Another day off...

Not much going on around here today. Today is another day off. So far I'm working on laundry again and I've almost got that done. I've also painted my nails and caught up on some emails and things. This week I work Tuesday and Wednesday and then not until Monday and Friday of next week. This weekend is the church's family camp out weekend so it should be a good weekend to have a long weekend, but hopefully I can find a few more things to do!!
Oh well if nothing else I'll catch up on movie watching and I can always use the stitching/knitting time!

Wonderful weekend!

What a beautiful Sunday! A nice sunny day, about 80 degrees with just a little breeze!

We enjoyed a nice Sunday service, Pastor D was preaching and he spoke a little about the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant to give a bit of context to the passage that he was preaching from in I Samuel 4 and it was especially exciting to me because that is what I am reading about in Exodus right now. He helped me to understand a couple of things that I was having a bit of difficulty with and I learned some new facts and he didn't even know it! I emailed him a little thank you earlier this afternoon and explained to him why I appreciated his message even more.

After church I went with B to the Art Show in the park just off the highway and held and turned pages of music for her as she played the piano for a little atmosphere music for a half an hour. They paid her ten dollars and she split it with me. That was kind, I just enjoyed doing it and listening to her play!

Otherwise I have spent a nice quiet afternoon at home doing some more Bible reading. I made it up through chapter 26 in Exodus and needed a bit of a break so I went back to my reading in Matthew 19. I am really enjoying my new study Bible and all the notes it has! The only problem is that it's taking me a lot longer to read as I am reading the notes and jotting notes of interest to me, and words that I need to look up in my notebook! I am getting a better understanding of some verses though, so it is worth it!

Now, I'll leave you with a few pictures from our weekend from my cell phone:

Walking home from the park on Friday! Miss A and Mr. T holding hands....she calls Mr. T and his brothers "her boys"!
Tonic Sol-Fa an acapella group that we went to see Saturday night in a neighboring town. Some friends had extra tickets and I had everything caught up so we went and we really enjoyed it! They have been seen on the Today show and are up for some Emmys! Their harmonies were great and we were especially impressed with the bass, he could get so low! It really sounded almost like they had some background music, but you could tell it was their voices...they did some really cool things. They were alot of fun too, they picked on one guy in the front in a Hawaiian shirt for quite a bit of the show and the guy really fed into it too. He even bought the guys bottles of water while they were on stage! It was a great family show! We bought one cd and the guys were kind enough to autograph it afterwards!

Quiet weekend?!

My unplanned day off on Thursday was very productive. I finally caught up with quite a few things, and as I thought the only thing that I was not able to check off my list of things to do was to watch The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, which is not a big deal, I will have plenty of time to watch it. Looking at my schedule I only work Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.
My day was not without drama though, I had just put the last load of laundry in and was sitting down to eat something at about 7:30 that night when I got a phone call asking what was going on at church and why there were firetrucks out there. I had no clue and took off driving like a mad woman....SO thankful that I didn't get a ticket!! I was able to speak to a police officer who told me that there was a gas leak at a neighboring business and they were just parked in the parking lot. Whew!
I ended up with the whole crew for a while yesterday. They were all good and we spent the morning at the park letting them run off some energy.
We went out for supper with some friends as a repayment for some work that K had done on their computer and went out for root beer and vanilla ice cream after we had hung out and caught up for a while. We decided to go on a drive instead of heading right home afterwards and we were both so tired we went to bed before 10pm! I even slept through until 8:30 this morning!!
K had to work so I cleaned house and did a load of laundry while I waited for him to get home. He finally got home around one and we've just been hanging around the house since doing some blog and Bible reading. We are planning on heading out to a neighboring town to a concert tonight, we may head out a little earlier if things go well, the town is having a big celebration this weekend and there is alot going on around town to check out.
Hope you all are having a great weekend!!

Day off take two

I ended up with another day off today. Miss A, I-man, and C's Mom was fired from her job today. Too bad I didn't know earlier, I could have gone to the waterpark with K and the youth group! Oh well, no one wants to see me in a swimsuit anyway haha!
I have gotten alot done here around the house, I'm even one load away from catching up with the laundry! It's a miracle haha! Really my day has been pretty boring but productive. The only thing that I most likely won't be able to check off my to do list is to watch The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe. Maybe I will watch that Saturday morning, I think K has to work anyway.

Enjoying a great day off!

Logger Louie

The Logger Dog
The field

The baseball game last night was great! The LaCrosse Loggers beat the Green Bay Bullfrogs

8-4. It was alot of fun just to hang out with friends! The trip there was a bit stressful since the boys Dad was a bit later picking them up, but once we got there we had a great time! They had lots of little fun things going on between each inning and it was just a good time. C and I agreed that we would love to go back for another game. It's just too bad it isn't closer, it is quite a drive to get there!

I was reminded of a depressing thought last night thought...no PowerPoint for three weeks! It's a long story but it includes two trips and our yearly Family Camp/Outdoor Service/Baptism/Back to School Picnic. It's a good thing that I have four radio messages to type from cd (no or almost no notes for all four) and the hymnal index project to keep me busy! I'm also down to about three weeks left of teaching Sunday School. I'll miss it, but more and more I am thinking that I am ready for the break and excited about how much I will grow being under the teaching of the Ladies' Sunday School class.

I've been enjoying my day off today; I slept in (that felt great!), gone to Wal Mart, cleaned up and organized some things around the house, and I'm getting ready to go to a friend's place for my Zone Therapy treatment! I can't wait, I have been so stiff and had some pain and swelling in my bad foot and even some in my good foot lately, I am so glad that my appointment is today!! Not to mention the sleep that I will get! I sleep like a rock for three days or so after a treatment! Hopefully it will do some more good with these allergies too, I tell ya they have started in with a vengance! And of course being off my schedule today I forgot to take my allergy meds! K says it improves my mood too haha!

I have been looking at a couple of the comments left on some of my posts with pictures and been talking a little bit with K and we both came up with the same idea about the same time...and we thought that we would throw it out to you who are reading my blog, the few of you that there are :)! Anyways here it is....we wondered if anyone would be interested in seeing the sights around our town? It would give another side to one of our favorite things to do together, drive around and take pictures! We thought it would be fun (K is always asking "Did you post that picture on your blog?"), but if no one is interested we don't want to bore you! Let me know what you think!

Finally, the pictures I promised!

Teddy before his haircut
Teddy after his haircut (with Casey)
The view out my front door after they had pushed the branches up into the yard.
More branches down just down the street.
Tree down behind the church and laying in the neighbor's bean field.

K was picking on Casey and used Tater's favorite superman cape for a photo op!

Soooo happy that it's naptime today! I think that the boys were up later than usual last night. Their Mom's brother is back home from Iraq and L and T went with Grandma and Grandpa to pick him up and Mom, Dad, and Tater joined them at the house when they got back.

They have been good today, but the tears have flown a little more freely and we have been just a little more short tempered than normal. Tater fell asleep almost immediately after I turned the naptime music on and T took a bit longer but crashed too! L had some quiet time and then the other family that I do daycare for called and wanted to take him swimming with them so off he ran! He will be good and worn out for Mom and Dad tonight!

Last night we found out that my brother's fiance will be deployed to Iraq within the next 30 days. This changes their wedding plans, they had December 12th chosen as a date, but now she won't be back in the states until maybe May.

After the kiddos leave this afternoon K and I are headed to a minor league baseball game. I am sort of excited to go, not for the hour drive, but it sounds like it will be alot of fun.

Blog Hop~Favorite Kids Picture

This is my niece Miss B. I took this picture about a month ago when my sister in law, S, and her new boyfriend came up to visit. We went to a neighboring town and went to some parks and some of the group did some hiking. Miss B was having fun and playing in and near the little stream in this park.

Summer storms!

I really meant to post the pictures of Teddy before and after his haircut Friday, but we had a really big storm and ended up losing power for most of the day! About noon things started clouding up and the wind picked up. It started getting darker and darker and it started pouring and hailing and the sky was so black! We lost power and I looked out the front door and we had two big limbs from the tree out in the front yard in the middle of the road. It took me seven calls to get through to the police department to let them know that there were branches blocking the road ( I live on the north end of our main street and only a block or so from our hospital). After the branches fell the street started to flood (we always have some water that collects on our road, but this was much more!) the neighbor across the street started to walk across and the water was up to her knees! The neighbors worked and worked at clearing the storm drains and finally they were cleared enough to let water through, and the rain stopped and the water receded. I had water almost up to my front door and a river running through the back yard that took the kids small playhouse about ten feet!
Tater had fallen asleep just before it all started, and thankfully he slept through it all. The branches falling did wake up T and L doesn't nap so I had two boys to keep entertained with no power. We dug out the Playdough and that kept them pretty busy. They did also like looking out at the branches and watching the city workers come and push them up in the yard with a front end loader after things calmed down.
There were lots of branches down around town. Big ones at the hospital, it actually hit the hospital from what we could see, but it hit a brick area so it didn't look like there was much damage. A house a block behind us had a large branch land on the roof and did some damage. A lady was out in the park and had a branch land on her and it broke her leg. A friend of ours from church was driving home to be with his kids since his wife wasn't home and a branch landed on his car. He was ok, but it did do some damage to the car.
Tater was funny when his Mom came to pick him up, he had no idea what had gone on outside and when he saw the branches in our yard he looked at me and said "Holy cow!!!"
We finally got power back around 4 and it stayed on for a half an hour and it went off again. We left for church just before 5 (we had a wedding on Saturday and the rehearsal was Friday!!) but the power was back on when we got home. The church still had power, although it did have a large pine tree fall into the neighbor's bean field!
I didn't get a whole lot of pictures, but I did get a few. I will post what I have for you soon, and the pictures of Teddy and his haircut, I promise!!

Still trying to catch up....but I'm making progress!

I feel like the to do list is getting the best of me today! I check one thing off and another gets added! I'm getting alot done, just not as much as I would like! I don't think that there is anything going on tonight, so I should have more time to catch up, I would like to watch The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe tonight...I just finished reading the book and I thought that it would be a good time to watch the movie again. I have also found that there is a big debate over which order the books of the Chronicles of Narnia should be read, I didn't realize it until I bought this book, which has all of the books in one. A friend was looking at it and told me that they were in the "wrong order". I looked more and found a note that says: "...The books are presented here according to Lewis' preferred order.....". I am reading it through in the order that my friend says that I should read it first, the order that corralates with the movies so far and read them in the book's order another time.

My miniature poodle, Teddy, went in for his haircut this afternoon. When he gets back I will post some before and after pictures. We have tried to cut his hair and he growls and bites, but apparently for the groomer he is very good. My Dad even tried wearing a pair of insulated leather gloves once and still ended up with teeth marks on his hand!

I've crossed a couple more things off my list, but don't know how much more I will get done, we are supposed to go out with some friends to the new Mexican restaurant in town. We enjoyed it the other night we went out...it was crowded, but the food was good!

Hope everyone is having a great day! I'd better keep moving or I definately won't get through my list!

More pictures!

My fashionable bandaid after I cut my thumb....you can see the nail color I wrote about in an earier post...NYC East Village

A view of the fish hatchery

An empty tank in the fish hatchery. We've never seen it empty before!

A view of the field behind our church

The mysterious rubber boots. This is where they have sat all winter/spring/into summer and no one seems to know who they belong to!

Behind our church

Catching up and a few pictures

I am still working on editing some of my pictures from the last couple of weeks in Photoshop, but I will start showing you a few so I don't end up with a HUGE post of pictures!
I'm also still trying to catch up on laundry and things around the house after our week of "vacation". Laundry is getting there and I sent out a bunch of birthday and anniversary cards this morning. I still have to clean the house and we have prayer meeting tonight and wedding rehearsal Friday and a wedding on Saturday. K is doing the sound/video for it and I usually just run around and help with whatever needs to be done.
Anyway....that's all the "fun" around here. Hope everyone is having a great day!
One of K's marigolds

A lily around the birch tree

A few of the roads we came across on our drive


I'll post more, maybe later this afternoon if everyone sleeps!

Blog Hop~Favorite Recipe

It's time for another Blog Hop! I had a difficult time picking out a favorite recipe...I am still learning alot about cooking but this has been one of our favorites!
Bubble Pizza
1/2 pound ground beef
1(30 ounce) jar spaghetti sauce
2 tubes refrigerator biscuts
2 cups mozzarella cheese, shredded
2 cups cheddar cheese, shredded
Optional toppings: onions, olives, pepperoni, mushrooms, green peppers...

Brown beef, frain fat, add the spaghetti sauce and the refrigerator biscuts (cut into quarters first) and any other desired toppings. Pour into a greased 9 x 13 pan. Bake in a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes. Add cheeses over top, then bake another 10 minutes longer. Let stand 5 minutes before serving.

Hey there!

VBS is now over :(. It was a great week and a very tiring one! I had 6th graders. K was the sound/video/snack quality control guy. K and I also had most of the week off, I worked on Monday. We finished up some projects at church during the day...river rock around some new areas of cement where plants won't grow, fixing the flood lights that are around the church, and getting the new sign set up.
I am working on editing some of my pictures and should have a massive photo post coming up for you very soon!
Hope you all are doing well, I'm off to find my pillow!

Blog Hop~July 14

This week's blog hop is difficult....hmmm let's see 3 things you didn't know about me....
1.)I have lived in Iowa for my entire life. Actually I live an hour away from the town I was born in.

2.)I have to be able to hold on to a blanket to fall asleep. It doesn't necessary have to be covering me, but I have to be able to cuddle with it...also I have to be on my left side to fall asleep, a little bonus fact for you there.

3.)I love doing crafts right along with the daycare kids...hey, it's part of the reason I do daycare, I don't wanna grow up lol!

This week, on TUESDAY, 7/14/09, the theme is THREE THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT ME (or US). You can express this with photos, writing or a combination.

A better day!

K was a huge help in snapping me out of my mood last night! After the kids left we went for a drive to the fish hatchery in a neighboring town, where they also have a small, but beautiful garden of flowers, for me to get some pictures. Some of the flowers had already bloomed and gone, but I still got some beautiful pictures! I will post them along with a bunch that I have taken in the last week or so after I get them downloaded from the camera.
After the fish hatchery we headed to Wal Mart for a few things, and K spoiled me a bit with a rounded corner punch for my card making, a Veggie Tales dvd for the kids, and a new nail polish color. I'm all about the out of the ordinary colors! The one I picked out last night is N.Y.C.'s East Village. Hopefully I will get my nails painted tonight and I will snap a picture to show you too!
Getting a good night's sleep helped too, although I was woken up with a loud bang of thunder at one or two this morning, followed by Casey, the shih tzu, freaking out and trying repeatedly to jump on the bed with us! I think we both fell right back to sleep, so it wasn't too bad!
Today the kids have been so good! Only Miss A has had a time out (or two), and they have all gotten along so well, used polite words, cleaned up and worked together when I asked them to! The only downside to the day has been that I cut my thumb on a can of green beans while making lunch. Nothing a little Hello Kitty bandaid wouldn't cure! Lol it was either that or Transformers...that was all that was in the first aid kit downstairs!

It was all just a dream.....

I have been out of it all day today! I woke up to the most vivid dream, and it felt like my heart was being ripped out! In my dream it seemed like I was in another country, but really I could see our church parking lot and I was sitting on the steps to the Pastor's office with three kids that I didn't know and little Tater.
It seemed that there was some sort of fighting going on or war or something...and as I was sitting on the steps some people that I knew came to check on the children and say goodbye. Before I knew it a helicopter was there and I was supposed to put the kids including my Tater on the helicopter and I just knew that I would never see him again. I was sobbing and begging the men loading the helicopter to let me go along or to somehow keep me in contact with him. I tried explaining that I had him in my daycare since he was born and I just couldn't lose him. I could feel his little arms around my neck, hanging on for dear life as he did not want to leave me either. Just as I should have let him go I woke up.
That dream has hung on to me all day and I just can't shake it. I've been sort of sad and depressed all day over a dream! But it really felt real! Hopefully a good night's sleep tonight will help things look brighter tomorrow!

Quiet rainy day

That blog hop was fun! It's got me excited to show you some more of the pictures I have taken recently too! I am already looking forward to next weeks' hop!
Not much going on today, it's been cooler and raining off and on. I was supposed to go watch Big C play baseball, but because of the rain the game was cancelled. No kids until noon left me some time to catch up on some projects....VBS starts on Sunday and I have some typing work to do for the songs so we can show them over the projector during the assemblies. I got three out of the five songs done. Our theme this year is Surf'n God's Word. They have a sandcastle building contest planned, a game time with water balloons, some neat candles to make for crafts....we can't wait! I will have the group of kids that is going into 6th grade in the fall.
Tonight is a bridal shower for a friend at church. Hopefully we will have a good turn out. They are a newer couple to church and some people say they don't know them so they aren't sure they want to come.

Blog Hop - Favorite photo

It was so hard to choose a favorite photo! I love to take pictures and experiment with settings and things...sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. K and I love to just head out in the car and try to find roads that we haven't been on before and stop in random places and take pictures. This was taken on one of those trips.

Back again!

Well, it's over. I had the tooth pulled this morning. The worst thing was hearing the crown pop off when they first started pulling. The dentist said that she expected that to happen, but it was still not something you want to hear when someone is working in your mouth, it was LOUD! I'm not numb anymore, a bit sore, and still bleeding and changing the gauze, but I have definately felt worse! I could use a nap, but hey, that's every day!

Saturday we had a GREAT day! There was a bridal shower in the morning at church, C picked me up with her daughter in law at 9:30 and we all went together. After everyone left from the shower C and I called B, who was having a surprise anniversary party for her parents' 25 anniversary and C and I hung out at the church and helped because some of their kitchen help didn't come on time and they were running behind. We waited for B's parents to arrive and said a quick hello and goodbye and we were off to a Mark Schultz concert! They bought their son tickets for his birthday and they bought us tickets to go too! It was GREAT!! Mark would tell the story about how he came to write the song before he would sing it, very cool to hear, and he had a great sense of humor! If you are ever able to go and see him I highly reccommend it!

Our busiest part of the summer is now over and I hope to begin blogging more regularly again. I know some of you are taking breaks for the summer and because you have alot going on now....I hope we can "reconnect" again and catch up with each other!

Dentists....

I really did mean to come back here and post right away with some pictures and things from our crazy hectic schedule, but I was hit with something else before I could.
I woke up one morning with a sort of an ear ache and my mouth/jaw sort of sore which quickly turned into the mouth pain from you know where, pulsing and pounding with every heart beat!
Here begins problem number one...which dentist to call. The dentist that my parents took me to when I was a kid is no longer practicing...which I wouldn't have called him most likely anyway, I didn't like him....the dentist I went to a couple of times after K and I were married caused me alot of pain and I didn't like his personality....and the dentist I had been to one other time on the advice of a friend was more than a half an hour away and couldn't get me in for about a week! K remembered that there was a new dentist opening an office in town and we called them. Unfortunately they couldn't get me in until the next week either, but it was earlier than the other dentist could get me in and she suggested that I see my regular dr and get a prescription for some antibiotics.
I went in and got the antibiotics and that and four ibuprofen every six hours helped the pain, but that antibiotic did some funky things to my stomach, I tell ya! Lots of yogurt the last couple of weeks!
When I finally got in to the dentist she found that the dentist that I had gone to as a kid had essentially started a root canal and never finished it and never told me. He just told me that it was a deep cavity and he filled it and it should be fine. Well, a couple years later that tooth broke and I had to go to dentist number two and he said the root canal was finished and that he would repair it by putting a crown on it. Sounded reasonable to me at the time. Well, like I said, really the root canal had not been finished and with the crown all that "lovely" bacteria and things were trapped in there and it became infected. It is apparently quite infected, but I hadn't felt anything until now because dentist number one had removed the nerve. Yay! As the new dentist opened up the crown she found that it number one had alot of metal used, and two the filling that dentist number one had used was nothing that she had ever seen before...apparently bright blue!....and it is so filled that she can not perform the root canal. She referred me to an endodentist to have the root canal done telling me that this may not even save the tooth. I called to find out if the accepted our insurance the next day and I found out that they do not, that we have to pay the whole cost up front and that they would bill insurance to reimburse us some, but they may not reimburse anything. She asks me which number tooth it is, and she tells me for that number tooth the price for the procedure alone is $975!!! And I have to be seen at least once before that for examination! Yeah, I just have more than $1,000 laying around to hand to her no problem! So after another phone call to the new dentist it has been decided that I am going to have it pulled. Fun. This is the second tooth that I will have had pulled. The first one was the very last tooth on the left side, now it is the next to last on the right. I just hope this is the last! At least I now have a dentist I feel comfortable with and will go back to see for more than emergency visits! She was very kind and explained everything well to me and made sure I didn't feel a thing, at one point I felt a tiny poke and she numbed it some more so I didn't feel anything!
So for now I am being very careful, no pain today, but it was a bit sore yesterday...two more weeks and it will be pulled and it will be all over!