My birthday party

My birthday was last Thursday. Jay, Hannah and I met some family members for dinner at Applebees. We had a good time visiting together. I had the best birthday in years this year. Here are some of the pictures I caught. Mom has a really good one on her camera I want to snag soon. It's a hoot. All of these pictures were edited in Photoshop CS2 and I used two- three Pioneer Woman Actions, "Boost" from pack one, "warmer" and "seventies" from pack two.

The cheese girl. The girl LOVES cheese. But she's picky. She used to only eat processed American cheese food products. Then I broke the news that it wasn't real cheese. Good thing she's not a die hard Santa player. The cheese thing was hard enough! So she started exploring. We also eat real American cheese now. She likes to be patriotic like that. She loves Monterey Jack cheese in and on everything if she had the choice.

In the last six months, she has grown a love of fried Mozzarella now. Praise God.

You know ... I cannot remember the last time we took a picture this good. Seriously. Not even our wedding pictures were this good. He was smiling, too! Yes, that's a Jay smile for pictures. He usually doesn't smile. That's why you don't see a whole lot of "posed" pictures of us. This was his gift to me.

"Mommy what made you fall in love with daddy?" Hannah has asked. Well here ya go.

This picture also answers the question to how I can have such brown eyes and my children do not. Note: no additional eye filters were done to this picture. Yes, those are real! :)

You can see the rest of the birthday pictures on the Facebook page. Enjoy!

Wordless Wednesday: Missing the Beach

GratiTuesday: August 4th

This is one of the easiest posts of the week. God has blessed me with so many wonderful things in my life, picking something out to talk about is easy. Of course I am grateful for my daughter. She's my daughter! I think she's everything I wasn't when I was a little girl. She's all hearts, flowers, balloons ... princesses ... always thinking of others. Her heart is a mile wide. She is the best friend anyone could ask for. Really, she cares SO MUCH about other people. There's a downside to this- it's easy for her to be hurt, too. At the same time, though, those hurts have been teachable moments to show her more about Christ, and about people's need for Christ in the way some treat others. She accepted Christ as her Savior two months before her 6th birthday, and she led herself to Christ. All we done was witness it. It was a precious, precious night for our family.

This past week has been GREAT. Jackson was with one of his uncle's visiting, so it was just me and Hannah here at the house. It was so peaceful. Usually she pecks me to death wanting this, wanting that, complaining about something or another. Not Wednesday. I realized as I was doing my bible reading in the living room, how peacefully quiet it was, even with her three feet away from me in the dining room. She was playing on Pixie Hollow and was as content as she could be. It wasn't like she'd never played on that site, it was just different. We didn't even turn on the TV that day until 4pm. Thursday was the same, and Friday was very close to it. It occurred to me that this new found peace could possibly be her changing, a result of her growing up.

I told Jay in a conversation not long ago how we were on the brink of a number of accomplishments with the kids. We were close to getting on the "other side" of some issues we were trying to overcome. Little things, such as, her insistence on sugary drinks. While we were at the beach I convinced her to drink a glass of water each day to stay hydrated. She's still doing it. As a result, she's not paying as much attention to food during the day because she's able to more accurately tell when she's truly hungry or not. That's big for us, as she was continually snacking through the day, and I believe it was more from potential boredom than true hunger. She's more willing to try new foods, which has ALWAYS been a struggle. The big thing in recent weeks is her relationship with the Lord. No matter where she sits in a church service, she always makes it down to the alter to pray during invitation. That warms my heart SO much. This past week, she brought a friend with her. A friend who is new to church, no less. What a blessing it was to see her be a positive spiritual influence towards another child!

Last week, she also figured out how to make comments on blogs, so you might be seeing links to her new blog posts in the near future. She was so excited about commenting :)

Check out more Gratituesday posts on Heavenly Homemakers.

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