Happy Halloween!

Service

I wish I could share my story in it's entirity, but that would be totoally innapropriate. I just want to say that service is more important than any of us have any grasp of.

I was feeling down on myself yesterday, for what I knew to be very selfish reasons. At one point during the day I did something that needed to be done. What I didn't realize is that my actions were an act of service for more than one person. The thanks and gratitude I received lifted my spirits more than anything else in the world could have. Moral of the story? Serving others makes you happy.

Christ's life was one of service. I hope that I can make my life more like his.

BOO!

Did he scare you?

I love this season for so many reasons! One of them is the infinite amount of fun, festive treats I could bake! Unfortunately, my sugar supply is feeling low, so I haven't made as many fun treats as I would have liked to this October. I do have one more up my sleeve, so stay tuned.

If you're curious about my little ghosts, they are cooked meringue. (It took 2 1/2 hours to slow cook these babies!) After their stint in the sauna, I dipped them in chocolate and toasted coconut. Despite the long time to cook, they were super easy. Fool proof. And, my kids love them! Too bad I didn't make them for the kids. :) Oh well.

Making an Effort

It always makes me sad when I don't have somebodies blog to read. It seems to me that all of my friends are on similar blogging schedules, so I have 5 new updates to read one day, and then nothing for a week. Maybe I'm just too nosey, but I really do love reading people's blogs. So, I can't very well be sad when I haven't blogged lately, can I? I have no new funny stories to share, but I do have cute pictures of my kids!

We spend a lot of Saturdays at my mom's house, and all of these were taken there, two weeks ago.
Lizzy and Logan always get ice cream at Grandma's house. And apparently spaghetti sauce stains too.

Logan took this picture of me. I guess that's what I look like from his perspective.

I took this while balancing precariously on the swing and Lizzy on my lap. I've been looking at baby pictures of myself lately, and shockingly enough, my nose used to look like Lizzy's! I guess I've turned into more of a witch since then.

Always a must activity at Grandma's house: reading books. This particular book is of the prophets. Logan likes naming all the different prophets. James wants Logan to memorize the presidents of the United States next.

My cute angel!

Just kickin' it on the swings.

To my knowledge, this is the first time Logan has ever climbed a tree, so I had to document it!

Grandma is giving Logan a ride on the swings. I'm quite certain this wasn't comfortable for her. She just loves Logan that much.

Hopefully I'll have better anecdotes for you in the near future. In the mean time, settle with this. :)

p.s These picture are really making me miss the warm weather.

End in Sight

Our prophets have been counseling for a long time to get our food storage in order. We'll be the first to admit that we've been slow to get started. But, this year is different for us. We had already decided that we wanted to spend our Christmas money (we have generous parents) on food storage. Not even a month later, James' mom gave each of her kids their Christmas early. Money to spend ONLY on food storage. She even made little notebooks for each of our families that says how much we need to buy of everything. Very nice. We've taken inventory on everything we have, and we're proud to have a whole year on some things, 6 months on many things, and only 3 months on just a few things.
Logan is showing off all the food we bought with our Christmas money.

All of this food storage talk got me thinking one night. I told James that while the thought of Christs' return to the earth is very exciting, quite frankly, I'm scared to have to live through all of the turmoil that has been prophesied. Through the course of our discussion, we decided that, while James would rather be here for the second coming, he'll be in heaven with me when the time comes if that's what I would prefer. But, we still don't want to miss the big event! So, I'll be either one of the trumpet playing angels, or one of the singing ones. (I still can't decide.) And James will be charging forward, valiantly (and oh so handsomely) with sword in one hand, and the title of liberty in the other hand.

Tell me, do all married couples have discussions like this?

Let Them Eat Cake

'Nuff said.

Our House

I have a hard time falling asleep almost every single night, because I can't seem to turn my brain off. Last night my brain was obsessing about our house and how much work we've put into it to make it ours. Of course I've put these pictures in backwards, but you can deal with it, because it's my blog, and I screwed up. :) The latest project we finished was our garden.
This is only a partial view of this section of our yard. When we bought the house, this was all grass, but it didn't have a sprinkler system in it, and I figured it would serve it's purpose better as our garden. We dug up all the grass the first year we lived here and planted our garden in that horrible dirt. We've since put in all this bark and the raised beds. James also added an ingenious sprinkler system to that side of our yard.

Before the garden was the extra room in our house! When we bought the house, it was only a three bedroom house. It become increasingly clear to us that we are going to be in this house a long time, so James became more and more obsessed with the idea that he could build an extra bedroom, from nothing, above our living room. I'm so glad he did because we love our play room with the huge walk in closet!

About a year before we built the room, we remodeled our entertainment center unit thingy. This is the "after" shot.

This is the before.

A nice improvement, don't you think?

Putting the tile in our house was one of our very first projects. Oddly enough, this is the one that James was the most scared of. There was carpet under our dinner table, and that just did not jive with me. We ripped out all the linoleum in the house, and part of the carpet, and put in this tile.

Aside from these obvious projects, we also replaced the carpet in the whole house, put a ladder up into our attic and put down boards to walk on and store all of our "junk", we put hardware on all of our cabinets, and we painted, of course.

Of course, painting this whole wall was later a waste since this is where the new room went. But it was our first painting project in the house, and we were proud of it.

You can tell that we've put a lot of energy into making our house, OUR house. We've really enjoyed all of it. I often joke about hating our house because it's a measly 1500 square feet, we owe about $40,000 more on it than we bought it for (due to the tanking economy, not our own stupidity(though that is arguable)) and we hate the HOA that is tied in with living here. But, I got a wake up call a couple of days ago.

James and I are forging forward into an investment venture. It involved meeting with a financial guru, of sorts, to give us some advice on how to get started. He laid out two different plans for us and the first one involved us renting out our house. I've always thought that I would like to move into a bigger house, with no HOA, but when he suggested that we move, I immediately knew this was not an option. I love our house and cannot foresee any immediate plans to move out of it. I think we'll make it work for us as long as we possibly can.