Menu Plan Monday - 7.16

Monday: breakfast cassarole, fruit salad
Tuesday: tex mex macaroni surprise, grean beans
Wednesday: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, baby carrots
Thursday: wild rice & chicken cassarole, peas, salad
Friday: pizza
Saturday: leftovers or taco skillet if I need a back-up meal

Hosted by Org Junkie ... head over if you need more weekly inspiration!

Friday Felicities - 7.13

Things that make you happy ...
~ that the most horrendous trip to Walmart ever in the history of mankind with three girls is over
~ that no one was injured other than the small chunk of hair that N2 tore from N1's head
~ that the big girls are going to Grandma's tonight to spend the night
~ that I have a fun dinner planned for me and the husband (fun dinner = food that is not kid friendly)
~ that there is the possibility that we will go and wander around the bookstore together with baby E
~ that diet coke might be drunk at some point later today
~ that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet

Honor Your Husband - Week 4

Lately I've been working on something ... getting up for some quiet time in the morning before the rest of the house is awake. I set my watch alarm and the coffee maker for 6:00 a.m. and when they go off, I creep out of bed - trying my best not to disturb the baby in the moses basket next to our bed, or the girls in the room next door. I make a cup of coffee, adding whatever new flavor of cream that I'm trying out, and come out to my desk in our family room. I lay my Bible open across the desk and try and figure out where I left off yesterday. How handy my little read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year bookmarks are. : )

This is hard for me. I've struggled for years with setting aside time to read my Bible and study ... there are more "exciting" things to read, or I want to have the "perfect time" - no disturbances, hot coffee, maybe a cute coffee shop where I can journal and be uninterrupted by children for a couple hours.

That's not my reality. : ) And that's okay. However, putting off time invested in my relationship with the Lord is only going to be more and more detrimental in the long run. Whether I get a whole hour alone in the morning, or I end up reading my Bible while feeding my 10 week old, I just need to do it.

Now, why am I writing about this when this is supposed to be my Honor Your Husband post for the week? This is something that I've been thinking on for a couple of weeks now ... how can I be the best wife for my husband, one who puts God first and serves her family out of that relationship if it's only a casual Sunday-morning relationship at best? I am honoring my husband by making time with God a new focus and priority. It is changing my attitude and my heart about serving my husband - when I submit my sinful self to the Lord, I'm seeing a difference in how I choose to submit to my husband (and with what kind of attitude). : )

Head over to Christine's at Fruit in Season for more HYH posts and encouragement.

In response...

to those of you that asked about me making you an address book binder ...

I'm not ignoring you! : ) I've been swamped with life and girls and LAUNDRY. : ) Let me do some thinking and I'll let you know if I think I could do them and for how much.

Thanks for asking!

Honor Your Husband post hopefully to come sometime before this week is over!

Another fun project

... and super easy. The inspiration and instructions came from this site.







I got frustrated with never having enough room for all the info I wanted to list in my address book ... lines to short for email addresses, not enough phone lines (because everyone has a home phone, cell phone, work phone, etc.) and on and on ... so I made my own. Font is CK Marissa, one of my favorites.

You can click each photo to see larger in Flickr.

Menu Plan Monday - 7.9

Monday: mac & cheese for the kiddos (and Travis, he loves it); I'm supposed to have a girls' night out with friends
Tuesday: lasagna, salad
Wednesday: chicken stir fry, made with whatever miscellaneous veggies I can find in the freezer
Thursday: spaghetti, some veggie
Friday: pizza night
Saturday: I have no idea ... I'll go grocery shopping Thursday or Friday and restock then. :-)

Creative Questions...

I had a couple questions from this post that I put up on Saturday so I'll see what I can answer here. Some of my answers may still not explain very much, but I'll try. :-)

Lauren asked about the photo of the girls and how I did the photo effect. Let's just start with the fact that I am no digital photography expert. I am, however, and expert in clicking something in my photo program to try and then hitting undo if it doesn't look good. :-) That said, I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to play/correct/mess with my photos. Using that program I opened the picture up and first changed the picture color to sepia. Then I searched around in the different pre-made frame options in the program and picked a "rough masks" so the edged look all swishy and messy.

Lu asked about ideas ... I find them all over the place, but here are some of my recent favorites:

• Rebecca Cooper's book: Real.Life.Scrapbooking. It is excellent. She's a stay-at-home-mom who just wants to encourage folks with limited budget, time and energy to keep scrapbooking. Her pages are simple and beautiful. My layout of the girls was my own creation, but I have to say that I tried to pattern just the simplicity of her layouts.
• The inspiration for the baby announcement also was from Rebecca Cooper (she's a favorite blogger and scrapper of mine, can you tell?) :-) I tried to find her original announcement on her blog, but struck out or I'd post a link to her original creation. Then I just copied the same style for the baby shower invitation that I was working on, changing the style and text.
• For cards and invitations that I make for others, I get a lot of ideas from this magazine: Paper Crafts. I tend to simplify a LOT of their project because I just don't have the supplies that their designers have, and the friends that I design stuff for usually can't afford to pay what it would cost me in just supplies to make some of them. However, it is GREAT for inspiration.

That's just a start. Maybe I'll post more inspiration links in the future. Right now, it's time for some lunch round these parts. :-)

Creative Saturday

Birthday card ... duh.















A scrapbook page of the girls ... I love how it turned out.




















Card for a friend having a boy.

















E's baby announcement ... mailed about 3 weeks ago.




















Baby shower invitations I worked all.day. on. 72 of them - finally done!

Friday Felicities - July 6

Things that make you happy ... from the mind of Nattie Rose.

• fresh raspberries
• food, hot from the grill
• healthy babies (2 month appt. yesterday: 11 lbs., 14.8 oz.; 23 inches long -75% all the way around)
• making plans for some preschool fun with N1 for this fall
• learning things about myself
• a new recipe (posted below)
• Back to the Future - what a trip down memory lane watching those movies!
• fireworks from the back of a pickup
• uninterrupted sleep

Chicken Pepper Pasta

4 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, cut into thin wedges
1 medium red bell pepper, cut into strips
1 medium yellow bell pepper, cut into strips
1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh garlic
1-1/2 cups cooked chicken (from freezer), thawed and chopped or cut into strips
1 tsp dried tarragon leaves
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground pepper
8 ounces uncooked dried vermicelli (extra thin spaghetti)
1 cup Mozzarella Cheese, shredded
1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese (found bagged in the dairy section)
3/4 cup half & half

Prepare vermicelli according to directions and drain in a colander in the sink. Melt butter in large skillet and add onion, bell peppers, and garlic. Cook on medium high until vegetables are tendercrisp. Remove vegetables from pan and add chicken, tarragon, salt, and pepper. Cook until chicken is hot. Add vegetables, mozzarella, half and half, and Parmesan cheese to chicken. Reduce heat and cook on low until cheese is melted. Rinse vermicelli in hot water until noodles are warm. Add vermicelli to pan and toss gently. Serve warm.

Honor Your Husband - Week 3

I'm late this week on posting my update for the Honor Your Husband challenge hosted by Christine @ Fruit in Season. Life is in full swing here - complete with ant issues (ick!), girls that won't nap, and laundry like you wouldn't believe. That, and I've been wrestling what to post for this week's update! It seemed that once I posted my thoughts on contentment last week, I immediately began a battle that I struggled with all. week. long. Rebellious and contentious thoughts. Anger. Frustration. You name it. Both at life in general and toward that certain someone. Not so much in the success department.

However (and isn't God funny this way?), this morning I picked up my Bible to read a chapter in Philippians before my girls got up. I've read these verses before, but they JUMPED off the page at me this morning:

Not that I speak from want for I have learned to be content in whatever
circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also
know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned
the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and
suffering need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens
me.

And my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches
in glory in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4.11-13, 19

Timely, eh? More to work on in this area, most definitely.

My goals last week were:

• to continue to think before I speak.
• something practical ... remember to fill the coffee pot and set the timer EVERY NIGHT for a week so that I'm not doing it in the morning and there is hot coffee ready for Travis to take to work. (Yeah on this one!)
• have a good attitude this week as I have a lot of evening kid duty by myself this week. Travis and our oldest are doing VBS this week, and so I'll have the two littles all by myself every evening and then a hyper/exhausted/filthy 3.5 year old to wind down when they get home. (Did pretty good on this one...)
• read my Created to Be His Helpmeet book and study verses on contentment. (Um, not so good here ... but then again, I haven't read much of anything in the last week so it's not that I put it aside for something entertaining. Will work on this this week.)

And my new challenge (just adding one):

• Work on improving my mind (and memory) so that I can have intelligent conversations with my husband.

I hope I'm not the only one who struggles with this one. I feel like I spend so much of my time immersed in diapers, bottles and the like, that when my husband asks me a question about how his Sunday School lesson for the youth went, I can't even remember what he talked about ... and I was sitting there the whole time! I need to be better about (1) paying attention and also (2) stretching my mind and growing in other areas besides that of playmate and chief diaper changer. Please hear me, not that those areas aren't important, but they so are, but as a wife, I think part of my responsibility is to also be an intelligent conversationalist with my husband and right now I'm not. :-) I want him to come to me when he has big thoughts to think and discuss and not find better conversation opportunities elsewhere. Know what I mean?

For more on this, visit Christine (our gracious host) at Fruit in Season.

Menu Plan Monday - July 2

Monday: turkey burgers, broccoli w/ parmesan, fries
Tuesday: stirfry chicken and veggies
Wednesday: steak, baked potatoes, roasted squash
Thursday: leftovers
Friday: pizza
Saturday: chicken enchilada casserole (crockpot), salad

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