May 13, 2011

Another post of random information dotted intermittently with photos that may or may not have anything to do with what I'm writing about.  I've decided to stop trying to come up with clever post titles for my randomness.

 

• First off, hapy birthday to my wonderful mother-in-law!!  We're having a badminton tournament tonight to celebrate her birthday, how fun is that?  From what I hear she used to be a tennis superstar and we had to dumb it down to badminton so the rest of us could hang with her.  I really am so thankful for my loving and supportive in-laws.  We're blessed to have them!

• We’re closing in on the last week of school and I’ve got mixed feelings about it. We’ve decided that A will go back to school next year mostly for her younger sister’s sake (she kind of got lost in the shuffle this year) and there’s a small part of me that will miss being A’s teacher. I like watching her learn and I like learning a lot of this stuff myself (its seriously pathetic how much of the first grade curriculum was basically brand new information to me: some of the rules of phonics, “Ohhh! So that’s why we pronounce that that way!”, things we’ve learned in science: telling my husband, “I never realized that fruit comes from flowers!”, geography I’m just now figuring out, the list goes on!  Who knows what I could learn in second grade!) I’m not all sad about it though, I’ve already got a list a mile long of projects I hope to get done around my house next year when I have my time back and I’m super excited about the one-on-one time Miss C and I will get that I think she has been seriously missing this year.  Its just weird knowing this season is coming to an end already.

 

• I am cracking up at my baby boy lately. His little personality is blossoming and I love it and struggle with it all at once. He thinks he’s such a big boy already. The kid wants to play sports already. There was a free throw competition going on for like eight year old kids recently and L found a ball along the sidelines and was toddling out onto the court with it (someone was talking when he was on baby-duty and I won’t mention who) and got himself right up underneath that basket and you should have seen the look of determination on that little man’s face…he seriously thought he could get in on the action. Again last night we were at a park and there was a group of high schoolers playing volleyball and my boy threw a fit when I wouldn’t let him out there to show his stuff. You can be sure that his daddy is thrilled and can’t wait to see where this is headed.

 

• I’ve been reading “Forgotten God” by Francis Chan and its given me a lot to think about. It’s a book on the Holy Spirit and how we’ve kind of set him on the shelf in a lot of American Christianity. We don’t take Him up on the power He’s offered to unleash in and through us because we’re scared in many cases of abuses of that power. This book has hit home in a lot of ways. Its made me so much more aware of the fact that the Sprit of God dwells in me! How should my life look if that is true? One quick little story about this. I was driving home by myself about a month ago and was thinking about a wedding I was shooting that was coming up. For some reason I was super nervous about this particular wedding and I had really been wallowing in self-doubt about my photography abilities for a while. I was getting that frozen in insecurity feeling and was just dreading this wedding. I started praying about it and telling God how insecure I felt about all that I don’t understand about photography and how I just felt so ill-equipped to be asking other people for money for doing it. As I was praying, I felt God remind me of what I had been reading about the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit could open my mind and help me understand things that in my humanity I might not be able to grasp myself. It was like He was saying, “Ask me for help to understand what you don’t know. Ask me to physically allow your brain to function beyond its normal capacity”. That sounds so funny now and I realize there are so many other capacities that I need help with brain function in. “Uh, God? Could you help my brain to stop farting? That would be great”. But it was like an "a-ha!"  moment and I just felt this peace wash over me. And what is so cool is that He totally did. I felt like He guided me to some things that better helped me prepare for the wedding and reinforced a lot of things I already knew. The wedding was a couple of weeks ago and I feel like it went really well. It was a good lesson for me that I can take even the most mundane, seemingly trivial things to Him and He will walk me through them.  Who knows what kind of power He will unleash in me if I will just seek Him and ask for it. God is so good!

 

• We’ve got this cool little courtyard space at our house that has been nothing but dirt and weeds for the past three years that we’ve lived here. We finally set aside a little bit of money from our taxes this year to do something about it and I’m getting so anxious to get it done. Especially before it turns into a blazing inferno here and we’ll have to wait another six months to actually be out there. We’re struggling with how to go about getting it done though. We got one estimate that was waaaaayyy over what we were thinking we could afford (they would do a really amazing job though) and another guy came out and looked at it and then just never called us back. The third guy we called we’re having a hard time getting a hold of to give us the quote as well. I’m seriously contemplating just doing it ourselves, especially after seeing John and Sherry tackle their patio themselves. They made it look do-able and their budget, while still being a lot more than we had anticipated just for the pavers, is a lot more realistic than the other quote we got. The only problem is Brian and I are not really the diy types. I like trying to tackle small projects myself but I’m afraid since there’s stuff like being accurate involved, this might be over our heads. I don’t know, we’ll see. I just want to get this show on the road already!

 

• Oh yeah, one final thing. I wanted to give an update on The Shred. I did the full 30 days and I don’t think I dropped a single pound. Might have something to do with the fact that I probably ate back every single calorie that I burned. BUT I did lose some inches and I feel more toned, especially in my shoulders and arms and maybe even in my waist so I feel good about that. Mostly I’m proud of myself for doing all 30 days—I did at least 5 days workouts every week, sometimes even 6 so I was happy with that. Now, I’m still doing 5 days a week and alternating between the Shred Level 3 video and two of her other videos that I can’t think of the names of at the moment. They’re both 40 minutes long and are circuits as well. They’re actually quite a bit harder than the Shred so I feel like I’m accomplishing a lot to be working out as much as I am right now. Now if only I could get my eating under control as well. I need an eating plan that is does not feel mentally like a diet. I hate feeling like I’m restricting myself because it makes me so focused on food and I just count down the days until I can eat what I want again. I need a brain shift—something that’s going to flip a switch mentally for me.