The Golden Birthday!

Today is my GOLDEN Birthday! I turn 26 this March 26th. Everyone says you're supposed to make this one very special so I have declared this whole week to be my Birthday week in our house. It is the festival of Jennifer! lol

My husband has some lovely things planned for us both on Thursday and Friday that I am really looking forward to!!

My ideal Golden Birthday party would have everyone I love attending with a Golden Birthday Cake done by Charm City Cakes. Decorations would have gold everywhere, gold ballons, gold streamers, gold confetti, and even a gold pinata! ok I have no idea how to get the ~ over the "n"

But since I don't have a fortune to spend on that kind of party I'll go for one with my girls. Like last years Disney Princess Party they threw for me, party favors included!

The End of the Whirlwind

Wow, this Easter weekend has been the busiest weekend I've ever had. On Friday, my husband wanted to finish installing the ceiling fan/light in the dining room so he and his friend started at 9:00am. However, it wouldn't work. "Mr. Z" (the friend actually doing the work) went back up to the attic 3 times before I decided to try the kitchen lights and see if they work. (Earlier in the week we were having problems with them not working) And sure enough they weren't working which is why the fan wasn't working either. That was around noon when they discovered the problem wasn't the actual fan. So they tried everything to figure out how to get the lights in the kitchen to work. It wasn't until 3:00pm that they decided to try an actual electrician but by that time due to the holiday weekend nobody would return our calls and the only one that did wouldn't come out until Monday morning. (Did I mention my parent's were due to arrive at 5:00pm?) Finally at 4:00pm another friend of ours came over and within 2 minutes fixed the problem. It was a bad circuit breaker. He just switched the wires to a new breaker.

Thankfully, I didn't have much to do in getting ready for my parent's. Their room was ready for them and I had kept the house pretty clean over the week so not much cleaning to do. We had such a good time with them and I really enjoyed them staying with us. It will be even better when there are 2 bathrooms but we made do.

On Saturday we had a big BBQ and Easter Egg hunt for some families with small children from our church. Again my honey got up early and got us a grill then took off for Saturday visitation. My dad stayed at the house and put it together while my mom and I took the girls shoe shopping for Easter Sunday. Have you noticed a decline in Easter dressy dresses? We went to 3 different stores before we found shoes for only 1 child. Then we went grocery shopping for the rest of the needed items for the BBQ. Everyone showed up and had a great time. It all ended around 5:00. My parents offered to watch the girls so my honey could take me out for some quiet time and to celebrate my birthday. It's on Wednesday if you didn't know. While out we found shoes for Sissy for her Easter dress. I wanted to get a new dress but no luck with the stores in our town. I couldn't even find shoes to go with an outfit I already had that would be good for Easter. So we ended up at Starbucks drinking coffee and talking. It was a nice relax time from the busy day.

Sunday, Easter Sunday, the girls looked so cute!! My mom took all the pictures. It was such a great service! We had a lot of visiting families in church. Afterwards we did our own BBQ with just us. It was really nice! After the Sunday evening service the ladies of the church gave me a surprise party and roses. They are just the sweetest! I am so blessed! My parents took off after the party and drove home. We had a quiet evening but boy were my honey and I tired. I am definitely using up the last of my spa gift certificate this week!

Good Night

It's so quiet tonight! Ballerina Girl and Sissy are spending the night at their Mima's house and Blue Eyes was asleep before I got home from service. Have a great night!

Good Morning!

Ode to String Cheese

Ode to String Cheese
Oh you are so stringy
Stringy and Cheesy
I guess that's why your name
is String Cheese

You're so easy to grab
Out of the fridge
When it's time for a snack
For my little kids.

I love you myself
At time for a snack
You're so fun and delicous
Hmmm....I'll be right back!

Hospitality Basket for Guests

(What are you saying? You mean EVERYONE doesn't have a guest room like this? Just shocking! {"shocking" what a funny sounding word, shock, shock, shock, it even looks funny})

My parents are coming for Easter weekend and I'm excited about it because this time they'll be staying with us. With our new house we have an extra room (our office) where guests can stay. (And no it's not pictured above.)

I did not like for people to stay with us when we didn't have a room or a bed for them to sleep. My in-laws stayed with us once before, they even shipped out their own air mattress. However they ended up on the couch and recliner the whole week because of bad backs and bad knees. It was too hard getting up and down from the floor where the mattress was. Thereafter everyone stayed at hotels.

In preparation for their visit I picked up some things at the store. I wanted to make a hospitality basket full of stuff they might forget to pack to make up for the lack of incredibly nice guest room pictured above. (You know the things when you start unpacking your suitcase and go, "Oh man, I forgot my _________!")

Some hospitality baskets include items like snacks, water, pain reliever, etc. but I've kept mine simple. I know they more than likely will not forget anything (my mom is big with lists for packing we all got our own list to check off when we went on vacations, camp, etc.) but these will also be for future guests into our home. I have a large square wicker basket that was given to me by a visiting preacher and inside it I've got their towels for their stay, his/her shaving cream, toothbrushes, toothpaste, body wash, soap, shampoo and conditioner, hairspray, his/her razors, lint roller, lotion, his/her deodorants, q-tips, and a body puff.

I received this whole basket idea from a class I took in Bible college called "Ministry Mates". My friend Tammy and I took that class together (we were the only two married girls in the class). The teacher gave us a cute poem to put into the basket but I couldn't find my notebook from the class because it's buried in the garage somewhere so Tammy kindly found hers for me and emailed me the words.

A Note to our House Guests
If in this basket you can find,
An item that you left behind,
Please help yourself to what you need
Because we count you friends indeed!

If you have someone coming to stay at your house, try making up your own basket of goodies and improvise, put some stuff in there that you know they like (my dad likes a certain type of gum and later this week I'll be adding it to the basket).

Oh So Sore!

After I had Blue Eyes I bought at a greatly reduced price some Winsor Pilates DvD's. I haven't been doing them for about 6 months due to the move and they got packed away. But yesterday I finally pulled them out and started up again. And just from the 2 workouts already I am "Oh so sore!"

A Beautiful Day

The weather has been so wonderful lately!! Yesterday after morning service and the girls were in bed for their afternoon naps I took a book I just started on outside to read. I enjoyed it so much I did it again today with my devotions. It's much more peaceful on the street we live on now compared to where we just came from. At our old house there was a busy road right behind our house and it always had cars zooming back and forth on it. Not too great of a spot for peace and quiet. But today while I was reading I very much enjoyed the sounds of nature rather than that of man.

When I was done the girls came out to join me and we had such fun. My husband's day off is on Monday so we all ended up outside playing tag with spray bottles. I love our new yard it is such a nice size for us. I'm looking forward to when it will really be complete. It just needs to be leveled out and some grass planted in some very bare spots.

We have a friend who is helping us get our yard looking nice. And I finally emailed him what I would like in that little strip of yard next to the street where our mailbox is. Currently that area is like this:


(Ewww, thankfully that carpet is long gone! But the outside pretty much looks the same.)


We have a rather large strip of ground to fill in (just erase the truck in your mind and delete the dumpster) and if you can see the neighbor's (across the street) strip of land, that's the look I'm going for, minus the rocks. Except with these choices:


Some beautiful daylilies...


and red bark.

Ladies Conference "Let Your Light Shine"

Well, our ladies conference was a blast as usual. We had a group of 17 ladies go!! I was so excited. Every year it's been my goal to have the same amount of ladies or more go to this conference. This year I thought we would be doing great to just get the same amount as last year but was surprised with 17 ladies! The biggest blessing of the trip was on the way home. One of the ladies with us doesn't go to our church but was invited by her friend to go. And when we were almost home we got a phone call letting us know that she received Christ as her Savior. WooHoo!! What a blessing! She is such a sweet lady and is already planning on attending next year's ladies conference with us and she wants to bring her daughter along.

Again there were so many things at conference that the Lord spoke to my heart about. Many things I need to work on. But just being up there and being close to some of the ladies in our church for that time is such a great blessing. I am so thankful to the Lord for the ladies He has given to me in this ministry.

My mom was able to come with us and that was a lot of fun! I really enjoyed being able to spend the time with her. We don't get many times like that so I think we will try to make this a yearly thing for her as well.

On the way up I missed getting on one highway but thankfully I knew of another way to get on. Then when we were getting on another one further ahead we somehow ended up going the wrong way which led us to paying the toll across a different bridge. I don't know how many bridges we ended up going over by the end of our trip but my traveling companion and I ended the trip with the inside joke of "We LOVE bridges!"