From Chaos To cats To Camping........

Many of you have asked how Tiger was doing and Susie asked for a photo. Sounding a little warped if you asked me Susie! :) Just kidding. Here he is all healthy and doing fine. See you can't tell his teeth are gone unless he smiles.

We went from chaos the last two weeks with the cat to camping with friends all weekend. Our church held their first family camp and with just over 200 people signed up there was lots of fun to be had. The photo above is our kids and our friends kids zoning in front of a movie after a long day of swimming and playing in the dirt.

Nothing like chili cook out night while you are camping.

Then it was home Sunday afternoon to shower off the "yuck" and watch a little football with daddy. I won't mention any names but my team won yesterday. (Dallas Cowboys!)

Just a side note: I was really praying and asking God to give me wisdom about the ministry we are trying to get off the ground. You know the annual couples weekend away? Anyways, I was wondering in the back of my head if this just wasn't the right time, if the economy was to bad for people. If nobody was interested in a marriage retreat right now etc. And then through good fellowship over the weekend and someone being transparent in their marriage struggles I sensed the Lord nudging us in the direction we have been going. Still don't have all the answers, heck not even some of them. But I do know that marriages are struggling and will continue to struggle and hurt in silence as long as we live here. So with that said I think the more opportunity's there are for couples to get away and invest in their marriages the better chance we have of families staying united and strong against the devil in his attempt to tear the church apart.

Controlled (or not so controlled) Chaos

It has been a C-R-A-Z-Y week since last Monday. If you have been reading my blog for any length of time you are rolling your eyes and saying to yourself, "uhhh what's new?" :) Let me just let you into a peek of my week.

Sunday September 12th 11am: Super excited to be driving away from my house with only my husband and an overnight bag. Headed down to the beach to "test out" a place for a romance conference for our church. A ministry God has laid on our hearts for some time now and God seems to be opening doors in the our direction to start it. Rode bikes, ate lunch and talked for hours about life, work, school, our marriage etc.
5pm: Pull into hotel to find out it is very nice although not the nicest neighborhood and so close to the airport they were using the roof of the hotel as an extra runway. OK not really but after the third time of being ZOOMED over by a jet and jumping out of my skin I decided that is NOT romantic.

Monday September 13: Spent the next 12 hours driving to different locations all the way from Laguna Beach to Big Bear to tour places, talk to camp/hotel managers, and get a "feel" for the location only to find out they didn't have room for our group size, the weekend was already booked or it was out of our budget. Tired, frustrated and seeking Gods will in this new adventure.
6:30pm-Pull into drive to greet happy mom and three kiddos only to discover that our beloved cat Tiger is very sick.

Tuesday 8am: Run around with like chicken with my head cut off trying to get girls out of the house and to the vet to have cat checked. Cat escapes cat cardboard cat carrier and tries to steer the car back home. I am sure God had his hand on me driving cause I was scratched, Morgan was scratched and I don't really remember the rest of the drive.
10am- Vet informs us Morgan's cat, love of her life since she was 4 and basically a member of our family has an autoimmune disease that he's had since birth that is now attacking his teeth and mouth. Oh wait, it gets better. We can either put him to sleep or have ALL of his teeth removed. Yes you read that right REMOVE ALL OF THE FREAKIN" CATS TEETH! Seriously, is this happening to me?
10:30- Morgan's crying, I'm crying, Ryanne is dancing around in little circles in the office singing (hey it's good to be oblivious sometimes) and Dan is at work texting me. And I quote,"Honey if they can save her cat do whatever they want! It would be like when I lost my dog and I don't want her to go through that." In some strange way his text made me love him more. Is that weird? Ya' I thought so to.

Wednesday September 15- I decided as I am half asleep in the shower to listen to our pastor from the previous Sunday and give God my day. So I pray,"God I turn over my day planner to you and ask that if I am supposed to detour from the norm today you make me sensitive to that amen."
10:00am-My phone rings and its a leader from the exchange program asking me to take a teenage boy from Thailand who has been taken away from his host family. Just for a few hours. I take the kid he spends the rest of the evening with us. We go to swim practice, dinner and just hang out. I find out the home he was in was NOT good and he tells me things that as a mom give me great anxiety into the night. I call the head of the program and fill them in and they inform the necessary steps to get this kid in a good home are in the works. God totally breaks my heart for this kid and our family basically spends the rest of the week hanging with him, doing homework, feeding him etc. Dan and I spend the rest of the week trying to figure out how we can make room for him here when God tells me I am not the end solution just part of the tool to get him in a good, loving, Christian home that will present the gospel to him. Graph tells me he is Buddhist so I invite him to spend the day with us at church. He loved worship and informed me he had never been inside a church. Dan and I pray with the pastor and 7 hours later our friends from church come forward to take on this blessing. God is good.

Thursday September 16 7am- take cat in for surgery to have teeth and infection removed. *sigh* I know it sounds inhumane but he survived, is eating, playing, happy and healthy and the infection and disease are well on their way to being gone. The worst part is EVERYWHERE we go Ryanne tells people I had all of our cats teeth pulled. *sigh*

Friday September 17th 4pm- Take Graph to YAPS for orientation so she can volunteer once a week working with the dogs at the animal rescue center here in town. End up signing myself, Morgan and Ryanne up to help for an hour a week. Whaaatttt? You should have seen all the babes that needed loving on. Plus when my girls want to do something for someone else and expect nothing in return I say,"YES!" Good for them and good for their hearts. :)

I'm also in the process of getting us ready for family camp this weekend, planning my friends baby shower I am hosting here the following weekend and supporting a husband who is studying all the time and training for the Iron Man. Need I say more?

Post From My Daily Wife Tip

The lady who I get the daily wife tip from posted her husbands daily husband tip today. I thought it was good enough to share with all my favorite blog readers out there. :) Now go hug your spouse and thank God for his grace in mercy in our marriages. :)

Imagine I had a bad sunburn, but wore a shirt so you could not see it. If you came up and hugged me (I’m from Texas, everyone hugs) it would hurt – probably a lot. Now imagine if rather than hugging me, you slapped me on the back – very hard. That would hurt even more.

In the first instance, you have no intention to hurt me – in fact, you intended to bless me. In the second instance what you did was not nice, and would have hurt had I not been sunburned, but my pain would be far greater than what you intended.

What if I reacted in each situation without telling you I was sunburned? In the first case you would think I was crazy, in the second you would think I was a big baby making way too much out of something minor.

The same kind of things happens in marriages all the time, except that the sunburn is wounds of the heart and mind, wounds that can never be seen. What’s more, we tend to either not know or not care that our wounds are not the norm – we expect the world to see the wounds and treat us accordingly, or we think the entire world is similarly wounded and thus similarly sensitive.

So, your wife has one of these hidden sunburns, and you do something you think is nice, like a hug. She reacts with hurt or anger, and you have no idea why. She can’t or won’t explain. Or, you slap her on the back and she goes off on you, telling you how mean and horrible you are. You can see that it might have been a bit much, but her reaction is so over-the-top that you feel wronged by her. It’s clear to you she is unreasonable and can’t be talked to, and you pull back.

You can avoid a lot of trouble by learning see the wounds in yourself that your bride is hitting. Help her to understand, or at least be aware of, your injuries so that she can try to avoid them while you work to get them healed. Additionally, when your bride over reacts, don’t chalk it up to her hormones or just being irrational – try to figure out if you are hitting an internal sunburn.

Kids.....

Morgan: "Hey Ry, do you know how ladies get their boobs?"
Ryanne: "Uhhhh, no how?"
Morgan: "They go to a store, pick out the size they want and then have them sewn on."
Ryanne: "Mooooommmmmm!!!!!!!"
(I guess I should limit the time I allow them to watch Nip Tuck. Kidding!)

Ryanne: "Look at my picture mom. It's from the NASA field trip the other day. My sentence says, Daddy took us on a field trip to the NASA place and it was fun."
Me: "That looks great Ry. But who's the lady next to daddy in the red dress?"
Ryanne: "Oh that's just the lady that was hanging around daddy on the field trip."
Dan: "Whaaaaaaatttttt???"

Ryanne: "Morgan you gonna wear earrings today?"

Morgan: "Yup."
Ryanne: "Did it hurt to get them pierced?"
Morgan: "A little why do you want to get yours pierced?"
Ryanne: "Nah, I'm gonna wait till' I'm way older and just get my belly button pierced."
Morgan: "What's way older?"
Ryanne: "Oh like 7 probably."
Morgan: "MOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!"

Morgan: "Mom you know how when Graph first got here how she didn't like me hugging and hanging on her?"
Me: "Yes."
Morgan: "Well, I just kept loving her and hugging her without caring if she hugged me back, and now she loves hugging me!" :)

(I thought that little bit of wisdom from a 9 year old spoke volumes about how we are supposed to love others around us. Thank you Morgan even though you have no idea you blessed me.)