Two things...

One:
This picture was taken today.  TODAY.  Jason gave me this balloon on Valentines' Day.

It refuses to die.  I hate to be crude, but I'm wondering what kind of balloon viagra they put in this thing.

Two:

It's official.

I have reached the "Bless Your Heart" stage of pregnancy. 

All old ladies say that to me, first thing. 

I had a lady tell me yesterday that I looked like I was about to "pop wide-open."  Thanks, lady.  REALLY.

For the record, I'm told I have about 7 weeks to go.

More pictures are unlikely.

I do not own a wide-angle lens.

"Unfinished Projects"

I am a serial project starter.  I have bought fabric to make curtains for Anna Beth’s room.  

 I have piles of clothes waiting to be mended. 

 I have all the materials a girl could desire to organize a huge volume of recipes. 

 I have tons of scrapbook material and resources. 

 What I don’t have is the time and/or desire to see all these projects through to completion, which frustrates me to no end. To my own dismay, I am not a serial project finisher.

If I would complete just one project before I decided to embark on another, I could probably make some real progress.  My problem is that when inspiration to do a new project starts, I have to do something then—or take a chance on forgetting about it or not caring about it so much later.

I am tremendously grateful that God does not go about His projects the way I do.  As Paul wrote in Philippians 1:6, “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”  God doesn’t give up on a task halfway through it.  He is the Master of following through to completion that which He starts.  He will not forget about or get discouraged with us, even when we are unnecessarily difficult or tedious.  He never gets bored with us.

I am reminded of a song from my childhood that said, “He's still working on me, to make me what I ought to be. It took Him just a week to make the moon and stars,
The Sun and the Earth and Jupiter and Mars.
How loving and patient He must be, He's still working on me.”  God is still working on me.  Even before the day I was born, God had a plan for me (as He does everyone else), and He is working in me every day of my life.  As Paul wrote in Philippians 2:13, “for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” 

I’m so glad that He is still working on me and that He will not grow tired or neglectful of me.  Praise Him!

 

Springing into Spring Break...

This past weekend, Emma, Mom, and I decided to have a Girl's Day Out.  It was pretty cold and drizzly outside, so we decided that we would go check out the Tupelo Flea Market in Tupelo, MS.

It's only a little over an hour away, but we were still surprised at how many people we saw from our hometown there.  We saw my Uncle and Aunt, my Mom's co-worker, a classmate of Emma's, and a lady that used to work with my Grandmother.  That same lady came up to us to introduce (show off) her 5 month old granddaughter.

After introductions were made, my Mom mentioned that we have another little one on the way.  That lady took one look at my belly and said, "Huh.  Looks like a great BIG one on the way, instead of a little one."

She was very lucky to have walked away from that encounter with all her teeth.

I'm just sayin'.

Nevertheless, we enjoyed our day.  We feasted at Olive Garden for lunch.  Emma enjoyed a carousel ride:

 
We finished off our day at a shoe sale at Belk.  As I've mentioned multiple times before, I have a sliiiiiiight love affair with flip flops.  I have an especially soft spot for Yellow Box flip flops.

In my own defense, I have to say they were on SALE!

But here's the thing:

They stink.

Really badly.

As in, I wore the red ones yesterday and could smell them from underneath the church pew, stinking up the place.

It's not a sweaty feet smell.  It's more...well...I don't even know how to categorize it.

You know how dog's feet smell when they are hot?

Kinda like old, dirty Frito chips?  Well, it's kinda like that, only add in a chemical chili pepper smell to the mix.

REALLY unpleasant.

I think it's that foam stuff you see in the bottom picture that stinks, so I'm going to let them air out a few days before I wear them again.  Not to mention, it's 46 degrees outside today and the next day and the next day...so I guess it's back to tennis shoes for a while.

Today is the first day of Spring Break with the kiddos, so let the fun times (and whining--could be mine, could be theirs...hard to say) begin!

If you blog it, they will read it.

This is the same look my "Blogger" button gives me every time I get on the computer lately.  It's not that I don't love blogging and/or have nothing to write about.  It's more like every time I sit down, I start to fall asleep due to my sweet, energy-sucking, precious, unborn child.

I've started using the "notes" feature on my iPhone so that I could remember details of some of the crazy stuff that's been going on in my life lately.  Goodness knows that Swiss cheese-brain-pregnant woman is NOT going to remember any details.

For example, back in early February, Jason and I attended a country music concert put on by Miranda Lambert and Brad Paisley.  I am not the country music fan in the family, so it was a bit of a unique experience for me.  But we are over a month past the concert, so I feel like it would be wrong to blog about it now!  So, instead, I will give you these "gems" that I felt it was necessary for my readers to know.  (If they don't make sense to you, that's okay.  I probably don't remember what was meant by them, either.)

• Drunk chicks know every word to all songs ever written.
• Gangster rap played in the parking lot before a country music show is weird.
• "Yee-ha" is the only acceptable battle cry at this concert.
• "This girl next to me just hollered like a scalded dog."--Jason  (This is my favorite quote, EVER!)
• (After seeing drunk girl eating mayonnaise on French fries)  "Bet she's gonna see that again later."--Jason
• Largest assembly of dancing mullet women on earth.
• Got kicked in the shoulder by drunk girl standing on the back of my seat when she fell on the guy next to me
• Miranda Lambert is a bitter and angry woman.

See? I told you that you needed to know these things.

Another note on my phone is about what happened to Luke and I a couple of weeks ago when he had strep.  After we left the doctor's office, he wanted to eat at a steak restaurant that allows you to throw peanut shells on the floor.  (We only eat at THE classiest establishments.)  These were the "pertinent" details about the family that sat behind us:

• Please make your kid stop screaming in my ear.
• I never thought I'd be one of "those" people that complain about other people's kids in a restaurant.
• "Bite?  Bite?  Bite?"  (Hard poke in my back)--what the kid kept saying when our food came out.
• I cannot believe they are letting a two year old drink straight out of a Heinz 57 bottle.
• A Heinz 57 bottle was never meant to be used as a hammer.
• Who's surprised that the kid just smashed his fingers?  Not me.
• Yelling a kid's name (Bryson) 800 times is not the way to get them to hush crying.
• Letting a kid "scream it out" in a restaurant is hardly appropriate.
• No matter how many times you say, "Bryson, you are usually good in here.  You don't usually do this in this restaurant," it's not going to help.  GET UP out of your seat.  Leave the fried pickles on the table and go comfort your kid.
• Please don't let your kid stab me in the back with a butter knife.
• Please apologize when your kid stabs me in the back with a butter knife.
• "I guess you better get used to this, huh, Mommy?"--Luke  (Again, it's a good thing he's cute.)

Could you have lived the rest of your life without knowing this?  Yeah, I didn't think so.

Finally, we have what I looked like last Sunday morning:

Here you have what I actually felt like:

Now, aren't you glad you spent time reading this?

I know.
I'm sorry. 
You will never get this time back.

Have a great weekend!

Party lines

 
I remember an oddity of my Great-Grandparents’ and my home from when I was about 5 years old.  Whenever you needed to get on the phone, you had to be cautious that you didn’t interrupt someone else’s conversation.  We had something called a “party line,” which meant that the one line was shared by several households.  Whenever the phone rang, you had to count how many times it rang to know which household it was for.
 
That’s not to say that some folks didn’t take advantage of the situation.  There were some people that would pick up the phone no matter how many times it rang, just so they would know the news of the day in the neighborhood.  You certainly never wanted to share anything deeply personal or scandalous over the phone, because you never knew who all was really listening to you.  You also couldn’t stay on the phone for very long, since this was before call waiting, because some impatient neighbor would be pretty likely to blast a trumpet into your ear if they felt like you’d been on long enough.
 
Mercifully, with God, we have multiple lines of communication.  We can talk directly to Him in prayer and in our thought life.  We have His words communicated to us through the printed word of the Bible.  As believers, we have the constant companion of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, which guides and speaks to our souls.
 
Thankfully, unlike the party line system, we don’t have to wonder when we hear God speaking if it’s really for us.  We are not limited by others on how long or how in-depth we get when we are speaking to Him.  We never have to worry that our private business will become public knowledge when we pour out our hearts to Him.  We don’t have to worry that we are interrupting someone else who might be talking to Him.  There is no question that He is listening when we speak.  The key is to make sure that we are listening when He speaks to us!

We may have a slight problem.

Now, I've mentioned before that I have a little, tiny, almost not-worth talking about problem with shoes.  Apparently, it carries over into cheap, disposable plastic storage.  (Don't look at my cooktop.  For some crazy reason, the camera made it look like it hadn't been cleaned in a week.  Which it hadn't.  But who wants to see that?)

I cleaned out the cabinet over the fridge on Thursday evening as I was looking for a large container for individual Dinosaur Dirt Cakes for Luke's class for Friday.  I had to pull out all of our foil, Ziploc bags, and such to get the container out.  (Sidenote:  The bigger my belly gets with Anna Beth, the shorter my arms seem to be getting.  Between the disappearing feet and all of the other maladies of pregnancy, I am just perturbed at the ways my body is rebelling against me.)

So, basically what we have here are 600 resealable sandwich bags and 22 bazillion feet of plastic wrap.  (What you don't see are the two boxes of Ziploc gallon sized freezer bags and the one box of quart sized bags...Or the two rolls of tinfoil.)  What's a girl to do with that much plastic storage, I ask you?!?

And I promise that (unlike the shoes) I totally didn't know I had that many storage bags or rolls of plastic wrap.  It was a matter of, "Hey, I'm at Wal-Mart.  What did I come in here for again?  Hmmm...must've been milk, eggs, bread, plastic wrap, and Ziploc bags."  You would think that I'd remember from one trip to the next that I had bought those and that we hadn't been bagging or wrapping individual slices of bread or pretzels or whatever in them.  *Sigh.*

If plastic storage hoarding isn't your thing today, maybe this is:

Jason said the prayer at breakfast on Friday morning.  As soon as he said "Amen," I noticed that something had happened while the food was getting blessed.  Part of it (the chocolate chip pancake part) had ended up on Luke's head.  And like a good blogger, Mom and her camera were there.

Y'all have a great Monday!