Christian Momma

When I was an Avon representative, I would have my boys drive my route with me.  As a treat for the boys, I would take them to get them something to drink.  They loved it, especially on a hot day of running up to the doors of all the houses to hang the books on the knobs.

On this particular day, we decided to go to Caribou to get drinks (I’m sure mommy didn’t have any influence on that decision because I’m not addicted to Caribou Coffee or anything).

We get to the drive-thru and there are a couple people in line ahead of us.  And like any other trip to Caribou, I ask each of the 4 boys what they would like to drink.  We order our drinks (all 5 of them) and I dig out my money.  Once the gentleman in front of me pulls away, I proceed to the window.

The worker pops her head out of the window and asks if I would like to buy a bag of coffee.  I look at her a bit puzzled…they never ask that when you get to the window.  She proceeds to explain…

“That gentleman that was ahead of you just paid for all your drinks, so you don’t have a total.  So would you like to buy a bag of our coffee?”

SHOCKED!  I decided that since I have an obsession with like Caribou’s Coffee, that I would go ahead and purchase a bag of coffee…because, well, that coffee was a lot less than it would have been to buy 5 drinks.

What a great thing Random Acts of Kindness are!  Have you had someone do something nice for you?  Have you done a random act of kindness to someone else?

Y.M.C.A.

My wonderful husband ok’d me to get a family membership to the YMCA!  I’m so happy!  The boys are excited too!

Anyway, I just had to share!

I was reading Soliloquy’s end of year review that she wrote and thought…I wrote something like this last year, I should do it again!  Thanks Soliloquy!

So…Let’s begin, shall we?

January

I felt God’s direction about Vacation Bible School.  It was the beginning of January that I realized that God had been calling me to be the director of VBS for 2009.  I had helped run it in 2008, but the call to lead was stronger than the year before.  So by the end of January, it was decided that I would be the director of VBS.

February

Daniel and Andrew turned 4 and I celebrated my 35th birthday.  There was that LONG gap of my internet time.  From the moment that we decided to drop the DSL line and get the Cable line…December through February!  WOW, I remember being so upset that it was taking so long and we would get the run around!

March

The stress of VBS was in full force.  My dad struggled with clots one big one that he had been hospitalized for that ran from his groin to his ankle.  I was so happy that he was able to get that taken care of and sent home.  Kevin and I started our online search for a house.  Our intentions were to get a house big enough that my parents could come and stay when a kidney would become available for my dad, since dad’s Kidney doctor was down here by us.

April

I was so excited to be joining in on the A Woman Inspired online conferences!  My dad’s kidneys were getting worse and the doctors were moving forward with getting dad ready for dialysis and his kidney transplant.

May

God began speaking to me about a ministry that my heart had desired to work with.  At the time (May) I didn’t mention the ministry and I really hadn’t mentioned it much since…things just recently came to pass.  I was speaking of the Ladies Ministry at our church.  God had began to open the doors for me to work with that ministry.   I also began writing about the Road to a Kidney and the feelings regarding my dad and a kidney transplant.

June

We were packing up our place and getting ready to move into our new home.  What an exciting time!

July

Michael turned 12.  We had a 4th of July party in our new home!  My dad had to have open heart surgery in July.  It was a triple bypass.  How hard that was to know that my dad going into this surgery would cause his kidneys, that weren’t functioning properly, to completely stop working.  It was extremely hard for me to be there and see all those tubes he had when he came out of surgery.  At that moment, I had realized just how hard it was to watch my dad struggle and be in so much pain.

August

VBS month!  Wow, it was such a whirl-wind and a blur!  I was so happy when the week was over!  The day after VBS, however, I jumped right into working on the Women’s Ministry Retreat.

September

Noah turned 9!  We had the Women’s Retreat and I had so much fun!  I enjoyed every minute of getting all the things together as well as participating.  I started my research on 2010 VBS’s…I was overwhelmed again.  While praying for which program to run the next year, I felt God telling me my time as the director was over.  I was actually very relieved at that, but decided to pray more to be sure it just wasn’t my will.

October

An amazing month.  How I realized that distance doesn’t matter when God is involved and how God was using technology to minister to someone first hand!  My dad’s feet had began to turn purple from lack of circulation.  I had mentioned it to a pastor/friend who had mentioned it to a pastor/friend of his who just happened to be having revival services at his church…streaming online!  So I was able to get online with Larry Silverman’s church (who, by the way are STILL in revival and stream their services online) and hear them pray for my dad while having my cell phone up to the speakers of my computer so my parents (who were on the phone) could hear the prayers for my dad.

November

Unfortunately, my father passed away at the beginning of November.  It was very hard to watch him die.  My heart was split from being happy that he was no longer in pain to being sad that he was no longer with us.  I still struggle with this!   Kevin celebrated his birthday, it wasn’t much of a celebration time (sorry honey!) since it fell between my dad’s viewing and his funeral.

December

Our first Christmas without my dad had it’s moments, but we all had a pretty good time.  We celebrated this Christmas by having my mom spend Christmas Eve/Christmas Day with us.

As an overview, the beginning of 2009 was really great, the ending, too many deaths in the family!

I am looking forward to a new year!  Happy 2010!!

It’s Black Friday!!   Kevin and I are out shopping…getting all those sales, yes we are one of those crazy people that go out at 3 am!!   The boys are with my mom…they went home with her and my sister after Thanksgiving yesterday, we will see them on Sunday!  Yep, that means a Kidless weekend for us!!

Have a wonderful day!!

With all the thoughts running through my head right now, I know this post is going to be all over the place.  Consider yourself forewarned!!

I, along with many others I know, have bronchitis!  Not fun!!  Because of this, I missed church…again!  I didn’t want to, I was scheduled for singing…but I couldn’t hit any note, and my “sexy voice” just wasn’t going to cut it!  Not to mention I didn’t want to get everyone else sick.

So, today was another lazy Sunday for me.  I got to sleep in.  We did run out and get groceries this afternoon after Kevin got back from church.  I am so glad we didn’t send our boys to church…Daniel got sick on our way home from the grocery store.

I had to miss my niece/God Daughter’s 2nd birthday too.  That was hard for me…I hate having to back out of plans, but I didn’t want to get their family sick too.

Noah has surgery on Thursday.  He’s getting his adnoids taken out and tubes put into his ears.  I pray that this will help with his hearing and that he would stop getting ear infections.  He’s struggling with reading and we have been working alongside his teachers getting him the help he needs to catch up.  I can’t help but wonder if his ear infections and him not being able to hear properly doesn’t have something to do with his reading.  I guess time will tell.   I just got to keep him healthy between now and Thursday.  I don’t want to have to reschedule his surgery.

Prayers would be greatly appreciated!!

We were so exhausted from the past few weeks of having something to do all weekend, we decided that when we got up this morning to make it a “lazy Sunday”.

We took our time getting up and around, went out and got coffee, then headed to the grocery store. Came home and just lounged around for most of the day.

*gasp* We skipped church *gasp*

My sister drove down to drop her son off at college with our mom. We decided to meet at IKEA and do some shopping, then went out to eat. Kevin decided to stay home and watch football. Didn’t buy a thing, but had a lot of fun!

Here I sit, it’s almost 12 am!  What am I still doing up?  That’s a really good question…but I’m not real sure what the answer is.  I am tired, I should be in bed, but the quietness of the night is so peaceful.  I get so much done in that time.

I have been working on getting my binder together, I have one specifically for out home and another (planner) that I take with me wherever I go.  The planner is all up to date, the other binder, however, has been MIA since we moved…until tonight!  Good thing we found it, school starts on Wednesday and I need to have a central place to put all of the boys’ school stuff they get…the handbook, how to contact each teacher, etc.  It’s nice to have it all in one place so I can find it.

As I was looking through this binder tonight, I realized I had created this binder last year in hopes of taking full advantage of all the sections in the binder…but I didn’t because some of them are specifically for owning a home…which now we do, so I can use it!  YEAH ME!

Anyway…that’s what’s keeping me up late tonight…working on that.  There’s no way I could work on it when all 4 boys are running around!

Literally!

Dear Meijer,

While at Meijer today, I was filling up the cups of pop for my family.  2 Employees were messing with the slushie machine…they filled a cup 1/2 full with RED slushie…when finished one of them (XXX.) threw the slushie into the trash causing the red slushie to fly into the air and land on my head and on my white shirt.  They left laughing about it…when I went to customer service to get my apology (which I shouldn’t have had to ask for) I was given an attitude from this XXX saying “I’m sorry, I had no idea it happened”, yet he was laughing and telling all his friends about it.

I talked to one of the managers at this store (XXXX, OH on XXXX) and another manager came up and listened in.  They said they would take care of it.

My only issue is HE NEVER SAID SORRY without me prompting him!  If he would have said sorry, it wouldn’t have been an issue and I would have laughed it off.

This is a Customer Service Employee who did this.  If he can’t even apologize for something he KNOWINGLY did wrong, how can this employee begin to help YOUR customers with their issues?  Is it not your store’s policy to keep the customers Happy?  I left the pop area VERY UNHAPPY.

I am VERY Disappointed in the way this situation was handled.  My own children (ages 11, 8, 4 & 4) all kept saying that guy never said sorry and he should have.  How can a child know better than one of your Customer Service employees??  That’s not right!

Saying sorry when you do something wrong could go a long way.  In this instance, you wouldn’t have had to read this long comment…in his instance, he wouldn’t have gotten into trouble with his manager.  In my instance, I wouldn’t have been mad, would have even probably laughed with him about it!!

Yeah, I’m over it…and YES, it is funny…now we’ll have to see if I can get the red slushie out of my white shirt!!

It’s been such a long time since I’ve posted!   I bet you are wondering where I’ve been…well, maybe not, but just humor me!

In December, we decided to change from DSL to Cable internet.  Little did we know how long that would take to happen!  We finally got the cable installed and up and running on Feb. 14th!

Can you imagine being without the internet for that long?  Yeah, I can’t…I hit the coffee shop many times in the apst 2 months just so I could keep up!

However, that lack of internet has allowed me to turn off the computer without thinking twice about it…a newfound freedom, so to speak.

I did miss you all and keeping up…

During my time without the internet, I have played more games of solitare than I care to admit and started a new craft…book thongs! 

2008 has come and gone already.  It sure seemed to go by quickly…sometimes a little too quickly!

January

The year started out with me beginning to work on Power Lab VBS (Ah Ha!).  I was also homeschooling Michael.  We were pretty on top of our schooling and things were going pretty smoothly at the time.  I was also beginning to work in the K-1 Sunday School class room at church.  That, wasn’t going as smoothly as I had wished.

February

VBS started to consume my thoughts.  I was having dreams about not being ready, and just an overwhelming sense that I’ve bitten off more than I could chew.  AKA…I wasn’t relying on God to help me, I was relying on my own strength to do it.

February also brought about Daniel & Andrew’s 3rd birthday as well as my 34th birthday.

Michael entered his first Science Fair and ended up with a Superior rating!  I was proud, but knew full well that if he had applied himself earlier in the month, but he decided to wait until the last minute to do it.  Then we hit a rough patch in our homeschooling…a bad one.  Causing me to question my ability to teach him not to mention my basic parenting skills.  But, through the Grace of God we got through it with help from some friends in our church.

March

March brought in a lot of saddness.  My grandmother’s health begain to fail drastically.  And a friend of mine lost her child in a horrible accident. My heart ached in ways I never knew it would.  Things in me shined trhough as well.  I didn’t realize how “in tune” I was to other’s saddness.  Michael had a meeting with the staff from his online school and things turned out so much better than I had originally anticipated.

April

In April, I took a blogging break…school slipped behind and I had to push Michael to get as much done as possible a day!  Spring seemed to bring out the worst in his schooling abilities and slowly we fell behind.

May

I won this Word Press blog…I’m ever so greatful to Lisa for hosting the giveaway that allowed me to win! The final push to get VBS was upon us.  VBS was scheduled for the 2nd week of June.  My grandmother passed away that month as well.

June

VBS week came and went without too much problems.  Yes, there were a few bumps in the road, but overall things turned out GREAT!  I was elated that things went as well as they did and relieved that it was all over with as well.

July

We celebrated Michael’s 11th birthday in July along with Kevin and I’s 14th wedding anniversary.  In between those 2 events, we threw my mom and dad a 60th Birthday/40th Wedding Anniversary party.  We were very impressed that we were able to pull it off!  Mom and dad had only suspected that we were planning on all going out to eat together, not that we would have all of their friends and family at a hall waiting for their arrival!  We even got one of their friends from High School to travel from Chicago to Ohio to celebrate with them as well!

We also got to see Extreme Makeover Home Edition in our town.  My mother drove down the night before to stay overnight and we headed out to the new house to watch the bus move.  That is a day that was HOT, but I wouldn’t have missed for the world.  To see something like that is a once in a lifetime thing.  Michael still claims to have High-Fived Ty!

August

We went for our 1 and only camping trip of the year.  We had so much fun, and would love to go back to the Michigan Dunes again.  Our church also had a Worship Night.  Something changed in me that night and I have been forever changed!

September

School started right after Labor Day!  We decided to send Michael back to public school since things weren’t working out the best for us at home.  We are happy to report that he is doing wonderful in the public school!

We celebrated Noah’s 8th birthday in September.  We also found out that an eight year old child, when given $20 in cash and not watched very closely at the grocery store (because mom and dad were busy ringing/bagging groceries), will spend the whole $20 on lottery tickets!  And before you ask…YES it’s illegal for him to purchase them, but when they have a “vending machine” of lottery tickets just sitting over by the bubble gum machines, it’s just calling for a child to play with it!  And he only wond $2!

October

In October, Kevin and I started going to a new Bible Study.  I was elated that Kevin wanted to go to one since he has never really showed any interest in going before.

We also walked, for the first time, in the JDRF Walk for a Cure for my Niece.  We were so proud of her, she ended up getting 2 awards…one for the amount of money raised and the other for the T-Shirt design!

November

We celebrated Kevin’s 38th birthday.  How?  Well, I went to a Arbone party and he watched football…now that’s love!

We had our traditional weekend after Thanksgiving shopping adventure.  My parents’ took Michael, Noah, Daniel, & Andrew for the weekend (it ended up my parents had Daniel & Andrew and my sister had Michael & Noah).  We always enjoy that weekend away from the boys.  It’s nice to pretend we are childless…even if it’s just for the weekend!  But we are always so excited when they return.

December

We spent most of the month either running from Christmas Program to Christmas Program or from Christmas to Christmas.  However this year it seemed to be a little less travel than usual.  We only spent 1 night up at my parent’s house and we actually had Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at home for the first time in a long time!

For 2009, I’m sure there will be new things that God shows us along the way, new challenges to overcome and new friends to meet, but I trust that God will be joining us along this journey and we will rest in the knowledge of Him.