Archives for 2013

What I Wore Wednesday 02.27.2013

February 27, 2013 by Amy 10 Comments

It’s Wednesday! I share my outfits from the week with The Pleated Poppy’s What I Wore Wednesday.

I pair my outfits with inspirational photos. Read more about that here.

I had a conversation about Tami Taylor from FNL the night before and needed to wear my Texan garb.

Source: flickr.com via Amy on Pinterest

Source: ninbra.tumblr.com via Amy on Pinterest

Sorry for the bad picture. Those plant holders are nice and focused!

Source: fat-birds.tumblr.com via Amy on Pinterest

Source: flickr.com via Amy on Pinterest

Putting these posts together for you isn’t getting old yet. I just love finding these beautiful pictures. Hope you are still enjoying them!

PMS and Trash Cans

February 26, 2013 by Amy 3 Comments

Alright, here’s the deal. I’m having the worst bout of PMS I’ve had in quite some time. Dear family, I do apologize for my wretched behavior the past few days.

Y’all, honestly, just wretched.

It’s one of those times where you know in mid-stride that what you’re doing and saying is so terrible but you cannot seem to stop yourself because your body has just taken completely over.

To give you just one example, the other day Lexi was complaining about a pair of her shoes and how they fit. This is nothing new. She’s very particular about how socks and shoes fit.

Well, we went in rounds about how she WAS going to wear those shoes I just bought her because they were EXACLTY what she wanted and she was going on about how she WASN’T going to wear them because her toe in her right foot was hurting even though they were EXACTLY the same size as the previous ones and the next size up was too big for her.

I got so frustrated, that I yelled and stormed in the kitchen and threw the brand new shoes in the trash can, telling her she didn’t ever have to worry about the shoes again because they were GONE!

I knew as I was walking in the kitchen that what I was doing was so daft and I should just calm down and NOT throw the shoes in the garbage but I really could not stop myself.

Before long, she was crying, begging to keep the shoes and I was begging for forgiveness and neither of us knew whether she should wear the silly shoes or not.

Please tell me you have acted this way before!

I would like to blame the hormones, I really would but I truly believe in these times of stress that it simply just brings up the mess inside us already.

Just as Romans says, we all still do things we don’t want to do and don’t do things we want to. We all still fight against our flesh but thank God I can still find Christ at the bottom of a trash can loving me anyway.

To Bar or Not to Bar

February 25, 2013 by Amy 20 Comments

It’s been awhile since we’ve done any big projects around the house. It’s been almost two years since we built on our master bedroom addition and since then, it’s just been small things here and there.

Scott and I are both getting an itch to do something we’ve been batting around for quite some time. The thing is, I still can’t decide whether I want to or not and I’d really like your input.

One thing I really wanted with this house but didn’t exactly get was an open floor plan between our living room, dining room and kitchen. While there’s a nice open space to our kitchen, it’s not what I would call open.

Please excuse the dog crate with the John Deere blanket. It’s just what it is.

We’ve been thinking of tearing out these top cabinets, or at least half of them, and knocking a hole through that wall so we have an island with a counter and bar stools.

I’ve been messing around in PhotoShop and while I’m no Layla or Kevin from The Lettered Cottage, I think the photos I did might give you a visual of what we’re thinking of doing.

Option 1 would only knock out part of the wall facing the dining room. In this way, I can salvage half the cabinets up top and minimize seeing any mess in the kitchen with that short wall.

We’d need to paint the back door as the black is too stark from the living room.

Option 2 would knock out the entire wall above the bottom cabinets.

With this option I lose all my upper cabinets and I’m pretty concerned about the mess at the stove you could see from the living room as well. We’d have to deal with repairing the ceiling too. Oh, and our contractor told us we’d need to add a support beam in the attic.

However, this option really opens up the room and I don’t think it would cost much more.

So, whaddya think? Leave it alone, partial wall or tear the whole thing down?

What Mama Did

February 22, 2013 by Amy 7 Comments

Five Minute Friday is changing it up a bit this week. We’re to write on “What Mama Did” for five minutes. No editing or backtracking.

I ate lunch with Lexi yesterday and we sat with one of the little boys and his mom. The two littles started talking about the other kids in her class that were sitting back at the main table. I’m embarrassed to say not all of it was positive. Lexi wasn’t trying to be mean but kids call it as they see it. Lexi calls me out all the time. Why are you mad at me? It kills me when she says that. I stopped her yesterday at lunch. Quit talking about your friends. If you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. Lexi, naive, said I like to gossip. I wanted to hide under the table. I urged her to just quit. She did and started talking about something else. Probably her peanut butter and jelly sandwich she was picking apart.

When she got home last night, I told her I wanted to talk to her about what happened at lunch. Gossip isn’t nice and talking behind peoples’ backs will land you with exactly zero friends. The Bible warns against and it’s really just not nice. She assured me she wasn’t trying to be mean, she just liked talking about her friends. She’s just too honest and naive now to know how that will turn out in a few years. I could tell she got it though and we moved on to talking about the weekend.

I always thought mothering would happen with serious, hour-long conversations, but I’m realizing I get to dispense what little wisdom I have in spurts, like a Pez dispenser and its little candies. And I’ve realized that’s what my mama did. Years and years of teaching and guiding, sometimes seconds at a time showing me what wisdom looked like. She still does it. Sometimes just a sentence between what we had for dinner and what she found shopping that day.

Motherhood sometimes doesn’t look like I thought it might, but I sure hope it looks a lot like what mama did.

God-clippings: How I Use Evernote to Hear God

February 21, 2013 by Amy 5 Comments

Do you ever find the same word or theme suddenly pops up everywhere? In blog posts, in TV shows, in quotes, in songs, in sermons—sometimes you just can’t get away from it, whatever “it’” is.

Don’t ignore those “coincidences”. I tend to think that’s God beating us over the head with a lesson of some sort.

My lesson right now? My word? Control.

Truthfully, I never thought of myself as an over-controlling person, but I definitely think God has some things to teach me.

I don’t want to miss one little thing God is trying to show me, so I thought I might share how I’ve started collecting the pieces of the puzzle.

For you savvy readers, I just create a folder in Evernote and stuff them all there and then revisit.

If that makes no sense to you, let me explain.

Evernote.com is a lot like Pinterest You gather items from all over the web and organize them into folders called Notebooks.

While Pinterest is great at organizing visual data publicly, Evernote is great at organizing text-based data privately.

First, you should set up an account at evernote.com

Then, make a Notebook for your word, or theme.

At this point, you can create a New Note if you’d like. Let’s say the sermon on Sunday spoke directly to your word or theme, you could create a new note with the sermon’s title date date and then type in the applicable notes.

However, as an avid blog reader, what I’ve found most helpful is the Web Clipper.

Web Clipper is an extension for your browser so that a little Evernote button shows up in your toolbar and then you can use it to clip items to your Evernote account.

You can see the extension here on my toolbar.

When I find a sentence I want to clip from a blog post, I just highlight like so:

Then click the Evernote button in your toolbar. A box pops up and lets me pick which folder to save it in.

Then, when I’m ready I can log into my account at Evernote.com and see what I’ve clipped.

In a twist of irony, I just wrote all that and realized that might come across as controlling. Ha! Well, I just tend to look at it as PASSIONATE. So there. I’m looking forward to what God is teaching me and hope to share some time in the future.

Do you use Evernote? What are some other great uses for it? What’s your theme or word right now?

What I Wore Wednesday 2.20.2013

February 20, 2013 by Amy 8 Comments

It’s Wednesday! I share my outfits from the week with The Pleated Poppy’s What I Wore Wednesday.

I pair my outfits with inspirational photos. Read more about that here.

Source: inlaidgrace.tumblr.com via Amy on Pinterest

I don’t know why I looked so confused here..it was a lovely Valentine’s Day!

Source: photo.net via Amy on Pinterest

Source: desert-dreamer.tumblr.com via Amy on Pinterest

Source: animalworld.tumblr.com via Amy on Pinterest

Thunder Snow and a Few Games to Survive

February 18, 2013 by Amy 2 Comments

Friday night we were headed to dinner and I announced that my favorite weatherman was calling for snow on Saturday.

Have I ever told you about my favorite weatherman? Brad Panovich is a weatherman in Charlotte and is a social media maven. I always can trust that if something weather-related is happening Charlotte, Brad is tweeting about it.

He’s great at engagement and will even answer silly questions like should I go to the mall at 1 or 3 this afternoon to beat the rain? Once, Lexi told me to “ask the weather guy in your phone” about a storm brewing.

I hope other cities have an equally awesome weatherman because it ROCKS.

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Everyone scoffed at the snow news as we had some snow flurries recently, but it was quite underwhelming.

Saturday morning came along and sure enough, there were flurries. It didn’t do much sticking though and the girls scoffed once again.

We moved on with planned play dates for the afternoon and I noted to the mother that I had heard (through Brad on Twitter) we were supposed to get another bout of snow that afternoon but none of it was supposed to stick.

Well, SURE ENOUGH, about 20 minutes before the girls were scheduled to finish up their play dates (we exchanged girls with a set of sisters), ALL THE SNOW fell out of the sky.

This picture is not more than 10 minutes after the snow started. Either I missed one of Brad’s tweets or he might have underestimated this thunder snow but we definitely had some accumulation.

Lexi got dropped off from her play date just a few minutes later and all the girls spent some time playing around.

Normally, people are running to the store for bread and milk 24 hours before snow but nothing this time. We had no clue it was going to be like this.

By Saturday evening, we had 2-3” and everyone was rushing to get home. Many churches canceled Sunday morning.

I heard (again, from Brad) that this was the most snow we’ve had in 2 years.

Sunday morning we got up and properly dressed in snow clothes. You have to hurry because snow never lasts long. You can see much of it was melting already by the time we got out.

Scott was at work and I could not find our one purple sled to save my life so no sledding for us but we did manage some snow angels

and snowball fights.

Did I mention that this was Tucker’s first snow and he was insane in the membrane about it?

He was running circles so fast and when it was snowing on Saturday he was jumping 3 feet in the air trying to catch the snowflakes.

As you imagine, these pictures only account for just minutes of our weekend. The girls and I spent most of it inside enjoying our weekend.

This post is so long already but really, I wanted to share a few games we played ad nauseum to pass the time indoors.

They’re all easy, cheap and actually fun to play.

Four Corners

I played this game YEARS ago in school but the girls had to remind me what to do.

One person counts in the middle of the room with their eyes closed. The others quietly pick a corner in the room and stand. The person in the middle, with their eyes still closed, picks a corner number. Whoever is in that corner is out. You keep doing that until one person has not been picked. The remaining person wins and counts next.

I love this game because it requires me only to walk quietly, stand quietly and count to ten. The girls think it’s hilarious though to try to walk quietly and stand quietly and get really excited when they’re not picked.

One Word Story

We started this game at dinner-time and while we don’t play it at every dinner, the girls LOVE this game. The game is simply played by one person starting a story with one word. The next person adds just one word to the story and it continues in a circle until you’re done with the story, whether from a good ending or boredom.

The first time we played this game, Emma was in stitches. We were writing stories like “Once there was a dog who jumped over a house and died.” So silly but I think the girls enjoy being silly and seeing US be silly too.

Rat a Tat Cat

Rat a Tat Cat is a card game of numbers that the girls got as a present. I can’t explain it all but basically each player gets four cards, 2 of which you can look at. You go in rounds trying to get the lowest sum of cards. When you think you have them, you say “Rat a Tat Cat” and everyone adds up their cards, seeing if their unknown cards played well for them or not.

Usually the games go fast and there’s not a lot to fuss over so it’s a good family game.

I hope those help you finish out this winter being stuck inside. Hurry up, summer!

How was the weather like this weekend for you? What are your favorite family games/

Twitterature – February 2013

February 15, 2013 by Amy 5 Comments

My blog-friend Anne, aka Modern Mrs. Darcy, has started a monthly link-up for books called Twitterature. The premise of this link-up is to share short, casual reviews of books we’ve been reading.

Sometimes I write full-on book reviews but other times I read and move on. Not because they’re not good, often times because they’re so special I don’t have the proper words. This link-up will give me a chance to share ALL the books I’m reading without having so many book reviews through the month.

The Old Testament (66 books)

I admit, it’s a little hokey but this will explain why my reading list is so short. I’ve been trudging through another round of reading through the Bible this winter (in 122 days) and we finished the Old Testament, all 66 books in 3 months. I’ve written about it before, but I cannot stress enough how much I learned the first time I read the OT through and how much I continue to learn. Sure, it’s painful at times but so, so worth it.

The Gospels (4 books)

Is it MORE hokey I’m listing this separately? We finish the Gospels today and if you can’t tackle the OT, then please tackle The Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Honestly, Jesus and his parables leave me spellbound. I think I could read these for months and still not get bored.

Chasing Sunsets by Eva Marie Everson

Emma bought me this Christian fiction book for Christmas. To be honest, I usually find Christian fiction lacking in strong characters and storylines. I’m not sure this was much of an exception, but it was a nice diversion. With the premise of a rekindled teen romance on a Florida island after a divorce, it was enough to keep me around for the whole book but not to continue the series.

You Are Already Amazing by Holley Gerth

Holley’s book is practical, thoughtful, personal and challenging. Highly recommend this for folks still trying to find their strengths and what God might be calling them to do. And psst, I just signed up for e-coaching with Holley and I cannot WAIT!

Be sure to check out Twitterature. Hopefully we can all find some new reads!