Growing Together A November to Remember

Anastacia_Greyhound_2015November 5, 2015, I stepped out of my comfort zone and traveled by Greyhound bus to Nashville, Tennessee for a meeting with the Ask God Today Ministries team. I’ve been writing with Ask God Today for about a year now and I’m amazed at how God has grown me through being a part of this team. 

I wrote more about that meeting over on today’s Warm Hearted Wednesday Link up which I hope you will check out and join if you have something you would like to share. Link up parties are a great opportunity to meet other like minded bloggers and to share your posts with others. The link up will be open for a week so if you see this a couple of days after it started you can still join in. 

You're Beautiful, Mom!The rest of November just flew by quickly. I am about to launch a new book. If you like the stories I tell about my children and the things they say and do then you’ll really like this book. It’s entitled “You’re Beautiful, Mom! Lessons I’ve Learned from My Children.”

If you would like to help me by being an early reader let me know either by email or in the comments. I will email you an early copy of my book. Some of the things I ask is that you help me catch mistakes if you happen to see any and if you like my book share it with your friends and family once it is available for purchase. 

In return you will receive a free digital copy of my book along with an update to it once it is in it’s final corrected form. You will also be kept in the loop as to the progress of my book and the latest news from my Rock Solid Family.

That has been my work in progress for November. Another thing that happened in November was my agreeing to help coach one of my children’s team in Upward Basketball. I never really imagined myself as Coach Mom before this year. If you remember I also coached in Upward Soccer. Thankfully it’s been the youngest age group so far.

LandofLightsThen I took a break from it all during the week of Thanksgiving. I seriously enjoyed my vacation time. We started our Thanksgiving by visiting my grandmother for Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday morning. Then we went to my parents’ home by way of the Land of Lights in Athens. We enjoyed some special time with my family. 

My husband and I celebrated our 19th anniversary together on Saturday. We were married Thanksgiving day, November 28, 1996. It was interesting to think about the fact that I was 19 when I married Scott and we’re now celebrating our 19th anniversary. Of course my birthday is in December so I was just about to turn 20 so I guess I can’t quite say I’ve been married longer than I was single. That time will come soon enough. And now you know my age. 🙂

wedding2Scott turned 21 the August before we married. (Now you know how young he is too.) I had a fun time teasing him after his birthday that he robbed the cradle because a 21 year old married a 19 year old. Of course I didn’t acknowledge the point that we were only that far apart by a few months. If we hadn’t moved our wedding date up a month I would have been 20 but that would have ruined the fun. 🙂

I really like our Thanksgiving anniversary. We usually celebrate our anniversary on Thanksgiving Weekend. This year Scott reserved us a hotel room. Before we stopped at the hotel he bought me a new coat and I got him a new electric razor. We bought ourselves some food and reminisced over those early years and how young we were. 

It was funny how many memories we have that we keep shaking our heads and exclaiming, “We were just kids!” It’s nice that we can look back at many of those past mistakes and laugh. Everything in life is a growing experience. I wonder how many things we’ll laugh about 19 years from now when we look back at our time right now.

If we have grown this much in our first 19 years together I can only imagine how much more we will grow in the next 19. We never plan to stop growing and learning. In fact we are still looking to go to Argentina in the near future. I know we will have some major growth going on when that day comes. 

Do you have some special Thanksgiving memories you would like to share? 

Feel free to share them in the comments and if you want to share with even more people you can share your post in our Warm Hearted Wednesday link up, where our Ask God Today MinistriesContributing Writers and followers can read your post as well.

I’ll be sharing more about my book in an upcoming post.

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Learning to Read Through the Stages

Our older 3 children all have pen pals that they write to every month.

The other day they were writing letters, while their younger brothers were pretending to write letters as well.

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My 5 year old wrote this letter. He asked me to read it. So I made up what it said.

“Dear Mommy, you are the best mommy in the whole wide world…”

He started erasing it, “No! No! No! Mommy you need to learn how to read!”

Ha! I laughed but informed him that the real problem was that he needed to learn how to write.

My husband and I were realizing the other day that we have kids in just about every stage. Here in about 6 years we probably will have kids in every stage as our eldest will be old enough to move out on his own.

Wow! Where has the time gone?

Meanwhile we’re continuing to learn.

This past week we’ve dealt with everything from teething, potty training, to puberty.

My solution to all these issues? Give the kids more work!

Yes. They might not like me now but I hope they will appreciate all this work when they’re grown with families of their own.

For now I’ll just keep on praying for each one of them and dream of the days when we start having grandchildren come over. My husband and I can’t hardly wait until we can spoil those grandchildren real good and send them home. I’m beginning to understand this spoil the grandkids thing. 🙂

How has your week been? Do you have days that you struggle with the new stages your children are going through? Feel free to share with me in the comments.

I have had a lot on my plate lately and haven’t had much time at all to post on all the social media sites that I normally frequent. After all I do have a Rock Solid Family to build.

This blog will be the place I’ll be doing the most writing and I’ll do my best to answer your comments here on my blog as soon as I possibly can.

If you know someone that might benefit from our lives feel free to share this blog with your friends.

And if you haven’t already, sign up for my free email updates in order to not miss a single post.

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Aftermath of Ike

Here is a picture as promised of some of the damage caused by Hurricane Ike. In this picture you can see a tree down, the church’s steeple twisted and moved, the power line is down, and there was a stick impressively harpooned into the ground. Yes, those are the trees roots you see. It’s amazing how much damage can be done by a hurricane. We have other more detailed pictures of some of the damages but I thought this one made an impressive over all view of the damages.

We stayed with my parents for 2 weeks. When we arrived home we had to find a way to park in our front yard. The entire yard was covered with branches. We came home expecting the power to be out for only a couple of days, it turned out being closer to a week and a half. We were really happy when the electric company finally showed up in our front yard. It’s funny how much you appreciate something after you have been without it for awhile. We really appreciate electricity having gone that long without it.

The kids are doing well. We were doing our lessons over at the church during the week that we didn’t have electricity. We would go over there for breakfast and then I would get the older involved with a lesson, while I figured out what to do with the younger two. It was fine but it is a lot easier to keep them out of trouble in our own house.

It amazes me how much there was for my 3 year old to displace. I walked into a room to get something and saw a large stack of books where she cleared the bottom two bookshelves that she could reach. I, of course, commanded that she put those back on the shelf neatly. Later I found half the church sign numbers moved and set messily on another table. I told her to put those back and she said, “O.k. I’ll put my money back.” Then on another occasion she had pulled all the coffee cup holders out of one of the kitchen cabinets and piled them on a table. I first turned it into a lesson for her by having her separate the cups by colors and then count how many cups of each color there were. Then I had her put them back. That was only some of the things she found to unorganized.

Now that we are able to do lessons here again, I feel like I’m able to keep a better eye on all the children. At least, here I know what she could possibly be doing in another room. There aren’t as many surprises. I can also keep a better eye on Jonathan this way as well.

I have a lot to do this month. I plan to put some of the things the kids are doing in homeschool next time I write. We’ve been pretty busy. I’ll try to get some pictures of them doing some of their lessons. Until then…

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