Photographers

Recently I realized that I know a lot of friends who are photographers. Several have started their own photography business (with the exception of Whispers. I do not know anyone in this photography business - I just think their photographs are amazing!).

I have posted their links on the right side of screen, just in case you are ever in need of a photographer.

There are also several that I know that do not have a business in place, but take beautiful photos: Amber and Tara S. are two that I can think of at the moment. They have blogs under my friends.

Hopefully I haven't left anyone out. I will update this list if necessary.

Enjoy.

Enjoy.

PS - check out the the Little Love gallery once you enter the Whispers website!

Mr. and Mrs.

April and Tobi were married on Saturday. It was such a great day! Here are a few pictures that are posted in the wrong order! I thought I had more, but I think I took those with her camera and I did not get to take any pictures at the reception. They are now cruising in the Bahamas! :)

April getting married!

April and Tobi are getting married on Saturday! She is beautiful! Brent will be performing the wedding, while I will be telling everyone else what do to. :) HA! or at least attempting to......

April and Tobi are a very fun couple and have managed to plan a great wedding in 3 months!

We have a pretty fun present to give them, but can't say anything till next week.

Yesterday our Aunt Barbara and myself did a family shower for them. I had great plans to make chocolate covered strawberries and some fruit skewers - but those plans completely and utterly failed! It was pretty sad. I ended up just throwing all the fruit in bowls and grabbed the chicken salad and left in a trail of tears. - it's been a rough week. I even had a breakdown at work on Friday, with a customer in the lobby of course (way to go, Marianne)! That has never happened before in my life! I have never had a breakdown at any job I have had in all my years of working. I was a little shocked myself. The word rough does not really do it justice though. It all started on Tuesday and ended yesterday! :)

This week has to be better. :) The shower ended up very well and the fruit looked very nice in the bowls -thank goodness for people who by you crystal for wedding presents! You never know when it will come in handy! :)

Snow in March

But it was all gone by lunch and we still had to go work.

Adoption update

Well we have offically, yet sort of unoffically finished our homestudy!! FINALLY! oh my goodness - I know that God's timing is perfect and everything happens right when He wants it too, but sometimes I do not understand it. For instance why in the world did we send in our application in May 2009 and just now February 2010 finish it! That's ridiculous - of course we did not help the process by changing to domestic and then changing back to Peru and then changing placing agencies! And now that it has taken forever we will have to get our medicals over again and wait for the child abuse forms to come back from Alabama before our social worker can offically send off our homestudy to DHR!

Once our homestudy is sent off, we can begin working on our dossier!
In the meantime we have so much reading to do! It's like the paperwork - it never ends!
But that's okay, it helps us to be prepared. And some days I do not feel prepared for raising a child and then some days I wish we were on the way home from Peru!

I have just finished reading a blog of some friends from Texas who are in the beginning of adopting from Ethiopa. They were talking of all the paperwork they were doing and amazingly enough was encouraged! Who knew paperwork could be so encouraging! :) But along this road of adoption, there can be much frustration and waiting. And listening to other people stories gives me encouragement and reminds me that we are on the right path and this will all come to completion.

As a side note continue to pray for our friends adopting from Nepal. They are so close to end of their journey!

We recently visited the International Adoption Clinic for an all day seminar. It was amazing! I loved learning all about what we might face with adopting internationally. We heard all kinds of the information about traveling to the country, medical issues, developmental delays, emotional stuggles (for the child - and us), but also hearing about the love, and the joy and excitement of adopting children and raising them!

I have mostly been learning about hope the past few months and not only with the hope of adoption. Hope is a such a vital part of our life. Without hope, all seems lost. Hope bring life!

This week has been a much quieter week for my soul, more peaceful. Until this weekend. Just let me say if evil plans to come on our land, it will be met and defeated by the host of angels that are standing, armed with flaming swords and shields because they are surrounding our land and home. I know this because I have prayed that all weekend! And now we must pray for them to surround about a mile or two radius around us to encompass our friends who live around us! CRAZY weekend. :)

1 Thessalonians 3:16 - "Now may the Lord of peace Himself give you peach at all times in every way. The Lord be with you all."

I hope you are able to follow this. I think I have talked all over the place!

Posting correction

Okay, I know said I wasn't going to post for awhile, but it was a normal Sunday for the first time this year! :)

It has been a hard week. Brent and I have not communicated well, I didn't something I should not have done, and there is a situation I have been angry at this week. That is why prayer and music have been my helpers! Music helps me to get my thoughts focused and remember the truth of God's word. It's been very hard for me to trust God lately with a situation that is completely out of my hands, I want some things to change and it's not up to me to change them. I want God to snap His fingers and correct it all instantly, but He's not doing that in this situtation. He lets us choose our path. For the past year or more the prodigal son story has come up seveal times, I beginning to think that either I am the prodigal or to help me understand some of what's going on now with a current situation. I am daily figuring out how to surrender to the Lord.

I felt like I have been very passionate about a situation lately and I've wondered why sometimes my passion for my own relationship with God, as well as spreading Christ to others is not of the same intensity?


Happy thoughts today are: today is my brother's birthday and mine is tomorrow! So we are going celebrate with our families after church! :) We also might get to meet a friend from seminary who is passing through later this evening.

Hopefully Brent and I will communicate better this week and I will behave!

I will leave you with this song by David Crowder :

He is jealous for me
Love like a hurricane, I am a tree
Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy
When all of a sudden,
I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me

And oh, how He loves us so,
How He loves us,
How He loves us all.

He love us,
Oh how He loves us
Oh how He loves us
Oh how He loves
Yeah, He loves us
Oh how He loves us
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves

We are His portion and He is our prize
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes
If grace is an ocean, we are all sinking
So heaven meets earth like an unforseen kiss
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest
I don't have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about, the way

He loves us,
Oh how He loves us
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves
Yeah He loves us
Oh how He loves us
Oh how He loves us
Oh how He loves

Happy Valentine's Day

There are a lot of things going on in life at the moment. Mostly a few things I am working through and figuring out. Not very pretty either. :) Plus since we do not have internet access at the house, it's harder to keep up with this blog and with facebook for that matter. So with that said I may not be blogging for awhile. But don't give up completely, check back later. :) I might suprise you. If you need to catch up with me, call me. :) I will talk to you later.

What's going on.....

What a month! There has been a lot going on. In our families and with us! It hasn't worked out for me to blog any of this since so many things have been happening.

One of the things below was Sonya's birthday - very fun times. Also April is engaged! Hooray! She and Tobi will be getting married in March. Aunt Barbara and I are going to give a family shower for her. I'm very excited about it. We received so many showers when we were married that it is nice to give back and be apart of someone else's new life - especially when it is your sister-in-law! :)

Destin finally says my name. My mom and Brittany started calling me "Auntie M". So when Destin says it is sounds like "Ann-y, Mmmm". He can't say "M" yet, but the "mmmm" is too cute! :) He also has a hard time saying Granma for my mom, so it comes out as "Double"!!! - Hilarious! The other day in the car, we were saying the ABC's and he will repeat each letter as you say it and towards the end of the alphabet he started saying "LM-mommy, N, OP-mommy, Q, RS-mommy, T, UV-mommy......" he's so funny.

The adoption has been really frustrating the past month or two, but things are finally picking up!

Brent and I have been doing some adoption training online this weekend. There is a lot - and when I say a lot - I mean A LOT of reading to do!! There were plenty of videos to watch also. I really enjoyed the videos. They contained very good information on medical issues, traveling issues, post-adoption information with the agencies and government(s). The interviews with the families were my favorite part of the training. It was really interesting to hear their experiences with different parts of the adoption and traveling. Some of the information seemed to go over my head, but I like knowing what to expect and I'm sure I will need a refresh course! But the agency will be giving us exactly what we need to know at the right time.

Speaking of agencies, we are currently hoping to transfer to a different agency! We are very excited about this new agency! We are hoping that everything transfers smoothly and quickly!But a few things are slower than I would like!
We are partly to blame for the slow down in this process. For a few weeks, we really weren't

sure what we were going to do. I started to second guess everything. Then one night my friend, April, stopped by for a visit and during our conversation, she started me on the thought maybe that God had a different idea for our adoption than I originally thought. April's friendship is a true blessing. She is one of the few people I know (or at least who I have talked to) who understands about not knowing what God is doing. Even though they were very different circumstances, we had a lot of the same feelings and thoughts about what was going on our lives. We know God has this process, but the pathway is very foggy, if not at what seemed to be dead-end!

So I've been reading this book called "Disappointment with God" by Phillip Yancy. It's very good so far. You should check it out. Although I did wonder what the people at the bookstore thought about me as I was buying it! :)

Sonya turns 50!

My mother-in-law turned 50 this month. So we threw a surprise party for her at our house! The whole family came! We all had a great time! Mini-burgers, cake, dancing, even Pin-the-Tail on the Donkey!

New Year

I am so glad that it is finally 2010. 2009 could not end soon enough! :)

I realized I haven't blogged in almost 2 months! You may have even given up on ever hearing from me again! ha! November and December were very busy months. I pretty sure I didn't sit down until New Years Day!

We had a good time with our families over Christmas. We took the youth to Gatlinburg for the Scott Dawson winter youth conference. It was very good this year. The kids really enjoyed it - or at least they seemed to! :) I hardly have any pictures of any thing with Christmas or the youth trip. Sometimes I get too worried about getting a picture and I don't enjoy the moment or the time. So this year, I just decided to enjoy everything and not worry about getting a good picture.

Life's a little bit crazy right now, okay, a little, I'm sorry - it's a lot crazy! In fact I have been pretty bummed about 5 or 6 things going on in life right now. So the other night I had to sit down and list all the good things in my life - which do out weigh the not so good, confusing things in life. :)

One fun thing that is going on is that Brent and I are taking dancing lessons starting this week! We got them for our parents for Christmas and so we are going to take too! It's only 6 weeks - ballroom and latin. My parents preferred the ballroom lessons and Brent's parents preferred the latin lessons - so Brent and I decided to take both so that we could be with each set of parents. It should be fun. Of course you can sign up for session 2 when this first 6 weeks is up, so we'll see how it goes! We took lessons for a few weeks while we were in Texas and really enjoyed it.

I found this note on one of my friend's website - I really liked it.


“casting all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:7)

It is a happy way of soothing sorrow when we can feel that He cares for us. Christian, do not dishonor your faith by always wearing a brow of care. Come and cast your burden on your Lord. You are staggering beneath a weight that you Father would not feel. What seems to be a crushing burden to you would be like a little dust on the scale to Him. Nothing is so sweet as to “Lie passive in God’s hands, and know no will but His.” … What a serene and quiet life might you lead if you would leave providing to the God of divine care! With a little oil in the cruse and a handful of meal in the barrel, Elijah outlived the famine, and you will do the same. If God cares for you, why do you need to worry? Can you trust Him for your soul, and not for your body? He has never refused to bear your burdens; He has never fainted under their weight. Come, then, soul; be done with fretful care, and leave all your concerns in the hands of a gracious God.

-Charles H. Spurgeon

Hope you are enjoying the new year!