Simply Blessed

This past weekend I had the greatest time catching up with a few friends from my younger days.  Friday night I met up with Becky, her husband, John and her beautiful daughter, Madison.  We had a great time hanging out and eating dinner together.  Becky and I took a similar path in life and while we were friends in high school, we’ve become close friends now – thanks to facebook and sharing our love of writing and birthing kids (she has 4 and I have 5)!   Becky is the editor of the paper in our hometown called the Towns Tribune.  She also blogs HERE.

Here is a pic of us with our girls :)

On Saturday, I was so blessed to be able to catch up with another friend from school (and my ex sister in law) Tonya and her beautiful daughter, Alexis.  Tonya and I were like sisters so many years ago (she was even there when I gave birth to Madison), but when my ex and I split- we didn’t see each other anymore.  It had been over 10 years since I saw her and her kids.  We spent the day at a place called Funworld (kinda like a Dave and Busters).  The kids all had a great time playing and Tonya and I had a wonderful time chatting and catching up on the last ten years.  Tonya was recently diagnosed with MS and is courageously fighting it with grace.  As she says, “I have MS but MS does NOT have me!”  What a great attitude is that!

Here we are:

and Madison and Alexis- this was the first time these cousins actually have played together EVER!

I feel so blessed to have reconnected with such great friends.  I know that nothing will ever keep us from being close again.  Life is too short!

Thanks for a great weekend Becky, Madison, Tonya and Alexis!!  You girls are awesome :)

This past week, our small town has been rocked to the core.  A local Pastor of a somewhat large church in the area resigned his position because (as rumor has it) he was having inappropriate contact with a few women in his congregation.  And yes… he was married with kids.

Now I’m not posting this to judge him or anyone else for that matter.  In fact, I think we should all be in prayer for him, his wife and everyone involved as I’m certain the next few weeks and months ahead are going to be challenging at the very least.

My point of this post is this…

I am a Christian.  I am not perfect.  I don’t ever say I am- Lord knows I’m the first to admit that I have my short comings.  Some of which are dropping four letter words all the time occasionally.

But… I’m not a leader.  I don’t get in front of a congregation and tell them how to live and then not live it myself.  In my opinion, people who decide to give their life telling others how to live should live as moral a life as humanly possible.   When Pastors or other people in positions at churches act immorally and cheat on their spouses, it leads people like me to distrust all that is religion.  All that is church in general.

I worked at a church for 9 years as a weekday preschool Director.  There were lots of wonderful Christian people I came in contact with, but there were also those that had no business being in a leadership position.  Some of the things I saw and heard were just horrendous.  And it wasn’t just that one particular church.  I was raised in church and there have been things like that in EVERY church I’ve been to.

Such immoral treatment of others and immoral acts by the Christian “leaders” pushed me to not want to go to church for a long time.  I’ve spent the last three years not going anywhere because honestly I just couldn’t get over the bad feelings I had about the hypocrites that are in every place of worship.

I finally had started going to a church in the last few months… and now again my faith in church as a whole is rocked by this newly found immoral act by a local pastor.  No, he’s not the pastor at the church where I go.  I’d like to think that the Pastor where I am going would never do that- but then again… I never thought the one previously mentioned would either.  You see, I visited that church about three times and really liked the Pastor and his messages.  He was funny, entertaining, and seemed Godly in his approach to his messages.  One time I visited that Pastor even spoke about the movie “fireproof” and how to fireproof your marriage against porn and sexual immorality.  Wow.  Talk about saying one thing and doing another.

I guess at this point I just distrust everyone in a church leadership position.  And that’s pretty sad.  How am I supposed to live a Christ centered life if the people I look to for guidance aren’t?

So if you are a Pastor, Music Minister, Sunday school teacher, etc. reading this- take it to heart.  What you do and how you live affects all of us.  If a Christian feels this negative about church, how do you think a non-Christian feels?  How do we ever expect them to trust in Jesus if all they see is hypocrites when they come to church?

My brother, Richard, celebrated his 39th birthday with us yesterday.  He’s still single and looking… so I thought it would be funny to make him a cake.

Not just any cake though…

A BOOB cake.

So I started by pouring the cake into a small round mixing bowl and baked it.  It took literally hours, and in the end the middle never finished cooking so it fell.  It ended up looking like this…

Well, that just wasn’t going to work.  So I decided to use the rest of the batter and bake a small sheet cake and two cupcakes for the “breasts”.  Here is what the rough draft of that looked like…

So I was pretty pleased with that.  I ended up trimming a “waistline” into the sheet cake and iced it with flesh colored icing.

Now how in the world do you make flesh colored icing, you ask?  I used just a teeny tiny amount of brown gel food coloring.  I think it turned out pretty good.  Here’s the body before I attached the “boobs”.

So then it was time to finish the cake off.  I trimmed the bottoms off the cupcakes so they would lay flat on the body of the cake.  I also shaped them a bit.  It was quite funny since I kinda felt like a sculptor or plastic surgeon or something!  I ended up using gum drops for the nips… I think it was a pretty funny effect since they were most “perky”! LOL

Here is the finished cake…

I’m pretty sure my brother LOVED it!  What do you think??

He was a good sport and posed for these pics :)  We all had a good giggle over it!

Happy 39th Birthday Richard!  I hope I helped make your day a great one :)

Boy am I glad this past week is over!  It’s been a stressful time for me, and since I can’t go into details here for now- let me just say that it worked out in my favor.  Whew!  Now maybe I can relax and breathe a sigh of relief for a while.

I’m so looking forward to a weekend full of fun, friends, family and worshiping God!  Happy Friday everyone!

If you know me in real life, you know that I tend to be a bit of a control freak.  I feel most at ease when I know what is going to happen and when I can steer things in the direction I feel they should go.

At this point in my life though, there are quite a few unknowns.

My two oldest children aren’t living with me.  What their future holds is a big unknown to me.  I thought I had guided them on a course to be successful in life, but they’ve both chosen to take other roads.  So, I’ve had to give them over to God and pray He will continue to guide them while I cannot.  This has not been easy for me to do since I was so involved with them for so long, and I struggle with it everyday.

The next few months are going to be challenging to say the least.  I’ll finally be working toward my dream of being an RN, but that is going to mean so many changes for my family.  The classes I’ll be taking will most likely be in the afternoon/evening, so I will be gone during dinner and most of the time I’m here will be spent studying instead of cleaning, laundry, doing housework and being on facebook.  I have so many unknowns that come with going back to school.  I have no idea how much my Pell grant is going to pay and how much the Hope grant will pick up, therefore I don’t know what is going to have to come out of pocket for us.  I don’t know how many classes I’m going to be able to handle at once and still be “Mom”.  I guess once it gets going, it will become my new normal, but for now it’s all still an unknown, which makes me nervous to say the least!

Another unknown right now is what kind of preschool to do for Devin and Makenzie next fall.  Since Devin just turned 4, he will be eligible to do the state funded pre-k here in Ga.  That means he can go to “big” school for pre-k, instead of the private church preschool.  As with anything else in life, there are pros and cons to both. The one big drawback for me at the moment is the fact that the “big” school pre-k goes five days a week from 8:30 am until 3:10 pm.  Up until now, his preschool has only been three days a week, 3 hours a day.  So you can see my dilemma in the time difference.  I feel like it’s going to be a much longer day for him.  I just don’t know what to do.  I feel like this will be his last year not “having” to go a full day and I don’t want to rob him of that.  But, when he’s at home, he’s either bored, watching Spongebob, or picking on his sister- so who knows… full time school might be a good thing for him.  As far as Makenzie goes, she’ll most likely go back to the preschool she is currently attending.

*Sigh*

All these unknowns are driving me insane.  I know if I put it all in God’s hands, it will be taken care of and all will fall into place.  There’s just that one little thing though…I like to be in control!  I guess if these last few months have taught me anything it’s that sometimes no matter what you do, things just don’t come out the way you planned.  And when that happens, it’s not your fault.  It’s just the way it’s supposed to go for some reason.  God may have plans we don’t know about yet- and may never know about.  So just do the best you can and hold on for the ride because sometimes it’s bumpy.  Sometimes you feel out of control… and maybe that’s a good thing.   God has a funny way of reminding us who’s really in control.  So, thank you God for the unknowns.  Keep them coming.  I’m ready…I think.   :)