Joel and Katy's Adventures

Photo

2011-08-22T06:22:00.001-07:00

Ok so forgive me: I'm trying this new App on my phone so I can do blog posts from my phone. However, I can't seem to figure out how to do more than 1 photo at a time. That sounds super basic, but there isn't an option for that anywhere! So on the one hand, I'm finally updating our blog, but on the other hand, it's not very organized! Anyhow, this is Joel and I on the Harley.

Harley Ride

2011-08-22T06:15:00.001-07:00

So this was probably the highlight of Joel's trip to AK. He finally got me on the back of a motorcycle! Dave & Debbie's daughter, Ashley, watched Mia while we went out with Dave, Debbie, Ed, and Heather on the Harley's. Joel & I rode Ed's Heritage Softtail. That lingo is like Greek to me, but maybe some of you will appreciate knowing that :).

We rode on some scenic highways and went to a supposedly nice restaurant. We waited there for 20 mins without even a greeting, so we went to another place to eat, but they were packed, so we wound up at a super nice restaurant downtown - after riding through the rain. So the Harley crew looked real classy, needless to say! Hahaha.

Anyways, I had planned on going through life perfectly happy without ever riding a motorcycle, but after going with Joel, I have to admit it was pretty fun. I will also admit that I prayed the entire time, but it was fun.

Our Trip To Alaska

2011-08-21T22:16:00.001-07:00

We have had an amazing time in Alaska. Thank you so much to Ed, Heather, Debbie, Dave, and Ashley for taking care of us. Wendy, Jason, Megan, Chris, Sabrina, and all the other friends that we got to go see, we love you all and had so much fun!

Bible Class in the Mountains

2011-04-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

While in Zihuatanejo, we wanted to do a little ministry work with the local church. When we got married in Zihuat 5 years ago, we attended this little church and whenever we go back we always go visit them. The preacher is originally from America but has lived in Mexico for probably close to 25 years. He's married to a local woman and they have a 20 year old daughter, Dani. She's awesome and I had a ton of fun with her. They are the only non-denominational church anywhere in the area. The rest are all catholic. It's awesome because people from all sorts of church family backgrounds meet in this little church, regardless of their traditions. They put all that aside and just worship God together. Oh I just love them!!! Anyways, we did several outings but this one was our favorite! We drove about 45 minutes out of town up to the mountains, away from the tourists, where the locals live. This wasn't a terribly bad area and had nicer than average houses for the locals.

We went down this road:

by this house (which really isn't bad for the area...)

You can kind of see the city below in the background. We're up really high!

Close to the "church"...

And finally arrived at this pavilion that they use for a children's church. They started this work about 5 years ago with just a few kids. Now there's close to 40 kids and they've even helped some of the mother's to become saved!

Before the class the kids had fun playing...

which of course Mia got into as well.

Here class has begun and the kids are taking turns reading out of their Spanish Bibles.

So I have to mention this - but I don't have a photo for it... We were in the middle of the service, the kids were calmed down and behaving well, when suddenly we heard the most awful screaming sound! We all ran over to the house next to the pavilion to find a rooster attacking a chihuahua. Now, only in Mexico does church get interrupted for a rooster beating up a chihuahua! A little girl walloped the rooster with a stick and rescued the pup. The dog ended up being fine other than a few bloody places, and I couldn't help giggle at the whole situation.

Our youth group wrote letters and drew pictures about Bible stories to these kids before we left. So we brought them to this church service and Joel read them and described the pictures to all the kids. They were SO fascinated that kids in America would write them letters.

While all this is going on, there were several boys who were too shy to come into the pavilion. They sat on these huge pipes just up the hill from the pavilion and tried to act un-interested. But the fact that they come every week and sit JUST close enough where they can hear, added to the fact that they've been busted singing along at times, proves that they are wanting to be involved. In time maybe they'll grow more comfortable with the idea!

Ok so these two little girls, Clarissa and Glori, are totally reading the Bible. They're 4 and 5 years old. Holy Moly!!! They were reading out loud and it gave me goose bumps (which is incredible considering it's 100 degrees all the time)!!!

After the lesson and Joel's reading of the letters, the kids asked if they could write letters back to our youth group. These kids poured their hearts into these letters. They sat and worked on them for 45 minutes or so - without being told to! They just wanted to. Their words and drawings are priceless.

The kids wanted to hear the letters from our youth again and again, and here is Dani reading one to them.

Ok so this is disturbing. Fransisco, a guy who works closely with the church, told me to go look in the back of his rental car (they had been doing some ministry way out in the country that day). I walked over to see what all the fuss was about...

and saw 8 iguana's in the back of the car! Ew!!! So what happens is, super poor kids in the country catch iguanas and try to sell them to people driving by. I remember seeing their "Iguanas, $3" signs when Joel and I drove through years ago. Well, they tie the iguana's toenails together up above their heads so that they can't run off. It's terribly inhumane, but it's their only way to get a couple bucks out there. So Fransisco had an idea. He stopped at each child on his way back and bought an iguana from them - under one condition - he got to talk to their family about Jesus. So by purchasing these creatures, he got to share the gospel with like 19 people that day. Awesome! He even went back the next day (2 hours driving) to continue a Bible study with one super interested family. Good job Fransisco!!! Oh, and once he got back home he untied the iguanas and set them free. Poor guys!!!

Zihuatanejo, January 2011

2011-04-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

Whoa! I had these pictures all ready to post and forgot all about them. At long last, here's a look at our trip to Mexico:

We happened to be in the city where we got married on our 5 year anniversary! You would think we would have at least one photo of the two of us, but you'd be wrong. Ugh. Sorry.

Here's Mia during our layover in Houston. She thought these fast walkways were pretty cool. She's a little unsure of it at first though...

Here's the crew: Ed, Dave, Debbie, Mia, Joel, and Katy. We love our Alaskan friends (even though they are 100x more tan than we are!!!) and were SO happy that we got to spend such an awesome time together.

Joel and Mia walking through the streets:

Ed brought Mia a Harley Girl shirt from Fairbanks, SO CUTE!!! She really loved Ed and he was SO good with her. Debbie brought Mia presents too, an adorable bracelet that Mia wears and flaunts her wrist like she's all fancy, and an awesome Alaskan puzzle. Mia loved "Aunt Debbie" and still tries to say her name when she sees pictures :)

I just love this little naked photo...

The view from Dave and Debbie's deck. Our room was up the stairs.

Mia and mommy reading their books.

SO CUTE

There are more photos to come of some mission work we did while we were there... stay tuned!

Another Informative Bit

2011-03-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

Ok. Stick with me on this. It's something we can't be ignorant to in our society or else corporate America will continue to feed us crap because it makes them more money. Even Monsanto (the corporate giant who created the first genetically engineered seeds, genetically modified corn, saccharin, etc.), advises their own employees to seek out organic corn and soybeans rather than consuming the GM versions. Genetically modified foods such as these are already banned in almost all other countries. The mighty dollar is just too strong for America's greed to stand up against it.

Ok so this video isn't actually fully about that rant I just went off on (again). It's about other stuff that I could rant about all day. It's a FAR shorter piece than the last (less than 4 minutes). So go to this website, and the "Wake-Up Call" video should pop up. Watch it. If it doesn't pop up, you'll see it somewhere on their home page.

http://www.healthychild.org/

Thank you!!!

SO important. Please listen

2011-03-03T12:57:00.000-08:00

OK most of you who know me know that I am part hippy and I get made fun of a lot for the way I choose to grocery shop, cook, garden, etc. Please listen to this and take it very seriously. I am now an Arbonne rep partly because of the facts you'll hear, but even if you never want to use Arbonne, please listen because it could literally help save your life. If you're reading this, it's because you're a person I love and I want everyone I love to know 2 things:

1) that Jesus came and died for us and rose again to show us that death is NOT the end and that being a Christian is the BEST life to live, even if it isn't always easy, (which has nothing to do with what you're about to listen to, it's just the first thing I want everyone to know...)

2) there is a better way of living and making healthy choices while on earth, and this audio file will help explain that.

You can listen to it directly from this website or download it (there is a button on the screen that says "download file") and listen to it later.

https://www.freeconferencing.com/playback.html?cn=51-87-32-24&e=1360648800000&cid=conferences%2F375383-17-65-67-17-65-6762-17-65-6746548414-17-65-67-43-9524-17-65-67.mp3

Please do this. I promise you won't leave unchanged :)

Christmas Eve

2011-03-01T17:02:00.000-08:00

I forgot something WAY back when...

For the weeks leading up to Christmas, our youth group put together gifts for people who had to work Christmas Eve night, and were not able to be with their families. They handmade different kinds of ornaments, they made peppermint hot cocoa mix to put in christmas mugs, and peppermint fudge mix for people to make in the microwave. They also printed verses on little decorative pieces of paper that they tied to the gifts.

Then Christmas Eve night, we set out to hand these gifts out. We went to 2 nursing homes, the sheriff's office, the grocery store, the Dollar Store, 2 gas stations, pizza hut, and a few small restaurants that were open (we closed our restaurant early that day). All in all I believe we gave gifts to nearly 80 people. We looked them each in the eye and told them "Thank you for working tonight". We had one lady in the nursing home follow us through the whole building thanking us, another lady at the gas station said, "you really brought me a gift? I don't know what to say!" with tears in her eyes. It was pretty awesome.

I hope that the kids got as much out of that as I did. I was very proud of them for sacrificing their family time that night to go out and do something nice for others. Hopefully projects like this will plant a desire to do good in their hearts, and as they become adults, hopefully they will plant those same seeds in their children and any others they come in contact with. Stuff like this makes the world a better place, every little bit helps.

I'm gonna preach for a minute: So Jesus didn't come to Earth and talk about "how" to worship him, what our worship services should look like, what songs we sing, or anything. In fact, it's very hard to get a sense of any worship service in Jesus' day that looks anything like what we call "church". But over, and over, and over, he talks about helping orphans, the poor, our neighbor, widows, those in prison, those who are lost. He never said, "you saw me hungry and gave me food... and a christian tract". He says, "you saw me hungry and you gave me bread." He is interested in relationships and bringing heaven to earth by being compassionate, having open eyes for opportunities to help others. THAT is the Good News of the Bible. By starting these relationships, others will want the joy that you have found in giving. It is THERE that they will see what Jesus was talking about, the Good News, and desire to be in His family.

That night taking thank you gifts to people, was a far more holy worship service to our awesome God and creator, than I've ever experienced in a church building. I 100% believe that it is beneficial for Christians to come together and learn and worship and grow together, and I believe it's crucial. But I think a lot of us use that as our scapegoat to not actually have to get out there and get our hands dirty and DO something to reflect what God really wants us to be like Monday thru Saturday.

Ok. I'm off my soap box. I don't have good pictures of this event because I didn't want people to think we were just giving these gifts out to glorify ourselves and get to show off pictures. But here's some silly photos of the kids working on the project - every so diligently :)

I know this is 2 months later, but I ran across these photos & wanted to brag a little bit on the awesome kids we get to serve.

TYMTJ Day 10!!!

2011-02-25T11:05:00.000-08:00

“We shall finish up by looking forward.

Press into praying for your man's future; everything God has in store after this very minute. So many things that will happen for you and your man will be far greater than you can currently conjure up. We serve a God that does not have his hands tied. He is mighty!

Our focus:
-Protect him.
-Bless his health.
-Guard his mind.
-Hold fast to his heart.
-Go before him.
-Be his counselor, his confidante, his help and his refuge.
-Surround him with people who will speak life into him.
-Be his shield and his firm foundation.
-Light his way and give him hope.

Thank you, friends, for joining me on this journey; we made it! Way to be a faithful mate. You have also helped hold me accountable to doing what God called me to do. I can almost guarantee that I would have weaseled my way out early, if not for you. Gracias!"

TYMTJ Day 9

2011-02-24T12:24:00.000-08:00

"Anyone still trucking with me? When you say pray for ten days, it seems a small feat. Yet, when you put ten days of hard-core praying to the test, it doesn't seem so small does it? I am confident that our dudes will reap from our diligent, loving efforts.

On the first day of our journey, we prayed for our man's worship. Now, here we are back to Wednesday and I just cannot get away from the fact that this is a day in which most of us take our worship public {at Elevate tonight!}. So let us focus on his Jesus time today.

Spending time with the Lord. A statement, a question, a request....

Whether or not you know that your husband spends daily, quality time with the Lord or not, let's seek this for him. Now, don't you start judging your man. What does your time with the Lord look like? Yeah. That's what I thought...I kid, I kid.

As we go through our day today, let us really just press into this topic for our man. Pray for your future husband, that God would do these things in his heart this very day and that God would develop discipline in him now, rather than later. May we all step closer to the Lord as we take this cry of our heart to Him.

Our focus:
-Draw him into an intimate time of worship.
-Call him away to a quiet place.
-Drown out life.
-Speak with clarity.
-Reveal yourself.
-Love him.
-Give life to your Word.
-Pour out revelation.
-Grant him accountability in his journey of following Christ.
-Shape him into a man of integrity, character and self-discipline."

TYMTJ Day 8

2011-02-23T20:00:00.000-08:00

"Long before you knew your man and even early on in your relationship, there were many events and much life that took place. Just as our past has much responsibility for determining who we are on this day, so does our man's.

Let's pray for our guys life, before today. We want life before today to be an encouragement for his present and his future. Though we cannot change the past, we can learn from it, grow through it and become mature because of it. When our man may not think to pray for his past, let us take that responsibility on ourselves. As we pray for his past, let us ask Jesus to reconcile it. May we also thank the Lord for developing him into the man he is today.

Our focus:
-Seek forgiveness for yourself if there are any areas in his past that you have yet
to forgive or have developed bitter roots.
-Ask that he would have full forgiveness of himself for who he used to be.
-Allow his past to be used to encourage him in his future.
-May he learn from past triumphs, successes, failures, and sins.
-Would he be able to use each part of who he is as a testimony to Christ and his
faithfulness.
-Pray that his past is not where his thoughts dwell.
-Give him eyes to see that you are doing a new thing.
-Reveal yourself faithful in the past, giving the promise of being faithful in the
present and the hope of being faithful in the future."

TYMTJ Day 7

2011-02-22T14:34:00.000-08:00

"Onto day seven...

I really think it would be meaningful to spend one day focused on your husband's family. If you are married, this is now your family as well, but these are the people that knew him & loved him long before you did.

I realize that families can be a very 'sticky' situation in some cases. I ask you to put opinions, disagreements and past hurts aside today. No matter the family circumstance, the Lord used family blessings & trials in your man's life to develop him into the guy you are so crazy about. As easy or difficult as it may be, spend today focused on your man's family, taking them before the Lord.

Our focus:
-Thank Jesus for a family that brought such a wonderful man into the world.
-Pray for mended family relationships (if needed).
-Petition that Jesus would make himself real & known to his family; call each
person out by name.
-Ask for protection to surround his family members.
-Pray for the health of family.
-Give wisdom to family members.
-Pray that your husband would be quick to honor his family.
-Seek out wisdom so that both you, & your man may know & agree on what
family legacies to pass along & what God desires to break & rebuild in your family"

TYMTJ Day 6

2011-02-21T16:10:00.000-08:00

Ouch. I don't like this one because it hits too close to home :(. I REALLY struggle with this because I'm so jealous of Joel's free time. He doens't get much free time and I feel entitled to every minute he does get. The second he mentions "guy time" my hackles go up. I've REALLY been working on this lately and I'm proud to say that I'm getting better. My initial gut feeling isn't any better but the words that actually come out of my mouth are more encouraging and positive ;) So I guess I better pray for this one double time!

Here is the post I got from Meagan's blog for day 6:

We have completed half of our ten-day, focused prayer time for your man. I just want to encourage you to stay strong in your commitment. I am great at starting tasks, but stink at finishing strong. I do not want this to happen to me, nor you. Really commit to disciplining yourself over the next few days to finish strong in your prayer journey.

Friendship. A word my man knows so, so well. I am ashamed to admit, but I am not always gun hoe when Brad wants to spend time with friends. I have been known to feel that they are competing for my quality time. I rarely take the time to acknowledge how beneficial Brad's quality friend-time can be, nor do I give thanks for the great friends that my husband has. Maybe some of you are on the opposite end of the spectrum, you desire for your husband to develop more friendships. If so, spend today requesting this from the Lord.

If your husband has many friends or few, let us be thankful for all of the men in his life whom he can be 'real' around. Be thankful if he returns home refreshed and a better husband and father after being around his friends.

Our focus:
-Give him wisdom in choosing men worthy of honest friendship.
-Thank Jesus for the friends that he has been given.
-Be specific, thank Jesus for each friend that comes to mind. Call them out by
name.
-Ask that he would be vulnerable with his friends.
-Pray that the vulnerability would grow to true accountability.
-Develop him into an authentic, giving, approachable friend.
-Increase integrity in friendships, making him worthy of great friends, in return.

Maybe he should get a guys night soon, away from the stresses of a job, the demands of a family, the requests of a wife and the expectations of those he leads. Just a thought...

TYMTJ Day 5

2011-02-20T19:10:00.000-08:00

If your man is already a daddy, this is a prayer that is probably constantly on your heart. I know that it is for me. If you do not yet have children, this is the perfect time to start praying for them, by praying for their daddy.

I love my husband ten-fold after watching him become a daddy. Amen? There's something amazing about Mia being in my arms and giving me kisses, but it's almost more magical to watch her crawl up in Joel's arms and give him kisses. He's such a sweet father, and she loves her daddy so much. They say that the relationship between child and father is every bit as important to development as the child and its mother. That's why when Joel exercises a different parenting style or disciplines her differently or doesn't discipline her over something, basically does anything I wouldn't have done, I try to bite my tongue and let him be the dad God created him to be. He's never doing anythine WRONG to her, just different from my instinct. But I think that the two parenting styles are very important for a child to get. It creates balance for the kid as well.

Our Focus:
-Teach him to train his children up in godliness.
-May his time with his children be increased.
-Grant him wisdom, patience and endless love.
-Grow his children up to always bring joy to their daddy.
-Prepare him to use 'life' as a teacher for his children.
-Inspire him through his offspring.
-May he always see the wonders of the Lord in his children.

Miss Fix-It

2011-02-19T16:57:00.000-08:00

My mom and dad are VERY smart and talented and can fix just about anything. Well, I found this beautiful, very heavy Kohler sink for only $25 (with faucet!!) for our cabin. Mom was fixing some sort of plumbing issue on it and Mia grabbed a wrench from the tool bag and got right in there helping! She's so observant and wants to do exactly what we do.

I walked into the bathroom to find her doing this! Not bad for a 20 month old... if only we could keep this spontaneous, voluntary cleaning up through the teenage years...

Not sure what she's trying to fix here, but she was focused and determined, so I left her alone.

I'm hoping she'll keep up this love for tools and fixing things. She'll come in handy!

TYMTJ Day 4

2011-02-19T07:50:00.000-08:00

God has been doing some good things in my heart as I've put much time and focus on the spiritual well-being of my husband. Anyone else?

Today, let's focus on our husbands as just that, a husband. If you are not yet married, pray for your guy as he steps into the role of husband. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. Your husband, my husband, is the leader. Already. It's settled. You don't have to negotiate it or loose sleep over it, they are the head of the home. Christ appointed them to that role.

In thinking about praying for this role, it was hard for me to strip this roll from the other rolls he fulfills. Yet, it is the one role that is solely created for me. Funny, isn't it?

Our focus:
-Encourage him in his leadership of me, his wife.
-Continue to develop him into a man that always makes marriage a priority.
-Give him a deep love for me, his spouse.
-Give him new revelation into your heart for marriage.
-Guard his eyes from Satan's attempts to steal his affection from me.
-May he be a model of submission as he submits to the Lord.
-Give him wisdom in leadership.

TYMTJ Day 3

2011-02-18T09:04:00.000-08:00

Whatever it is that he does to 'bring home the bacon,' let's ask that Jesus meet him there today.

We all know our husband's jobs well, so spend some time today personalizing your prayer in the way your husband needs them most. Try to take yourself out of the prayers. Don't pray for what you would be pleased to see happen, but rather things that would bring growth to your man.

Our focus:
-May his workplace be/become a place where he has freedom show his
creativity and use his gifts.
-That he would gain encouragement, specifically today, from his co-workers.
-That he would be effective.
-A thankful heart for a job that provides.
-Give clarity to any callings that the Lord may be placing in his heart.
-Professional growth.

Take a few extra moments to thank Jesus for giving your husband a job. For those of you who have the joy of staying at home with your kids make sure you have your heart right. Rather than comparing your life to the lives of others or wishing you had more to "show" for your life or sulking in the career you used to have, give thanks for a man who works so hard so that you can be a full-time mommy.

Let us all make a noticeable effort today to show our gratitude for our husbands when he enters the doors of his home at five or six or seven o'clock in the evening.

One of the most applicable pieces of advice I have ever heard is this:

"When your husband comes home from a long day at work, you and all of your children should go to the door to greet him, showing him how thankful you are that he has come home to you. A man who comes home with no one to greet him, feels as though no one notices his presence. If his presence is not noticed, he will start to pull away. Make a conscious effort to greet your husband today. And have your children or pets or make believe friends do the same thing. It will make him feel loved. That is our goal!"

More Mia

2011-02-17T16:37:00.000-08:00

We had a suitcase packed for Mia when she spent the night at my mom and dad's for the first time. When we got home, she took the liberty of unpacking it in the kitchen. For the record, this is a little suitcase!

Then she got in the suitcase and laid like this for a very, strange, long time. Looks like a frog to me. Maybe that corner smelled good! Tee hee...

As we were packing totes for moving out of our house, we constantly had to give her rides in totes. This one in particular was comfy as it had our guest bedroom bedding in it! She played in this tote forever, it was so cute! I wish you could see the joy in her face while Joel pulled her around, inverted :)

Here she is helping my mom cook by breading sliced zucchini and handing it to "grandma" to cook. SO cute! She gets a bucket or a chair or whatever she can get up on, whenever someone is cooking, and loves to help. This morning she spilled my protein powder all over the floor in an effort to "help". Thanks Mia :)

While we were in Mexico, Mia got a few blisters on her feet. They are almost completely healed, but the slight scab that is left still has her very bothered. I still have to kiss the dang "owwweee" about 3 times a day. After playing in the fridge door, she thought it would be a good idea to get out the Cholula (hot sauce) and put it on her blisters. I'm tellin' ya', strange child!!!

We had 10-12 inches of snow this week and we have taken full advantage of it. We have a little hill on our property and have been kayaking down it. SO fun. Mia doesn't really like her hands in it - who does? it's cold!- but other than that she has a great time and cries when we have to go back in the house.

Just a goofy picture Nora took of Mia:

She loves taking baths and is so cute all wrapped up in her towel afterwards :)

So, my child loves anything that is dangerous. Here I was doing paperwork on the table 4 feet from her. She reached up where the dishes were drying, grabbed this steak knife, found an apple, apparently stabbed the knife into the apple, then brought it to me like this. I figured if she hadn't hurt herself while accomplishing all that in mere seconds, she could hold it for a few more while I ran and grabbed the camera.

Her beloved, obnoxiously pink, 4-wheeler:

Opening the dog kennel door (or should I say, "about to be demolished by overly excited labs getting out of their kennel")

Just cute:

That's all! Aren't you proud of me for the semi-consistent blogs lately??

TYMTJ Day 2

2011-02-17T09:04:00.000-08:00

Worship, as you know, is a matter of the heart. So, let's begin by praying for his heart. I know what it feels like to have a heavy or burdened or uneasy heart. Don't you? Let's come together against this for our guys.

Our focus:
-Take the burdens from the heart of my husband.
-Replace them with freedom.
-In that freedom, begin to teach my husband what it truly means to worship You
in spirit and in truth.
-Come and meet my husband where he is.
-Allow him to find rest in his home and in his current circumstances.
-Begin to lay new words and encouragement on the heart of my husband.
-Develop him into a man who is capable of being in a constant spirit of worship.

TYMTJ Day 1

2011-02-16T09:53:00.000-08:00

Take Your Man to Jesus Day 1:

I read this on a friend's blog and decided it would be good to post on mine as well! The men in our lives have a lot resting on their shoulders as they strive to lead us and lead others - in their jobs, in the church, and in the community. I think our culture has gotten far to comfortable with "man bashing" and demolishing their reputation. Especially when a group of girls get together. Our men need our confidence, our support, and our approval. I think the saying goes: "behind every good man there is a good woman" and that is so true. The more we help meet the needs of our spouse, encourage them, and believe in them, the better they will be in all facets of life.

We've all seen what can happen on the flip-side: a lively, strong man gets together with a girl, they fall in love, they get married. She has no problem putting him down in public, pointing out his shortcomings and his flaws. He gets home from work and she hounds him to do this, do that. He has no quiet time, and finds no joy in coming home. Eventually he isn't so lively or strong. He starts letting her make the decisions, their kids are brats, she doesn't respect him because he has no back bone anymore. He dreads coming home and finds any excuse not to. It's just a downward spiral.

Ok. Let's lift our men up to the awesome God who created them for the next 10 days. Let's strive to support our men, thank them for what they contribute to our families and encourage them every day.

Day 1:
"disclaimer: Before I begin, I want to let you know that I will, most often, be referring to that special man in your life as "husband." If the guy you are praying for is not your husband, please still participate and know that when I say husband I actually mean: husband, fiancé, boyfriend or future husband...

Let's begin by praying for our husbands as leaders.

All of our men are leaders in one way or another and most of them lead in multiple areas. They are all the leaders in our relationships and homes. Many of them lead multiple people in their place of work. And whether you realize it or not, many of your husband's friends look to your husband as a leader in their friendship. For those of you who have been in leadership roles yourselves, you know the burden and pressure that can come from such roles. Recognize that your husband is a leader to many people, even in situations that you may be unaware of. Let's ask the Lord to bless them in this role, to teach them through leadership and to use them to influence others.

Our focus:
-Increase his wisdom in making decisions for those he leads.
-God would give him confidence as a leader.
-Call him to step out in his role and calling.
-Give him influence in the lives of others.
-That he would view his leadership as a way to lead as the Lord has lead him.
-Teach him through leading others.
-A teachable spirit.

Use the next twenty-four hours to focus on your husband's roles in leadership. Take him before the Lord, specifically as a leader."

A Girl and her Dog (and goat and horse)

2011-02-15T16:15:00.000-08:00

Mia LOVES animals and in fact, we had a hard time keeping her from loving all over stray dogs while we were in Mexico recently (more on that later).

This is such a pitiful picture of little Chevy. Any of you who know this spaz will appreciate the fact that she was being SO mopey about being in her kennel (which is bigger than our house), that she sat still with this leaf hanging out of her mouth, the whole time I walked up to her and took this picture. Brat.

There is little that excites Mia more than getting to go feed all the random animals at my mom's house. This is Lizzy, the ginormous goat. She only gets more ginormous when Mia is around because Mia gives her so many treats! This is actually a big deal because for MONTHS Mia was scared to death of Lizzy. She wasn't scared of the huge white mule that could stomp her in the ground, but she was petrified of the goat that wants nothing more than a snack.

Here my dad is watching Mia feed the mules and horses. Joel's mom sent us the camo trapper hat and orange/camo pullover. I'm not sure why she chose the boy stuff for Mia, but Mia pulls it off and still looks adorable to me.

So I was cooking one day and found it odd that Mia was quiet for a few minutes and not insisting on "helping" me in the kitchen. I went to the living room and found her painting the black dog white! I had a paintbrush in a baggie for future use that she found and decided her dog needed to look more like a skunk. Silly girl. Poor dog.

Here she couldn't get the dog's attention so she flopped on the floor and laid there staring at the dog for AGES. She'd talk to Sadee, sing to her, poke her in the eyeball, anything to get Sadee's attention, but Sadee is a master at ignoring you when she wants. So Mia lost this battle. Ha!

This is probably a good example of WHY Sadee chooses to ignore Mia a lot of times. Here Mia had gotten the thermometer thingy and decided that Sadee needed her temperature checked. She kept swiping the thing over Sadee's forehead like you're supposed to do with those things - on humans. Sadee is such a good dog and just sits there and takes it.

These posts are a little random but I'm behind so this is catch up time! Enjoy!

OFL

2011-02-13T16:06:00.000-08:00

Our restaurant sponsors the Ozarks Fight League, which puts on MMA fights every 3 months with fighters from all over this state and surrounding areas. One of our employees, Braden, fights for a local team and retained his title belt at the last fight we went to. Here are some photos:

This is a RazorBack Ribs staff photo: the blond girl is Laura, she works for us, and they hired her to sing the National Anthem before these fights. She brought the house DOWN with her amazing voice!!!! I was thoroughly impressed that such a big sound could come from such a little human :). The other guy is Brian, and he's our assistant manager. He's worked with us for about a year and a half now and we are very proud of the way he takes his job seriously, takes on responsibility, etc. He's great. We love our staff!!!

Christmas in February?!?

2011-02-11T11:57:00.000-08:00

I guess that's what happens when you don't post for a month and a half :). We had a great Christmas. We spent the morning at home just the 3 of us, then went to my Aunt Gwen's where we played Just Dance (along with 50% of all Americans that day it appears), and finished the day at my mom and dad's with a delicious prime rib dinner.

She got VERY good at opening presents this year and in fact was quite willing to open gifts for anyone and/or everyone...

Her grandpa in Texas send her a pretty dress with shiny bloomers, and apparently she liked the bloomers. She put the dress aside, put these on, and went on with her day!

Here is at my parent's house. This was her big gift from my dad, a rocking horse!

It required some assembly... (thanks dad)

...which she decided to help with. Notice the directions AND screwdriver in her hand!

At long last, she's on it (and pieces didn't go flying - Christmas miracle). She loves this thing!

This is the day after Christmas in her pretty Christmas dress. Yes this is another picture on the potty. Some people record themselves singing in the bathroom, we take pictures of Mia. Either way, it's a bathroom studio :)

Book Review

2011-02-10T09:01:00.000-08:00

I am letting you know that I am currently doing some photo editing of the past 2 months of this blog famine. That means that there will be several new posts in the days/weeks to come. Yay! It's long overdue....

In the meantime, I recently finished a really REALLY good book called Velvet Elvis. It's by the same author, Rob Bell, as Sex God. He's all about catchy titles apparently :). Regardless, I HIGHLY recommend picking up one of these books. Or better yet, both!

We are currently under crazy winter weather here in Arkansas. It sure feels like Alaska when temperatures are below zero around here!!! I've gotten very UN-used to that feeling.

We moved out of our house the first week of January and into our cozy cabin on our 3 acres. We plan to apply for financing to build our house on this property in the near future. But as we are self employed and the economy is crazy right now, who knows what will happen. We are VERY happy in our little cabin at the moment (minus the fact that our hot water pipes are frozen right now... how does HOT water freeze and not the cold??)

So hopefully you can forgive my lack of blogging. Stay tuned! But as usual, don't ever hold your breath :)

In the Snow of Detroit

2010-12-22T18:51:00.000-08:00

OK. I need all of you to click on the "Tentpegs" link, on the far right of my blog, under blogs that I follow. Then read the blog titled "In the Snow of Detroit". This group of people is incredible and I long for the day I have a Christian family like this. We do little things like this here and there, but never to the level that they do on a monthly basis. This is just ONE of this group's outreaches and stories. They're awesome and I know God is just beaming over what they do. Enjoy!
Katy

The Many Faces of Mia

2010-11-28T09:43:00.000-08:00

Since I haven't posted in a while, and Mia is changing daily, I thought I'd do a post of just Mia pictures. Enjoy!

There's always hair in her face, it's just so fine and slippery and won't stay back!

Actually, in this pic my dad slicked her hair back with conditioner and hair spray, but she's carring his metal tool box full of tools! Strong little thing!

Playing in the sink at grandmas :)

Wearing Nora's bat headband thingy on halloween.

She loves putting on gloves like mommy and "Helping".

Here she's playing spoon tug-of-war with Jaydia and finding it hilarious.

Before our homecoming game, in her custom "Panther Cub" shirt.

I guess we can't leave without her!

Oh my... check out those rainboots ;)

Could she be any more flexible? She's trying to buckle her own seatbelt.

Once again, wearing a glove and "helping" mommy. We have issues when the oven is actually on because she thinks the broiler part is her toy. Ugh.

Looks like a china baby with her hair like that! She's running through pretty intense rain, barefoot, on asphalt. Crazy!

This is early summer, but it's when she learned to whistle. SO cute.

I walked into her room after a particular unsuccessful nap attempt, to find not Mia, but Mogley!!! She had somehow gotten her arms out of the neck of her shirt, yanked her hair out, thrown all her pillows and blankets overboard, and was quite proud of it all.

Some pictures from the potty (we have to do something to kill time while she decides to go). Here's a happy face...

What does the cow say? Moooooooo! (Although she more resembles a goat in the picture)

Stinky!

Last one for today, I think she's got water in her eyes! Hee hee hee, silly girl!

Thanks for sticking with me through a mass collection of Mia pictures. Hopefully those blog stalkers who are grumpy at my infrequent posts have gotten their fill of pics :) You know who you are! Love you!

Shutterfly

2010-11-24T15:47:00.000-08:00

Last week I saw Brooke's blog and read her rave about Shutterfly holiday cards. I am always looking for good holiday photo cards but I usually end up using the same company as everyone else and get the cookie-cutter cards that look like everyone else's. Well, Brooke always has the best looking photo stuff so I figured she had good taste and I should check out the website she was referring to. So I went to Shutterfly.com and was really REALLY impressed. They have SUCH unique, high-end looking cards. I assumed that since they were so professional looking, that they would cost a lot more than other sites, but honestly, they're not more expensive. They just look like it :). Check them out yourself here. So I too decided to blog about them and receive my 50 free cards, even though we all know that with friends and family across the world, we’re gonna need way more than 50! Also, for Mia's birthday Joel and I wanted to do photo cards instead of invitations so that they would kill 2 birds with 1 stone in the scrapbook. Check out all the birthday cards! I won't be using walmart.com or any of the other holiday photo card places because I don’t want my cards to look the same as ones I get in the mail. Ours will be unique, creative, and professional. Thanks Brooke for passing on this great promotion AND such a great site.

Halloween '10

2010-11-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

We had another halloween party at our restaurant this year and it was a lot of fun. We had live music, great prizes, etc. We didn't plan it very well because the football team had it's last game of the season in a nearby town that evening, so we didn't have much of a crowd. Anyone living in the south knows how games in nearby towns create a ghost town in your own. That's ok though. We had a great time, then afterwards we went dancing with some of our friends.

Check out Steve Irwin in the back. He has a stingray coming out of his chest! EW!

Our Louisianna friends brought a "cheese" cake with "rats" on it. It really was cheesecake - a good one at that, and the rats were chocolate covered strawberries with tales and little beady eyes. Hilarious!

Joel and I, always clowning around... rodeo clowning that is :)

A Visit With Ashley

2010-11-18T19:50:00.000-08:00

At least once a year, one of my best friends, Ashley, and I try to get together. We need to make it more than once a year, but with a combined three kids under 4, making the 6 hour trip doesn't come easily...

This time I went to visit her at her beautiful home that her and her husband Nate have with their two sweet kids, Aiden (almost 4) and Miley (2 1/2). I probably shouldn't mention that this trip took place in September, seeing as how I'm not posting anything until November...but I'm working on getting caught up. SORRY!

Mia and I were there for a little more than 3 days and had a GREAT time with them. It's CRAZY how much Mia and Miley look alike. They could totally be sisters - which is even crazier considering how Ashley and I look NOTHING alike.

We went to the awesome zoo and had a blast. Here are some photos!

When I first got there, we decided to put all the carseats in one vehicle so we didn't have to drive around separately. It was SO cute that all 3 held hands! Sorry for cutting your face off Aiden - the iPhone camera kinda stinks.

Here's Miley and Mia at the Zoo!

Miley feeding the cute little goats...

It only took 345,677,889 attempts to get all 3 to look at us. We looked like complete morons trying to make them smile and look at us. Everyone in the zoo was looking at us EXCEPT our kids...

Something's stinky!

Aiden handled the lorikeet being on him like a champ.

As did Ashley...

But Mia apparently takes after her mommy and was petrified of the birds!

Look closely, there are 3 kids on this stroller! Ashley's working so hard, and I'm taking pictures... oops. We had a great trip and LOVE you guys!!!

RazorBack Ribs

2010-08-22T19:54:00.000-07:00

Well, in late June we purchased a new location. We started out in a BBQ trailer in January of '09. In September of '09 we took over a coffee shop on the town square and added our BBQ to the menu. We were simply renting the building and equipment at that point. The building was awesome, an old bank with a safe in it from 1893. However, it didn't have a full kitchen, our seating was limited, and it's super old so that brought it's share of issues. About 6 months ago, a 60+ year restaurant went out of business. It had changed hands a few times, fell to bad management and after they neglected to pay sales tax several months in a row, the state locked their doors. Enter Joel and Katy :).

This place USED to be a fantastic stop that everyone hung out at, but in recent years it has gotten pretty disgusting and hardly anyone went there anymore, unless they wanted ice cream. This place always had the BEST ice cream and desserts.

We purchased it for a fair price and started the most incredible renovation we've ever undertaken. The "before photos" I'll post here aren't even the true beginning. This is once all the equipment was pulled out. Trust me, it was B-A-D. We had a professional steam cleaner/pressure washer for 5 entire days work on the building. It took him a whole day just to do the vent hood above the grill. EWW. He then steam/pressure washed the entire interior. After him, our staff went in and hand scrubbed floor to ceiling. We then repainted the entire place before moving any equipment back in.

After hanging up some decorations (which we will improve upon as time allows), covering tables, having chairs reupholstered, installing a new kitchen our style, implementing a full POS computer system, and getting the place spotless, we opened this past Wednesday (the 11th). The night prior to opening day we did a "friends and family" dinner which served as a trial run for all our staff. It was a bit chaotic but all our kinks were worked out and it's now running fantastic. We are truly blessed to have 10 of the best staff members we could ever hope for. Praise God!

Here are some photos from start to finish. Like I said, it'll never be finished as we continue to add and improve things, but this got us opened...

And After:

More to come at some point... But for now we are just grateful for all the help and all the work that went into this place. We had our first health inspection Friday and the inspector said it was the first restaurant with "zero" write-ups that he has had in years. In fact, too many zero write-up inspections and the state will come audit his inspections. It's that rare. We were THRILLED to say the least. It's been a crazy past few weeks with not a lot of sleep, but it's totally worth it. People have been flocking to the new place like crazy. It hasn't stopped. Because of all this, we are able to provide 10 jobs, not counting Joel and I, to a small town hurting from a terrible economy. What a blessing!!

Joel the Baptizer

2010-08-20T19:54:00.000-07:00

So anyone who knows Joel and I know that we try our best to be good Christians (even though we fall on our faces A LOT) but our true goal with our restaurant is to use it as a ministry tool. Well, it's working. This past week Joel has baptized 3 people into Jesus and that is just awesome. Braden was the first one. He has been in Joel's collegiate class for quite some time now, Joel baptized his sister Kortnie last summer. Braden just started working for us 2 weeks ago and he has been a huge blessing to us, and we pray that we'll be a blessing to him also. The next two ladies are Kacie and Tracy. They were eating lunch at our restaurant the other day and started talking to Joel about Christianity and decided to take the next step in their spiritual lives. Praise God!!! One of our youth kids was baptized this week also, we call her Peanut, but her name is Makala. Pray for all of these new, clean, Christians. We are so excited and honored to be a part of their lives.

I love to watch baptisms. The people are so free and clean and relieved afterwards. It truly is a transformation and God definitely is present in those moments. I get goose bumps just thinking about it!

Cute Lil Mia

2010-08-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

Mia just LOVES the water. And this post is out of order because she actually had a swim suit that fit in at this point.

Swimming with Shana and Kids

2010-08-16T19:40:00.000-07:00

One day early in July my friend Shana took me and Mia to a fantastic swimming hole on her family's property. Shana has 3 kids who are SUPER cute, and her niece and nephew came too. They are SO good with Mia and are very close family friends of ours too. Anyways, we had a great day together. Mia kind of resembles "Mogly" from the Jungle Book in these pictures - she grew out of her swimming suit and I haven't found another one that fits her yet...

Could these two be any more opposite in the looks department? It's pretty cute to see them together. They are actually like 3rd or 4th cousins. But who really counts that far anymore unless you live in Arkansas...

Mia will hate me one day for this picture...but it just shows how she could care less about getting dirty and playing in the sand. And what I have to go through to keep that hair remotely decent. UGH.

I think this is super cute. Mia thought it was hilarious when True would splash her with water through her Crocs. Who woulda thought?

Thank you, Shana, for a fabulous, relaxing day with the kids. It was a great distraction from the busy day to day. Since that was over a month ago, we'll have to plan another day like this...

St. Louis

2010-06-24T18:58:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day weekend, we ran up to St. Louis for a one-nighter. The Rib America circuit begins that weekend and runs through Labor Day weekend in Reno (Sparks), Nevada. The teams that we used to work for are some of the original teams that began this whole circuit thing and since they were so close, we thought we would go see them. They have become very dear friends to us. So dear, in fact, I have ZERO photos of them. Grrr. Anyhooo... it was fabulous to see all of our "ribbing" buddies and Joel got to stay out and talk restaurant business with some of the older ones who have very successful restaurants back home. It's always good to pick the brains of those who have paved the way! The St. Louis Rib Show always has really great bands and the night we were there Brett Michaels played. He played for EVER and did great. I guess he appeared on American Idol before St. Louis, but this was one of his very first shows back after his brush with death. "People" Magazine was there covering the event. So that was cool. Once again, no photos.

We went to the arch:

And then to this awesome kids water park in the city garden. Forgive the abundance of photos. I went a little crazy and this is just a sampling. Enjoy!

"Hey Dad, what's this?"

"Whew! That was kind of cool!"

"Oh! Oh! There it is again!"

"Daddy, I don't need to hold your hand, I can go explore by myself. I"ll be fine."

"Wha....!!!!!" (mommy note: btw this is my favorite picture EVER. Going on the fireplace for SURE)

"Holy cow! What just happened?"

"OK. I got this. It comes out of there...."

"Dang it!!!"

"OK. I guess it's pretty funny. At least I'm not thirsty anymore!"

"This is SO Much fun mom and dad!"

The girls

My Mommy and Daddy!

We had a lot of fun in St. Louis even though we were there less than 24 hours :).

Blow Creek Cave and Falls

2010-06-21T18:41:00.000-07:00

Another Adventure! We took Jaydia on another hike on Memorial Day. It was about a 6 mile round trip hike that was SO beautiful. We truly live in a gorgeous area.

The first "attraction" on the hike is Blow Creek Cave. It's a small cave that apparently goes way back in the mountain (we didn't venture that far). It has a natural spring flowing through it that comes out here and flows down the valley creating waterfalls below it.

This is Blow Creek Falls and there isn't a lot of water flowing right now because it is so hot and we haven't had a lot of rain. It's still really pretty! As we came from the spring to the falls, we saw some chickens, a horse, and eventually a really awesome wall tent, and then a lady standing outside! At first we were weirded out but then we started talking to her and she was SO nice! Her and her husband (they're probably in their mid-30's) decided to move out to the boonies and raise their 3 kids away from media and stuff like that. We've talked to WAY loonies before who make that choice, but these people were pretty "normal". They have a laptop that they watch movies on and they use solar power. Their water comes from the natural spring. They are really devout Christians, they dress normal and are really cool to be around! We ended up visiting with them for a long time and they invited us to come hang out on their property (apparently this was no longer public lands...oops) and stay the night, bring the youth group, whatever. How cool! And what a gorgeous place to live! Their front porch hangs out overlooking these falls, though you can't see it in the photo.

That family sent us to this overlook. It wasn't on our hiking map, but it was super cool and I'm so glad they directed us here. The view just went on and on and on...

That was the view to the right, this is to the left.

I L-O-V-E these flowers. They look like little fireworks!

Joel and I fell in love with Vibram's Five Fingers "shoes" about 3 years ago and haven't stopped wearing them since. We hike in them, run in them, everything (I'm pretty sure Joel's even preached in them. Ha!). There are times when the bottoms of your feet do get poked or prodded, but you learn to maneuver better and it's SO much better for your body to walk/run/hike using the true muscles of your feet and ankles. Before I go on and on about them, look up barefoot running, or the book "born to run", or just do some prodding around on google about the topic. It'll blow your mind. Anyways, sometimes you do get leaves caught in-between your toes and it's kind of cute :)

Here's the family!

Eden Falls

2010-06-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Also a few weeks ago, we went on a hike with Joel's young adult class to a place only about 45 minutes from here called Eden Falls. It was incredible. Joel and I hiked to some pretty incredible places in Maui that I never thought could be rivaled, but this area was pretty close. There were probably 7 waterfalls from the base to the top, and at the very top there is a cave that you crawl, squeeze, and maneuver through until you end up in an open room that has a waterfall coming down inside of it. It is absolutely pitch black in there and the only way you can see where you're going is with a flashlight. It's breathtaking. It's also only 58 degrees in there so it feels like mega-air conditioning compared to back outside the cave!

This was Mia's first time in the hiking backpack. She loved it!

This is one of the first pools you come to. You climb up the ledge, and through the "cave", and out to more pools and waterfalls. This cave is open and they call it a natural bridge.

This is the view back out from the natural bridge. It's so pretty!

There are Joel (and Mia) and Jaydia (more on her later) maneuvering through the cave to the other side.

Here are the crazy kids climbing on the bluffs. Kortnie and Sadie got down carefully and safely, but as Braden and Brian were coming down the bluff they lost their footing (oddly at the same time) and came falling down the bluff face. Luckily, Ricky (at the bottom) stuck his arm out and caught them both up against the rock and let them down carefully. Holy Moly Ricky! You DA MAN!!!

Here are more falls that we came to. I like this photo. It's all artistic and pretty :)

The falls from the above picture with our group.

I love love LOVE this photo. Ahhhh! So sweet!

This is Jaydia. We started doing the Host Home thing again but now we are only taking girls (or at least that's the plan). She's 15 and a real sweet girl. She stayed with us for 5 weeks and got to go home Monday, which she was real excited about. Anyhoo... this is her in a hollow tree... We miss you dear!!!

It was a long day of hiking and adventure and one little girl was worn out!!! So cute...

Stay tuned, more adventures to come (but as always, please don't hold your breath. I'm so slow!)

Fishing!

2010-06-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

Being that I grew up in Alaska, I truly do love to go fishing. It's so relaxing, the water is so peaceful, and all the cares of the world just go away when that line starts tugging... ahhhh.... love it. Anyways, although nothing on EARTH could ever top fishing in Alaska for REAL fish (you with me Alaskans!?), Arkansas is known for its fishing and there are tournaments held all the time all around us. Now, it's hard for me to get used to a 20 inch fishing being huge, BUT... I'm working on it.

All that being said, we haven't gotten out and fished really since we've lived here. I think Joel threw a line in the water a few times from our lake boat, but I don't remember him catching anything over a few inches. SO, a few weeks ago Joel surprised me with a guided fishing trip on the White River. We are good friends with the guide and it was a fabulous day. It was real foggy in the morning and almost chilly, though by noon I had a ridiculous sunburn that I'm still peeling from.

Joel caught the first few fish of the day, but I came back strong and started just bringing 'em in. I caught the first Brown Trout of the day and it was pretty decent at 19.5 inches. Once again, they tell me that's good :). Well, after my run of luck, the luck went back to Joel and he caught several more towards the end of our trip, including a nice Brown also (not as nice as mine though, tee hee!).

Thank you Babe for such a great day on the river! I had so much fun!!!!
P.S. I'll let you catch the big one next time :)

Wedding

2010-06-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

Joel was asked to officiate another wedding, this one was for a beautiful young couple, Lance and Trista. They had a very fun wedding outdoors. It was H-O-T though, and I felt terrible for the guys in black suits. But it went really well and I believe they are off to a good, God-centered marriage.

Mia's Birthday

2010-06-02T10:10:00.000-07:00

Well, our little girl turned 1 May 15th. Wow. What a crazy year. It has gone by very fast, but at the same time I can't remember life without this little creature that only showed up a year ago. She gets to be more and more fun every day. Ashley Myers once told me that every stage will be your favorite stage and you'll think that nothing could ever top that stage - until the next day :) She's so right. Anyways, enough sentiment... here's the birthday party!

I didn't want to use up any of the REALLY cool birthday theme ideas on her first birthday where she really doesn't "get it"... so since she's into bubbles I thought I'd do a bubbles theme, which kind of led to a rubber ducky theme. So here's the cake:

Well, Joel didn't exactly ask what I was planning to do for Mia's birthday, so when his mom asked if I had a theme, he said "no". SO...she showed up with a whole theme set up for Madagascar, complete with a 4.5 foot tall giraffe pinata. Whoa. So at the party there was a bubbles and rubber ducky area with a kids pool full of all sorts of different rubber duckies for the kids to play with (or chew on), and then a Madagascar area. Classic... :) If it wasn't totally random, it wouldn't be our family, right?!?

Anyooo, here are some other photos from her party:

Mia hitting her ginormous pinata!

Then after the party we went home to open gifts. I swear Joel's mom bought all of WalMart. I had to pack up all sorts of toys in boxes for future use as we only let Mia have a few at a time. At least she won't get bored! AND...we won't have to buy her another toy until she's 8! Ha!

I'm always getting sneezing pictures! (I think they're cute...)

And at the end of everything, she gave us a little recital. Awww.

Well, we've been doing a lot of adventurous stuff, so stay tuned, I shall be posting!

Mia Mia Mia

2010-05-11T06:17:00.000-07:00

When looking through recent photos to give you guys an update, I realized that little miss is getting ALL the camera time! I hereby resolve to take more pictures of Joel and I. Promise. I can't believe it, but her ONE YEAR birthday is this Saturday. CRAZY!!!! In the mean time, here are pics of her this past month.

Giving "knuckles" is one of her favorite things to do:

Her famous "Avatar" Face. We can't teach her to blow kisses for anything, but she'll do her crazy avatar face 1000 times a day on command. Even when crying. Who woulda thought?

She LOVES to talk on the "phone". Anything can be a phone. Yesterday a toothbrush, a dog toy, and a CO2 detector were all phones. She says "hewhoa" because those L sounds are hard to make in hello. When we get off the phone, she always helps by saying "ba". I can't tell if she's just sounding SUPER southern saying "bye" with a drawl, or if it's just her not being able to say the actual y part very well...

Walking with grandma and grandpa... She has taken 2 steps on her own, but just gets SO scared to let go.

I took a photo of her on this thing when she was quite a bit younger and it's neat to see how much she's grown.

Here she is with Peanut being a rockstar...

Her first time playing real drums. Mia has ALWAYS been into tapping on everything in sight and has been able to keep a rhythm by tapping her toes or hitting something for several months now. We think she's gonna be a drummer chic- which would be cool - no one messes with the drummer chic! Anyways, we are going to try to find her a little drum set for her birthday but until then, her awesome drummer cousin, Alex, will be teaching her on real ones.

Alright, I'll work on getting photos that include Joel and I and I'll work on posting more than once a month :)

Ha!

2010-04-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

I actually did go outside and started to take photos of spring flowers when, shocker, my camera's battery died. SO... here are two that I got prior to the camera casualty:

I hope everyone is enjoying spring so far!

Another day...

2010-04-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

Life is busy busy as usual. I'm sure you're bored of hearing that! The sad thing is, reflecting back, I have no idea what we've been doing this past month! I mean, there's the obvious, running a restaurant, catering for a lodge, raising a monkey - I mean 10 month old, being the youth group leaders and doing at least 3 events with them per week, trying to catch a few minutes to ourselves here and there, but other than that, where has the time gone!?!

One thing that consumed a lot of my mental time was that on March 22nd, my mom went into ICU for 4 days, then remained in the hospital for another 4 days for monitoring. She had bacterial pneumonia that was sepsis and through her entire blood stream. Her kidneys were having a hard time, her potassium levels were far too low, her blood pressure was terribly low, and her heart rate was irregular and far slower than normal as well. Poor thing! If I had been thinking clearly, I would have blogged about that and asked for prayers! Oops... Anyhooo, she's at home now recouperating. She still feels terrible and is very weak and easily exhausted. She has a ton of pain where her lung infection was as well. So some extra prayers in her direction wouldn't hurt :)

I have hardly any photos of things going on lately, though the trees are blooming and flowers are everywhere so I should get my hiney outside and take some photographs. Stay tuned... but don't ever hold your breath :)

Mia is doing fantastic. Crazy, but good. She has 1.5 teeth at this point. Her 2nd one breached the surface yesterday but you really can't see it yet. She's very efficient with that one tooth though. She can take bites off a whole strawberry or hard boiled egg and loves to eat most anything.

Here she is with a strawberry:

This one was a disaster. I was baking for the restaurant and needed to keep her busy so I gave her a little tub of all natural peanut butter, forgetting that she had a toothbrush in her other hand. Well, needless to say, she brushed her hair, her face, her clothes, her chair, everything, with peanut butter. Right before the peanut butter, she had eaten a strawberry - which of course was every where also, so when you got close to her all you could smell was peanut butter and jelly sandwich !!! But it kept her busy, and that's what baths are for, right!?!

This is my dad and his birthday cake. My dad LOVES to squirrell hunt, you could even call it an obsession. He gets on his horse and goes in the woods for hours. He calls it his "therapy". So mom made him a squirrell cake holding a white flag in surrender. It's on a tree stump and there's another squirrel looking out of a hole in the tree.

A Little Bit of Everything

2010-03-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

I don't feel like separating these posts, so just go with the randomness. This is what we've been up to the past few weeks!

First off, we live crazy lives - as evidenced by my child's hair:

Next, we took over the youth group for our church, which we were pretty much doing anyways but now it's "official". Our first trip was to ChrisTeens, the annual youth rally in Russellville. We had SO much fun, though it was an exhausting weekend.

Joel's older brother, Ernest, came to live with us for a while, these are a few photos of a hike we went on with him this past weekend.

Ahhh the peace that nature brings. Thank you God for making beautiful little things to look at.

OK. Now we've of course been doing some more cakes, which are TIME CONSUMING. We've actually had to inflate our prices so that we only do the coolest cake orders and not spend our entire lives doing cakes. It was getting a wee bit overwhelming.

A baby shower cake:

We used the center of that cake to make this little monster for the new big brother to have his own cake:

Our first wedding cake:

And the grooms cake for that same wedding.

I'm so happy that it has warmed up here. It was SO cold for the south for SO long. I felt like I should have just stayed in Alaska. At least I used AutoStart then and dressed for the cold! Ugh-hands down to all the mom's in Alaska. I can't imagine having to bundle up my little bundle every time we wanted to go outside. YUCK. (Geez, I've become such a pansy!) Ok. That's it for now.

Wendy's Visit

2010-02-21T05:35:00.000-08:00

My dear friend Wendy came to see us in January. This is the second time since Mia was born - what a friend!!! These first pictures are of us being silly at Mear's Bluffs.

Here's Joel peeking between two rocks:

I don't even know what I'm doing, but between my goofy pose and Wendy mid-air, it's a classic photo :)

The rock I'm sitting on has like 300 feet of NOTHING below it, so Wendy it acting like she's pushing me off the rock. The only thing was, she got a little TOO into her role and actually pushed a little!!!

So here we're dying laughing once she realized that she was actually pushing, and saw my terrified face. Ha!

Whoa!

Awww....

Here we are at the restaurant watching the National Championship game - I kind of look like the Michelin Man. I promise I'm not that fat...

Here's Aunt Wendy with captain mischevious...

Thank you for coming to see us again Wendy! I miss you already and can't wait until your next visit!!!

Ice Photos and Wendy's Visit

2010-02-19T05:33:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures of the ice we had in Arkansas in January. Check out how small I am compared to the icicle in the bottom picture!

More Cakes

2010-02-16T13:58:00.000-08:00

Well, as you can tell, we've been doing lots of cakes, and not much of anything else! SO... I promise I'll post more about life pretty soon. But in the mean time, enjoy these new creations!
This one was for a guy's 21st b-day, he flies for the civil air patrol and this plane is a replica of his plane.

Our school is the Yellville Panthers and these are the school colors. This was for a girl's birthday who is really into basketball.

This was for the National Championship game, Joel's a die-hard Texas fan. Brooke - we all know who won, you don't have to rub it in :) hahahaha!!! But the cake was cool!

This was a baby shower cake that was covered in buttercream instead of fondant so it's not as smooth, but super yummy. The shoes, bottle, and sports balls are all edible and hand made.

Cakes

2010-01-27T05:16:00.000-08:00

So in October, we catered a large wedding in a town about an hour from here. My mom happened to be chatting up the bride a few weeks prior, and got the bright idea that we should do her groom's cake. The groom is a PBR Bull Rider, so we did this belt buckle for him. About a month later I got a call asking how much we charged for wedding cakes! I was kind of taken back, so I called mom and she said, "why not!" SO we have begun a new branch of RazorBack Ribs and now do custom cakes. The wedding isn't until March, so you won't see those photos for a while. But here is a sampling of the cakes so far!

Baby Shower cake

She won our coffee tasting contest and this was the prize.

A fairy cake for a girl's birthday

Kinda obvious....

Not at all obvious :) ha ha ha... This one is kinda abstract, but it's a fall themed cake. Just go with it!

My aunt & cousin share a birthday on Christmas day so we made this for them.

Christmas cake

And we have 6 more orders in the next 2 weeks! So it's a busy business. Who woulda thought?!?

Ugly Christmas Sweater Party

2010-01-01T10:18:00.000-08:00

In our continuing effort to jazz this town up a bit, we hosted an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party at the restaurant. We had about 40+ people come throughout the night and we had a BLAST.

Here are some of the faces & ugly sweaters:

A hand game that totally messes with your head. It's so fun!!!

Peanut and Kenzi making a "christmas tree" pose.

Toby and Bean about to play a game called "Norweigan Nosedive"... kinda like "Twister" on steroids. Very fun.

The newly engaged couple, Josh and Ellen:

More Norweigan Nosedive:

Family Photo

2009-12-31T09:57:00.000-08:00

We did a snowy Christmas photo with my parents down by their creek.

Santa Claus Picture

2009-12-30T08:53:00.000-08:00

This older gentleman in town goes all out for every holiday, decorating his entire house and yard. His Christmas tree lights are timed to music and the whole bit. Well, for the past 15 years, he goes out every night the week before Christmas and waves at all the cars going by. People stop and have their kid's photos taken with him (at least so I'm told). So we decided instead of doing the boring mall photos, we'd have this guy be Mia's santa. He was super nice, and although Mia wasn't really interested in him holding her, his beard was pretty fascinating.

Christmas Day with Grandma and Grandpa

2009-12-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

We then went to my Mom and Dad's house to do presents and later to my aunt Gwen's house to eat and hang out with the whole crazy family.
Grandpa chose and wrapped these toys for little Mia, how cute!

Grandpa and Grandma even got a gift or two...

And We got a Wii!!!! We got rid of our TV channels so we just do Netflix and now Wii, and OH it's so much fun. Turns out I'm quite the golfer... Joel, on the other hand, is quite the bowler.

So this is our version of "over the river and through the woods" to Aunt Gwen's house. We were blessed with a white Christmas (though it was pretty wimpy compared to my Alaskan standards), but the creek crossing was super high due to lots of melting run-off. Makes for a good adventure though! (You can tell we came from Alaska with that big ole crack through Joel's windshield)

Isaac kickin' back

Tim and Lacey picking the turkey apart.

98% of my family was blessed with amazing singing abilities, I'm in the other 2%. Regardless, this is my Aunt Julie, Uncle Don, and Aunt Gwen singing some country songs....

...to which Joel and I danced :)

This is Mia being nice for the camera...

...and this is when she thinks the camera is gone !!! She's not horribly thrilled with her cousin. Clara is 7 days younger than Mia.

This is my cousin Megan.

Christmas Morning

2009-12-27T09:00:00.000-08:00

We didn't really get Mia any presents this year because a) the kid is 7 months old and won't remember all this hooplah, b) kids always enjoy the box and wrapping paper more than the gift so we figured we had enough boxes and wrapping paper to keep her busy, c) she's the only grandchild on both sides and therefore will get PLENTY of stuff, and d) we decided to use our Christmas budget to buy gifts for families that are real poor. Thanks to Aunt Wendy, Aunt Debbie, and Abuelo Ernest and Maria, we had a few presents for her to open Christmas morning.

I have to brag a little here... Mia LOVES books and about 2 months ago (maybe more) she picked up how to turn pages. I just lift the page where she can get her hands around it, and she moves it over! She loves to see new pictures and try to grab them off the page, silly child.

Christmas Tree Cutting

2009-12-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

Every year Joel and I try to pick out and cut down our own Christmas tree. This year was a little ridiculous, I'll explain...

We decided that we needed a tree for the restaurant AND for the house. We always cut a little tree for our house because it's not a very big house and it would definitely dominate the living space. We wanted a BIG tree for the restaurant because it has like 15 foot ceilings and a big tree would look GREAT! SO... a hunting we went.

We found the two perfect trees and cut them down....

Joel did the big tree:

And I did the little tree:

We drug them home, put them in water, and.....

NOTHING! We are so stinkin' busy with the restaurant, church and ministry work, and everything else that we never got to decorate our trees!!! Grrrrr..... Next year we HAVE to do better....

2-Cute

2009-12-26T12:37:00.000-08:00

This is Mia with pig-tails for the first time....

And this is Mia helping mommy do dishes! She stood up by holding onto the dish rack, but it would roll from left to right and she would hang on SO tight and look at me like, "Help!!". But she didn't fall down and eventually found the movement to be fun. She's such a strong little monkey.

More Random

2009-12-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

So my posts haven't been very cohesive lately, so we are going to keep with that theme. Here is the one and only Thanksgiving picture I have. My Aunt Gwen played the guitar and Mia was absolutely mezmorized. She sat there, completely still, for like 30 minutes. And Mia doesn't even know HOW to sit still!!! hee hee.

This was Tuesday night at Mia's first basketball game. She was pretty into it. She has a cold and looks kind of homely in this picture... poor kid.

This was the day after Thanksgiving. My mom was tooling patterns on leather and Mia decided she needed to help.

Thank you Brooke!

2009-12-04T09:51:00.001-08:00

Thanks to my friend Brooke who is FAR more computer savy than I am, for fixing my blog and making it cute again!

AHHH!

2009-11-30T18:53:00.000-08:00

I've done something to my blog and it's so ugly right now! Eek! Hopefully I'll get it figured out tomorrow, I gotta hit the hay for now...

Random Cute-ness

2009-11-29T18:56:00.000-08:00

My friend Tina made this turkey costume for her kids, but we thought it would be funny to put Mia in it for Turkey Day!
Mia in a hay bale... ouch! pokey! We were taking pictures of her in an outfit that I wore when I was a baby. It's lookin' a little old, but I think it's cute that my mom kept some of my outfits :)

This is when Mia first learned to sit up, and rockin' the little pony tail :)

Ernest and Maria's Visit!

2009-11-11T20:18:00.000-08:00

Joel's dad, Ernest, and his wife, Maria finally got to come see us and meet Mia for the first time over Halloween weekend. We went out to one of our favorite places called Mear's Bluffs and took some neat photos.

We had a great time visiting with them and we only wish the weekend would have lasted longer!

Mia LOVES being outside, as you can tell from her big grin over daddy's shoulder :)

The wind was a little rough on keeping her bangs out of her face!
I love this picture of Joel and his dad and Mia. SO cute!!!

Halloween Party

2009-11-09T19:54:00.000-08:00

At our restaurant, we hosted a Halloween party for our little town. We sent out formal invitations and the whole bit. Yellville isn't used to such a thing, and we weren't sure how it would go over. Our goal is to spice up this town a little and have them cut loose and enjoy life a little more. I think we were successful this night! We probably had 40 people come through during the night, which is great for Yellville. Since the party, we've heard many people say that they wished they would have come, so hopefully next year will be even better. We had a live band who did a spectacular job, we did an all you can eat taco bar, and had all sorts of snacks and random desserts. Here are a few of our closest friends:

Sonja and Tonya displaying their pumpkin (we had a decorating contest where teams could only use the random stuff we put in a bag to decorate the pumpkin with. They didnt win, but their costumes are adorable. hee hee)Mr. President Obama... my cousin Giancarlo, and Hillary Clinton, his girlfriend Daisha.My dear friend Tina (who also works for us), and her husband Josh. She drug that ball around all night and almost tripped SEVERAL times on it...Nathan and Kaci Rogers... how cute!A really neat family, also my cousins, Michael, Hali, and Darcy.A member of Joel's collegiate class, an employee, and friend of ours, Kortnie!Another part of my family, Tim and Lacey. They are Clara's parents from the last post... Only in Yellville will a costume include a real gun!!!My little cousin Cora is all grown up now... Yikes!There's always one... Braden. Good part is, he is a fantastic MMA fighter so he really can represent the Ninja outfit!

Brian (who also works for us on occassion), Sadie, and Kortnie. He and Obama almost had a throw-down!!! Good thing the Ninja is his son!An awesome Christian couple, Leslie and Keith. My newest friend, Ashley, and her husband of only like a month, Jason!

And of course, Zorro and his wife Elena... US!!!

Hay Ride

2009-11-08T19:42:00.000-08:00

My dad and a relative of his planned a hay ride for a bunch of the kids in the area a few weeks ago (yes I'm a little behind on my postings...oops). It was a chilly October night, but we had a ton of kids show up, a big selection of warm chili to warm our bellies, and of course a lot of fun with family and friends.

To my friends in Alaska who, like me, don't have a clue what a hay ride is, or why on earth that would be a fun idea because it's always below zero in October in Alaska, I'll explain what went on... Dad lined a big flat bed trailer with bales of hay, and sprinkled it all over the floor of the trailer too. We sat along the bales in a big square while he pulled the huge trailer around with his truck. We sang some songs (I pity anyone who was listening...), enjoyed the fall air, and drove down to a cemetery. All of a sudden, there were screams and a white sheet shape running through the cemetery. That pretty much freaked the kids out. THEN... on the other side of the trailer, a guy came running out of the woods with a chainsaw. Yikes. That scared me too. Didn't know Dad was so into the whole halloween-scary bit. Anyways, it was entertaining to say the least. Mia slept through it....

A tad cross-eyed...

This is her before the hayride all bundled up.

This is her cousin Clara. They were born exactly a week apart. I don't think either one is too thrilled with the other!

Has it REALLY been this long!?!

2009-10-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

Oh my. Where do I begin!?! So we've been open for business at the new restaurant for almost 2 months and things are going GREAT! Here's a picture of us three at the restaurant in it's early stages.

We are no longer working close to 80 hours, we're down to 60 or 70 a week (but that's an AWESOME improvement). We have some great employees who are very reliable and smart, and we're able to leave them alone from time to time to run the place. Thank the LORD!!! We prayed very hard that the employees we got would be a blessing TO us, and receive blessings FROM us. SO far that seems to be the case! It's awesome to be in the position to hire people who you know are honest and hard working and just want to support their families. Especially when everyone is losing jobs left and right. Once again, praise God! There are more pictures of the restaurant somewhere, but they're escaping me right now... I'll find them and post them soon-ish.

Next up. Our dear friends who we hardly ever get to see, but who remain very dear to our hearts, David and Brooke Cibik asked Joel to officiate their wedding over labor day weekend. What an honor!!! Joel was so excited, humbled, and as I said, honored, to do their wedding. It was probably the most incredible wedding I've ever been to. From the welcome gift bags they gave us upon arrival at the hotel, to the welcome dinner complete with more gifts and a photo booth (such a fun idea!), to the AMAZING location of the wedding (Riverwood Mansion in Nashville, TN), to the handsome groom and probably the most beautiful bride I've ever seen, to the fun and heartfelt reception with the BEST, most thoughtful song choices I've ever heard at a wedding. It was incredible. The whole thing. Check out Brooke's blog to the right for more pics, I will just post these 3 to give you a taste:

Now on to our "exciting" lives... if you have kids, you'll understand this, if you don't, you will one day. Mia is now starting to eat food, and it has been a fun journey. I make her baby food from scratch (it's really very easy, cheap, and at least I know what I'm really feeding my child) and she's a little food mongrel. These first pictures are of her grandpa feeding her rice cereal for the first time. She had never used a spoon before but apparently had been watching and learning because she had NO doubt what that thing was for, and how to get it in her mouth. She would attack the spoon when dad got it within a few inches of her face. Crazy!

And yes, she is wearing camo. Her grandpa bought it for her, but she has a green bow in her hair, so that's ok.

This is her and grandma reading a magazine...

And now back to the food thing. So after about a month of eating rice cereal, we decided it was time for the veggies. They recommend veggies first so that babies don't get the sweet taste of fruit first and then refuse the less sweet veggies. SO... we began with the peas for a week. Day one, not a big fan as you can see from her face: But we stuck with the peas for a week and by day 7 she was actually enjoying them! Now we're on to squash, and she seems to like that a lot more.

A few weeks ago we fell into an awesome deal! A friend of a friend needed to get rid of a piano, for FREE!!! So I got an upright Baldwin piano for nothing! Woo hoo!!! I played piano for 14 years growing up, and quit the day I graduated high school. I was a little bitter at the whole deal for a few reasons, but 8 years later I'm over it and VERY glad to be back playing the piano. It's amazing how fingers remember what they're supposed to do. The best part is, I have a little sidekick who sits in my lap and plays with me. She gets pretty excited about it.

Hmmm.... what should I play now....dum dum dum DUM..... very dramatic....

And lastly, a cute little photo of her in her ducky pajamas with her rubber ducky!!! She may look sweet, but right now she's clawing my arm with her fingernails and wailing in my ear. I should post pictures like THAT. She definitely has a temper! Wonder where she got that.... Hmmm.... Well, I'll leave you with this picture and hopefully it won't be so long before I update again!

Portraits

2009-09-15T15:33:00.000-07:00

We just got back from Mia's 16 week apt (even though she's over 17 weeks...oops) and she's officially 12 lbs 2 oz, 25'' long. She's a long skinny little thang. And cute as ever. She was a little slow on the rolling over thing, but did that about 3 weeks ago. Of course she did it to avoid me taking a picture of her, but that's beside the point... She has now done it for entertainment purposes, and not simply spiteful purposes. She is also eating rice cereal now at night which is SWEET because she's sleeping through the nights!!! I REALLY need that extra sleep, as you'll learn more about in a minute.

Two weekends ago we went to Nashville to see Brooke and David get married. It was probably the most beautiful wedding I've ever been to - they went all out. It was incredible. They gave Joel the honor of officiating their wedding and, though I MIGHT be a tad partial, he did a fabulous job. They are on their honeymoon, but you can check out their blog on my list of blogs I follow and when she posts pictures be sure to check them out. I have a few to post, but not today, and I'm sure they're nothing like the ones she has! We got to see our dear friend Heather Kornack from Alaska while we were there too and she looked gorgeous as always, and gave a fantastic speech at their reception. It was so good to see you Heather! We miss you already!!!

We officially opened our restaurant, but no photos of that either. Sorry. I'll get there, promise. Just be grateful for this post! Anyhooo.... our little restaurant can seat 36 people, we have TV's up for news and sports highlights in the morning, and games in the evening. We had a fun crowd for Monday Night Football with some fun themed food specials as well. We've been incredibly busy at the restaurant, praise God, and it's awesome to work at a place where I get to be with my family all day long. I'm so lucky to work next to my best partner ever, Joel, every day, with my little girl on my hip. It's awesome. Tiring, but awesome. We open at 7:30am for coffee's, mochas, pastries, etc, so we get there around 7am, and don't close until 8:30pm, getting home around 9:15pm. So, like I said, tiring, but awesome.

Here are some photos that my aunt Susan and cousin Hannah helped me take of miss Mia about 2 weeks ago. Eek... maybe longer, I have no concept of time right now :) Enjoy!

Misc.

2009-08-27T08:27:00.001-07:00

Our church directory picture. Too bad Mia didn't exactly cooperate. But this was when she was only like 6 weeks old. Her hair was so cute and spikey! Not for long...
Ha ha ha ha ha!!! See how long her hair has gotten? This was just a week or two ago. With all that hair Mia gets SO hot and sweaty. I like to run my fingers through it to get it off her head a little and she seems to really enjoy that. So, being the easily entertained parents we are, we got a little psycho picture outa the deal.

Awwww.... I took a bunch of pictures like this the other day and they are SO sweet. We're trying to get her to take naps un-swaddled, with no pacifier, etc. Just lay her down while she's awake and she sleeps type thing. It works pretty well most of the time. She always falls asleep on her own when swaddled, but she's quickly growing out of swaddling blankets! Anyhooo... she fell asleep on her stomach here with her little footsie's crossed so I couldn't resist.

Mia's first piggyback ride from daddy:

Apparently his hair tasted good :) Look at how her little toes are spread out! She definitely got her monkey toes from her daddy.

Cave Wedding

2009-08-26T16:14:00.000-07:00

Joel catered my cousin's wedding rehearsal dinner a week or so ago at Beckham Creek Cave. This place is awesome. You drive in to the middle of nowhere, then go a little further, up a really steep impressive driveway, and end up at this cave. There are 5 bedrooms with a master suite upstairs, a really neat living room area, a billiards area, full kitchen, etc. It's pretty cool. The last photo is us actually at the wedding. And for those of you wondering, they didn't get married in the actual cave, they got married outside on the bluff overlooking the pond and field below.

No consistency

2009-08-07T10:31:00.001-07:00

Well, once again I have taken forever to update this. Sorry! I like what Megan wrote on her blog about how hard it is to do anything productive when you have those beautiful blue eyes of your baby staring at you! I second that...

So, here are the random things we have been up to lately. This is probably not the half of what we've been doing, honestly, but sometimes we remember diapers, change of clothes, bottle, bottle warmer, wallet, ID, keys, blankets, oh yeah, the dogs, and somehow forget the camera...oops!

This flower fascinated her and she made all sorts of faces at it. I think this one is super cute, but I might be a teensy bit biased... nah....

These are the young adults from Joel's collegiate class. They went out on our boat to this spot called "dino head" where you can jump off the rocks into the lake. It's SO beautiful here!
Last Wednesday night we went to hear our favorite preacher (besides Joel of course!) speak in Russellville. His name is Patrick Mead and he is amazing. If you ever have religious questions or want to learn more about anything, go to http://patrickmead.net/tentpegs. It'll rock your world. Especially the older posts. All in all, we had 17 people from our church make the 2 hour each way trip and we had a ton of fun. Here's Joel and his co-pilot Mark.
And me and the gang in the back. Poor Mia got left out of the photo, she's in the car seat by me.
A little while back we went to Silver Dollar City with some of our best friends, Lee and Andrea. It's a theme park based on the mining town of way-back-when. There are roller coasters, water rides, tons of good food, and about a million things to spend your money on :) This is Lee and Andrea acting like newlyweds in front of the little church.

Here's us...

This is Joel and Josh (the kid that's living with us for a while, he's 16 and a really good kid, we are working on keeping him until he's 18... keep that in your prayers please!) on a water ride about to get soaked...
Can you see the spray of water about to get them? Well if this doesn't soak them, once they get into the cave ahead they get truly wet.

Another weekend we took my mom and dad out on our boat to the lake. We don't get to spend a lot of quality time with my parents, so this was really fun and relaxing. We spent a long time playing in the water and just enjoying the beautiful weather. This is my mom...

I L-O-V-E this picture, because Mia is mid-sneeze, tee hee hee! Well, Joel looks great too, but he always looks good... I just thought it was hilarious that Mia decided to sneeze right when the shutter snapped her photo. Cute little thing...
This is just another silly face brought to you by little miss expressive herself, Mia Joelle. She's all about sticking her tongue out at you right now. I gotta get a cute photo of her big toothless grin and post it, those are super cute too :)

Buckle Up

2009-07-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a super random post from the past 3 weeks or so of our crazy lives :)

First, one of my best friends, Ashley Myers (used to be Ashley Hemphill for those of you who knew her in highschool), came to visit me with her two adorable kids, Aiden and Miley. We had a great time just hanging out together and getting to spend time with each other and our kids. It's so weird going from wild & crazy friends in highschool to being moms and sharing all the experiences with each other throughout our lives. I'm very grateful to have a friend like her! Anyways, this is a picture of our clan at the creek by my mom and dad's house. Aiden had a ton of fun catching crawdads, throwing them in the creek and watching bass swim up to eat them.

This is a photo of my friend Becca, her son Josh, and of course Mia and I. Becca is one of my closest friends here in Arkansas. We worked together at the law office and spent endless hours trying to make that job fun (much to our boss' dismay!). We both no longer work there but still try to get together as often as possible. I think this picture was actually taken on my Birthday! We went walking at the Yellville park together and had a great time.

Two days later, Joel's Mom and her husband, Joe, came to visit us. They spent about 10 days here. During that time, his brothers Ernest and Gabe, came to stay for about 4 days.

ErnestGabe
Joel & his mom being silly, Joe in the background.
Bull Shoals Lake where we were riding around in our boat.

For the 4th of July we took the boat to the lake and met up with a group of friends. One family has a bass boat and the other has a big pontoon boat. So between theirs and ours, we can do anything from tubing to fishing to getting a tan! There were 17 of us altogether and we tied up together to watch the fireworks.

On our boat...
Us with Rose, a daughter of our friends.

All those little lights are boats parked in front of the dam. The fireworks were shot off the dam and were absolutely beautiful. To top it off, God put on an awesome show for us too...there was lightning going all around us, all across the sky. It was very impressive and out-did the fireworks show by far! This is part of our crew on the pontoon boat.
So this was the 5th of July, but Mia is sporting her patriotic colors nonetheless.
Lastly, Friday night we took a group of teens/young adults to the drive-in movie. It was SO much fun to sit outside on the grass with the beautiful evening temperatures, and watch a movie. We saw Ice Age 3, very cute. This is Joel and I there, but it was too dark at this point to see the movie screen behind us. Oh well.

Mia's First Boat Trip

2009-06-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

Monday evening Joel took Mia and I out on the boat for a relaxing evening on the water. Mia LOVED the wind in her hair (it has been REALLY hot here), just being on the water makes me super happy, and Joel was excited to catch a few small, small mouth bass :)

Random Photos

2009-06-27T15:54:00.000-07:00

Here are just a couple cute shots of our cute little girl. Enjoy!

This one is a bit mischevious...a sign of days to come, oh my!
I absolutely love her in this sleeper. Oh, it's SO cute!!! She just looks like my little bug...

Father's Day

2009-06-23T15:40:00.001-07:00

For Joel's first Father's Day, Mia got him a T-Shirt that is like a superman logo, but has "DAD" in the middle instead of the big "S", a book about Father's and Daughter's with little sayings about how special their relationship is to her life, and an engraved picture frame that says, "Our First Father's Day" with their names and the date. Very cute. It was a great Father's Day for all of us. Joel preached at the Mull Church and did a fantastic job, then we had lunch with all my crazy family, then we spent the afternoon with my parents giving them lots of quality grandma and grandpa time with Mia.

They have 2 baby deer right now, one's mother got hit by a car, the other has a broken funky back leg and was probably left by it's mom. So they have to bottle feed and care for these two, I thought I'd include a photo, they're VERY cute!!!

Arkansas' Grand Canyon

2009-06-23T15:37:00.001-07:00

2 Sundays ago we went to Russellville to see our good friends Lee & Andrea. On the way back we stopped to check out the sights of the Buffalo River Canyon.

More of Mia

2009-06-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

As far as our past week or so, there's not much to report, we haven't really done anything of interest. We mostly just enjoy our few spare minutes of life here at home getting to know Mia. She is still absolutely fantastic. Never a dull moment with this child :) Well, here are some pictures, because I know that's why you're really looking at the site!!!

Bad Hair Day....

Good Hair Day....

Cute Socks!

Mia's First Bath. Joel's taking the pictures and she is looking at him like she doesn't want to be photographed naked... poor thing. She actually really enjoyed the bath and totally sprawled out in the warm water.

Mia Video

2009-06-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

Here is a video of Mia when we were still at the hospital. She is literally only hours old and already providing SO much entertainment :) Before you watch the video, go down to the music box on the right side of the screen and hit pause on our song that plays so that you can hear Joel talking in the video. Enjoy!!!

One Lonely Photo

2009-05-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

After much chastisement I finally got motivated to post some new photos and try to figure out how to post the cute video of Mia. I got her all situated in her rocker next to me, have my bowl of cereal here to eat while I work on it, and when I went to grab the camera, it was GONE. Joel took it today :( SO, in an attempt to fend off the angry blog readers, I'm posting a cute photo from my phone. Not the best quality, but it's pretty sweet.

Mia is still a fantastic baby, real easy going. She likes pretty intense movement which works well with a dad like she's got. There's no peaceful rocking or swinging in this family. She's gotta be flying a million miles an hour to be thrilled. She even gets scared now and then and her little arms will quiver, but if he slows down, she looks at him like, "what's your problem?".

She's all about holding her head up. She hasn't quite mastered it yet, but she sure is trying. It's pretty incredible being that she's only 2 weeks old today.

As soon as I get the camera back I promise, PINKY promise I'll post more. 'Till then, enjoy this one....

She Has Arrived!!!

2009-05-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it was a week ago tonight that I started having contractions! Crazy how time flies. So I had contractions from Wednesday night all through Thursday, getting more intense as the day wore on, and we finally decided it was time to go to the hospital Thursday night around 9pm. Friday afternoon at 4pm (19 hours later) little Mia Joelle was born. She was 6 lbs, 6 oz at birth and 18.5'' long. It was just Joel and I with our midwife and nurse in the hospital room and it was a very intimate and emotional moment for all of us.

The delivery went fine, I mean, no birth is fun or easy, but I had no complications and Mia is perfectly healthy and happy. That's all we can ask for! We spent the next 24 hours at the hospital and then got to come home. My friend Wendy was able to come down here to help out with things for the next week or so, and she got to our house about the same time as we did. Her help has been a HUGE blessing for me.

Mia is definitely the cutest thing to ever hit the Earth (no bias here!) and she already has all of us wrapped around her itsy bitsy fingers. She has SO much character and her facial expressions are constantly changing. Yesterday she figured out how to smile and has been flashing us a grin now and then ever since. She has the longest, skinniest arms and legs and is constantly flailing them around. We try to keep her swaddled for naps, but those darn arms always work themselves out!

There are many more photos to come, but we've been really busy with all this new-ness, so give us a few days to post some more. This is a picture of her at when we were still at the hospital.

Nursery Pics

2009-05-13T15:58:00.000-07:00

Ok. Here's me proving that a) I do own a camera, tee hee; and b) I have done something in the nursery. I didn't take a picture of the crib because I have not finished sewing the bumper pad and dust ruffle thingy for it. She's gonna sleep in our room for the first while anyways in a bassonett because the baby room is WAY on the other end of the house and me stumbling through the house at 1am, 3am, 5am, etc. without contacts in does not sound like fun... I'll probably have those done by next week though, to my credit :) And her room still looks a little bare as far as the walls and such go, but we have some picture frames we want to hang up, we just need her to GET HERE so we have actualy pictures of her to put in them! Oh yeah, and mom is making a bungalo looking book shelf to match the room that's not quite finished yet either, so that will add to the decor. So in a few weeks you'll probably get updated nursery pics.

Update

2009-05-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

OK, here's my pregnancy update, and sorry, no photos :( I'll post baby shower photos as soon as I get them from my friend, but as for today, you'll just have to read.

This might just be a bunch of numbers to some of you, I'll try to summarize at the end. I'll try to leave out any "tmi" details. I am 38.5 weeks along, meaning my due date is in 10-ish days. Last week I was dilated 2 cm and 50% effaced. Mia's head was a little off to the side, but pretty low. My midwife was super excited about my progress and said that I probably won't last until my due date.

This week I'm almost 3 cm dilated, and 75% effaced!!!! And to top it off, Mia's head is WAY lower than last week (I didn't know that was possible without her popping out) and she's presenting perfectly. And to top all that off, my fundal height is 4 cm lower than last week, meaning she has dropped quite a bit in preparation for delivery.

SO... I'll explain for those of you who are like me and feel like you just read a bunch of Greek. Dilating before going into labor is pretty exciting for a first time mom. Some moms get stuck at like 2 cm and don't ever progress any more before labor starts, but I'm progressing before labor even begins so that is SUPER awesome. Especially for a first timer. Being 75% effaced means that almost all my cervix "stuff" is gone and as soon as it's 100% gone, Mia comes out. Once again, many moms don't efface at all until labor begins, so I'm really lucky to have progressed so far. The fundal height is the distance in cm's from your pubic bone to the top of your uterus. It's usually the number of weeks along you are in cm's. For example, last week I was 37 weeks, and 37 cm's. But when the baby gets ready to come out, they often drop making your measurement less. So today I should have been 38, but I was only 34 meaning she's moving into D-Day position :) And "presenting" means how she's positioned for delivery, and there is an ideal way to "present" and some not-so-ideal ways to "present".

Let me make this clear: I'm not like "super prego" or anything and it's not like I have any control over all this. So I'm no better than any other pregnant chic, I just happen to be super LUCKY at this point. I figure I deserve it for how crappy I've felt for the last 9 months where other moms have enjoyed pregnancy. Right?!?

And to clarify another point, I could still go full term or even late even with all this progress. Every pregnancy is totally different and unpredictable. However, the odds are pretty good that we'll be having a baby super soon. My midwife says she'll be shocked if she doesn't see me before next Monday. AHHHHH! That's crazy.

And one more thing, there are some tips that my midwife has given me the last few weeks to speed up the labor process that I thoroughly believe are part of the reason I'm progressing so quickly, but they might be a little "tmi" for general reading, so email me if you want to know the tips. They've worked for more than just me, and my nurse who just had a baby used these tricks and went into labor naturally 2 weeks early. Awesome. So I'd be happy to share and see if it works for you too :)

So pray for Joel and I. I think Joel's almost more nervous than I am, it's very cute! We will try to post as soon as anything changes and will definitely be sending a mass text message. If you don't think we have your number, email it to us soon so we can add you to our mass text. And providing she doesn't resemble me as a baby TOO much, we'll post photos soon after birth too :) If she looks too much like I did, we'll have to wait until she "ripens" a little. I was hideous.

Thanks for checking in on us and keeping us in your thoughts and prayers. I'm so excited!!!!!!!

Rock On

2009-04-26T08:20:00.001-07:00

Two Saturdays ago I took the girls in our youth group to what's called Spring Sing at Harding University, about 2 1/2 hours from here. The different clubs at Harding put on this sing and dance competition each year and it is a lot of fun. They do all their own costumes, they make remixes of popular songs to go along with that year's theme, and they choreograph intricate routines. Here are the girls from our group.

The next weekend we took my mom and dad to a really nice restaurant called Gastons which overlooks the White River. My parents have been super helpful with many things along our way here in Yellville and we wanted to show a little of our gratitude. Dinner was fantastic and we really enjoyed their company!

This past weekend we took the kids from our youth group to a christian rock concert in an outdoor ampitheater. The main band was Skillet and the two openers were Decyfer Down and Disciple. Skillet put on an awesome show! Their lighting effects were incredible and I didn't realize how many of their songs we knew! If you get a chance to go see them, definitely go! It's very cool to hear these tattooed rockers talk about their faith and their humility that God loves them so much. I know that they are far more effective at reaching the teenagers that need God in their lives than some polo shirt wearing youth director because those kids can actually relate to them. I think that's awesome.

For the past two weeks we have had another juvenile host kid in our home, Josh. He has been an absolute pleasure and we really enjoyed having him. He was very helpful around the house and business, and fit in right away with our youth group kids. I know he is happy to go back home tomorrow to be with his mom, but we are grateful for the relationship we have made with him and we hope he will continue to come around and visit us from time to time!

Pregnancy is going fine, I'm mid-way through week 36, so not long to go! I have a nasty cold right now that is making me a tad miserable, but other than that life is good. Please continue to pray for little Mia that she continue growing healthy and that there are no complications as we near the end of her time in the belly. Hopefully by next week I'll have something to post about her nursery progress... as of right now... I'm still a slacker.

34 Weeks

2009-04-09T08:27:00.001-07:00

EEK. The last time I posted a belly photo was when I was 26 weeks. That was 8 weeks ago, and quite a few inches in circumference ago! I can not BELIEVE I only have 6 weeks left! And, three of my friends have given birth in the last 2 months, and all three were early. One was three weeks early, two were two weeks early. SO, if I follow their trend, we could have a baby in as little as 3 weeks! AHHHHH!!!!! I doubt that will happen, knowing my luck I'll be 42 weeks pregnant, doing cartwheels, jumping jacks, and anything else to get this child out of me.

Her nursery is not what I would call ready, by any means, and she doesn't have anything to wear home from the hospital yet. To my shock, it is really hard to find those sleeper thingies for babies with long sleeves and the feet in them! I thought that was like the thing babies wore more than anything, and I can't hardly find one! Grrrr. Anyways, keep her and I in your prayers.

I'm doing pretty good, though I can definitely tell that I weigh a lot more than I used to! And they don't tell you all the things that get awkward when you have this belly thing in front of you. So I'm learning the hard way. Also, I've got the third trimester morning sickness that I had heard rumor about, but never in my LIFE thought would happen to me. Luckily it's only for like an hour or two in the morning, as opposed to the eight hours a day I was sick that first trimester. So I can handle this, it's just not fun.

Her movement is getting pretty vicious as she's definitely getting larger. Last night I swear she was doing some speed bag training on my bladder while doing tae bo on my rib cage. She is so far up my one side that I can't even find my last two ribs, and haven't been able to find them for a few weeks now. That side of my belly is hard as a rock while the other side is squishy because she NEVER goes over there. It's so funny. You can actually look at my belly and see how lop-sided it is! Maybe not in this photo, but in person it's very obvious.

RazorBack Ribs

2009-04-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

I didn't mention the BBQ business in my last update. Business has been FLOURISHING! God couldn't be more evident in his blessings on us, that's for sure. Every week has brought us more income and so now the business is paying for itself and we are even making a little bit of profit! Woo Hoo! It is so hard to believe that a little mobile unit like this can support our family, but I suppose that is where faith comes in because we are doing great :) Here are a few photos of our sign, the trailer, and the inside of the trailer with my mom and Joel's bum.

End of March

2009-04-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are in April. How in the WORLD did that happen? I'll try to briefly update you on what we've been doing.

We had a busy end of March. On the 22nd we had our childbirthing class which lasted SIX hours, but was really informative. It wasn't the breathing classes you see being made fun of on TV, it was more an educational class with some pretty graphic videos about the whole process. I'm really glad Joel went because he had never seen birthing videos and now he's as horrified as I am of the whole process :) After that class we met up with my parents and headed to Branson, MO, to watch the Dixie Stampede dinner show for my dad's birthday. It was a TON of fun. They have spectacular horses and do some really awesome stunts and skits with the animals. They also fed us a huge dinner during the show.

A few short days later it was Joel's birthday. We had a "grape jelly making party" for him at my mom's house (long story, it was his request...), we ate some really nice steaks, and he got a really cool touch screen camera! I know, you would think we'd have more photos posted!!!

The next day I left for the Tulsa Workshop with a group from our church. It's a huge event with thousands of people from around the country. There are different classes every hour on the hour with different speakers on different topics that you can choose to attend, and there are booths with all sorts of info to browse. At night there is a keynote speaker and lots of really REALLY good singing! Joel joined us Friday night and attended the Saturday classes with us. We got to see some old friends, and more importantly, learned a LOT about being a more effective Christian. We came back pretty excited and got all sorts of neat things going at our church to reach out and help our community.

Saturday in Tulsa we found ourselves in the middle of a blizzard. It snowed like 8 inches from 8am to 4pm with that wet, heavy snow. The roads were a MESS and since we were with a group we decided to leave a little early and get past the weather before it froze for the night and got dark. Here is a photo of us in the snow. Brrrr!

Little Miss Mia

2009-03-17T13:22:00.001-07:00

Well, we got to see our little baby girl again today and it was such a treat. Joel, my mom, and I went to get the 4D ultrasounds and Mia sure put on a show. She yawned for us, she smiled for us, and she even got fussy when I pushed too hard on one side of my belly. She made a real cranky face, which I won't post - we're only going to show the cute happy baby pictures, not the preview of the attitude that is to come...tee hee hee.

She looks perfectly healthy and a little chubby too! I can not believe that in 9 weeks she will be here in my and Joel's arms making these faces out in the open air. It's amazing. And we have so much to DO still!!!! Eek!

Please continue to pray that she grows healthy and strong in my belly and that everything comes out all right - literally :) . I'll post a baby bump (more like baby BLIMP) photo soon so you can see how much larger I've gotten!

Here's a peaceful sleeping picture. Her arms are up by her face, you can see her elbows, and her hands are behind her head. She's just kickin' back relaxing in there!

The whole time the ultrasound was going on, she kept this right foot up by her face. She would stick her toes in her eyes, her nose, then kick it outward toward my belly. But she always brought it back to around her face. SO...here's her cute little grin, with some chubby toes included :)

Here's the big yawn. I guess we wore her out with all the poking and prodding. Once again, that little foot is front and center, those arms are still behind her head reclining, and looks like she's ready for a nap!

SO sorry!

2009-03-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

Well, it has been entirely too long since I've posted anything, and I'm very sorry. I'll explain what we've been up to and perhaps you'll forgive me =) There aren't any photos to post today, but I promise you'll have some next week...

About 6 weeks ago, Joel and I opened Razorback Ribs, our new BBQ joint. We purchased a mobile unit and professional cooker a few months ago and have been preparing to open in the mean time. For anyone who didn't know, Joel lost his job back in October, so we had to find another avenue for income! It took a little while, but we're finally open. Since I've known Joel, he has always dreamed of owning his own restaurant and that is finally becoming a reality. We are not a full-fledged restaurant at this point, but who knows what the future holds. For now, people order their food at our window and most take it with them either back to work for lunch, or home for dinner. We do have indoor seating for about 12, and we have picnic tables behind our building by the creek for those who want to get away and eat outside in the fresh air. So far, God has blessed us beyond belief with great business. Everyone RAVES about Joel's BBQ and we have done really well with sales. We have landed a few catering jobs which really helps as well.

My part of the gig is that I make all the potato salad from scratch at home. I go through 50-75 lbs of potatoes a week, so you can imagine how busy that keeps me. Along with that, I'm working between 4 and 6 hours a day at the business until we can afford to hire someone (or Mia comes along, which ever happens first!). It has been really hectic, but if we can get a good solid start at this business, I know it will be far easier when we hire someone. We'll have all the kinks worked out by then and they won't have to be guinea pigs :).

In the middle of all this maddness, I got SUPER sick and couldn't be of any help to Joel for about 3 days, and I was pretty lame help for about a week. That wasn't fun. Luckily they gave me antibiotics and I'm finally on the road to recovery.

ALSO, I wanted to brag on my precious husband a little bit. He has preached for our church twice now (first time was a few months ago) and does an absolutely incredible job. I was pretty nervous the first time he preached, because if you know Joel, you NEVER know what's going to come out of his mouth! But he did amazing both times and God is really working through him. He has a great way of connecting with people and really touching hearts. I'm very proud of him, as is our whole church, and community at that!

SO, between new business, potato salad madness, illness, church functions, getting a baby room ready, being 7.5 months pregnant, trying to keep my household kept up, and finding time to put my swollen feet up, you can imagine how busy it's been around here. I promise I'll be better at posting with time. Next week are our 4D ultrasound pics of Mia, so I'll be sure to post those!

Baby Bump

2009-02-16T13:04:00.000-08:00

Ok. After a lot of poking and prodding (especially on MEGAN'S PART!!! tee hee hee), here is a picture of my belly. Granted, Megan is FAR more brave for baring all in her belly bump picture, but beggars can't be choosers. I'm shy! So this will have to suffice. Anyways, I am 26 weeks pregnant. Full term is considered 36 weeks, but normal gestation is 40 weeks. Confusing. But long story short, I could easily give birth in 10 WEEKS and Mia would be totally full term and healthy. That would be AWESOME. Yet, a little nerve wracking at the same time. I can't fathom what life has in store for Joel and I in a few short months!!! She is a kicking and squirming little thing, and lately she has this new thing of kicking her feet and punching her arms at the same time, so both sides of my belly are getting pounded at the same time. It's pretty hilarious. She has quite the attitude already. Joel talks to the belly all the time and the other day he called her fussy and got punched in the ear. Hee hee hee. I like this kid already :) We get our 4D ultrasounds in like 5 weeks so we'll have a better idea of what she is going to look like. Be sure to check back for those photos!

Caring for the Utility Workers

2009-02-10T13:24:00.001-08:00

Since these utility workers have been in our area for over 2 weeks at this point, they have been working ridiculously long hours trying to get the power back on so that they can get back home. They are exhausted, to say the least. So we wanted to do something nice to tell them thank you and that we're grateful for all their hard work. Every Thursday night our local youth come over and have dinner at our house so we put them to work. I bought all kinds of snack foods, from chips, jerky, and tangerines to string cheese, and some other parents pitched in with peanuts, gum, and cookies. We put together these care package bags with a little thank you note. We drove around that night to the parking lots where most of their utility trucks are parked and put a care package on each windshield. We also delivered bags to the Army National Guard guys (about 50 in our town) who are here doing clean up. All in all, we delivered 115 bags to the utility works and ANG guys. It was a lot of fun and I hope they know how grateful we truly are for their service.

This is Gentry making cookies for the care packages.

Joel, Mikaela (Peanut as we call her), and Whit cutting up Razorback Rib coupons for the bags.

Karlie, Kaitlin, and Rachel cutting out the Thank You notes.

Me putting on the final touches.

And my dear Joel counting our progress.

Aftermath

2009-02-10T13:11:00.000-08:00

We have recovered (almost) fully from our ice storm here in Northern Arkansas. Almost every one has gotten power back at this point, but for many the wait was close to 2 weeks!!! It has been a mess, but also a blessing for many. I'll explain. Of course everyone, everywhere, is complaining about the economy, but due to the storm we had over 500 utility workers from out of state working in our town alone! And our town is TINY. These utility workers ate at local restaurants, stayed at the local motels, had flat tire after flat tire fixed at the local tire shop, supported our hardware store, etc. On top of that, many locals who were without power also had to eat out more often, and many of them opted to stay at a hotel or motel rather than at home because they didn't have power for nearly 2 weeks. To top it off, all the tree limbs that were broken everywhere gave many unemployed men work to do cleaning yards, business lots, etc. They are still working their tails off trying to get everything cleaned up. Our local utility workers have been working 7 days a week, and long hours every day, so they're making a lot of money in overtime too. And that's just our TOWN. There are many towns surrounding us that have had the same experience. So really, even though it was a mess and people didn't have power for a long time, God has really used this to bring financial relief to a lot of people who were hurting this time of year. Our friend owns the main motel in our town and he wasn't going to be able to cover his bills this month, until the storm hit. Now he's had a record January and it's looking like a record February too! Isn't that awesome?

Joel and I took a 4-wheeler ride to look at the broken trees and such in our area. Here's just a glimpse of one small section of forest that has fallen down. And I threw in a photo of our dog, Sadee, launching herself through waves we were making in my parent's creek. Silly girl.

Ice Storm, Day 2

2009-01-30T10:40:00.000-08:00

So we had snow fall Tuesday night which just made the limbs heavier and caused more destruction. We had no power all Tuesday night, but it came back on Wednesday morning. Somehow we are some of the lucky ones who have had any power at all, though ours goes out for a few hours each day. Our neighbors, friends, and family are almost all without power and the power companies estimate 3-4 weeks before they can get the power back on to most people. We had people coming over to use our showers, charge their electronics, eat some warm food, etc. Generators are completely sold out for hundreds of miles and so today my dad drove 2 hours south to buy 6 that my uncle found him, which he already has buyers for when he gets home. As a result of having no power, most people have no water either. All the stores are sold out of gallons and bottles of water at this point too. Yesterday at 1pm, our city lost all water as well. So those of us on city water were also without. The main water pumps still do not have electricity so we have been running off reservoirs and those have run dry at this point. There have already been 9 deaths related to this ice storm, and 17 counties are declared in a state of emergency. There are a lot of elderly people who can not get their oxygen machines or life support machines to work without electricity, and also those who can not get out to get their medications. Almost all businesses are closed and most people are out with chainsaws trying to clear roads and driveways to help people get access to those who need help. The prison even has inmates out using chainsaws to clear roadways. I can't help but think to myself, "only in Arkansas do they give inmates chainsaws..." but so far they haven't had any troubles! We'll keep our fingers crossed on that one.

See the ice build-up on the power lines?

Here's a close-up of another power line.

Here's part of the destruction we woke up to outside our front door:

And this is where that destruction decided to land :( We don't think anything is broken, but the limbs are so heavy we can't pick them all up yet to see. When it melts we'll be able to pick them up no problem and assess the damage then. Thank goodness for insurance!

Part of the dog's kennel, which was pretty much completely beaten down by branches. But the ice is pretty...

This is my darling little plum tree and my darling little dog. The poor plum tree is covered in icicles, and is getting its revenge by stabbing my goofy little dog in the face and back as she tries to walk underneath. She's just lucky a branch didn't fall on her head :)

Remember the cherry picture from yesterday? Well with the accumulation of snow and more rain, the icicles went from about an inch long to about 3 inches long.

Arkansas Ice Storm, Day 1

2009-01-30T10:21:00.001-08:00

Monday night a storm blew in covering northern Arkansas and southern Missouri with ice by Tuesday morning. There was at least 1 solid inch of ice on everything in sight Tuesday. From power lines and vehicles to trees and grass, nothing escaped the ice. Hundreds of thousands are without power and are stuck in their homes due to fallen trees across their driveways and roads. All Tuesday the drizzling freezing rain continued, making the prognosis for Wednesday even worse. Power lines were snapped absolutely everywhere, thousands of phone lines were down too. Joel and I drove out towards my parent's house and literally had to drive over 7 phone and power lines that were laying across the road. We decided to get a bunch of thermoses full of hot chocolate and coffee and take them around to the emergency power, phone, and road crew workers who were doing all they could in the freezing rain to help out. They were extremely grateful and gracious for the gesture, and we felt good that we maybe warmed up their day just a little. Poor guys. That work has to be miserable. All day you could hear tree limbs and branches breaking off and falling to the ground. With all the ice on each branch, it literally sounds like shot gun blasts every time a branch falls. A friend compared the sounds outside at night to being in Iraq where you could hear it all around you, non-stop. Amazingly, we didn't see many tree parts that fell on people's houses and damaged them. God did a great job of pushing the trees right next to the houses and keeping them from falling directly on top.

John and Marie's Wedding Affirmation

2009-01-30T10:14:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday Joel and I had the honor of attending our dear friends' wedding affirmation ceremony. It was a beautiful event at the country club with delicious catered food and lots of fun dancing. The ceremony was absolutely wonderful and you can tell the two of them are headed for many more years of love and marriage.

John and Marie laughing at some silly dance moves by their son.

Joel and I, pregant and purple :)

Our 3 Year Anniversary

2009-01-23T10:32:00.001-08:00

Wednesday, Joel and I celebrated 3 years of marriage. We have been incredibly blessed with each other and we give God all the credit for somehow matching us up (that sure took divine intervention!) and giving us the joy of having the best marriage I could EVER imagine. I am married to my best friend and I wouldn't change one single little tiny thing about him. After all, it is our differences that keep us on our toes :) We are usually in Mexico for our anniversary, but this year our trip fell a little early and we were there last week. So we kept it real simple: Joel bought a HUGE prime rib (far too much for the two of us), I cooked it up with some mashed potatoes and corn, Joel's favorite, along with some ginger ale punch (no wine this year!). The prime rib turned out amazing and cooked to perfection - if I must say so myself! Joel said that if it wasn't better than the Turtle Club, it was really close, which, for anyone who knows Joel, that is a HUGE compliment! Below are a few photos of our evening. Oh, and about Mexico, we were in Mazatlan for 7 days with our friends from Alaska, and as soon as I get all the photos from everyone, I'll tell you ALL about our trip. Promise.

Cutting up the Prime Rib. Can you see the baby bump?

Joel wanted to show pictures of the meal....

Happy Anniversary!

Hi Little Mia Joelle!!!

2009-01-06T16:28:00.001-08:00

Today we found out that we're having a little girl, and providing no crazy last minute changes, her name will be Mia Joelle (mee-ah, not my-a) Gallegos. She weighs about 13 oz. right now which is right about average. She has 10 fingers and 10 toes, cute little ears, two healthy kidneys, a really healthy heart, and of course an above average brain :) We are very excited, but have about 17-19 more weeks until we actually get to meet the little girl. She was so funny during the ultrasound, she kept her little fists right around her face the whole time like she didn't want her picture taken. The ultrasound tech pushed on my belly enough to get her to move her hands a little and we got a few photos of her face. At one point she even threw us the peace sign for a little bit! Below are some of the regular ultrasounds where you can see her leg and foot in one, and her head and hand in the other. Below those is a 4D ultrasound where you can actually see some of her features. She's still a little funny looking, but give her a few more weeks in the oven and she'll be gorgeous, I'm certain! Needless to say, we are very excited to finally refer to "it" as "she" and by her name.

New Year's Bowling

2009-01-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

For New Years we were going to be in Chicago but with all the crazy weather, combined with our friend that we were going to go see getting very sick, we were at home not really sure what to do. We spent the day 4-Wheeling at my mom and dad's property then took Cody, his two little sitsters, and his cousin, Brandon, bowling as their mom had to be out of town. It was a lot of fun and I was the champion bowler of the night! Woo Hoo! I had a photo of my score, but Joel wouldn't let me post it. I guess he was afraid of getting teased for getting beat by a pregnant girl. Tee Hee Hee!

Our dogs Chevy and Sadee anxiously waiting for us to go for a "ride".

A sunny section of the creek and bluffs on my parent's property. It was really chilly that day!

My mom found a bird's nest in a cave along the way. We former Alaskans know how to dress for the cold!

Joel inside the cave.

Brandon picking up Shilah after she got a strike!

Brandon and Cody, mischevious as always.

Kira and Shilah, Cody's youngest siblings.

I'm very happy because I'm winning. Joel...not so happy :)

Christmas!

2009-01-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

Well, I have to admit that Joel and I were slackers when it came to taking pictures on Christmas. So you only get one lousy photo. Sorry! Between our central heat going out Christmas Eve and a massive gas leak in the other part of our house the same day, it's been a little hectic... We did have a great Christmas though, electric heaters and all :) We started off by making our favorite breakfast, eggs benedict, then we opened our gifts, then got to work. Every year we do a Christmas Craft of some sort, and this year we made holiday spoons. They're basically chocolate dipped spoons rolled in either sprinkles or crushed peppermints that you can stir your coffee with for a little extra holiday flavor. So we made all of those, wrapped them up, and used them for decorations to top off the gifts that we got our family and friends. Then I cooked our usual Christmas ham, homemade peppermint patties, and mini sweet potato pies which we took over to mom and dad's for our Christmas meal. We had a great time eating and playing games at their house, then we all went around to visit all of our family for the rest of the evening. The next morning Joel went hunting with my dad and they each got a deer, which I also have no photos of... Overall, we had a really great Christmas and weekend that followed, though we are both happy to have all the sweets out of the way!!!

Christmas Tree Cutting

2008-12-17T14:18:00.000-08:00

So every year Joel and I like to venture out into the woods and find the perfect little tree for Christmas. Sure we could go out and buy a tree that's fuller and a little more symmetrical, but then we wouldn't get to enjoy that time together that always ends up being so much fun. We took a 4-wheeler from my mom and dad's house and rode around their acreage until we found the perfect little guy. We took the dogs with and they had a blast running their hearts out. So not only did we have a cute tree, we had two worn out dogs, and an afternoon of enjoying the outdoors with each other. We got home and decorated the little tree with little ornaments, as the branches wouldn't hold anything larger :) The lights were almost too heavy, but after some reinforcements were in place, it's standing up just fine! Maybe next year we'll have room for a slightly more substantial tree, but for now, this one makes us smile :)

Baby Update

2008-12-11T13:27:00.000-08:00

We had a general check up with the midwife yesterday. We wanted to deliver with a midwife, but we also wanted a hospital delivery, so from the start we've been going to this lady who is just fantastic. The nice thing about the midwife is that you have more say in what happens. Doctors tend to push for certain things more quickly and don't always allow the mother much say in what happens. Also, it's nice to have a female taking care of you, one who has actually been through a delivery, unlike a male doctor :) This midwife works in an absolutely gorgeous clinic under a doctor. So if anything were to become high risk with our pregnancy or delivery, the doctor is on hand and would take over. So long as things remain routine, we have the midwife. To top it off, they deliver in the hospital with the nicest birthing center around! Sweet! Anyways, the baby is doing great, his/her little heart is beating strong at 143 which is perfectly average for 16 weeks. On January 6th we'll find out if it is a boy or a girl, so stay tuned!!!

Jasper Retreat

2008-12-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

Last weekend we took 9 of our youth group to a lodge in Jasper, AR for a weekend youth retreat. Our previous youth minister, Lee, came as our guest speaker and between his wife, our current youth minister, a parent, and Joel and I, there were 15 of us total. There was a pool table and hot tub and we played a lot of games from horseshoes to dominos. The theme of the weekend was finding our purpose in life-why God put us here. 6 of the 9 youth were kids that Cody (the kid who is living with us) knows from the alternative school and most of them are in host homes too. The lessons that Lee presented were perfect for this group and the kids all asked great questions. I really hope they took the messages to heart and find ways to apply them to their lives. I didn't take very many photos this year, and in fact this first one is a photo from last year's group that I'm posting to show the outside of the lodge.

Joel concentrating on a game of horseshoes.

It was so chilly outside, these goofs put the lid on the hot tub with a breathing corner!

Kyle, Cody's brother, in front, and 3 of the other boys figuring out how to 'break'.

Other Highlights

2008-12-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

In addition to our on-shore excursions, we had a lot of fun on the boat. Here are photos of us at our formal nights on the ship and at the ballroom dance competition we took Runner-Up in with our Salsa dancing :) We won a trophy, rose, and bottle of champagne that I couldn't drink because I'm pregnant! Thanks for checking out our stories and photos from the cruise. It was a ton of fun and we will definitely be doing more cruises in the future.

Princess Cay

2008-12-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

Our last stop was Princess Cay, on Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas. Princess purchased a huge section of this island and has created a private, beach-front resort for its passengers. They serve a buffet of food, have beach volleyball, snorkeling, kayaking, etc. It's a relaxing day to end the trip. Here are a few photos.

Cozumel, Mexico

2008-12-01T10:04:00.001-08:00

Our next stop was Cozumel, Mexico. It's a little island off the east coast of Mexico. Once again, we rented a Jeep and took off for some exploring. We first went to one of the ruin sites that ended up being really lame. It only had one building and wasn't very tall or impressive looking. So we continued on the 1 road that goes around the island and drove past miles and miles of untouched beaches with incredible waves. Once in a while there would be a market along the beach, but really nothing else on that side of the island. We found a blow hole where water would spout through the rocks when big waves would hit. We randomly saw two racoons run across the road, and later saw a wild crocodile soaking up the sun on a rock. It was only about 3 feet long, but exciting nonetheless. We then went to another ruin site that was far better than the first. There were probably 20 different buildings or sites where buildings had once been. They weren't the tall pyramid buildings I was expecting, they were 10 to 15 feet tall and arranged in a way that suggests a whole village lived there. It was really neat. After that we explored the city a little bit and dropped off Isabell and Danny. Our Jeep rental place had warned us not to go down this one road on the island because, according to him, Donald Trump had just bought the property and it was therefore private property. Joel asked another guy and he said that that wasn't true, but that the road was really rough and shouldn't be driven down. So he asked ANOTHER guy about the road who told us that as long as the Jeep was 4x4 we would be fine. Apparently there was another ruin site at the end of the road. So Joel and I let our curiosity get the best of us and took off down the road, past the "restricted access" signs, and they sure were right about it being rough! It went through some gorgeous terrain, but after nearly 2 hours and miles of maneuvering over rocks and through deep sand, we still hadn't seen any ruins and the time for our ship to depart was getting closer and closer. So eventually we turned around and headed back. When we were within sight of the main road, two Mexican policemen appeared walking down the road. They were strapped with M-16's across their chests and didn't look very pleased to see us. We pulled up and said Hi, and they just looked around the Jeep, said a few words, and walked on. Phew!!!! So, here are a few photos of our sights around the island of Cozumel.