Everyone Loves A Parade

In the morning, we'll do our 3rd Westside Rotary Club Independence Day parade. It's so funny to think about how different each of the parades has been.

The first year I had no idea what to expect and neither did the boys! Maverick was about a year and a half and Bailey was 3. I can remember Bailey finally getting the courage toward the end to walk up to parade watchers to give them candy.

Last year I had all 3 with me by myself! The boys hung out on the trailer most of the time with their friends shooting water guns at each other. I carried Jenna Beth in my pouch sling the entire parade. She was just a little bitty thing!

Tomorrow morning I have no idea how things will go down. Jenna Beth is going to need lots of snacks to keep herself occupied in the stroller for the whole parade. Bailey says he's going to be squirting his water gun. Maverick said he was going to hand people candy. We'll see what they really do when we get there!

I love the parade because it's a fun time to just hang out with the kids and their parents. I also love seeing all the people who have made it a tradition for years to sit in their favorite spots to watch the parade. There will not be a 4th of July that goes by that I won't think back to the parade here in El Paso and have such fond, wonderful memories!

The Lasts...

Within the past few days I've started having those thoughts of..."This will be the last time (fill in the blank) in El Paso." It really hit me today as I was driving across town to pick up some supplies for VBS. I'm on the schedule to sing my LAST solo at FBCep on July 4th, which will be my LAST Sunday on staff at FBCep.

As I was singing through one of the songs I'm thinking about doing, I started imagining the faces of people that I may be singing in front of that day for the LAST time. The faces of people who have become like my family here in El Paso. The faces of people who have loved on my children. The faces of people who have been so encouraging and giving to me as a staff member.

I remember singing here for the first time in 2007 and coming home to post about my first solo here. You can read the post here and now that I am looking at it, I typed the name of the song incorrectly. Singing that first time to a room full of strangers, for lack of a better word, reminded me of all the friendly faces that I had come to love at FBC Fort Mill. Now that we're preparing to move away from El Paso, those faces are no longer the faces of strangers. These are people that I love and admire.

Every time I have sung in the past year and a half has been an emotional thing for me. I sang a song by Andrew Peterson while I was pregnant called "Labor of Love." Talk about hard - - singing a song about the mother of Jesus knowing that I would be alone giving birth to my 3rd child while my husband was in Iraq! A couple of months later, I sang a Sandi Patty song called "God of All of Me" just weeks before I would be bidding farewell to my husband for 12 months!

Singing one last time here will be an emotional thing for sure! I may just have to sing "Happy Trails" or something light hearted and non emotional. I know that I'm not singing for these people. I'm singing for my Savior. I'm singing to bring praise and glory to Him and I think that's why singing has become so emotional for me in the past few years. I want to sing songs that mean something to me, songs that are personal, but sometimes personal songs mixed with emotions brought on by other circumstances can put me over the edge.

I've tried to bury this whole moving thing, but practicing a song to sing as my LAST one has uncovered the well of emotions! I'll just have to go back into denial about this whole move thing and not practice until I absolutely have to.

50 days - - WHAT?

Captain my Captain informed the world today that we have about 50 days before we make the move north to Sooner country! WHAT???? 50 days??? Do you know what else happens in the next 50 days?

Here's just a snippit of things that will happen in the next 50 days:

Celebrate my 34th birthday. Bid farewell to our interim pastor. Celebrate the inactivation of the Task Force. Farewell a few Task Forcians. A mommy vacay with a friend. Welcome our new pastor. VBS. Preteen Camp. Pack. Get things organized at work for whoever is going to replace me. 4th of July Parade. Shed many tears. Say See You Later to many who have become like family to me.

I'm trying not to freak out about all the things that aren't going to get done in the next 50 days or so, but trust me, it's going to be difficult. On top of it all, I've got to think about sending my first born to kindergarten and pray I don't spend too many days in the principal's office or parent teacher conferencing. I think I'll have to start praying daily for the 3 kindergarten teachers at his school! I'll have to find out their favorite Vera Bradley pattern or something and start sending them gifts NOW!

Okay, back to the pile of laundry on my bed...

Monday Musings

10 days ago we had a yard sale or garage sale, whatever term you want to call it. We were awakened by a knock on the interior garage door at 6:30am that day! Some how the exterior garage door had been left open all night so I opened the door to about 5 people already in my garage pilfering through our stuff! The very first sale of the day was a $90 sale that consisted of patio furniture, an armoire and a few random pots and pans. The guys that made the purchase left and said they'd be back later to pick their stuff up. 10 days later - - - that stuff is still in the garage!

I have all kinds of conspiracy theories going through my mind about why they've never showed up to get the furniture. None of which I can prove! We have no way to get in touch with these people. They have no way to get in touch with us other than to just come and knock on the door. It's the oddest thing!

I think we're about to list the furniture again for sale on craigslist or something so that we can get rid of it. That was, of course, the purpose of selling it in the first place! It's just baffling and everytime I walk in the garage my mind begins to wondering why these people haven't picked up their stuff. I mean, if I woke someone up at 6:30 am and gave them $90, I'd not forget that I needed to pick up my stuff! I'd for sure take a mental note as to the location of my $90 worth of stuff.

If there are any developments in this story, I'll let you know!

Happy 4th of July!

The children and I spent our morning in the Westside Parade here in El Paso. The boys had a great time and have been begging to go back to the parade all day long. Jenna Beth just slept in her sling carrier the whole time.She was a hit with the parade watchers. I heard little "look at that tiny baby"s throughout the parade.

We've done this two years in a row and I always leave the parade being grateful for our nation and the fact that despite our freedom to have different opinions on war and the Middle East, we can come together on a day like today and line the streets of our towns and celebrate our Independence. It really gives me a renewed sense of pride in our great country and the calling God has on our family to serve it and Him the way we do.

The only thing that could make today better, other than having daddy here, is to witness live fireworks, but the boys are pooped and I'm not sure dragging them out after 9 is going to make it into the plans.

Enjoy a few pictures of us at the parade.

$20,000 Swingset

This is what Maverick thinks about his $20,000 swingset!

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that we were buying a swingset from a family in our church that moved to Dallas. See original post here.

As part of the swingset purchase, we also bought a truck. The joke has become that we purchased a $20,000 swingset. I realized the other day that I never have put up pictures of the swingset and partly because for about 2 weeks, it sat spread out over our entire backyard in pieces. When my dad was here 2 weeks ago, he tackled the major assembly of the various pieces. Thanks Paw Paw! I think LT is more grateful than the boys. I had to help a few times and avoided helping put the roofs on it like the plague, but somehow was still roped into assisting with that process. The roofs are huge and awkward and were a major struggle for LT and me when were were disassembling them.

Not bad for $300 and a new to us truck, huh? I'll add a picture of the other portion of the $20,000 swingset when it comes back in the driveway later. We've gotta get our money's worth out of this thing as long as we live in this house because we're not planning to move this thing again!

I think the platform up to the slide is their favorite place. Bailey even took some books up there with him today to read while he ate his rice cake and drank his juice.

I think Maverick noticed a reflective jacket, hard hat wearing construction worker walking across the street or something. Notice the broom in his hand? He always has to carry something up the ladder with him. Last week it was a ball bigger than him. Today it was my broom!

Speaking of Houses

In the past month, our old neighborhood has been torn down! It's been sort of sad to watch the process happen.

What once looked like this -

Now looks like this.

You can see that one side of our street was completely demolished in this first picture.

In this picture you can see where they've started tearing down our side of the street. Our house is right on the other side of the backhoe and other construction machinery in the picture. I think they had ripped the carport off of our house by this particular day. All of the houses on our street are gone now.

We loved our old house and I do sometimes miss the communal feeling our little neighborhood had. However, I wouldn't trade our new house for anything. You can sort of see our shared driveway in this picture. I also thought today about the fact that we have rockscaped yards so there's no real need to be outside doing any yardwork ever. One less opportunity to run into a neighbor or two. And by 'run in,' I mean a face to face conversation, not the car to car kind :o)

One Way to Meet the Neighbors

As I've probably mentioned before, we're not the best neighbors. Not that we're loud and obnoxious or anything, but we just have never gone out of our way to get to know our neighbors anywhere that we've lived. I've been convicted alot recently about my lack of relationships with our neighbors and so the Lord decided to take over and make it impossible for me to be strangers with my neighbors any longer.

My cleaning lady usually comes on Mondays and that was a good day for me when staff meetings were on Tuesdays. Then, staff meetings got switched back to Mondays and are at the same time that I need to take the cleaning lady back to the bus stop. Yesterday I made arrangements with a friend, we'll call her Spring, who uses the same cleaning lady that I do, to take the cleaning lady back to the bus stop yesterday afternoon around 3pm.

When I got home from picking up the boys at around 5pm yesterday, the neighbor that shares a driveway with us was sweeping the driveway and I noticed Spring's van in the driveway with the side door open and back window shattered. Oh no! From what I understand of the story, my neighbor was backing out of her garage and didn't see Spring's van parked behind my garage and ran right into it. The door was open so the hinge went into the side back window and shattered it. Another neighbor whom I met once before when we lived in our other house ended up having to take Spring and her 3 boys home and had to drop the cleaning lady off at the bus stop. I felt totally awful for Spring because she was just trying to do me a favor and now has even more of an inconvenience piled on her.

Yesterday was one of those days when I just had this feeling in my gut that something wasn't going to happen according to plan! Sure enough!!

This afternoon, I baked my 2 neighbors cookies as a thank you and as a way to say to the neighbor that hit Spring's van that everything is okay and it's not a big deal. It's just a car. Her husband is pretty aggravated with her about hitting the van so she's having a hard time letting it go. Bailey went with me to deliver the cookies and after we dropped them off at both houses he kept saying, "Cookies all gone. Cookies at friends."

I'm intent on getting to know my neighbors now. In my defense, (every woman needs a defense, right?) if you've ever been to our neighborhood, you know that everyone parks in their garages and goes inside through the garage. About the only time you see anyone outside of their houses is at the mailboxes or if they're walking their dogs. To get to someone's front door, you have to walk all the way around the huge garages. Even today, when I rang the doorbells at my neighbors' houses, you could tell it was a rare occurance because everyone who was home came to the front door! The arrangement and lay out of these houses does nothing to encourage the sense of community that our houses in the old neighborhood without garages and walled backyards did.

Everyone Loves A Parade

We started our 4th of July off with a ride in the Rotary Club of West El Paso's Independence Day Parade. I had a couple of different groups of volunteers from FBC tell me they thought we should do an entry in the parade so we did. It was lots of fun and we've already been generating ideas about what we'll do for next year's parade.

Bailey had a great time helping hand out our flyers to the people along the parade route. Eventually he got tired and decided to sit on the trailer. LT pushed Mav in the stroller. He didn't show too much emotion about the whole ordeal and just played with a flag and pencil he got from one of the other Paraders.

One Year Ago Today

Today marks 1 full year in El Paso. I'll never forget driving into the city of El Paso for the first time at night and seeing the amazing lights everywhere! I'll get a little more sentimental later, but I think I deserve an Iced Coffee from Starbucks for surviving 1 year in West Texas, don't you?

Views of the Mountains

The weather here in El Paso is just flat out unpredictable. I don't know how the weather people keep their jobs, really! I think the thing that is so hard to predict is the wind. Yesterday we had winds ranging from 34 to 56 miles per hour. Can you imagine? Bailey's 'garage' out back is a good predictor of how windy it's been because much like Dorothy's house in Kansas, it gets blown all over the place. The big problem with the wind is that it's so dry that the wind just blasts sand and dirt all over the place. As you can see in the first picture, what would normally be a clear view of the mountains from our street is a bit cloudy! That's sand in the air. I wish I had taken a picture yesterday because it was much more clouded than that one that I took last week some time. The good thing about the debris in the air, though, is the wonderful sunsets that we get. I had no idea how good of a sunset that was until I downloaded it onto the computer. It was obviously dark outside and I think my flash scared my neighbor who was standing in her driveway when I took the picture. I guess I'll have to take a picture on a clear day now so you can see just how drastic a difference it is. There's a great view of the mountains on one of the main streets on Post. I'll have to stop and take a picture from there some time, too.

More Pictures

This is our galley kitchen. I'm actually enjoying my gas oven and stove. I didn't think I would like it, but it cooks so much better than any electric oven I've ever used. I've managed to not burn anything so far! Can you imagine having this white tile floor in the entire house? In our neighborhood, all but about 5 houses have this white floor throughout the entire house! I should also add that without the curtain on that door, we can see straight into our neighbor's house. Our driveways are adjacent to each other so our kitchen doors are directly across from each other. This is a view of our main living area from the entry way. This is my 180lb table that my friends helped me get home from Garden Ridge in Pineville! I absolutely love it!! It has a battle scar on it from a drill that fell over, but what's a piece of furniture without a story, right? The entrance to the kitchen is on the left. You can see the corner of my 'piano' on the right.
This is a view of my seating area and the living room from the hallway. I just got the coffee table yesterday at Hobby Lobby (I LOVE Hobby Lobby) and I'm not so sure if I like it or not. It'll grow on me. I just like having the drawers to hide my QT stuff. Eventually it'll go in the living room so this is just it's temporary home at this house.
Here's the living room. It's normally covered with cars, trains and whatever other toys Bailey decides he needs to be playing with as well as a boppy and bouncy seat. It gets pretty cramped. The TV is enjoying a break from playing Toy Story today while Bailey's at MDO. (If anyone can tell me the English term for attributing human characteristics to an inanimate object and where I used it in the previous sentence, you get the star for the day.) The chair we ordered in Las Cruces will go where Maverick's swing is currently sitting. We're going on 3 weeks so I'm hoping I'll get the 'Come and Get It' phone call soon!

Hope you're enjoying my pictures. I love seeing how people live and decorate which I guess is why I'm a home improvement/decorating show addict! I guess I also am trying to prove that my 1960's chateau - military house - isn't that bad. It'll actually be hard to leave this place when we get to move into our new house. We just enjoy having so much space compared to where we've lived before.

Pictures

I've decided that since I can't go anywhere with my 2 year old without making a scene and I'm somewhat a prisoner to my house, except on Thursdays, PTL and Tammy Faye, that I might as well seek to have a clean and organized house! I have no excuse, really. Today I decided I would tackle Bailey's room. Have you ever attempted to clean a 2 year old's room while he is awake and knows you're in his room? I think I picked up the same cars and books 10x at least! He also attempted to help me make his bed. He sat on the box spring while I tried to put the bedskirt in place. Everything I put away, he got back out. It was a good time. Finally, after the bed was completely made he decided to get on it and pretend he was going 'nite, nite.'

I also decided I will start posting pictures of the interior of the 1960's chateau since the rooms will be clean. Today you get Bailey's room, along with a picture of Bailey, the green tile front bathroom and the washer/dryer hiding place! Enjoy! Laugh! Envy me!

Bailey's room - Left Side - Wonderful Ralph Lauren Bedding compliments of Jonathan Vehaun. Bailey probably has the nicest bedding that will ever be owned in our house!

Bailey's Room - Right Side
The Infamous Green Tiled Bathroom - A step back in time!

Do you see the Washer and Dryer? If only you could peek behind curtain #1! This is in a little hallway leading to the bathroom. Jake's closet is actually on the opposite side of the curtain that hides the 'Utility Room!'

Sunday Explorations

After we got home from church yesterday, around 9:30 since we went to the 8:15 service, we decided we would take a drive to Las Cruces, NM. It's about 45 miles from El Paso to Las Cruces. We've been on this hunt for another chair for our living room. Chris Whisonant thinks I'm the furniture buying queen, but you've got to understand that when we got married, almost 4 years ago, we purchased 2 pieces of furniture - a couch and a chair. Everything else we had was either Jake's grandmother's that we gladly inherited or things we had from single life and of course the California King bed that a friend of the Wades gave us. We also only lived in about 1000 square feet condos until now. So now we've started making some purchases. I bought a table and chairs before I left SC (I miss Garden Ridge!!). Once we got here we've purchased a couple of rugs and a couple of wicker saucer chairs for my sitting area, but we've been on the hunt for another chair for the living room and haven't found it. We've taken our poor children to every furniture store we can find in El Paso, except one, and haven't found anything we remotely liked.

Yesterday our trip to Las Cruces was partially to just check out the city and to see if we could find any more chair options. We stopped at one store and Jake went in by himself to scope it out. When he came back to the car he said they didn't have a chair less than $800 so we left. We drove a couple of blocks until we got to "Furniture Row." "Furniture Row" is like 4 stores in 1. I know there's one in Waco and there's one in El Paso - the one store we never went to! Turns out that "Furniture Row" is our treasure find! They had about 4 chairs we liked that would fit our current decor. We ordered a chair and are having it delivered to the El Paso store. We probably would already have the chair in the living room if we had just gone to the "Furniture Row" in El Paso. For some reason I thought it was a higher end store and would be too expensive. Obviously my preconceived notion was WRONG! Now I have to WAIT, I hate waiting, for my chair to come! They have a coffee table that I'd like for my 'sitting area,' but it wouldn't be here until June and I didn't want to wait that long.

We had some other cool finds on our trip, though. On our way home, we discovered that they're building an outlet mall on the west side of El Paso that's set to open in the fall! Yippee Skippee!! Also, about 2 miles east of the outlet mall, we saw a new gas station going up. As we got close it, I told Jake it looked like a Rudy's. As we got past it enough to see the side, sure enough, in bright yellow letters was the proof. Rudy's is on its way to El Paso! Rudy's has great brisket - sorry you South Carolinians, brisket is REAL bbq! Hmmm, I can taste it already. I told Jake last night that he'll have to go to the outlet mall with me so he can go to Rudy's on his way home.

El Paso is going from livable to very well livable! Now there are even more reasons for you to come see us!

Windy EP

The wind in El Paso has been unbelievable the past week. I think the high here yesterday was about 50 and the wind gusts reached about 50 mph at some points during the day. I went to drop off Maverick at a friend's house so I could take Bailey to get his shots and give him my undivided attention. When I got there or close to her house, I noticed that the street lights were out on the road leading to her house. Her power had been out since like 6am. We never lost power, but out internet goofed up and it took me until this morning to get through to an incompetent customer service person with Time Warner. She didn't fix my issue and after I hung up I was determined I could do it myself and I did - - Here I am!!

We're still working on getting the house set up. Jake and I stayed up until after midnight last night putting the table together. It's nice. We've still got a few things in the way of putting it exactly where we want to go. I worked on the boys' rooms some yesterday and they're almost ready to go. I need to get some hangers and a shelf and a high powered drill to drill through our concrete exterior walls so I can hang curtains. We managed to get most of the kitchen boxes unloaded yesterday afternoon. I watched Along Came Polly on the laptop while I unloaded boxes until Jake came home. Then he had to rewind it so he could see his favorite part. (The language in Along Came Polly isn't very upstanding and the reason Jake initially liked it would probably be viewed as offensive.)

Bailey has been sleeping in his big boy bed for 3 nights now. He does pretty well, but if we didn't have the guard rail up, he'd have fallen out every night! He is very jealous that Maverick is sleeping in the crib and watching the mobile. Every time he hears the song the mobile plays, he comes in and pokes his lip out and cries like he wants to climb into the bed and watch the mobile. It's hard being 2! He's stayed in his bed all night since he's been sleeping in it, but when he wakes up, he just gets up and wanders around. I don't know what time he got up this morning, but I could hear him playing with cars and stuff. When I got up to check on him, he came running into the bedroom and hugged my legs. He had turned the tv on to the hispanic pbs type station so maybe he's working on his spanish! Any ideas for how we can get him to stay in the bed or in his room until we're ready to get up??

Anxious

According to the driver of the truck with all of our 'household goods,' he's going to be here around 9 this morning. I can't wait to get the phone call saying he's pulling onto Fort Bliss. An Air Force Col's wife brought us dinner yesterday and is going to take Bailey with her this morning to a Bible study where free childcare is provided. She offered to take both boys, but I think I'll keep Maverick here and strap him into the snugli and then when the swing is unloaded and back together, I'll let him swing to his heart's content. He's not as hard to keep up with as Bailey is.

I found out yesterday that this Bible study that meets here on Post needs a worship leader because their current one is pregnant and about to pop. It's an avenue I'd be interested in exploring, but since I've never even been to this Bible study yet, I'm not even sure of the possibilities of my exploration. I'm planning to go next week and check it all out and in the meantime I'll just pray that the Lord leads me into the place of ministry here that He deems best.

We took our first trip to the El Paso Zoo yesterday. We bought an annual membership so we can go as many times as we'd like until next April. $45, with military discount, gets 2 adults and 5 children in unlimited visits! Bailey had a good time until he quit getting his way. He was a lot more attentive to the animals than he's been on our previous trips to the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco. He's a little bit older now and probably has a better idea of what he's looking for. This zoo has lots of monkeys and some very active wolves that are native to this area. They even have a sea lion that does a couple of performances during the day. It's only about 5 minutes from our house so we'll probably go once a week or so.

Once the movers are here I'll have my cord to download pictures so I'll take some pictures of the wonderful city of El Paso and our 1960's chateau as I've come to affectionately call our new 'old' house. And I'll let you see the new houses that we're anticipating living in by the end of the year.

Funny or not so funny

Last night Bailey met his match! Andrew.

Andrew is a 3 year old with more energy and mischief packaged into one chubby little body than should be allowed. He's the son of one of Jake's other classmates. We had dinner at their house last night and was my first time meeting any of them. I laughed several times at things he did. It began when he was attempting to double dip his vegetables in the community vegetable dip. For those germophobe friends of mine you would've been way grossed out. He took a bite of a cucumber, after dipping half his hand and the cucumber into the dip and decided he didn't like it. So he put the half eaten cucumber back on top of the rest of the clean sliced cucumbers. Then a little while later, he pushed his sister who is 6 and said "I push her once." A little while later, Bailey became his victim. We were in the dining room enjoying our dinner when we heard the sister scream - "Andrew's spraying the spray." I didn't really know what that meant until I walked into the bathroom to find Bailey hiding behind a shower curtain with his whole head soaked with melon scented air freshener! Poor little thing was cornered with no place to go! Hopefully there's no long term damage to his eyes from this incident. It didn't seem to slow him down. Later Andrew disappeared into the house to go potty and before he came back to the back yard had sprayed the rest of the can in the kitchen. The smell was gagging! It made me not feel quite so bad about Bailey's wildness that is slowly being tamed now that daddy is back in the picture.

Later on this same trip to dinner, Andrew's mom, Lindsay, and I took their little cocker spaniel for a walk and encountered a not so funny comment. I have to give the background about this cocker spaniel so our actions make sense. In January their cocker, Lacey, who knocked Bailey down as soon as he got out of the car, was attacked by a pit bull and has had almost a $1000 worth of doctor's procedures and is on the road to recovery. So...As we're taking our little after dinner stroll, we see a couple walking toward us on the sidewalk with 2 pit bulls - one large and the other a puppy. We casually walk to the other side of the street and then Lindsay picked Lacey up. As we passed the couple, they had taken a seat in their yard and said something to the effect of "We're not going to hurt you." We acknowledged their comment and just smiled and nodded. A few seconds later we heard them say "That's why I hate crackers." I don't think Lindsay quite understood what they said, but I did and was ready to tuck my tail between my legs and run. Thankfully we didn't hear any other derogatory comments and managed to make it home safely. I still can't believe I was called a cracker!

In case you're wondering, we still have no furniture and it looks like we won't have it until Wednesday. The moving truck broke down in Louisiana! So I think the boys and I are going to fill tomorrow afternoon with a trip to the El Paso zoo.

First Sunday in EP

We've spent our first Sunday in El Paso and needless to say it was difficult, but even in my stubbornness and pride, God is still good. We visited FBCEP this morning. We were greeted almost as soon as we got out of the car with "Happy Resurrection Day." Bailey had on his seersucker and got rave compliments and lots of smiles. One of the ladies in the nursery said he needed to wear the suit every Sunday. Maybe his cuteness can overshadow his badness! He didn't want to go to his class, but that's pretty typical. I'm still not sure he was in the right class, but we'll get that all figured out if we feel like FBC is where the Lord wants us.

The service at FBCEP was more traditional than I've grown accustomed to, but we sang or heard 2 of my all time favorite songs - When I survey the wondrous cross in the choir setting that does the 2nd or 3rd verse in a minor key. Anyone who has ever sung in a traditional church choir knows what I'm talking about. The choir sang Brooklyn Tabernacle's "Calvary Came Through" as the closing to the sermon and I think the Lord planned that just for me. He knows that's my favorite Brooklyn Tab song and He knew I needed to be reminded that "just when I thought I'd been defeated, the cross was all I needed."

We had lunch with the Barrons at Cracker Barrel. Allen Barron is in Jake's class and his wife, Lori, is pregnant with their first child due May 8th. Lori and I have been emailing back and forth for a while so it was nice to get to have a face to face conversation with her and know she'll be a good friend while we're here in EP.

Things are looking up with the movers bringing our stuff tomorrow. Bailey and his daddy have had several 'come to Jesus' conversations so his behavior has been much better the past couple of days. Keep praying for us as we continue to make adjustments and attempt to somewhat establish ourselves this week.

Being REAL

Someone in college paid me the highest compliment I've ever been given, at least in my opinion. She told me she liked me because I was real! It's time to be REAL about the past 3 days of my life.

I believe this is the closest to Hell I ever want to experience. Spending 24/7, well not quite 24/7, but close enough, with a terrible 2 year old in a boring hotel room or in a house with absolutely nothing in it has taken it's toll on me, mentally, physically, emotionally, etc...There have been moments in my days when I've thought running away and disappering off the face of the earth would be the best option for me at that moment. I've questioned everything about my life and what we've decided the Lord has led us to do. Is it worth it?

Is it worth trying to restrain myself from harming my oldest child? Is it worth spending a week, 2 weeks actually, without my earthly possessions? Is it worth leaving my best friends in the world who have stood by me through thick and thin who if they were in the same county with me would be here helping me through all of this junk and rescuing me from myself and my crazy child? Is it worth walking away from a very comfortable lifestyle and into the complete unknown of the military world where my ID card is my best friend? Is it worth the constant weight of knowing that one day Jake's going to come home and say he's going to be spending a year in Korea without us? There are dozens of other 'is it worth its' rolling around in my mind.

My flesh is crying out 'absolutely not. But my Spirit reminds me constantly that obedience isn't always easy or comfortable or familiar or quiet or without chaos. My Spirit reminds me there are people all over Fort Bliss and El Paso who are without hope, without a Savior. That's when I have to say it's worth it! Though hard to see that in the midst of chasing Bailey down the street or having to carry his heavy butt 5 blocks because he refuses to walk himself back home, I know in my heart that the Lord knew before I was born that I would be sitting in El Paso today dealing with a wild child. He knew I'd miss talking to my friends and spending time google chatting or messenging. He knew how I'd hurt and grieve the loss of the familiar. He knew I'd be sitting here crying typing this blog.

Today I put a little plaque that the children's ministry gave me as my departing gift on the window over the kitchen sink at our empty house so that as I wash the endless string of bottles and look out over the sand and weeds in my back yard the Lord can remind me that "I know the plans I have for you - plans to prosper and not to harm you - plans to give you a hope and a future."

24 hours in El Paso

We've spent our first full 24 hours in El Paso and it's been loads of fun - please sense my sarcasm. Bailey's way out of whack and yesterday was a hard day for him. We spent most of the morning at our 'new' house, it's actually an old house and just our temporary dwelling until they build enough brand new houses for us to move across the street into. We're thinking we'll be in this house for about 9 months. When they built these houses, in 1964, they were trying to save money so they put wall to wall industrial tile in them. For some reason, there are a few in our neighborhood that have parquet tile in them. Jake went through 11 different houses to find the best looking one of all of them. He chose one that has parquet tile so it's not quite so prison like. There's tons of good closets! Counting 2 outside storage closets, there are 11 closets - 6 of them I'd classify as 'walk-in.' You know the saying 'junk expands to the space allotted'? I'm sure my junk will continue to expand. I'll send pictures once we get moved in completely. The bathrooms haven't been updated since they were built so we have a pink ceramic tile bathroom and a green ceramic tile bathroom. The toilets like like they've been scrubbed a time or two with steel wool so they're really rough looking. I'm sure people will come and think that I never clean the toilets, but they're beyond cleaning. They need a new paint job! It's only temporary and then we'll live in the nicest house we'll live in for our entire lives.

My mom volunteered her services last night and tonight for Jake and me to go out alone since we'll not have built in babysitters like we did in FM and this could be one of the last opportunities we have to go out for a while. Last night we went to eat mexican and then went rug and shorts shopping. Quite a combo! I've decided that I'm going to have a hard time buying a rug for the living room because I want style, but I want cheap and those 2 things don't mix all that well when it comes to large area rugs! I'm sure I'll decide on something or just bite the bullet and spend some cash.

The cable people are coming this afternoon to hook up some portion of our tv/internet/phone service. I think they come back tomorrow, too. I have some other paperwork issues I have to do, too. I need to get the boys appointments to go to the dr next week. That'll be fun. Jake tells me that the Medical center is chaos and we all know how I can't stand chaos!

Oh, the joys of moving...I'm still working on my top ten list for last week....It's on paper, but hasn't made it to the computer, yet.