Life Lessons from my Dog

We recently got a new toy for our dog, Sabrina. It is a little rubber basketball that squeaks...and she absolutely loves it! She totally ignores her other toy now, one that she thought was filling her needs, but not nearly as perfectly as the new one! Now let me tell you a few things about Brina....she LOVES meal time and she will tell you everyday when it is time to feed her, but when she got this new toy, she was at first reluctant to put it down even to eat! She also chose to play with the toy rather than beg for our food at dinner time also (and she usually never misses an opportunity to ask for our food too!) This toy has also made her fearless. She will crawl through chairs under the table, stick her nose in bags, jump in the bathtub, dig behind the window blinds....all things that would have normally freaked her out, just to get her toy. Brina is also scared of thunderstorms and she usually lies on the bed between Danny and I panting like crazy while the storm rages on....but last night, during one of the worst storms we have had in a while, she took her toy and lay down on the floor by the bed...still scared but a little more brave too. She will pick it up and take it with her from room to room and it's never far from her when she sleeps.



That's kind of how things are when we have Jesus...he satisfies our needs, he gives us strength and courage we didn't even know we had, he comforts us and protects us, and even when the storms of life are raging, we can sleep peacefully, knowing that he is right there with us and will never leave us.

"This is my command—be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9

"I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety." Psalm 4:8

Things I Love...

I LOVE...

...My husband!

...the fact that Danny is an awesome photographer!

...fitting into clothes I haven't worn in 2 years or more!

...spending time with Danny and going on photo expiditions!

...scrapbooking!

...making purses...and trying new patterns!

...the Library! I have read so many books this year!

I LOVE...

...seeing family that I haven't seen in months or even years!

...hanging out with friends and family!

...that my best friends are my sisters and cousins....Family makes the best Friends!

...my nieces and nephew!

...reconnecting and staying in touch with friends and family on Facebook!

...playing Wii and Rockband with my family!

I LOVE...

...having access to a pool on a daily basis!

...that July has been cooler than June this year!

...perfect weather on my weekend off!

...having a tan this year!

...the fact that in 78 days, I will be in Walt Disney World for my first ever Disney vacation!

Welcome 2010

I hope all of you had a wonderful Holiday Season year. We did, although i was sad that so many
friends and family got to see snow for Christmas and we didn't. Next year I think I just might be a snow chaser and try to find some for our holiday! The first weekend in December, Rachel, Danny and I went to Charlotte to visit our cousin Brandy and her husband Tim. While we were there, we went to the Billy Graham Library. It was all decorated for Christmas with lights and garland. They had a live Nativity in the evening and horse and carriage rides! It was absolutely wonderful sipping hot chocolate, riding in an open horse-drawn carriage with a blanket drawn over my lap, listening to the jingle bells on the horses' harnesses. Magical! And we also got to tour the Library and learn about the life of one of History's greatest men of God.


We enjoyed our usual family traditions this year including a candlelight service at Jeri and Jim's where the Christmas story is read and we sing carols before exchanging gifts. Then we get together at my parent's house for Christmas Eve and we go to Danny's parent's house on

Christmas Day to exchange gifts. We, of course, always enjoy great food as well! We had several other random Christmas parties spread out in the weeks before Christmas! Our hope is to be able to host a Christmas party of our own in our own home next year!
Danny and I are still living with Rachel, but we are feeling the itch to find a place of our own. We are waiting on God's perfect timing and hopefully all the pieces will fall into place soon with a place that will fulfill our needs and the finances to sustain us. Danny loves his job at Lifetouch and we are so blessed to both have jobs we love and to work for great bosses. I feel so blessed and my heart overflows with the peaec and joy that I have. To look at our lives (and our checkbook), some may think we have so little, but I have a husband who loves me, I have a roof over my head, I have good health, and I honestly am content...what more could I ask for! I know 2010 has many blessings in store for us, and I wait in anticipation to see where God is going to take us, together!

live, love, laugh

So I heard the other day that NASA is spending close to 80 million dollars to basically bomb the moon in search of water….my question is who is the guy that approved that budget? “I’m sorry we can’t afford to cloth the homeless, or fix our schools, or research a cure for cancer, or provide a clean water supply for an African city, because we have to bomb the moon!” Good grief!

Well Danny and I are still living with Rachel...no changes there! I can't speak for Danny, but I don't feel quite as suffocated in this small bedroom as I did. I guess I am just getting used to it and, since our situation doesn't look to change anytime soon, I am determined to be content. We have been through quite a lot financially this year, but it has only strengthened our faith in God through all of this and our trust in him grows with every decision we have had to make. And I think he will use our story to help others who may be facing the same things. I have been blessed to share part of our story on local television shows twice already, and God gets all the glory for that.

Speaking of television, our church, Faith Assembly, now has their own tv station, WLCN HD. We went live on June 12th. Dad has been working at the station and he absolutely loves it! Mom does some of the camera work on Sundays and she helps with scheduling the volunteers. WLCN has local news shows, classic television shows, and other original local programming like Ask A Pastor and Faith and Finance. I volunteer on Tuesday nights to run the teleprompter for the evening local news show, Port City Live. WLCN is currently only available on knology and Home cable channels, but anyone can watch WLCN streaming live on http://www.wlcntv.com/

Danny and I celebrated our 3-year wedding anniversary on September 23rd. We enjoyed a nice dinner at a restaurant called Farringdon's in Summerville. I absolutely love being married and I love my husband so much!


Can I just take a moment to say how lucky I am to have such a wonderful husband! But, honestly it’s not luck. We work hard at our marriage and we make a choice everyday to love each other no matter what. That’s right, I said we choose. Some people are under the illusion that love is this fantastic feeling that gives you butterflies in your stomach and hearts in your eyes, and when that feeling fades you are no longer in love and it’s time to move on. They couldn’t be more wrong. While it is true that loving someone can make you feel fantastic and can be a wonderful high, Love itself is not the feeling….love is the choice. I find it so frustrating to hear of people who choose to throw away their marriage vows because they aren’t “in love” anymore. The true fact is they stopped choosing each other, but instead became selfish and chose themselves.

Last Friday night Rachel, mom, dad, and I all volunteered at the Sanctus Real/Addison Road concert that was held at the Collision Concert Center at our church. It was so much fun! Granted I think the music was a little loud...the sound was almost distorted because it was so loud, but it was a great experience to be able to volunteer my time, because we wouldn't have been able to host this concert or others to come without many volunteers.

On a finally note, here is a hilarious picture Danny took at the zoo last month.

My Pink Blanket

So it's been quite a year! After being unemployed for almost a year, Danny finally has a job that he loves and that is perfect for him....He is a professional photographer and a local studio that handles the Senior pictures for many area high schools. They also do under classmen and yearbook portraits. His dream is to have his own photography business someday and this is the perfect launch pad for him! I'm so happy for him!

I had a scare back in May when I was temporarily laid off from my transcription job due to the economy, but God miraculously gave me my job back sooner than expect and on the day that I was about to sign with another company. I absolutely love my job and the company that I work for, and I'm so thankful that I get to work from home everyday!

We are still living with my sister, Rachel. It has been 8 months now and we ahve no idea how much longer it will be. I get discouraged when it seems nearly impossible to put any money aside for a place of our own....there always seems to be some unplanned medical/vet bill, or something else that pops up. We are continually thankful for having a place to live that still allows me to work from home and allows our pets to live with us, but sometimes the walls of our bedroom seem smaller and smaller and the desire for a place of our own is so very real. But we serve a great big God and I know that no matter how the numbers on paper do not add up for us, he can provide the perfect house for us when the time is right. So I'll just keep praying for my pink blanket! (this is in reference to a testimony of how God answers prayer that I recently read in Jim Bob and Michell Duggar's book 20 and Counting. I won't share the whole story here, but you can read about it here http://books.google.com/books?id=GWSeYWSIBdQC&pg=PA72&lpg=PA72&dq=pink+blanket+duggar&source=bl&ots=zXQvzMuNeR&sig=0UwXGTNSeWBp4PlMXJEwDUhcBZA&hl=en&ei=HM1wSpiBK5-MtgfCkbSnDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1 )

I hope you are all having a wonderful summer! We have enjoyed a pretty mild July for SC, actually. Some days are still insanely hot, but we had a day this month where I was able to work from the front porch all day and the weather was spectacular. Danny and I have done several fun things like visiting the Old Santee Canal State Park, going to the new Mt. Pleasant Waterfront Park and the Charleston Waterfront Park, all of which Danny had a wonderful time take pictures (but unfortunately I don't have any to share here because they are all on my external drive in the other room!) We also enjoyed going to a church league softball game. I wish we had been able to go to more, but they are usually too late. Hopefully, Danny can join the league next year....he so loves to play!

Anyways, I just wanted to share with you all since you haven't heard from me in months. As I always say, I'll try not to stay away so long.

randomness....

more random things....

1. I love shoes but I would almost rather go barefoot all the time.
2. I, however, can't stand other people's feet.
3. I don't believe that there is good in everyone....some people are just plain evil....like child molesters and serial killers....they get pure joy out of the evil they do and no matter what made them that way...screwed up childhood or abusive parents or social class or whatever....I don't believe they can be saved or rehabilitated from twisted lives they lead, therefore....
4. I do believe in the death penalty...I do not think we should over crowd jails and waste taxpayers money on people that are so evil they shouldn't be using our oxygen.... (of course #3 and #4 are my own opinion and they are why I'm not God)
5. I love driving through the country, seeing old barns and rolled hay....
6. I plan to go on a wonderful vacation or mini-vacation with Danny every year. I love getting away somewhere with him and exploring new places.
7. I hate having to go in the office and crawl under the desk 5 times a day to reset the router that constantly goes offline....(I just had to go do this again!)
8. I am very passionate about the sanctity of marriage....It is a covenant, it is a commitment....and it really upsets me when people don't honor the commitment they made.
9. I miss having my mammaw here to pray for me....I know she is praying for me in heaven and I know one person's prayers aren't necessarily better than anothers...but she was so close to God...and the Bible says "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."
10. I hate it when parents dress their twins (or multiples) exactly alike. (Thanks mom for not doing that to us!) We may have had the same clothes at times, but at least they were different colors. Twins are not the same person...dressing exactly alike treats them like they are (to me anyways).
11. I am addicted to Breathe Right strips....I have to sleep with one on every night or I will wake up not being able to breathe.
12. I hate subdivisions. I plan to live in a big house someday....hopefully a victorian....and have at least a few acres.
13. I have a horrible habit of not turning the lights off. It drives Danny crazy.
14. It totally makes my day when I walk into my sister's house and I hear my 2 neices and my nephew yell "Aunt Beka" as they run to give me hugs.
15. I love, more than anything else, spending time with my cousins, playing games, talking about growing up years, eating brownies, and just enjoying time together.
16. I wish I was wealthy....I'm not greedy, I just hate having to leave beneath my means....plus I would be able to share so much of it with family and my church

The end of 2008

Let me try to sum up the last 2 months of 2008. We started off November with a wonderful vacation to Tennessee in the Gatlinburrg/Pigeon Forge area. This is a great time to go! Not too crowded because it is in between the fall and winter seasons. The colors are wonderful, just slighly past peak. The weather was perfect! It made me never want to leave. Check out the video I made of our vacation.

I've been working all the holidays for some extra pay, but it hasn't really affected my time to spend with my family. I worked Thanksgiving day then we went to Danny's parent's house for dinner. Then on Black Friday we had our family dinner at Kristi's house. I made my yummy pumpkin ice cream pies!

I also got to help Jacquelyn and Nicole write their letters to Santa! So cute!

Danny and I moved in with Rachel in early December. We are still trying to get things organized and some stuff unpacked....it's so hard having a houseful of stuff and having to decide what can stay in a box indefinitely and what few things can go in our one room. I've pretty overwhelmed and feeling like a fish out of water this month trying to get used to the transition. I have never handled change well. In the middle of all this I have had to find time to finish a cross stitch of Nicole that I was making for Kristi for Christmas and also find time to study for my CMT test. I took the test on Dec 22 and I passed! So I now carry the CMT credentials behind my name (which means that I am a certified medical transcriptionist....only about 3000 in the country!)

I went with Rachel to a Christmas party downtown at the Mills House that the Spine doctors throw every year. It was pretty nice....at least we got to dress up!

Mack loved to nap underneath the Christmas Tree on my homemade tree skirt. Our Christmas was pretty normal. We went to my aunts house on Christmas Eve Eve for the reading of the christmas story and singing carols by candlelight. We also watched videos of different family members' vacations.

Christmas Eve was spent at mom and dad's. Dad made chili for dinner then we opened stockings and gifts. Here is a picture of Kristi holding the shadow box and cross stitch of Nicole that I made for her .

I worked on Christmas Day, but then Danny and I went to his parent's house for dinner and presents and to hang out. They got a Wii, so we had a ball playing on that.



We rang in the new year at our friends Kim and Josh's house. I've never really been to a New Year's party with friends....usually just hang out at home or with family....so that was fun. I wasn't in the best of moods but I tried to make the best of it and I did have a good time. We played cornhole and warmed up by the fire pit, we watched Josh set the lawn on fire with faulty fireworks, and we all toasted strawberry wine at the stroke of midnight. It was a great little party!