To Quilt, Or Not To Quilt

For my birthday/Christmas I got a new sewing machine from my mom. I previously had my grandmother's machine, though it is now in bad shape and in need of enough repairs that it was cheaper to get a new machine, which is exactly what my mom did! :)

I've been itching for awhile to start a new project, but am tired of scrapbooking, have no desire to learn knitting or crocheting (sp???), can't really have a garden at this place, and want a project that will be challenging and rewarding. 

On a previous post this week I posted pictures of the new $5 garage sale find quilt rack that I repainted. It got me thinking about my grandmother's quilt, and great-grandmother's quilts that hang on it now. My grandmother LOVED to quilt and sew, and was involved in a quilting group at her church for many years. She made enough quilts (and one for each granddaughter) that at her funeral they were draped over all the pews/benches. There is a legacy in her quilts...something I'd love to attempt to protect and preserve. 

Since we just got this new table (garage sale find!!!) that means our old one can be used for projects downstairs. Spare table + new sewing machine + itching for a new project that'll take me awhile = to quilt or not to quilt???

...I'll keep you posted on my decision ;)...

Memorial Day & Other Pics

This year for Memorial Day we did something new-we went on our first family picnic out to Tuttle Creek and relaxed by the lake (...er, uh, creek?). That evening we headed to the Weddle's for an evening of games and BBQ'ing fun!

looking cool, dude, but the lake is the other direction :)

chillin' in my lazyboy while mommy and daddy read. i LOVED watching the wind in the trees!

Go Salome!!!!

Yeah, I get all the attention ;). More cute pics of me:

Like father....like son.

All the essentials for a full day's work.

my gang and i ;)

mUsiCaL FuN!

It's summer, let's change things up a bit :). During piano lessons for a set of twins, we did 20min lessons inside, then combined their Theory lesson outside thanks to the beautiful sunny weather!

{learning the G scale, and the I, IV and V of the scale :)...did I mention the kids are only 10? Excellent students!}

...and incase you were wondering where Isaac was during this...

Summer Steals & Deals!

I heart garage sales & savings! Check out what I've found on some sweet deals these last few weeks:

Above was purchased at the Ben Franklin Closing Sale on Saturday. Woven table rug, snow candle lantern thingy, mini stocking {i collect country stockings}, Rustic Merry Christmas sign: All for $22.50, but I got it for $13!

$5 Quilt Rack from a garage sale in May {before}

annoying white shelf I've had for 4 years that I never really liked {before}

1 quart of OOPS paint from Home Depot {I was going to use a brownish color for $9, but decided for only $1 that I could settle for olivish-sage.

THE FINISHED PRODUCT after 1.5hrs painting in 99 DEGREE HEAT!!!!!:

My Summer Top 10 List

Ten things I like best about summer, or in my case, summer nights because I like them better than summer days :)

10. Home made ice cream

9. Night noises!!!

8. Watching shooting stars

7. Ice cream after supper :)

6. Warm breeze in the evening while sitting on the porch

5. Cool breeze in the morning before it gets hot and sticky

4. (This one I miss, a lot) Riding my grandpa's 4-wheeler through his fields in the evening

3. Sleeping with the windows open!...though I miss this one because our duplex only has sliding doors and no regular windows :(

2. Bon Fires!

1. Watching lightning bugs

I'm not that big of a fan of summer. My style is more autumn and spring, but alas, once summer actually hits, I usually love it. I'm 27, and yet I still LOVE going to the pool in the summer! I can't wait till I can take Isaac with me :). However, summers just aren't what they used to be now as when I was growing up...and I miss that, greatly. Remember the care free nights when all the neighbor kids or cousins would randomly show up in their yards and we'd all play together? Or what about running around the yard (and we had a huge one!) barefoot in the grass chasing fire flies :)!! Oh how I loved that! The girls would either catch them in jars and watch them, or put them on our fingers like rings (weird, I know), while the boys' goal was simply to smash them.

Oh what I would give to be 5 again and run through the sprinkler in my Strawberry Shortcake swimsuit, the cool water splashing my warm skin as I would play for hours in the yard!

I never thought I'd say this, but I also miss the sounds from the ball diamond just up town a couple of blocks. I played on the Denmark Little League teams from T-Ball all the way till junior high, so the better part of my childhood months of June and July were wrapped up in games. As I got older I would get annoyed hearing all the cheering and loud sounds from the ball diamond, but now that I live in a bigger town, I miss those small town noises.

When I was little, the best treat of all was after dinner (sorry, in Iowa, dinner is lunch or supper, but supper isn't lunch, and often supper in my family was referred to as dinner-confused yet?), my grandparents who lived about seven miles out of town would go for a drive and come up town to see us most nights of the week. My grandpa had two cars and a farm truck-if they pulled up in the nice car it meant they'd probably just eaten out somewhere and were going to sit on the porch with us, but if they pulled up in my grandpa's long red cadillac looking boat, aka The Boat as us cousins called it, then it meant ICE CREAM!!!! Whoever wanted to could load up in the car with the grandparents and ride uptown for ice cream cones, but if you didn't want to go along for the ride, you were out of luck because the deal was you HAD to go with them to get the ice cream :).

My grandpa also kept his baseball glove in the trunk of the car with a bat and a baseball for the boys/softball for the girls. It was on such an early summer's night as tonight that he took the time to teach me how to throw a baseball. I can still hear him saying, "Throw past your ear, then release..." And you learned quickly how to throw a good throw, or you had to chase the ball yourself! As I grew older my grandpa would catch for me while I practiced pitching (I played first base and pitched from grades 6-9 on that small town league).

But I think, of all the summer memories, the best of all was when my family (aunts, uncles and cousins included) would gather at one of the family farms and have a BBQ (over the fire, not the grill), home made ice cream, and sit around the bonfire...how I miss those bonfires...sitting for hours upon hours watching the stars and the flames out in the gravel road of a family farm in the countryside, blanketed by quilted fields filled sweet corn and beans, lightning bugs and mosquitos, and the faint sound of the distant coyotes.

I sometimes wonder, with a bit of sadness, what will Isaac's summers will be like. Will they be filled with BBQ's and laughter, sprinklers and sun, bonfires and lightning bugs? We live in town now...a big town. We have no yard, no tree to put a swing in, no grass to run through barefoot, no place for bonfires, no room to play catch outside, and sadly, not very much of an opening to watch the stars at night. I know that doesn't mean he can't do that a friends' houses, but there's something so special about summers and the outdoors growing up, and just going outside, and not waiting to be invited over. It's a selfish thought, I know, but a thought nonetheless. I long for a home, not a duplex. I long for wide open spaces, not a cul-de-sac. I long for a yard, not a curb.

...I miss the country life, especially at summer.

...date night...

Date Night:

6:00   Babysitter arrives on time (go Leia!)

6:10   Now running 10 minutes behind schedule as I finish picking up and telling her how to feed the boy

6:15   Arrive at cinema with tickets in hand (a friend got us movie tickets!) ready to watch SHREK 4 :)

        ...told by lady in box that we cannot put tickets toward Shrek because it's 3D

        ...told we can only put tickets toward Sex in the City (not happening!!!), or some other thing that sounded dumb

        ...told if we wanted to watch Shrek it'd be $24 for two tickets-What?! No way!

        ...left theatre and on to Plan B

6:25   Plan B: Blockbuster and dinner at Freddy's

7:00   Stop by HyVee to purchase angel food cake to go home and make strawberry shortcake. ...out of angel food cake... harass Alan in parking lot about forgetting his wallet at work.

      ...Alan begs me to go to Best Buy so he can play with the new iPad's ... :P

8:00   Done playing with technology, on our way home. Alan waves at nice policeman on bicycle by Coco Bolo's in Aggieville who is sitting on his bike in the intersection watching drivers and checking plates

       ...Go through intersection...see bike cop in rear view mirror

       ...Bike cop asks us-through the sunroof because our driver's window is broken-to pull over in the KSU parking lot

       ...Bike cop asks us if we know our tags are expired (by 5 days), Alan responds that he submitted it online at the beginning of May and we still have not received our tags, and that he was planning on stopping by the court house on Monday to check on it. ...Asks us if we know our right brake light is out (ugh, again?!? seriously?! We fix it MONTHLY!), asks us if we know we're missing a bolt and that our license plate is dangling...yep, need to find a bolt.

       ...Bike cop asks for license, insurance and registration. Alan says he doesn't have his license, that he left it at work and we were on our way to get it. Provide other info and wait on cop...

        ...Surprisingly Alan only gets a warning and is told to go get his license and to check on the registration!! Yay!!! No ticket! As the bicycle cop hands us the warning I ask if we can frame it to remember this Date Night, to which the officer laughs and says, "Oh, you're on a date?! Bet this hasn't happened on a date before ;)" to which Alan responds, "Well, actually, it did once..." 

8:30   Stop by Home Depot to get bolts and fix license plate in parking lot

8:45   Stop by Baskin Robbins to redeem the date just a bit with chocolate :)

{a mommy meltdown}

Last week I had a meltdown. A mommy meltdown. A wife meltdown. A laundry, clean the kitchen, empty the dishwasher, fold the clothes, start crying meltdown. I realized I needed a day to myself-just one day-out of the house. Not because of Alan, not because of Isaac, but because I'd been stuck in the house for over a week since we're sharing our car right now, and I NEEDED OUTSIDE!!!! So I sent Alan an email that day. It went something like this:

Hun,

I need a day. I need out. I need fresh air, space to breathe, time to read and spend with Him! I want to go for a drive, I want to go photograph something. I want to sit on the top of the hill overlooking the town and just sit and read. I need OUT! Please, may I PLEASE do that next Friday???

His response: Sure. ...wow, that was easy!

 

Well, today was my day, and how'd it go?

It started early!!! Thursday night Alan happened to be meandering about the craigslist website and had me look at a table for $150. It was my dream table!!! If you don't know, our previous table was an oak oval table {granted the table was nice, but the chairs...}, with chairs that were heavy on the fabric and had rollers. I have hated them since the day we got married and I inherited them along with the rest of Alan's furniture. I have waiting patiently for nearly 5 long years now, and last night God blessed us with this:

 

{We thought we could pull out the drawer there and let Isaac just spit up in that during feedings :)}

 

 

Isaac has his own chair now!!!!

 

So how did the rest of my ME DAY go today?

8:30am: kid let us sleep in!!!

8:45am: daddy got up to do the feeding so I could take my time getting ready for the day

10am: helped Anna put the finishing touches on her newly painted and redesigned room {author's note: i heart painting and decorating!}

11am: Anna left, but let me hang out on their porch swing reading and chillaxing in the summer breeze {i love that they live in the country-i dearly miss the country life!!!!}

12pm: too hot. can't do it. bees bugging me. went inside, got comfy on the couch and spent the next hour working on my new website content

1pm: content and new pricing done! now on to the new bible study Anna helped me to find.

>>wow, deep stuff in that study, and I'm on the first day of it!

1:30pm: wander over to their grand piano, tickle the keys, let my fingers glide over them while playing some old etudes and exercises {is it wrong that I actually liked Hanon Exercises?}. Learn Lullaby by Brahms in 15min :). It's been forever since I've played classical music! Loved it!

2:45pm: Anna mentioned if I had time to water the flowers outside since it was a nasty 99 degrees today, so I watered, played a bit with Lars, let the cool water cascade over my feet and flip flops, sprinkled my legs and arms with the water to cool off, felt the hot breeze against my now cool skin: SUMMER.

3:30pm: come home to my boys, start getting everyone ready for Becca's wedding! Congratulations to the new Mr. & Mrs. Jordan Strom :)

THANK YOU ALAN, ISAAC and ANNA for MOMMY'S DAY OF RELAXATION!!!!!

Picture of the Day (from a month ago!)

I found these while going through photos of Isaac from last month :). Sorry I didn't post them sooner!! What a cutie!

...just plain cute!...

pLaYtiMe on MomMy & dADDy'S bEd

(can you tell it's bedtime??)

(for grandma sherry's bday back in May!)

Celebrating Life

A couple of weekends ago Alan and I attended a wedding of a dear friend from here in Manhattan who just happened to marry an Iowa girl :). May we just say-SO PROUD!!!

We were looking forward to a weekend of celebrating, joyful times, kick-off to summer fun...but we left having experienced so much more. 

Just days before the wedding of our friend, the bride's sister and brother-in-law woke to find their little four month boy lifeless and not breathing. While the family quietly slept, their little boy met Jesus. 

Plans shattered, numbness, world rocked, what to do was the question on everyone's mind so we were told. To post-pone the wedding? To go ahead with the wedding? When to have the funeral? No one knew what to do...

Then it was decided to go ahead with the wedding and to have the funeral the following week. 

Alan and I were asked to help serve the wedding party and their families at the rehearsal dinner, which was an honor to us. And in the midst of this family's sorrow, it was the least we could do. 

After the dinner, the two families and their close friends were gathered around and took part in a time of sharing their thoughts for the couple, their stories of growing up, of how they met, of how their lives crossed for either the bride or groom, or both. What I should probably say now is that the bride is one of eight children, the groom a member of seven children: BIG FAMILIES! I thought the groom's family was big, but then one sibling after another, after another...after another...after another..........after another kept getting up and talking! 

I felt so honored to be in that room sitting at that table with the red paisley centerpiece under the bouquet of white daisies, playing with my plastic fork in the frosting of my dessert, and listening to everyone sharing. These two families were such a testament to who and what a family should be in Christ. There was love. It was evident and everywhere. No negativity, no bitterness, no quarrels, only positive energy-something bigger and stronger tied them together. It was truly beautiful. And it was love.

The family-meaning both the groom's family and the bride's combined in the love of Christ-had two options for that weekend: to postpone everything or to go through with the plans for the wedding. The bride's sister sacrificed and respected her sister by blessing the wedding to go on; the bride showed love to her sister by respectfully postponing the honeymoon. It was a give and take of love. 

What Alan and I witnessed that weekend was so meaningful to this life we have this side of heaven. It was family, it was love, it was tears and mourning, it was laughter and joy. They celebrated life-the life of little Gabe, the new life of Tim and Lydia. They cried with tears of painful loss for little Gabe, they cried tears of joy as Tim and Lydia became one.

GOD WAS EVIDENT

The hearts of these families were filled to overflowing as they lost their son/grandson/nephew/little man with tears of sorrow and pain, but also with the hope of heaven. God knew their pain when His Son was on the cross, taking our burdens. God was evident in the life of this tiny child, and in his parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles...They mourned just as the Lord Himself mourned for us, the broken and lost that His Son Jesus came to die for. God knows pain. I recently was looking at the blog of Gabe's mommy, and in the midst of her posts about the events of this last month were the words from God's Word: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. They are praising Him even through the storm. God is there. 

 

(This was on Gabe's mommy's blog, and to me it captures so, so much. He is walking with Jesus now, and for that we praise God in the hope of heaven!)

 

The hearts of the two souls in love were also such a testament to His commandments and teachings. They love each other with a burning desire for Christ as their captain in this life together. God was evident in their relationship from the moment they met. God was evident in their engagement, and God was certainly evident in their vows, and without a doubt will continue to be in their marriage. Marriage is a beautiful picture that the Lord teaches between Christ and His bride, the church. And the marriage of Tim and Lydia, with the knowledge that Christ comes first, with love and respect for one another, with passion for righteousness and pursuit of the Lord's will in their lives, Christ is evident. 

That weekend will forever remain in our hearts and close in our minds as we begin to raise our little family of three. Our hope is that Isaac, and any future siblings, will be brought up in a home of love, not just to love or by love, but in the love of Christ. We learned that weekend about the brevity of life, of life's joys and sorrows, of life's unpredictability, of life's journey, and it is truly that-a journey. I pray it is a journey for Christ. There's something so much more about life when you are living it for Christ. 

To the Weddle, Weikert and Novak Families: Thank you for teaching us about love, about life, and about faith in Jesus.