Beautiful For Me

This has been a fun week!  The fun started last weekend when we had a birthday bash for Emilee at my sister's house!  Our hearts were completely filled up with friends and family and festivities!  I'll write a whole post about it tomorrow.

On Sunday we came home from a busy, exciting weekend, and along with fatigue and fun memories, we brought along our niece for a week long stay in the country!

We have kept up a daily routine of snacking, playing, watching movies, doing puzzles, coloring pictures, fighting over toys and tattling!  Then the the nightly ritual of dinner, dance party, bath time, cheese & crackers, bed time stories and then laying little sleepy princesses into their beds for the night.

This morning they were watching a Veggie Tales movie called "Sweet Pea Beauty".  It was playing in the living room while I worked around the house.  I know the message was about working more on our inner beauty and worrying less about they way we look on the outside, but I didn't catch a whole lot of the story.  The thing I did notice was the beautiful song that played during the closing credits.  It made me think of these photos taken on Sunday night at Emilee's birthday dinner with Tyler's family.  Three little faces completely content and excited about life, beaming and beautiful, just as Heavenly Father created them to be!

I can't stand the thought of them ever feeling less than beautiful!  I don't ever want them to look at their sweet little faces and not be able to see what I see in them now.... what I will always see.  It must be so painful for our Heavenly Father to watch his daughters feel less than the "beautiful" he created us to be!  I am working hard to be a better example to my daughters in this way!  I am finally starting to believe that if Heavenly Father didn't think we were beautiful just the way we are, he wouldn't have created us this way.  My new goal is to be beautiful for him!

I'm back......

.....and I feel like I just woke up from a night of no sleep! I look like it too!  The last month or so has been a whirlwind of emotion, change, experience and growth!  I might be exhausted, but I am exhausted and happy!

Previous to my "Blog Fast", I challenged myself to go for 40 days without any sweets.  During that time, I found I really didn't need chocolate as much as I always thought I did.

Blogs, however; are an entirely different craving for me.  I realize that I crave information, connection, creativity, and good writing!  I love learning about other people's lives, interests, aspirations and accomplishments.  Blogs inspire me!  I have missed them.

In their absence though, I have learned that I have a big problem with balance.  Learning to enjoy all things in moderation is a big deal to me, but right now I am not very good at it.  I have also learned that I tend to go unconscious at times, turning to outside sources to avoid fully living my own life.  I am not fully present in every moment.  I realized this, when I was finding myself spending too much time reading, or watching movies when I couldn't turn to the blogs I usually escape to.  Why would I do this?  I don't know!  I have a beautiful life filled with love and purpose and yet I seem to keep myself at a distance from everything I love.  Hmmm....interesting.

I am learning to be more aware of who I am and how I am spending my time.  I am trying not to judge myself....just observe and notice.  During the last 40 days, a lot of wonderful new things have happened.  My life is headed in a new and exciting direction, and I am so grateful to my Father in Heaven for giving me such an abundant and full life!  It's my choice to accept it though.  I think the Lord is offering all of us every good thing we desire.....we just have to ask for it and then make the choice to take it!

I highly recommend sacrificing something you might be holding on to a little too tightly.  Stretch yourself.  Take the time to step back and look at your life and behavior a little more closely.  I promise the Lord will show you the parts that need to be let go of, and the best part, is he will replace those parts with the thing you really want......happiness!

Blog Stalkers Annonymous

I know I don't write on my own blog very regularly, but I'm what you might call "blog obsessed".  I could read other people's blogs all day everyday and quite honestly (and unfortunately), sometimes I do.  Food blogs, design blogs, mommy blogs, lifestyle blogs....blogs.....blogs....blogs......ahhhhh!  I love them....I love them and I need them! 

(Hanging my head) It's true..I am an addict.

It is becoming disturbingly clear that while I love and adore my babies and long to squeeze and kiss my husband, my heart (at least a significant piece of it) is almost always somewhere in the blogosphere and not here in my  home with my family where it belongs.  

As with any addiction, my blog reading has robbed me of time and slowly taken over my life.  When other people are using the computer I get antsy waiting for my turn to log in and see if NieNie has updated or what C. Jane has to say or what's cookin' with the Pioneer Woman.  It's good stuff I tell ya.....all of it!  And I must read it....every.....single.....bit of it, or I don't feel like my life is complete.

Weird.  Sad.  Pathetic.  Embarrassing.  I don't know exactly what the right word for it is, but it is time to take my life back, and so I am making my own "Blog Intervention".  I will be abstaining from all blogs, including my own and FaceBook  for 40 days.  I will only be using the computer to do banking and check my emails and things like that.  

Phew.  This is tough.  

What will I do with myself? Get something productive done for a change? Maybe complete some projects, organize my home and work more on my dreams and goals and spirituality.  What if my marriage improves and I read to my children more.....what then?  Am I going to be able to handle a life where I am the one creating and living and loving rather than reading about other people doing it?  In 40 days I'll come back and let you know!

One of my favorite scriptures says, "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." (Matthew 6:1)

My family is my treasure, and it's funny how quickly we can become distracted and out of balance if we are not careful.  All things in their proper place....that is where I am headed.  Fully invested.  Available.  Present.

The blog break starts tomorrow!  Wish me luck!

Dreams by Firelight

A couple of weeks ago Tyler and I made a decision.  Move out the couch and move in the treadmill!  We thought it was a good idea...until we wanted to sit down! 

Our living room is small and doesn't really accommodate a couch and a treadmill, so....we moved in our bed!!

After celebrating the "New York" new year (10:00 p.m MST) with Royce, Lupe, Adolfo and Blake, we brought our girlies home and put them to bed, then......we heaved and pushed and pulled our awkwardly heavy dead weight mattress through our hall and into the living room, where we ushered in the real new year (12:00 a.m. MST) with a movie, cheese and crackers, sangria and our cozy bed!  Hooray for the new year!

Originally the "move" was just for New Year's eve, but it ended up staying until yesterday, and it was fun having a living room with a bed and a treadmill.  It made me feel like a young newly wed, or a college kid, or like I was living in a tiny studio apartment in New York City!

By day my girls and I would snuggle and eat popcorn and watch movies and color and read stories and jump and dance and by night Tyler and I would sleep by the flicker of our warm cozy fire!

This first week of the new year was fun and spontaneous and different, I like to think it is a precursor to what lies ahead for us this year!

Throughout the week I sat on our bed and recorded my hopes and dreams for the year, and I started my gratitude journal which has already brought a spirit of excitement and awareness into my life.

Eventually the bed needed to go back to the bedroom....where I guess it belongs, because now it's time to get down to business and make all of those hopes and dreams come true!

In my day dreams

Yesterday I discovered Janet Hill Studio on Etsy, and my heart leaped and twirled and finished off the happy dance with with some jazz hands!!

I love all things pretty and feminine, and she has got pretty and feminine all figured out! This art work is beautiful!  Janet paints the world exactly as it is in my daydreams and inspires me to make my dreams a reality!

Go here to see more!

We all have a part in the Christmas Story

Here is a little Christmas poem I wrote for my Primary kids!

To live a life as pure and clean as little Jesus did, 

is hard to do for me and you,

we make mistakes and sin.

But when we make a promise to take upon his name--

to hear his charge to change our hearts, 

and let his spirit in....

we will shine as brightly as the star on Christmas night,

and guide all those around us to his pure and perfect light.

And like the holy angels, who sang about his birth,

we can tell the story of his coming to the earth.

We can kneel before him, as the lowly shepherds did,

and give our hearts and all we have

like the wise men gave their gifts.

We were not there that holy night, to hear the angels sing.

But we're here NOW to share the LOVE of our

Savior, Lord and King!!

The Christmas Grump!

I was really  grouchy on Christmas day this year!  I just couldn't get into the fun and excitement.  I tried, but my heart was somewhere far away.  I felt like I wanted to burst out bawling and throw myself into bed for the remainder of the day.  I was completely lonely in a house filled with people I love and I felt like there was no one who could understand how I was feeling.

I felt burdened with weird emotions, frustrations, annoyances and hard feelings that I just couldn't shake.  The more I felt them, the angrier I got with myself for feeling so weird and for choosing Christmas day, of all days to throw my inner pity party.  It was a lame party....let me tell ya.

Just the night before I had made a personal commitment to be more grateful for all of the good and "not so good" in my life, and here I was, already feeling sorry for myself and finding it most difficult to be happy on the happiest day of the year!

Tyler dropped me off at home in the afternoon to put the girls down for their naps, and then he quickly returned to his parent's house to play games and hang out with his family!  I was trying my hardest to hold all of my emotions down, just waiting to let them burst after he shut the door, but he paused on his way out to thank me for the Christmas gift I had given him this year (which was very sweet of him), and I couldn't hold it in for another second and burst into tears!  I wouldn't even accept his offer for a hug and just told him to go.

I had a good, hard, deep cry letting out all of my sadness and bitterness.  Sadness and bitterness that had a million origins. I didn't even know all of it existed until then.  When I look back at it, I can see that it had been building up for a long time, little aches and pains in my heart that I didn't really know what to do with, so I'd just grit my teeth and try not to lash out in anger.

After my cry I just sat on the couch thinking about how I was feeling.  Why was everything hurting me like it was?  I still don't know for sure.  What I do know is that sometimes life hurts....it just does.  People are imperfect and we ourselves are imperfect, and sometimes our expectations don't line up with the desires and behavior of others.  People hurt us without even meaning to, and the unfortunate truth is some people are just a little too selfish.  It's all okay though, because we are learning.  We are all in need of repentance and forgiveness and on that day when we celebrated the birth of our Savior, I realized once again, just what he means to me.  How constantly I need him, and how all of the sadness and bitterness he took upon himself, was to allow me the choice to leave it with him, and not have to carry it all on my own.

Truly something to celebrate!