Zane is 2!

Zane is two! We made it!! It's been a long, fun, hard and blessed two years. I have a wonderful third baby who I know is going to do amazing things for his Lord. Yea, Zane!!!!!

Sung to the Conga Line Song

"We-e have hot wa-ter, we-e have hot wa-ter, we-e have hot wa-ter"

Please go give your hot water heater a hug and a kiss. It serves you well, and you don't even know how much so until you go without him for (almost) a week.

(even Lucy loves the new member of the family....)

If it ain't broke...

it don't live at our house.

We are currently without a water heater. Not a huge deal, really. Allen is making due with cold showers-luckily it's summer. The rest of us boiled water and bathed in two inches of tepid water last night. So I'm thinking how much water we would normally waste bathing. Anyway... back to the breaking.

Our garage door opener keeps breaking. Not a huge deal, unless you are late for something and have to crawl on top of the broken truck to pull the emergency cord to be able to close the door manually so you can leave the house. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Last week it was the upstairs air conditioner. It's just not easy to sleep when it's 84+ degrees in your house. Then I thought of the people who'd never had air conditioner. Or a ceiling fan. Or power. Or a bed to sleep in.

Last week Allen's truck broke too. He fixed it, luckily. His car door handle is also broken. You have to roll down the window and open it from the outside. It broke a couple of weeks ago on the way to pick up the van. The one that needed a new transmission.

Before that, it was the washing machine and the dryer. We'd been proactive and replaced all the kitchen appliances the year before, trying to avoid any disasters there.

We had termites too, so I guess you could say that our house was technically broken. I'm still not completely sure they are gone, but Scarlett is not thinking of that today.

I know that our air conditioning units (2 of them) are old. That's the real wallet buster there. We need new floors and garage doors too. I'm beginning to feel like we live in a small money pit. Or at least a black hole that loves to suck our money and credit into it with merciless glee.

I love what my mom says. "It's a fallen world. Things break!" It's true. Remind me that in heaven, nothing breaks. Really. Nothing does. That's a really good reason to want to go there. Besides the whole meeting Jesus thing....

It's good to be gotten

I have the best friends in the whole world. I really do. They love me, in spite of all my flaws. They pray for me and walk the spiritual walk with me. They care for me when I'm down or sick. They take care of and love my kids. They love what I love and laugh when I laugh. They have also cried tears with me. We can be silly, serious, or both at the same time. I have so many wonderful, precious friends.

One such friend just blessed me recently. She gave me a wonderful girlie skirt that I wore to church and felt just fabulous in! But more than that, I feel so blessed because she just gets me. She gets that I love clothes-fashionistas we both are. She gets that hair matters. We desperately want Beth Moore to do a study on how to balance the girlie parts of us with the Spiritual parts of us. (Beth Moore and Betty Robinson go shopping together. Is that not a hoot?) She lets me share bargains with her, because she loves them as much as I do and she loves a good garage sale as much as me. She loves to decorate and loves to eat as much as I do.

We do frustrate each other. I can just hear her saying, "Ahhhh, A.m.y.!!!" in that way she does. And I can hear her saying, "I know. I'm sorry..." when she knows that she's about to get in trouble with me! We are as different as we are alike, but as I pondered the joys of friendship this week, what I came to is that

It's just good to be gotten.

To have friends that "get" you. That let you be you. And love you just for you.

I really do have the best friends in the world. I hope we grow old together, have showers for each others kids, hold each others grand babies, go on old peoples' vacations and share the lives that God gave us with each other.

Two years ago today

I looked like this. Reason #248 that I'm so glad I'll never birth another baby!!! And a really good reason that the residuals from that are why I'm starting the South Beach Diet tomorrow. Jennifer is doing it with me so I'll have someone to complain to. I basically have to live on lettuce for 2 weeks. If I don't blog, would someone come over and make sure I'm not laying in my living room floor, passed out from hunger? Thank you.

The Big Read

The Big Read asked people to nominate their favorite books in order to find the most loved book. Below is the list. The fun thing to do is to put in bold all the ones you've read. Someone estimated that the average adult has read 6 of the 100. I'm going to see how I did. There is the original link...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml

And here are the "rules."

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read (as in the book is bought and sitting on my shelf).
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien (Working on it now...)
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Most of these are due to Honors English, and certainly not ones I chose on my own. Oh well. That was interesting. And kind of disheartening. I need to get reading, apparently!

Bane of my existance

How is it possible that 5 people wore these many clothes in one week? How is it possible that as soon as I get this folded and put away, there will be a full laundry basket to wash again? How is it possible that we even own these many clothes? (don't answer that.)

I think that's why motherhood is so hard. As soon as you get done, you get to do it all over again. I'm actually not complaining so much as I'm just observing. I might as well not complain about any of this. Like air, it's always there!

You should see my kitchen. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, Chick-fil-A, dinner. Breakfast, lunch, dinner.

And so it goes.....