Calling all Prayer Warriors!

Sorry for the short post, but I'm up to my eyeballs in VBS prep... hence the title...
Please pray for our week! We've already got 150 kids registered, and more are coming. Pray for these little ones (and big ones, it goes through 6th grade :-) to come to Jesus. Pray for a fun, safe week. Pray for health, patience, and stamina (!) for all the volunteers.
I'll post more later, but for now, please be in prayer for us this week! Thanks!

2nd annual scrap weekend!

Last weekend I was able to join 8 wonderful friends up at a house in Lake Nacimiento for 3 nights and 4 days of scrapbooking, eating, laughing, watching chick flicks, and just hanging out. Do I have to say it was awesome?? It was BEawesome, for you BOLT fans out there.
So nice to get away... and I even completed 62 pages!! Woo-hoo!!
Can't wait to do it again soon, girls!!

Memorial Day

Thanks, Dad, for your bravery during a difficult time in our nation's history. Thanks, too, to all who are still fighting, today. A prayer goes up for those that lost loved ones in the fight for freedom.

Kris Allen

Happy Mommy's Day

(There just has to be a better word than "Cheese!" to say when you want people to smile...)

What a nice day. I'm so glad it was invented. It's not like the world stopped spinning and there was no work to be done today, but it was nice. I awoke to a lovely breakfast and bouquet of flowers waiting for me at the kitchen table. Ted gave me a beautiful necklace, and Katie gave me a sweet little hand-painted flower pot (thanks for the "productive" playdate, Krystina!).
The boys made cute cards in church for me, and we went out to eat at a great little Mexican restaurant in SLO where "Spiderman" was playing on the tv in the bar... 3 out of the 4 kids were mesmerized, so it was a quiet, enjoyable meal.
After a short nap, I found Ted creating the COOLEST cardboard cars for each of the kids in anticipation of the upcoming AWANA drive-in movie night. "Cars" doesn't do them justice. Not when one is a Star Wars pod racer, and one is an army tank. He even loaded them all into the back of the Suburban for me because I'm a little, well, spacially challenged, shall we say?
My parents came over for a BBQ this evening, and we ended a great day by watching our favorite family show, "AFV" where the video we chose won the $100,000 prize. Everyone was thrilled.
Ahh... a nice day.

Ted leaves tomorrow for a week, but I refuse to think about that now... for today, I am still the queen.

Goth Baby

This is what happens when I turn my back while Abby is coloring with markers...
Eat your heart out, Marilyn Manson.

living in the moment

I'm usually an "all-or-nothing" kind of person. I either want to do something all the way, or I don't want to begin. (Which explains why I have not lost the baby weight yet, but that's another post.) If I'm going to attempt to take pictures of the family, I'd like them to be wearing clothes that look good together- or are at least clean. If I am going to clean out a closet, I want to clean them all out and get the old clothes to Goodwill. If we're having people over for dinner, I want to entire house to be clean, not just the rooms the guests will be in.
This works all right in theory, but now with four kids and homeschooling and volunteering at church and school, etc., I am finding it very difficult to accomplish even half (o.k., a quarter) of what I have set out to do. I have been frustrated for, oh, the last 4 years, I 'd say. It really came to a head when we had a number of families over for dinner one night recently. Remember how I want the whole house clean? Well, that didn't quite happen. I did get the main living areas clean, and even the kids' rooms looked passable. The laundry room, however? Not so much. And we also have this funky hallway that connects the back laundry room door , the back door of Ted's office, and the back door of the kids' bathroom to the garage. We call it the Secret Passage, although it's not a passage at all anymore because it's where I throw all the outgrown clothes that I plan dealing with "later". There are a LOT of clothes and old toys in that secret hallway that no one sees or even knows about.

Until that night.

See, I was busy in the kitchen, and Ted was out in the backyard with some of the guests, when one guest decided that she needed to use the bathroom. Not a problem- we have a nice guest bath right off the main room. But apparently she didn't see that bathroom, because she proceeded to walk through the entire house, and open every door. EVERY DOOR.

SERIOUSLY??!

She actually commented on the secret passage during the course of the meal, and that's the first I'd heard that she had taken this "sef-guided tour of humiliation". I went from being angry to being totally embarrassed to wanting to hide in my room and cry. When everyone left for the night, I remember telling Ted that we will never host another event in our home. Later that night, I started thinking...
Is this how I've been living my life, too? Showing people the good parts, the clean and well-taken-care-of parts? Trying to hide the dirty, messy places. Shoving the bad stuff into the Secret Passages. Yeah. It is.
I truly feel that God blessed us with four kids to completely humble me and show me that I cannot do it by myself. When it was just Katie and Tyler, I had a pretty good handle on things. So good we naively thought we could handle more. I stumbled a few times when TJ came along; my walls started cracking, but I just worked harder at keeping up appearances. When Abby came along, I realized that you can only stuff so much into a cabinet (or your soul) before it bursts, and everyone sees the mess.
So. There it is. I'm a mess. (You're probably laughing and thinking, "Uh, yeah, we've known that all along!") but humor me. I'm on step 1: admitting I'm a failure.
Whew. That feels good. God's been working in my life in so many ways, but now I'm allowing others to see a "work in progress" as well.
OK, enough rambling. I just needed to vent, and what better place than on the internet where anyone can see? I am a Christian, but my faith is a process. I don't have it all together, but that doesn't mean I should just stop moving until everything comes together. No, I need to be in the moment, live in the moment. Do what I can do and pray about... the rest?... no... everything.

In honor of living in the moment, here are some pictures taken last night up at the guesthouse... notice how no one matches, and everyone's a mess. :-) A beautiful , beautiful mess.