Sesame Street Live

The other day, some of my girlfriends and our kids, had the chance to go see Sesame Street Live in the theatre on base. It was geared towards military kids/families and some of the trials we face by being part of the Marine Corps family. It was such a neat show! There was one song that Elmo sang about how proud he was of us...the kids in particular, and it had all of us girls teary eyed. It was just so sweet and such a neat thing to get to experience. Below are a few of the pictures that were taken. Hope you enjoy them!

MADISON

Madison is almost ten months old. I can't believe it! She is getting so big and so smart! I love playing with her. Her two new favorite things right now are clicking her tongue on the top of her mouth and sharing. She loves to give me one of her toys and then once I've played with it for a bit I give it back to her. Then she hugs it (or puts it in her mouth) and then she offers it back to me. We can do this for a very long time, but it's so much fun because she is so expressive. I love watching her little eyes light up. It makes my day!

Madison is crawling all over and climbing up on everything. She loves to try to walk while holding on to either myself or Alex. She also is quite the dare devil. She likes to just let go whether it be while she's standing and holding on to something or whether she's in the middle of walking and holding my hands. She is very brave. It seems like she is always looking for my reaction to whatever it is she is doing or has just done.

She also loves to go to the park. The other day we went to the park with our friends (Diana and Levi). Here is a picture of the kids swinging (well really just posing for a picture :) )

I love her so very much and I can't believe that in about two months, she's going to be one.

Moving...

I know it's been awhile since I've posted anything here on my blog....life sort of took hold and when I had time I was working on updating my cooking blog.

Anyway, my family and I are getting ready to move AGAIN! This is a good move though. We've been back in California now for almost 8 months and we've been living in Joshua Tree. We love the house we're living in, but we're lacking community in a big way. We miss being around people and having people over and whatnot, so we've decided to move on base. We really felt God tugging at our hearts to make this big change, so we decided to go with it.

We will be moving around the middle of May. I've never had to pack up everything with a little one around, so any prayers you could send this way would be great ;)

Hope you're all doing well!

A Christmas Story

I don't know if this story is true or not, but it doesn't matter to me. The message is very sweet and the story is very touching. Hope you enjoy! Merry Christmas!

In September 1960, I woke up one morning with six hungry babies and just 75 cents in my pocket.


Their father was gone.


The boys ranged from three months to seven years; their sister was two.


Their Dad had never been much more than a presence they feared.

Whenever they heard his tires crunch on the gravel driveway they would scramble to hide under their beds.

He did manage to leave $15 a week to buy groceries.

Now that he had decided to leave, there would be no more beatings, but no food either.

If there was a welfare system in effect in southern Indiana at that time, I certainly knew nothing about it.


I scrubbed the kids until they looked brand new and then put on my best homemade dress, loaded them into the rusty old 51 Chevy and drove off to find a job.

The seven of us went to every factory, store and restaurant in our small town.


No luck.

The kids stayed crammed into the car and tried to be quiet while I tried to convince whoever would listen that I was willing to learn or do anything. I had to have a job.

Still no luck. The last place we went to, just a few miles out of town, was an old Root Beer Barrel drive-in that had been converted to a truck stop.


It was called the Big Wheel.

An old lady named Granny owned the place and she peeked out of the window from time to time at all those kids.

She needed someone on the graveyard shift, 11 at night until seven in the morning.

She paid 65 cents an hour, and I could start that night.

I raced home and called the teenager down the street that baby-sat for people.

I bargained with her to come and sleep on my sofa for a dollar a night.

She could arrive with her pajamas on and the kids would already be asleep

This seemed like a good arrangement to her, so we made a deal.

That night when the little ones and I knelt to say our prayers, we all thanked God for finding Mommy a job. And so I started at the Big Wheel.

When I got home in the mornings I woke the baby-sitter up and sent her home with one dollar of my tip money-- fully half of what I averaged every night.

As the weeks went by, heating bills added a strain to my meager wage.

The tires on the old Chevy had the consistency of penny balloons and began to leak. I had to fill them with air on the way to work and again every morning before I could go home.

One bleak fall morning, I dragged myself to the car to go home and found four tires in the back seat. New tires!

There was no note, no nothing, just those beautiful brand new tires.

Had angels taken up residence in Indiana? I wondered.

I made a deal with the local service station.

In exchange for his mounting the new tires, I would clean up his office.

I remember it took me a lot longer to scrub his floor than it did for him to do the tires.

I was now working six nights instead of five and it still wasn't enough.

Christmas was coming and I knew there would be no money for toys for the kids.

I found a can of red paint and started repairing and painting some old toys. Then I hid them in the basement so there would be something for Santa to deliver on Christmas morning.

Clothes were a worry too. I was sewing patches on top of patches on the boys pants and soon they would be too far gone to repair.

On Christmas Eve the usual customers were drinking coffee in the Big Wheel. There were the truckers, Les, Frank, and Jim, and a state trooper named Joe.

A few musicians were hanging around after a gig at the Legion and were dropping nickels in the pinball machine.

The regulars all just sat around and talked through the wee hours of the morning and then left to get home before the sun came up.

When it was time for me to go home at seven o'clock on Christmas morning, to my amazement, my old battered Chevy was filled full to the top with boxes of all shapes and sizes.


I quickly opened the driver's side door, crawled inside and kneeled in the front facing the back seat.

Reaching back, I pulled off the lid of the top box.

Inside was whole case of little blue jeans, sizes 2-10!

I looked inside another box: It was full of shirts to go with the jeans.

Then I peeked inside some of the other boxes. There was candy and nuts and bananas and bags of groceries. There was an enormous ham for baking, and canned vegetables and potatoes.
There was pudding and Jell-O and cookies, pie filling and flour. There was whole bag of laundry supplies and cleaning items.

And there were five toy trucks and one beautiful little doll.

As I drove back through empty streets as the sun slowly rose on the most amazing Christmas Day of my life, I was sobbing with gratitude.

And I will never forget the joy on the faces of my little ones that precious morning.

Yes, there were angels in Indiana that long-ago December. And they all hung out at the Big Wheel truck stop....

Good Video

Check out this YouTube video.


Logan, the Sky Angel Cowboy

Christmas

I LOVE THIS TIME OF YEAR!!!!

This is going to be our first Christmas with our daughter and I can't wait to share in all of our family traditions with her. I am so excited! I think one of the things I looked forward to most about having children was celebrating this time of year with them and teaching them about our Lord and Savior and why Christmas is so very special!

I hope that this holiday season finds you smiling and remembering the reason for this beautiful, amazing season!

Love to you all!!!

...just sitting here

Today is Thanksgiving!!! As I posted in the previous post, I have a lot to be thankful this year, but something just doesn't feel right about today. You see, Alex is on duty today. He's been gone since about 6:15 am and won't be back until tomorrow at about 8:00 am. It's been very lonely here today and as I sit here feeling lonely, I wonder what happened to how I was feeling when I was overjoyed with thankfulness? I'm still thankful for those things, people, and experiences, but something isn't quite right when you so deeply miss someone that you hold so dear to your heart. This is the first night I've had to spend by myself since having Madison. It's a very weird feeling to know that if I needed Alex he won't be laying next to me in bed. I know that he's doing his job and I'm thankful that he's allowing someone else to be with their family on Thanksgiving, I just miss him. I didn't think it was going to be as hard as it is. Oh well. I got to have dinner with those wonderful friends I mentioned earlier. It was very nice to have their company, but as I'm sitting here now, I feel lonely once again. I guess I just can't seem to get enough company today. Guess that is just life sometimes. Anyway, I hope that everyone had a wonderful day today. I'm looking forward to having Alex back tomorrow and having a house full of people for our "Fakesgiving."

Thank you to all of you who have touched my life in one way or another. I am a better person for having known you!