The Good Life

If you know my husband, you know that he is always into a project at our house. It's both a blessing and a curse. I LOVE having a husband who does all of our home remodel projects and is handy around the house, but I don't always love the mess (especially with a toddler in the house). Matt works really long hours through the week, so we are weekend warriors when it comes to projects/anything fun/family time/etc... It's hard to cram it all in sometimes. Remodels and projects used to be so simple. Matt would get them ready for paint, I would paint and do the finishing touches and wham, bam, we were done! When you throw in a very busy toddler, who wants to "help" with everything - it really slows down the pace. Colton feels like the weekends are his time with Daddy (which he should). If Daddy is home, he wants to be in whichever room Daddy's in, doing whatever Daddy's doing. Although this is awesome on most occasions, it's not so awesome when you'...

It's hard to believe that today is 9/11/14. 13 years have passed since the tragic day when our lives were changed forever. The America that I grew up in, was not the same. It was like an innocence was lost and brutal truth was standing in its place. I have always known that we live in a cruel, evil world but, as a freshman in college, I was still naive and innocent to the real harshness of the world. I came from a happy, loving home - in America. Land of the free, home of the brave. We don't have to worry about our safety - nothing happens on our soil. But, it did happen on that day 13 years ago, and things were different! Even 13 years later, there is devastation. All around us, evil is waiting to strike again. It's always been this way, from the beginning of time. Good verses Evil. The devil never sleeps. It's easy to get discouraged and feel weary of all the hatred and disgust in our world, but we need soldiers in Christ who can fight the battles! Today, I see ...

Matt took me to dinner tonight to celebrate my last night as a 31 year old. It was a total surprise and he actually called me and asked me to go “on a date”. As we sat there talking about the past and how fast time has seemed to pass, I am in awe of the amazing life I have had in 31 years. I am beyond blessed. Matt and I had a whole dinner, just the two of us, and for the first time in a long time, we talked about so many fun things from the past. I don’t know that Colton came up one time in the whole conversation (which is so weird). We talked about Garth Brooks and how we wish we were able to get tickets to one of his come-back concerts. Talking about Garth got us started on how much older we feel now, knowing that we were just fresh out of high school when he “retired” (we’ve been graduated for 14 years)! We talked about how Colton will be 2 in just 4 months (oops, I guess we did talk about Colton during dinner after all). We talked about how much we have been through in the (al...

About 6 or 7 years ago, we found a campground in Virginia that we really like to visit. It’s primitive camping (meaning, no water or electric hookups, no cell phone service and no Internet) which makes for a really nice time for visiting with just the people you’re with – no outside distractions. This year, we had 19 people, 5 campers and 2 tents. We took up 5 camp sites and had a great time! Matt, Colton and I left on Friday morning and headed to Bristol so that we could stop and check out the brand new Bass Pro Shop up there. While we were waiting on the rest of our camping crew, we looked around the store, got Colton his first BPS hat and grabbed lunch at their restaurant (which was – surprisingly –   good). We had great weather driving and setting up camp but as soon as we had everything out, in came a torrential downpour. It was probably the hardest rain we’ve ever experienced while camping up there. It lasted for about an hour (long enough to completely soak everythin...