Thankful #5 2013

I love my sisters.

No matter how mean we were to each other as kids....

No matter how different our lives become....

We are still each other's biggest fan, (well sometimes biggest critics.....in a loving kind sisterly way)

We grew up knowing we are all we have... We may fight with each other, but I will be a monkey's uncle before you mess with my sister!

I am thankful for a sisterly bond.

Thankful #4 2013

This is not the best picture, I was trying to zoom my less than par iPhone camera from the sound room of our church...

But none the less, I wanted to share this picture because it is my two favorite people in one picture..... Joseph and Katrina.

Joseph is a hardworking, honest, sweet, service oriented servant of God. We share the love of many odd things, have our own inside jokes, and can pretty much laugh at about and with each other at any time. His passion for all things Holy is astounding and in fact I learn more from him than he knows.

Katrina is my sweet friend. She can make me smile just by listening to Christmas music no matter if it is the season for it or not. Katrina was my "navigator" on a trip across the country....and we are such good friends we could bring laughter to any situation at pretty much any point.....She works hard for the kingdom of God, sings beautifully, and despite a rough emotional childhood, her strength, trust in God, and devotion to seek His will gives me hope.

So all in all.....I am thankful for the relationships I have with the newly married Joseph and Katrina Phillips.

Thankful #3 2013

I am thankful today for my church's ladies activities...

This weekend a lot of us went down to a retreat camp and spent 18 hours in deep intercession, supplication, and learning how to develop a deeper prayer life, and ultimately that will increase our faith and walk with God.

In the past few months, we have had to spontaneously provide meals for four funerals, we had to serve    our whole church family, we have had different groups plan events for our fellowship. 

We keep busy....sometimes we feel too busy......but we have a great time...and we all now have a friendship with each other that can't be beat.

Here are a few of the ladies at our breakfast fellowship we had at Mimi's Cafe.

Thankful #2 2013

Today I am thankful for Pinterest.

I get a lot of fun ideas from there.

The site gives me a place to organize everything I want to do that gives me a creative outlet.

The chalkboards above are pins I have made real. 

I made the chalkboards last year, and searched for thanksgiving ideas this year....

Thank you Pinterest!

Thankful #1 2013

I will try not to repeat any from previous years.... But I am going to try and share what I am thankful for throughout the month...

Day 1
I am thankful for how fast time moves...
Sounds weird I know but, it seems just like yesterday I was packing up my Christmas items....and here we are November 1st, 54 days away from Christmas.... I love love love having traditions and family time and celebrating Jesus his birth, and his miraculous life!
And unlike being an 8 year old having to wait FOREVER for birthdays and holidays....now I blink and time moved half a year!

Adoption fundraiser

I will get into more details later, but....I started a new business.

I am now an independent consultant for thirty-one gifts.... 

This is my official fundraiser for my adoption fund.

If you want to participate, go to

www.mythirtyone.com/laylaweaver 

Click on "my parties"

Then click on the shop now link on "Layla's open house"

Then shop shop shop.

I get 25% of each sale! and again this is for my adoption fund....

Change

Ha, much like me diaries as a kid, I get to start this one like this....

"I know it has been a long time, I am sorry, I have lots to catch you up on"

That's always fun!

Well, looking back to from November to now, I want to say not much has happened, but, again, a whole 5 months worth of stuff has happened.

I don't have a lot of time to break down five months, but I do want to update you on one of the most important changes...

We have refocused our efforts.
Instead of IVF and all the infertility stuff, we are redirected to adoption.
A BIG leap of faith in my mind, only because I really want my a child of my own. I want a little baby I can compare my baby pictures to...I want someone who I can say "stop acting like your daddy" or you have your grandma's nose....but...I had a moment a few summers ago while we were at a conference for the youth of our church, it was a moment I will never forget, but I obviously didn't hear the Lord loud enough.
But in that moment, I was directed to adoption. At the time, I was thinking that the Lord was trying to tell me that we should adopt all the kids of our lives into our hearts as if they were our own, when in fact He was telling me that Jason and I need to adopt. ha.
It only took me two years to have my "Ah Ha" moment and refocus my desires.

I will post more about that experience later, but, I just wanted to touch base and formally/publicly declare this focus shift!

There it is.

October 31 day challenge recap

Yes I have been slacking!
I am pretty sure it is intentional!

Last month I blogged about trying the 31 day challenge on "putting the HOME in homemaking" and I blogged about a specifically challenging day I was having.
Well since I keep it real and I don't put up fronts here or at home I am keeping it up....however after publishing the post and a day later reading it again, I thought how real and personal my feelings were that dropped off my screen! Almost to the point of deleting...so instead of trashing the post I had to make a plan on how to fix the person who wrote that! I decided that the only way for me to make myself feel like more of a homemaker was to NOT blog about it.
Oxymoron much?
Well I decided to scale down computer/iPad time and upscale laundry and kitchen time.
I made it a point to catch up ALL my husbands and my laundry in our room (which I dare say took me two whole days of nothing but loads and loads of laundry!!!) I got all of it done and was able to collapse the pack 'n play that was up in my room acting as a laundry catch all! That pack 'n play was up from when I was watching my niece and nephew over the spring!!!
Procrastinate much?
Then the kitchen.
I made it a point to not sit down and do any crafty things at night until I had the dishes washed, floor swept, counters and table cleared! Guess what...when you don't talk yourself out of it....IT WORKS!
Who would have thunk it?!?
Also in the way of the kitchen....
I managed to develop a weekly menu schedule... And want to guess what about that....it works! Ooohhhhh ahhhhhh!
And I actually LOVE it!
It saves the 3pm stress about - what do we want for dinner? Do we have everything we need? Who is going to the store? Do we have the funds to go? What do we have at home that I can invent?

So that is what I did in October!

disappearing act.

So yesterday/early this morning, when  I was creating my 31 days challenge post...I had a huge long post created.
I made a questionnaire that I said I was going to want to fill out every day.
I filled it out for yesterday and everything.

I went to bed at about 5:30am and laid there tossing and turning trying to decide if that is what I really wanted to do. Do I want to commit to such a daunting specific questionnaire? no.
So immediately I sat up, opened the iPad, and checked my blog, and then saw.....for some reason half my blog is gone....ha. Everything from the specifics of my day where I was leading into the questionnaire and then my answers to the questionnaire, gone. Not sure if it is the code that is put in my button...or if God decided I shouldn't commit that much, ha....who knows...

So today is day two of the 31 day challenge.

Lets see what I can get done.

Will report back later.

31 Day Challange: Day 1ish - The basics

So here it is on October 2nd, and I am writting a post that was supposed to be for October 1st.
Why am I late?
Well basically I couldn't make up my mind.
There have been several "challenges" put out there on the world wide web for the month of October.
Instagram has one
Bloggers have several
Twitter has one
...
you know all the important places..ha.
...

So it literally took me until about 11pm to figure out what exactly I wanted to do for this month...do I want to blog daily, take random pictures, or whatever....

..
I picked blog.
I figure with that I can take pictures as well as write about random stuff.

But this particular blog has you choose a topic.
A topic YOU have to come up with.
No guidance.
No rules.
Just you and your subject of choice.

Today has been one of those reflective days.

After an arguement heated discussion with my husband about how I am treating, and disciplining and not being nurturing and motherly, towards my stepson, Aaron...I have had a very internal day.

A plethera of thoughts, both good and bad, have ran through my head.
Why am I the way I am? was the main question....and I have lots of excuses, but not enough ideas on how to change.
so my subject I chose tonight (i.e.early morning) would be

"31 days on how I put HOME into homeMAKER"

but lets get something straight, "31 days on how to sleep in" or "31 days on how to play bejeweled blitz" sounds sooo much easier...ha.

Maybe after 31 days of changing my habits, making conscience decisions, and grinning and bearing the things I try to overcorrect, life will be easier and happier for my family. I seem to be the eyesore that causes Aaron to hideaway in his room most of the time, Jason to feel like a referee, and me to be the offical wicked witch of the west....so lets see what kind of changes I can make by being reminded daily of having to make a Home, homier...

So now here it is, 4:30am.
I am not doing the best of job at getting to bed earlier so I can start my day earlier....
and I have a blood donation appointment at 12:30pm.
It litterally took me from midnight till about 3:45am to make the stupid button for this series....argh....one day photoshop and I will be better friends...maybe that should be my next writting series..how to use and perfect my skills with photoshop"

So here goes, my actual post.

Sad news

.... The title is a bit concerning I know but just bare with me.... Or should I say humor me for a bit.

A few weeks ago I got the bright idea.... Let me combine my three (yes you read right THREE old blogs into this here my "new" blog. So when this blog has documented my life basically as a married woman I had a blog that was from my early dating years with Jason all the way up to my wedding .... I had a food blog where I documented my favorite recipes and last and definitely not least I had a blog where I documented my time with Ainsley. So.....I thought... Why not combine them so I can eventually make a book out of all of them....so that is what I did I followed the instructions given by blogger to upload the blogs to my computer then download them back to the blog I wanted.
Sounds innocent enough.
I followed all instructions.
And then I went through each blog post and deleted all the paid blogs I used to write. I tagged and cleaned up some other posts and finally I posted each one live to this blog.....
I went through checking each picture checking most links and everything was great. I did it! Yay.
Then I deleted all three of the old blogs. Why not.... That's the point right....to combine them do there is not a million of places on the World Wide Web I have to go to visit my pictures or stories or recipes.....
I haven't looked back...
Well that was until yesterday.... I wanted a cake recipe.... I went to the post....this is one I had merged a few weeks ago...and noticed on the picture it was black with a big yellow exclamation mark.
Wow wait a cotton pickin' second!
This picture was here a few weeks ago. I checked other random old blogs....All.the.pictures.are.missing!!!!!
Jason said maybe it didn't show up on the iPad. I explained that I read blogs all the time from the iPad. So that didn't make sense.
Then he being all computer savvy and such looked at the code behind the post. And he found the problem....
Well. When I uploaded my blog to my computer I uploaded text only. So the pictures were then being "hosted" by my old blogs....since it was my old blog that I uploaded the pictures to....and since I just uploaded text....and since there was NOT clear information regarding the status of pictures being hosted by the blog itself and not by other places.....and since I DELETED the said hosting blogs........ I accidentally D-E-L-E-T-E-D ALL my PICTURES!!!!!!!

So I spent the latter part of Sunday afternoon crying. Lamenting over pictures lost.... Time spent creating the posts....just sad.
On a semi-brighter note....I can report that between two laptops several old phones and a desktop that got bought by a friend (we hid the files to be retrieved at another time because it was sold in haste) about 90% of the pictures are retrievable....however getting the pictures gathered,organized, and reposted to the right blogs is a task I am not ready for.....ugh

So lesson learned. I will now up load to an Internet picture hosting site .... something like photobucket or Flickr or something....this will save a lot of headaches later.

9/11 Chat.

I have already written about where I was and what I was doing when September 11th happened.

I am 11 years older.
I am 11 years wiser.
I am 11 years desensitized.

That sounds bad. Desensitized. However it is the truth for the majority of us. 10 years ago, if we heard "Twin Towers" or "9/11" we would have probably shed more tears, a year later.
Now.
those words are just adjectives used to define war, high gas prices, new normalcy.
Don't think I am callus.
It's not just me.
It's the way it has turned out..
I have heard many a comedian make jokes, some even crude about that terrible day.
And the day I heard the first joke, I realized...it was no longer "too soon".
There was enough time for people to process and heal and now make light of it. Sometimes making light of things helps with continual healing, better to push down the emotions and make a joke at someones else expense.
The new generation of adults coming through were just little kids, and as kids they didn't have the worry and concern. They really didn't know how simple life was before. It was easy. It was less international. It was safe.
Can you imagine in another 11 years... that generation of adults will be completely oblivious to the emotional impact and just see 9/11 as a passage in a history book. The turning of an Era.
As sad as it is. That's where we are headed.
We can pledge to never forget, but we are not committing to never letting go of the emotions that blanketed the entire nation.
And that letting go of emotion is what turns this into a history passage rather than an emotional driven desire to see the United States rise up victorious and get whatever restitution we think we need.
Or did we already get the restitution and now we are comfortable with the new normal....

Don't confuse all this with my lack of appreciation.
I appreciate each and every person who is serving this country and sacrificing their time, family, and lives for me and keeping me as safe as they can.
I have a lot of people in my family who have served or is currently serving in the military. And I couldn't imagine knowing they died in their service pursuit.
Thousands and thousands of families are without loved ones because of 9/11, between the actual deaths on the day of, or the deaths in combat trying to defend..... and for that, I have sorrow...and for that I will try and not take for granted the liberties I have daily....
but
again
this event is well on it's way to the history books, and like Vietnam or any of the World Wars, emotions will soon be fleeting.
The new normal is here....and the new desensitization is too.