Louder Than the Voices

 Good morning everyone! I hope everyone has had a great week! I have. We pulled off a great eclipse event in Jasper County on Monday and yesterday I got to spend the day with my mom, with no doctor visits involved! We were still on a mission, but it was an adventure. I treasure the days I get to spend with my mom. I also treasure days I get to spend with my son and some conversations I have had this week has brought me to this post. Until Robert was almost 7, I was a stay-at-home mom. That wasn't the original plan but it was God's plan and that was what was important. When we moved to Pennsylvania 6 weeks before he was born, I knew I wasn't gong to trust anyone enough to take care of him. Especially when the first news we heard when we got the tv hooked up was how a babysitter had put a baby in a dryer and killed him.  I am so glad I had the opportunity and I treasure that as I know there are a lot of families out there that it just can't happen for anymore. I was also ...

 Happy Saturday morning! Haven't written about the weight loss journey for a while so I thought I would throw this in today. First off, I made it to ONEDERLAND!! Actually a couple of weeks ago, and now I am at 147 lbs down, or 196 lbs. Andrew weighs 190, so of course my next two goals are hitting the 150 down mark and hitting 189 so I weigh less than him. I left off last time at being at 209, new baby, not being able to lose weight and being told I was just having a little post partum depression.  Well, we moved back to Illinois when Robert was 18 months old, we moved to Pontiac, about 1 1/2 hours south of Chicago. Life was going along fine, I was still fat but wasn't gaining, I wasn't eating, but I wasn't gaining so that was at least good. I kept deciding sometime surely I would lose my baby fat.  Then, one day, w were cleaning out the garage and I picked up a trash bag that had broken glass in it. The bag was heavy and I hoisted it up my leg to help leverage the weigh...

 Happy Saturday morning! And more importantly, Happy Easter! I truly hope that when you hear the word Easter, bunnies and eggs are not the first thing that pop in your head. Hopefully it is a cross, an empty cross. Sorry I was gone a couple of weeks,  I had told myself I wasn't going to be a slave to the blog and so I give myself permission to take a week off now and then. I did that two weeks ago and then last week, I was in Missouri for Andrew's cousin's funeral. Last week was suppose to be the weight loss week but it will have to wait. With Easter here, I have to talk Christ today. We have had revival this week and it has been glorious! I know people who aren't believers cannot understand why we would go sit for three nights in a row listening to preaching about our Savior but for believers, it is a spa treatment for the soul. We always hope and pray that someone might come that doesn't know the Lord and they could get to but most of the time, revival is just tha...

 If you read the blog last week, I warned you. This week we are going to talk about "stuff". I started a decluttering mission at the beginning of the year, trying to dig deep into getting excess stuff out of my life one room at a time. Yard sale week is May 11th and hopefully, I have time to get my stuff together and be ready for it because I definitely have enough now unwanted stuff for a sale. I was doing okay with the fact that I was making things more simple and just feeling really good about what I was accomplishing until I watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie. It is funny, I remember laying on the floor of the living room anxiously awaiting the first episode of the story of one of my 7-year-old idols, Laura Ingalls. I was a reader from a young age and my mom and sister would read a lot to me too, We had already read most of the LIW books before the showed aired, so I was hard pressed to miss an episode. Andrew on the other hand, had never watched it, so the...

Good morning!     I hope you all have had a great week! I have, and this morning, as I stepped out my front door to soak in a few minutes of quiet, I had that overwhelming feel of gratitude. We have a lot going on in our lives, and I have had a lot on my mind, heart, soul, and plate lately. Some I can talk about, some I can't, with anyone but God that is. And oh how thankful I am that I can talk to Him. He has carried me through some really tough times lately and keeps reminding me He is in control. And then this week, He has just given me gifts and I feel so very loved. My State monitoring was this week. Once a year, our grantor comes and looks at our processes and goes over several of our files with a fine tooth comb. Their job is not to play, "gotcha" but to make sure we are using the funds entrusted to us to the best interest of the grantor, and ultimately, the tax payer. We had a new system for doing our furnace programs this year and I was very unsure if my files fo...

 Good morning everyone!      Sorry I missed last week, We had been in Vegas for a conference and our ETA of 7:30 pm to get home turned into 11:15 pm for me. Since I had been gone Valentine's Day, Andrew and I ran away from home for a bit last Saturday, so the blog went by the wayside. This is the week to continue my weight loss journey. I am to the point where I have slowed down losing. I knew it would get there, in fact, everyone, even my doctor, is surprised I haven't hit a stall. I have lost 6 lbs in the last month, bringing my total to a little over 140 lbs. I am STILL chasing the elusive Onederland, but I am 3.1 lbs from it, so hopefully within the next 2 weeks. I also travelled a lot last month, and even though I walked an unreal amount (17 miles in a 24 hour period week before last) and really didn't do bad at eating, travelling still makes it hard. So, I am giving myself grace because I know I am still eating right for the most part and still working out and ...

 Good morning everyone, I hope you all had a good week. I saw something on facebook this week that made me know what I was writing about. This: And I really thought, this is good to remind everyone but I really don't think there is an age limit on this.  Words hurt, and when people are talking about you, it hurts, no matter how old you are. And honestly, yes, it hurts worse when people just keep reminding you but it hurts even when it happens for a short time. The last few years there has been a thing going around that says, "What other people think of you is none of your business." I don't know if it is different being from a small town or what, but I can't wrap my head around this. If there is someone out there that can tell me they truly don't care what anyone thinks of them, I believe I would show you a picture of a pretty lonely person. But maybe I am wrong. I know I personally care very much what others think of me. I had an incident happen almost a year...

 Happy Saturday morning everyone! I hope you have had a good week, mine has been busy, but I have accomplished a lot. Getting ready for a couple of weeks of traveling so things are about to get a little busier. So, a series of events has prompted this week's blog. First, we started a new book study Sunday night at church, it is called The Unsaved Christian and it is very compelling to me. It is about our friends and family who confess to be a Christian but have never really accepted Christ as their Savior, or have that personal relationship with God, in one point of the book it mentions that a lot of people believe if they are not atheists, they are Christians, One of the study questions was, "If someone asked you why you're a Christian, or more specifically, how you know you are a Christian, what would you say?" We discussed 1 Peter 3:15, "But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason f...

Happy Saturday morning! We made it through another week, albeit the weather was a rollercoaster. We had icy weather Monday, the threat of which made me stay home from the gym for the first weekday this year. That was a hard debate. I hated losing that streak, but it was the sensible thing to do. I am very happy that I made it there faithfully the rest of the week and got my daily routines in, even though the crazy fog, so I trek on.  I talked a little about my visions and goals for 2024 but thought I would share a bit more today. A few years ago, I spent time with a life coach, Teresa McCloy. I was in the height of taking the verse, "I can do all things...." literally. Somehow, I was in that, "She who does the most is happiest" stage and I was in such a people pleasing mode that I was not saying no to anything. I was working 3 jobs and on a dead run between all of them. Teresa introduced me to the fact that my life was lacking one huge thing- Balance.  I was getting...

 Good morning, everyone! So, last week, I announced that I was going to start sharing my weight loss journey since my surgery, one week a month. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I really need to start from the beginning. I have had a weight problem most of my life. Actually, when I was very young, I don't think I was overweight. I didn't look like it anyway, I seemed to start putting on weight between first and second grades. Ironically, this was after spending a year eating soft foods (read literally baby food) because the doctor "thought" I had ulcers. I am so glad children's illnesses are diagnosed differently now. When we first decided there was a problem, the first thing the doctor assumed was diabetes. They did tests for that and it came back negative, so, they "decided" I had ulcers. I had lots of stomach aches and was throwing up a lot. So, I ate all pureed and soft foods for a year until they decided I was over it. I went through...

Good Morning!     I trust you have all had a good week and are keeping warm on this chilly winter morning.  I heard the snowplow scraping our street at 1 and again at 4, so I was slightly disappointed to see that we had a mere dusting of snow on the ground this morning. So much for our winter storm, but of course, we got the cold temps. May be a good day to stay inside. I already have ham and beans in the crockpot and though I have a couple of errands to run, I am staying in as much as possible today. Last Sunday night, we had a discussion at church about being bold.  I took it to heart and it has been a goal for this week. We were talking about the fact that we have some Christian young people in our community that are very bold in their beliefs and they are actually showing some of us that have been Christians for many years up. I was also fueled by one of the DJs on Sirius XM the Message. She was telling how, as a child, her mother was one of those people who woul...

 Good morning and Happy 2024!     After my long absence, I have so many things to share but I think you would need to be here all day, so I will drizzle all the things that has happened over the last year through the next year. Over the past several years, I have been keeping a planner and trying to be more intentional about my life. I had started the original in March, so I always go March to March. This year I bit the bullet and ordered a new one so I could start January 1 (yes, I even had the crazy thought of doing the other one through March on top of this one just so I wouldn't have an "unfinished" planner, but I quickly decided to pull an Elsa and let it go, lol.). I have been using Cleaver Fox Planners the last couple of years, I originally had a bullet journal but realized, as much as I loved the artwork and creativity, it was something that I could do without if somebody else would put all my spaces in order for me. So, this year, with my planner in hand before t...