Vow Renewal

These are some pictures that were taken at the vow renewal by Ben, Terri's husband. I'll upload the pictures the photographer took when we get it in the mail!

Me & Kennesha goofing off...then we fell afterward, but I didn't include that picture!! LOL

This is Pastor Mike and his wife Debbie who performed the ceremony.

Me & Terri (my friend from high school)

And I just love these two pics. (Thanks so much Ben!) These are our God-children. I so wish that our kids could've been apart of our renewal, but I'm hoping that we can ALL go back in two years when Larry & Kennesha renew their vows at 10 years.

Ok, so look for part two of the vow renewal sometime next week!

10th Anniversary

This year marked 10 years that we have been married! Can you believe it??? It's been awesome. We've had our ups and downs, just like everyone else, but the fact that we never threw in the towel and have learned so much from God and each other is just amazing. I thank God for this wonderful man that he has blessed me with. I am watching him transform this year and I'd have to sit for a long time if I wanted to write it all down. Since I will not be doing that today.....lol....I will share the wonderful surprise of my anniversary gift this year.

In January I started getting excited about our anniversary and would just bust out with, "10 YEARS!!!" and spirit fingers!! (because I was a cheerleader of course!) And because I have learned from my marriage that I need to clearly communicate what I want, I made sure that Wendell knew I wanted to do something really special this year. So while he was deployed he started making plans to surprise me with a trip to Hawaii and by the time he got home, he only had a few weeks to get some final arrangements for our trip and vow renewal that he was coordinating with our friends, Larry & Kennesha (who are stationed in Hawaii). We were blessed to be able to have Ivana come to our house for a week to watch our kids while we were gone, so we had no worries about the kids, and that was great.

Unlike last time we were in HI, we got to see the residential side of the island, which is very different from being a tourist, but guess what? I still love it. I said to Wendell two days ago how much I missed and loved Hawaii and can't wait to go back. Anyway, I'm going to talk too much and you really just want to see pictures, right? Okay okay. Here you go:


These are pictures taken from the balcony of our room at the Sheraton downtown in Honolulu. We were on the 30th floor (out of 31 floors) so it was pretty sweet. (Thanks LBJ & KB!!!)



My next post will have some pictures from our vow renewal, but I didn't want to cram it all into one post. I just wanted to share that we went down, saw our friends, our beautiful God-children and I even got to see one of my friends from high school, Terri, and meet her husband, Ben. We reconnected on Facebook and her husband is stationed down there in the Navy, so they came to our vow renewal too. It was really nice. Something else special while there was that we got to see Caleb on his first day of Kindergarten. It was emotional for me because I'm a sap, but also because I remember going to San Antonio to help Kennesha after Caleb was born. My babies are all growing up....

Next is Vow pics and HOMESCHOOL!!!

While You Were Out....

Now that Wendell is home, I can safely post these pictures up here! Every time he deploys I try to do something to surprise him when he returns (other than the house still standing, kids dressed, fed, and hair done, and of course, my sanity!)

So the first thing we did, which he did know about, was replace our front door. Because its an inch shorter than stock, the previous purchaser of the door had it cut down and how ever they "secured" it--it failed. So even Wendell had to muscle it to open our front door. So here is our new front door and storm door. (Yes, our front door is primed. I'll let him pick the color but let's hear your vote too!)

The other thing I did while he was gone was to make some changes in the girls' bathroom. It started out as a painting project (which he knew about) but once I asked my neighbor to come over and move the toilet so that I could paint behind it, it snowballed after he offered to move the sink and vanity to paint behind that too! I don't think I have a before picture of the bathroom, but if you've been here, you remember the ugly wallpaper that was up there. I had that stripped a few months ago so we were just trying to decide upon the color. We chose to keep it the plain cream that's all over the house in case we ever try to sell the house, but agreed to give the kids bright colors since we all hate "white walls." Working with the shower curtain that was given to us last year, we had our inspiration!





















I also got a little creative and bought some candle holders that were black. I spray painted them cream and bought the 4 colors in the shower curtain and mixed them around as the trim on the circles. I think they turned out great and impressed myself! lol
















So now with these pictures I see that the bathroom isn't all together, but this was all a surprise, so ......I had to be creative with my spending and haven't purchased the outlet covers and I'm going to let him put in the matching hand towel holder and TP holder.

Today was a good day

(I know this is long, but I wrote this instead of an email update to my husband!)

It started out seeming like it was going to be awful. I had plans to go to the store first thing in the morning, but I had forgotten that Miracle had to get her allergy shots at 10. So we pressed and tried to go to the store before her shots, but I was wrong in thinking that they opened at 9. I decided to get her shots early, but the kids just weren't in a quiet mood today and Gabi was doing A LOT of screaming today. Although it was her naptime when we left the doctor's office, I thought I could fit the shopping trip into our morning.... ha ha ha. It was a loud trip. I wanted to get in and out, but Brianna brought in her journal and wanted to stop and write down everything she wanted to buy for Miracle's birthday.......which is 5 months away. So I was pretty frustrated when we left there.

My nap was unsuccessful due to an angry child that did not understand the terms of her discipline and that we don't operate in military time (she wanted to know what time she could leave her room AFTER 12 o'clock. Mind you, it was 12:56 at the time of this meltdown and I told her 2pm.) So I got up and had my second cup of coffee. And from that point on, everything changed! I got 3 projects done, a load of clothes washed & dried, dinner made, and we were getting ready to head to baseball practice when we got the dreaded call.

Joshua's practice was canceled! His coach had to work late and couldn't make it. He was pretty upset so i decided to take him and see if another team would let him practice with them. That worked out and then he was able to practice with the girls teams because they were missing some players and their two teams combined. So he got to practice for 2 hours and got to play coach-pitch! (Yes of course he hit the ball! My boy rocks!) The girls are doing so much better too. All 3 of them get to play around the pitchers mound and 1st base. I don't think they've ever been on 2nd or 3rd. And pardon my lack of baseball terms. I'm sure there's a name for "around the pitchers mound!" LOL The director of sports is Miracle's coach and I know that he likes the kids and gives them extra attention after practices, so I'm not sure if they play those spots because they're really good or because he likes them. Actually, I just realized that I don't really know if those are good spots! LOL They do well there.

The coach knows that I'm going to homeschool the kids and we've been talking about having PE at the Y and he told me tonight that if the group doesn't come, he'll just play baseball with the kids. He loves to work with Josh because Josh reminds him of himself when he was little. ALWAYS wanting to play baseball. I honestly don't know what is going to happen in 3 weeks when Tball is over. I've started to prep Josh for it now, but he literally talks about baseball every day about 10 times a day. So maybe we have a ball player on our hands. I just hope he likes fall sports too!

Enough sports. After practice I was talking to one of Brianna's coaches and another lady who just happened to be at practice tonight. It was all a set up because the person she was coming to meet didn't show up. But the 3 of us stayed at the field until 9pm talking about church, faith, and speaking in tongues--and Bishop was JUST talking on Sunday about one of things we were talking about tonight. So I was able to invite the coach to church since she's looking for someplace new.

The fun part (for the kids). They got to play on these gravel mounds while we all talked. I've done good at keeping them off the mounds this whole summer...but not tonight. So when we were doing baths I noticed sand in Joshua's hair. Then Brianna's hair. Then I was really glad that they hadn't picked up the Kirby yet because I remembered he said there was a scalp massage tool with it! LOL Did he make that up, I don't know. But we sure used it as one tonight to get the sandy gravel out of their hair! (And it felt good because we all took turns!) yes, I still have to wash their hair, but I got most of it out.

Ok, that's a wrap for me tonight.

Devotions

I think I wrote before that we're trying to get consistent with daily devotions. One day I'll record Josh as he "reads" his devotion; that boy is hilarious! Obviously this is becoming routine enough that the other day Gabi decided she was going to participate as well. So she marched up with her brother and read her devotion as well.


While her devotion was spoken in a tongue unfamiliar to our ears and we did not have the gift of interpretation that evening so we could discern it.......Josh's devotions ALWAYS include, "When we bless God, He blesses us. God blesses us when He blesses us!"