I will think of this every time I see a piano...

I am sure you have heard the expression, "He played me like a fiddle!"

When it comes to the devil, he often plays me like a piano. I never would have thought about it this way before. Just read this.

Another school year over

Another school year is over. The kids are enjoying this first beautiful day off by playing with the neighbor kids.
The kids ended the year strong. Both of them had good grades and I really saw both of them mature in many ways over the past year. They are both looking forward to next school year. I can hardly believe that it will be Elias' last year of elementary school. I am so glad that he has a positive attitude about learning now. Last school year, trying to get him to read and learn was torturous for everyone! Bella had another great year. She is just a natural student who loves to learn, so she takes to every subject quickly. The kids have already scoped out the next grades' teachers and have decided which ones they would like to have! I have told them to not get their heart set on anyone in particular!

I took a picture of the kids last night in the same place I took their "beginning of the year" pictures. They had been playing and were a little disheveled looking, but it gives me an idea of how they have grown. Bella lost her 2 front teeth just a week or two after school began and she still has no teeth yet! We keep thinking they will pop through any day, but we have been thinking that for 6 months! The 2 teeth beside Elias' front ones have not grown in yet either. In fact, they are taking so long that the dentist x-rayed him to make sure they are up in his gums. I didn't know this, until I had met 3 different people that were missing those teeth, that those are teeth that people commonly are missing. They put in implants and have veneers to replace them. Luckily, Elias' teeth are up there, they are just taking their own sweet time to come in.

This is the beginning of the school year.

This is the end of the school year.

We took them to Burger King (their choice) to celebrate the end of the year and Bella wanted to show off her toy from her meal.

Thought of the day

God will not be handcuffed by my failures or unleashed by my successes - from Jon Acuff's blog post.

Spring Break Trip

Thanks to Charli's post at WV Urban Hippies, we decided to take a trip to the Unofficial Lego Musuem in Ohio over the kids' Spring break week. Since the kids love to stay in hotels - or more correctly - they like to swim in hotel pools - we decided to make it an overnight trip. So we checked out the visitors' web sites to see what else there was to do in the area.

We found a Children's Musuem that was less than 30 minutes from the Lego Museum. It only cost $4 for adults and $2 for kids. So we thought, even if wasn't that great, we wouldn't be out that much and we could just get in the pool earlier.

So we got up, I made a big breakfast, and took it slow getting out of the house. We had a great trip there. The kids were peaceful and it was only 2 hours, so we felt like we all were just beginning to get antsy when we arrived. Since we had a big breakfast, we went straight to the Children's Museum.

We ended up being there for over 3 hours! The kids had such a good time and it was small and not crowded, so it was relaxing for us because we didn't have to worry about where they were.

Then we asked the people who worked at the museum where we should eat and they suggested a place only a few blocks away. And it did not disappoint. The food was so unique and tasty! I had a fresh tuna sandwich and not the flaky canned stuff, either! It was not your average meal.

After we ate, we quickly found our hotel, checked in, and went immediately to the pool. We were at the pool for almost 3 hours. I got to read pool side while the kids played with Josh. It felt like a real vacation. Then we got in our pjs and the kids and I got hot chocolate at the coffee bar downstairs, while Josh set up Elias' new Lego Creationary game that we got him for his birthday. We thought it was only fitting to play it for the first time on the eve of going to the Lego Museum.

Finally, we let the kids watch the Disney channel while laying in their beds, which is a real luxury for them, since we don't have televisions in any of our bedrooms. Surprisingly, the kids actually went to sleep really well. That has not always been the case when we have slept away from home.

The next morning we let the kids get right into the pool again, while Josh and I switched off with them and got showered and packed up. After showering the kids, we ate the breakfast provided and we had the best hotel waffles I have ever eaten in my life!

We checked out and headed to the Lego Museum. We looked, and looked, and looked at Lego sculptures. It was all pretty interesting. I actually was just as interested in the old school building that houses the museum. Old school buildings just have such character and to me it feels like the walls are echoing all the kids that walked through the halls. And this building must have been quite a gem when it was first built.

We had brought some snacks, but after about 2 1/2 hours we were all pretty tired and hungry. Bella just began to get cranky in the last few rooms. But we made it through all of the displays with no meltdowns!

Then we headed out, with our trusty GPS, to find food. We couldn't all agree on what we wanted. The kids wanted Burger King and Josh and I wanted Subway. Luckily, they were just across an intersection from each other, so we picked up kid's meals at Burger King for the kids and then went to Subway and ordered our food and ate everything together there. Since the Subway was inside of a gas station, no one seemed to notice or care that all the food wasn't purchased there. It was a win-win for everyone.

We stopped at Cabela's on our way home - or the animal museum, according to the kids. It gave us a chance to stretch and I was able to buy some really great wool socks to wear around the house! I was so excited, since I had been looking for ones like them and couldn't find anything around here.

We arrived home around 6 - plenty of time to get unpacked and settle in before bed. And, since it was Saturday, we had a whole day at home to look forward to before starting the weekly grind.

All-in-all, it was a very successful trip. Low stress, low expense, comfortable stay, and many happy memories were made.

I can't seem to get any of my pictures to load! If I can figure out how to get them to post, I may do a follow-up post of pictures. We have many!

Our Anniversary

On April 8th, Josh and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary. I had meant to write a post the day of our anniversary and just never got time to do it. It was a really busy week for us, so we didn't even officially go out for our anniversary, but it was still a wonderful day to celebrate our lives together.

I had planned to scan our wedding pictures that have never been in digital form, since they were taken on 35mm film! I finally got around to scanning them and realized that since I scanned them in .pdf form, I can't actually insert them into my blog. When I asked Josh about them, he said that they really don't need to be made public! Let's just say, they aren't the most flattering. He let a cousin of mine who was an aspiring hair dresser (which didn't last very long) cut his hair minutes before the wedding. It wasn't his best look. And I had puffy bangs and an even puffier dress. If I can figure out how to get them on here, without rescanning them, you may just see them on her in the future - against Josh's better judgement!

Elias made a card for us for our anniversary. He worked a really long time on it. It made both Josh and I teary-eyed.  I scanned it, too - also in .pdf form

I was 18 when I got married and I feel like the past 18 years have been the better half of my life! I am so thankful that I chose to follow God's pull on my heart to pursue a relationship with Josh.

 In a recent chapel service honoring Rebecca St. James, Wess Stafford, the current CEO of Compassion, told of advice that he had given Rebecca about dating. I thought what he said was so insightful, I took the time to write it down.

These are his words:
"You are not going to find the perfect man. If he managed somehow to become perfect without you, you don't want him. He only will become all that he can become with you. You are looking for a diamond in the rough. You are looking for a godly man. You are looking for a man who will love you, who will respect you, who will admire you, and cherish you. I told her, 'You know all about proverbs 3,5 & 6 and you can trust God to direct your path.'"

I definitely feel like too many people are looking for the perfect person and then when the person they are with appears to be less than perfect, they feel like he or she isn't "the one".

I read a quote recently from Michael Phelps, Olympic Swimmer. When asked how he became so successful, he said that he just stayed in the pool longer than anyone else. I think that marriage is a lot like that. You just stay in the pool and keep doing what you know you need to do, even when it's hard or you are tired.

I am thankful for a fantastic swimming partner!

Easter photos

Elias won a 3D Easter Egg Dye Set last year, so the kids are testing out the glasses to look at their egg wrappers. I can't even remember where he one the dye set!

We got eggs from our friend who had boiled too many eggs for her daughter's birthday party the day before to dye them, so we had over two dozen to dye. It made it a lot of fun to have so many. I got the idea to do the face with the broken head on the left. Then Josh and Elias made the faces to the right of mine. Elias' to the far right says, "Don't eat me!" on the side. He thought of it himself. I thought that was pretty clever.

Another one of Josh's faces. Josh cheated and drew his faces with a sharpie.

After we were done coloring eggs, Bella asked if she could use the dye to color her hair. I surprised her by saying, "Sure, we can try it!" Elias thought we had lost our minds a little to allow her to do it.

This picture doesn't really show what it really looked like. It actually was a pretty pink. It is now almost all washed out, but it made her happy to have it for a short time.

We hardly ever dress up for church, but I really do enjoy a good reason to dress up now and then. I had found Bella's beautiful dress at a recent consignment sale for $10!

Bella kept making crazy faces or blinking, so it was very hard to get a good picture. She was in a great mood, we just snapped the picture at the wrong time! Josh got this one by counting to 3, but snapping the picture on 2!

My handsome men!

Bella with her ballerina figurine in the same ballerina pose.

Elias with his dinosaur egg. It is a hollow egg with solid chocolate dinosaurs inside.

Organizing again

I hosted Easter dinner for our extended family this year, so I did a lot of cleaning last week.

Remember that bookcase that I said in my last post that I keep paper on? Well, I didn't take a picture of it for that blog, because it was a mess! It had collected so much junk just since school started. I cleaned it last Friday by emptying all its contents on the counter and going through all of it piece by piece. I had so much paper recycling when I was done! After I finished cleaning it, I regretted not taking a before picture, because there was such a difference. So here is the after:

The trays on the top are the paper trays. The top one has notebook and handwriting paper and the bottom has printer paper. There are envelopes beside the trays. Then beside that I keep my kindle and books that I am either going to read soon or am working on currently. On the second shelf there are workbooks and notebooks, markers and extra Bibles for small group. The bottom shelf has coloring books and crayons/colored pencils, our sponsored children's letters in the small 3-ring notebooks and other important papers in the larger ones. And then the sorter with construction paper I showed in the last post is on top.

When my parents were helping me with the final preparations for dinner, I had to get in my large utensil drawer to get the "little jiggly thing" (for lack of a better term) that goes on the top of my pressure cooker. My dad happened to be standing beside me while I was looking for it and he said, "That is the first thing that I have seen disorganized in this house!" 

My kitchen drawers are always a constant battle to keep organized, but this drawer in particular is a real problem. It holds so many things of odd shapes and sizes and I use all of it, just not all the time. I have tried to declutter and organize it in the past, but had sort of just given up on it. But after my dad's comment and the fact that it took me almost half emptying the drawer to find what I was looking for, I decided it was time to come up with a solution! This time, I made sure to take before, during and after photos. But after I started on one drawer, I realized that it would be best to just organize all my kitchen drawers. I feel like I organize the other three drawers all the time, yet they collect clutter and get disorganized so quickly.

So here is the drawer that started this:

I think the only way to really organize anything is to empty everything and start from scratch. At the point that I took this picture I had already decided that I would organize the drawer beside it also. It is amazing how much stuff that was in these two drawers!

Here is the before of the drawer beside it. I organize this drawer often, but it is a catch all.

I realized that there was no way that I would be able to properly organize the large utensil drawer without finding a new home for the pieces in the drawer that I only use once in a while.There is a drawer in the cabinet that houses our craft supplies in the top and extra baking pans in the bottom. This drawer didn't have much in it. It used to hold regular place mats that match our plates and dry erase place mats that has preschool activities on them. We obviously do not need the dry erase ones anymore. So I decided this would be a perfect place to put this extra stuff.

So here are the after pictures:

You can see the bottom of the drawer!

This picture doesn't do justice to how much better this drawer is organized. I had so much extra room, I was able to put the egg dye stuff in back, which I didn't have room for in the kitchen for before.

This is the extra stuff that I took out of the utensil drawer. Included in this drawer is: knife sharpener, corn cob holders, pumpkin carvers, cookie cutters (in the bowl with the red lid), cheese grater, extra can opener, corer, ladles, tongs, cherry stoner, and my place mats.

Then I moved to the silverware drawer. But somehow I forgot to take pictures of it. It wasn't really too out of order, so the before and after pictures wouldn't be that dramatic.

After the silverware drawer was done, I moved on to our "office drawer". This is the drawer that is beside the counter and we use it all the time.

This is the after:

And then I decided that if I was decluttering the kitchen, I might as well deal with the last source of disorganization in my kitchen.

This is another cabinet that I have attempted to declutter many times. Some of these many, many cups have been in our yard sale before and the kids "rescued" them back out. We seem to collect cups all the time, either as gifts to the kids or promotional items from Josh's work, and my kids don't want to let go of the old ones when we get new ones. This time, none of the cups I have removed is coming back!

As I was cleaning, I threw very little away. But there are many things that are going in my yard sale pile. I decided to take a picture of all that I am putting in my yard sale.

I am so happy with the end results and I am glad that I finally became motivated to find a solution to my large utensil drawer.