New York City, here we come!!! We are taking suggestions!!

We are so excited! Brandon and I, along with some of our best friends, are headed for New York City at the end of the year. We plan to be there mid to late December. We may be there on New Years! We do need some tips though. So for anyone reading who has been there...any suggestions on where to stay, what to do, and, very importantly, where to eat...please, please, please leave it in the comments! We will only be there for 4-5 nights so we want to use our time very wisely!! So far, we hope to go to a Broadway show, the Statue of Liberty, Ground Zero, & Central Park. I had a suggestion today to go here on Sunday. I look forward to some helpful comments! This is the 2nd to last big trip that Brandon and I hope to take before kiddos. Next stop Hawaii!

Something worth sharing....

Just in case any of you have not seen THIS blog, I want to share it with you. I will be adding it to my favorites! I need a little something every day to remind me of where my head and heart should be as a woman striving to be of God's will.

Wordless Wednesday

The first bath I gave our nephew where he smiled instead of cried. I will have to use the sink from now on!! Until he gets too big of course.

Not so Wordless Wednesday... Our Disney Trip (last month) better late than never!

I also wanted to add this picture!! Smashed nose and all, I love this guy so very much!!!

If you could read the tablets of your peers heart, what is it that you would have contributed?

The verse below is a verse that was brought to my attention at our church's women's retreat a couple of months back. I really LOVE this verse. In fact, I have not moved the ribbon in my Bible from the page it is on since. I do not want it to get lost in the pages because I can look at it anytime, and be reminded of the desire God has for us in our walk with him.

You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
2 Corinthians 3:3 (NIV)

The Message says it this way:
Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you. Christ himself wrote it—not with ink, but with God's living Spirit; not chiseled into stone, but carved into human lives—and we publish it.

It is just a reminder of what we are called to do as Christians. Our everyday walk should consist of investing in the hearts of others. I think that if Jesus were a member of my church, he would not spend so much of his time at "church." He would challenge the "church" to get out of the church building and invest in the lives of others. By others I mean those who do not already know Jesus or seek a relationship with him. We should be a breath of fresh air to "others." I think that the hard part is that we do not know how to relate or how to avoid coming across as judgemental or condeming. As a result, we then avoid investing in the hearts of those people all together. I know that I struggle with that balance myself. I feel like I could do so much more but am concerned with these very things.

When you serve in many areas of a church, you start to see and realise things that you could do without seeing or realising. This verse helps me to overlook these things and to focus on the ultimate goal. I do not need to be concerned with others actions and agendas, I need to make sure that my heart is in the right place and that the imprint that I leave in the lives of others is what God would desire it to be.

This helped me to have a, much needed, spiritual reality check today. I thought I might share!

Thursday 13

13 Things I WILL get done this week!

1. Post pictures from our Disney trip!! Brandon does his school through Phoenix online and I have not been able to get to the computer much at home the last couple of weeks.

2. Get back ON track with weight watchers. I have lost 22 lbs since January but I have been going up and down between 2 lbs for the last month. I am ready to get back to going DOWN in pounds ONLY!

3. Help hubby get our garage cleaned out.

4. Fill the clean garage with items for our neighborhood yard sale that will be next week.

5. Help hubby upstairs in the bonus room. We are trying to get our bonus room finished. We started in November and have not done much since February. We have got to get it done! It is going to be my craft space and our office combo. It will be great to have a space for those things and then we will have two official guest bedrooms.

6. Work on some crafts projects that I have started recently but have not had the chance to finish. I might have some things good enough to sale on Ebay. I might get some pics of that on here if it turns out well enough.

7. Set a time to talk with a lady from church that always has a good prospective on things. I have been struggling with some things happening at church lately and just need some wise counsel on how to handle these things. Hmmm...There is probably a deeper post here.

8. Laundry...laundry...and more laundry. My poor husband.

9. Love on and Pray extra hard for my husband. There are some opportunities he is pursuing and we want to make sure that we follows God's will and not ours.

10. Give Mya a bath.

11. Take a nap!

12. Work hard at work!

13. Start a prayer journal.

Thursday 13....dedicated to my husband!!! Happy Birthday Brandon!!!

13 reasons I am glad that my in-laws decided to have a 2nd child : )

1. He is my husband. He truly means the world to me!

2. I have a best friend!

3. They produced God's tool in giving me lots of practice and lessons on the fruits of the spirits...Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, & Self-Control.

4. They produced God's tool in teaching me to just slow down sometimes!

5. Who else would hang things, lift things, build things, & fix the car all because they love me?

6. He is everything that I imagined a husband would be. He spends quality time with me and works very hard at providing for our family.

7. He wants as many (or more) kids as I do.

8. He shares the same goals for our families future.

9. He helps to control the amount of animals at our house. He loves the ones we have but says that if I want another, I must get rid of one that we have. How can you argue with that? I love our animals so much and if it was up to me, I would take in every stray and visit the pound once a week to get more! In all reality, he is preventing the neighborhood from labeling me the cat or dog lady.

10. When I lose things (daily or even more frequently) he helps me to look for them without complaining. He even trys to help me find methods to not lose things. So far...we have not found anything that works. Just this morning, I lost the keys to our SUV. We had to take the car because we could not find them.

11. Who else would rub my back or play with my hair, anytime I ask them to?

12. He drives me to work every day. We work within 10 minutes of one another! If he did not, I would probably have had an anxiety attack by now. When we are in traffic, I do not normally show the fruits of the spirits too well :)

13. I have a great future Daddy on my hands. This is one of the most important things about a mate. Since we want a little larger family then we both had, it will be good to have good parental traits on hand!

A Super de Duper opportunity

Alrighty...here is another chance to win something. Go visit 5 Minutes for Mom for a chance to win a Dyson vacuum. With the combination of dog hair and white carpet at my house, I could use one of these super de duper vacuums!!!


Also, I plan to give everyone an update on my weekend and pictures from Disney sometime in the next couple of days! We have been super busy and there have been many blogworthy happenings that I hope to have time to post here very soon!!!