Monday, Monday

This past weekend was my son Mattehew's 20th Birthday, wich in past years was a very joyus time for us all. Since he is in Texas this was the first birthday when we weren't together and that sure made me sad. I would love to tell you all that I have a wonderful relationship with Matthew but that would not be true. I love my son with all my heart but he is still in the growing up mode and it seems to be taking him a long time to go from the little boyhe is to the man I know he can be. It is very hard having a child so far away, I don't know what I will do when he is deployed in August.
Roger says it is taking a toll on my life as I worry so much about him, not so much really about him but for him. He is not one to do well with finances and he seems to always be in a ME mode. He will be coming to CA the 14th of may for some training and it just breaks my heart that he will be within driving distance (So. CA) and yet I won't even get a chance to see him in person, no hugs, no personal time. It tears at my heart so much just to think about it. I will see him before he deploys and I look forward to that time a time I will treasure forever.

I have also been dealing with a situation with some family members wich is another sad part of our lives. Roger has a daughter, well actually they are not really related to each other except for the fact that Roger lived with her mom when she was little and then basically raised her for a while. I don't know all the details but do know that he calls her his daughter and she calls him dad which is fine with me. Her and her husband have 3 children but we don't see them very often. Actually when they came over for Easter that was only the second time I had seen their daughter and she is now 2 years old. Basically when I talk with people I tell them we have 2 grandchildren Dylan and Katie. We see them all the time. We also see my daughter all the time even though she lives about an hour away.Roger is saddend by the situation of his daughter but we feel like we have done all we can and after talking aobut it have decided to give up trying to force the relationship. I know when I or Roger walk into any room with Dylan and Katie in it they will automatically run to us with gigantic smiling faces happy to see us.

Mandy is old enough now to get spayed so I will be making her an appointment probably for next week or the week after.She is getting cuter everyday.

One of my many treasured blog friends Winona has gotten me back into a crafting mood. I worked quite a few hours on the purse I am making for Jennifer's birthday, doing the embroidery. Hope to have it ready to put together this next weekend.

I hope and pray that everyone has a wonderful week ahead.
Blessings,Joann

Mandy is 5 months old now!!

She is getting bigger and when we took her to get her rabies shot yesterday she weighed in at 4.5 pounds. I still need to call the vet to schedule her appointment for spaying next month.


This is a picture of what the little girls do most of the day :)




Katie and Jennifer came over Sunday afternoon, we had a nice visit and then had dinner. Roger BBQ'd steak and chicken it was very good

Katie in our backyard~









Roger worked very hard this past weekend and finished up replacing the doors in the hallway. They were a very ugly wood color and now they are all white and it makes the whole hallway look so much cleaner and bright looking.

The hallway~



I have still done NO crafting yet, have you ever heard of writers block? Well I think I have crafters block. The project I want to work on is the shower curtain for the hallway bathroom So far all I have done is sewn 2 twin sized flat sheets together and put a valance on top. I am wanting to applique some prim looking things onto it. The shower curtain is dark blue and then the things I want to put on it will be in either a light tan or dark tan. The main colors in that bathroom are black and dark blue. I know exactly how I want the curtain to look when it's done in my head I am just having a hard time getting it out of my head and on to the curtain. Does this make sense to anyone??

I am going to try and work on something to finish that curtain this week but so far all I have done is look at it a lot. I did use my new extension table the other day for a light box and transfered some embroidery patterns.

Can't remember if I posted pictures of the extension table so here it is~

Of course right now I can't even hardly find it, as it's under a bunch of junk!! Sadly it's a flat surface and I am a piler, any flat surface just beckons to me to be piled on :)
to

Our new table and chairs

I just realized today that on my post about Easter I mentioned our new table and chairs but didn't post a picture of it, well here it is in all it's glory :)

Here it is with not only the Easter baskets on it but our lovely cat Oreo too!



I really like the fact that it is a square table, as it fits in the area much better than the old rectangle one. The chairs are very nice straight backed and feel very nice on my back.

The placemats we just bought don't fit right on it so I will be taking some measurments and just making some, sometime.

I have not been doing any crafting at all which is very not like me, need to get my creative juices flowing again.

Hope everyone out there has a wonderful weekend! Jennifer and Katie are coming to visit on Sunday so we are excited.

Blessings,Joann

Easter here at our house

I am finally getting pictures and my thoughts up about our Easter. We had our entire family over for Easter. We had and Easter Egg hunt and then a nice lunch of ham, baked potatoes and salad.

Prior to Easter Sunday Roger had been doing lots of work to our backyard, I do most of the supervising and he does most of the physical work. He is a very hard worker and whatever he does it's always done as perfect as he can.

We bought reed fencing to put along the back fence and I think it looks real nice. Roger also bought some stain for the wooden fences and the planters in the back yard. I picked out the color of barn red.

Here is what the back fence and yard look like now~





He also managed to get the entire back patio pressure washed and cleaned up real nice.

Here are pictures of the back patio~








Here are some pictures of the day, it turned out to be not a sunny day but cold and cloudy so we had a fast egg hunt and then we ended up eating inside because it was only in the 50's. It is very hard to find seating for 18 people in our house even when we set up a table in the living room.

Easter baskets for Katie and Dylan~



Katie in her pretty Easter dress~


Dylan and Katie with their Easter baskets~



Jennifer just had to take Mandy out for the Easter egg hunt~





Living room with people at Easter~




Saturday night before Easter Sunday we went looking to buy some chairs for our table, we only had the benches and I was missing a nice chair to sit in. We found a nice set in black that ended up costing not that much more for a new table and chairs than just buying the chairs by themselves. I like both the color (black), the shape of the table (square) and the nice back on the chairs.


Our weather here has been undecided I guess it can't decide wether to be cold or warm, cloudy or sunny, rain or sun. This coming week it is supposed to be back cold and raining again. I wasn't totally ready for the hot weather so this is perfectly fine with me.

I was reading an article that I had printed out form the Revive our hearts website and it was talking about "joy" I really liked what it had to say and I have really been praying about being blessed with joy again and being able to do things with joy in my heart. Too many people and things had taken over my heart with bad thoughts but I am now taking my heart back and filling it with joy. JOy that comes from my wonderful relationship with the Lord. I want to be able to once again find joy in doing things around the home as a home keeper would do. Joy in serving my husband and making him happy and most of all doing all I do for the Glory of God.

Blessings,Joann

A Real tough week for me...to Blog or not to Blog???

This past week and today are real tought for me to get through. My brother was killed in a car accident hit by a drunk driver on March 15th of 2002 and my father passed away on March 11th of 2007, at the age of 82. They both seem like it was just yesterday and I think of them both everyday.I have been having what seems like a rough year so far. Just don't think I am totally enjoying life right now. Some days I don't even feel like getting out of bed. I am trying very hard to find my joy right now and it just feels like it is just out of my reach. MY best friend knows what I have been going through and she always seems to know just what to say to make me feel better.As for my Titus 2 role as a keeper of my home, I am absolutely failing in a major way in this department of my life right now.I feel like I don't even have the right to have a blog named this because that is not who I am right now.I thought long and hard about keeping my blog or just stop blogging altogether. I have not made my final decision about this yet.I have made some wonderful friendships through my blog and I am so thankful to God for that.I even went as far as deleting this blog the other day but then realized that I still have a book review to post that I already have the book for and felt I needed to keep up my end of the bargain.So I will be posting that review in the next few days.After the book review post I will be doing a lot of thinking as to what to do next.

Blessings,Joann

Spring is coming!!!

Spring is getting closer and closer and though my days go by very slow I can't believe it's already March!

I pulled these fabrics out of my stash and have made some decisions on what I would like to do with them.~

Spring fabrics~




This cute little tinkerbell fabric will be made into a little bag for Katie~



This totally boy looking fabric will be made into a little bag for Dylan~



And this gorgeous butterfly fabric will be made into a purse for my daughter Jennifer for her birthday in May~


I would like to get the little bags finished in time for Easter but don't know if that will happen or not.

On the butterfly fabric I will be outlining the butterflies with some embroidery.

I ordered an acrylic extension table for my sewing machine the other day, and it should be here sometime next week. I ordered the 24"x24", it was the largest they had and the one a size down was only $10 cheaper. I can't wait to get it. I am not a quilter and have no intentions on making anything as huge as an actual quilt but I would like to make a few small wall hangings and think this table will come in handy for that purpose. Anyone out there who has one please leave a comment and let me know if you like it or not.

Roger is still working but we believe his job will be coming to an end in the near future. When he first applied for this job we knew it was only a temporary job, they said 6-9 months. He started working there May 19th, 2009 so we are just thankful that he has had the job this long.We are not happy that he will be without a job but we are prepared for it, we have been saving as much as we can from every paycheck knowing that we may need to live off of our savings for what could turn into a very long time.

Matthew called the other day and he gave me some dates for their timeline for deployment. I am glad that he has some actual dates but it also makes it much more real and for sure going to happen. His Deployment window is August 24-September 9 and he will either be gone for 12-15 months or 15-18 months, either way it's a whole long time.

Jennifer and her husband Chris recently made a trip to Arizona for Chris' grandpa's funeral. They took the kids with them and they had a nice little vacation out of it. The kids really liked driving down there.

Mandy is doing very good. I am kind of suprised at how well she is doing with the housetraining. She sleeps all through the night without whining or crying and is up when we get up at 5:30AM. I take her out every two hours and she seems to be getting the hang of it. I crate her at night and during the day she is in her little pen in the living room, then a few times a day I let her out to play with MOlly and us and she seems to like that a lot. Her and Molly get along pretty good. They even share toys, Molly does seem to get tired of her constantly jumping on her back and trying to bite her ears and legs but overall they do real good together. Tomorrow Mandy will be 14 weeks old. I took her to the vet for her 3 month shot on Monday and I also weighed her and she is now 3 pounds so she is eating good.

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend, we have a nice sunny day today and the temperature is very warm compared to the rest of this week.

Blessings,Joann

Today's book of the Bible is ......

I always think things happen for a reason. When I went to pick a book of the Bible today I picked up the cup and turned it upside down and shook it a little to mix up the pieces of paper when I was done shaking one piece fell to the ground. The first book was chosen for me!! I did not pick it out it just was to be and that book is John now how appropriate is that??

I know this system will have it's flaws as one person mentioned about one book maybe not making sense if you haven't read the one before but I figure it this way at least I am reading something and in time I think it will all come together.



So I promised some pictures, here we go

The books printed on my bright snazzy paper~



The book titles all cut up~




The cool cup~




All in the cup~



And of course I couldn't post without another picture of our little baby Mandy, she is one week older and that puts her at 12 weeks old(When we bought her they said she was around 9 weeks old but I looked up on a calendar and they were off a bit, she was born on NOv. 29, 2009) she is now 2 pounds 11 ounces so she is gaining weight good. She is doing okay with house training but some days I feel like a failure at it. Roger keeps telling me it's because she is still so young but I just want to make sure I am doing it right. She is full of energy and Molly has been very tolerant of her and they seem to get along very good so far. We usually let them play together every evening for a while and so far so good. Mandy is very snuggly and loves to lay on your chest or up on your shoulder.
~





I am feeling so much better this week than last. Being sick and having a puppy to take care of all day is not fun at all. I am trying to stay healthy but seems like I have been sick off and on for the past 2 or 3 months.