the four hour drive (which normally would take three) There was debris flying everywhere. We were surrounded by trees on either side of I 75, and I kept waiting for a tornado to come up over the trees.

At one point, after we had driven into Georgia we heard the emergency alert system on the radio say, "Take cover if you are in Rome, GA. A tornado has just touched down." About a minute later, we passed the turn off to Rome! Mike kept saying, "I am so glad we did this tonight." My thought was, "you get me safely to our hotel and I will agree with you."

When we were a half hour outside of Atlanta, I got a phone call from our neighbor asking if we were safe. After I told her, "yes," she said, "ok. The good news here is your ouse is still standing. The bad news is we had a terrible hail storm and your house is damaged and your car is probably totaled." That is what they knew at night.

The next morning, my neighbors were out boarding up our windows that were blown all the way through. Friends came over and vacuumed water out of our car, rescued music sheets, cleaned up glass, and cleaned up the house. We flew to California!

Once we got to CA, we received pictures of the damage awaiting us when we got back. After reading about Tuscaloosa, AL. I felt thankful for the minimal damage done to my house, and for the amazing people in my life who jumped in to help us out.

Danielle

This is Danielle. She is my best friend. We met 13 years ago at Bible Study Fellowship in Silverdale, WA. We sat together at the lecture, which was on marriage and she leaned over to me and said, "Mawwiage is what bwings us together today." We have been friends since. I say she is my best friend, when really, I have so many "best friends", but she was my first real friend to keep friendship real. To tell me the truth in love and to tell me when my butt looked big in a pair of pants and me not be offended by it :)

And....she and her family came to visit me for 9 days while on their adventure across the country. It was close to the perfect week for me. Every day Danielle and her girls came over, some days Kyle came too. We went to the mountains, a civil war re-enactment, shopped, took the kids horse back riding, and spent lots and lots of time sitting around and talking. (Oh yeah, and we went to the Melting Pot. Just me and Danielle)

Our kids got along great. They had not seen each other in three years, and don't really know each other. Kadie and April made me laugh almost as much as Danielle did!

It was realllly hard to say good bye at the end. They had to move on with their trip, and eventually get back to Washington. I cried and cried as they pulled away and my sweet Elisa said, "Group hug!"