I'm Thankful for... this blog award

Seriously! I received this award from Christine (alamama), one of my e-friends at Scrap Matters. Her and Anne (of Alamo) have become sweet Christian friends that happen to enjoy digi-scrapping as much as I do.

So, I'm supposed to list 7 things I'm thankful for and then pass this on to 7 people.

Okay, only 7?!

• Jesus Christ - my Savior! I would be nothing but a wretched sinner destined for Hell, if it weren't for Jesus. I'm still a wretched sinner, but I have hope and peace, and I live for Him, and I'm going to Heaven!!!!! Woohoo!
• Petie - My Big P! He happens to be the Most Incredible Husband Ever!
• My children! - Wow, they make life so completely fun and absolutely wonderful! Motherhood is the greatest career in the whole world! Women are to live out God's mother heart - El Shaddai!
• Parents and Sister - I have two sets of parents that are so dear to me. My Daddy and Moma (yes, she spells it differently) and my In-Loves. My little sis, Kimbo, too. Our relationship has grown much stronger over the past few months and I'm so thankful for her.
  
• Friends - I have the dearest friends in the world. I don't see them very often. Most of them only once per week and even more less often. They are dear to me and I feel like we can pick up right where we left off. Dear friends are hard to come by and I have several!
• Church - We have a wonderful church that we call home. I'm so thankful and greatfull to be fellowshiping with them again. We have been back at TBC for almost a year now and the time has flown by. What a wonderful church family!
• Sight - this was really brought to my attention today as I went to the eye doctor. I had to get my prescription upped, but I can see! I have two eyeballs that work and the entire world to see through them. What a precious gift!

Okay, I'm supposed to give this to 7 friends (bloggers), but I don't know 7 bloggers personally, so let's see what I can come up with.

1. Tanya
2. Tasha
3. Yin Her templates ROCK!
   
4. Lisa M.
5. Christian (my son)
   
6. Paige (my daughter)
7. Lindsay (whose blog is really awesome - but I don't know her personally)
   

Okay, that wasn't as hard as I thought! LOL


edited:to include my beautiful sister, who I unintentionally forgot about in the midst of getting sick when I posted this

Part of the Scrap Matters Gang

I'm so excited to announce this. I've known for about a week, but the announcement wasn't supposed to come until the 27th and it actually came early - so I can say something now!

I was chosen to be part of the Scrap Matters Gang. This is a group of ladies on Scrapmatters.com forum that help to welcome new members, leave lots of love in the gallery for posted layouts, participate in challenges, and even get to pick the Layout of the Week, Secret Comment Challenge winner, and interview ladies from around the Scrap Matters forum. And don't forget that we also get early notice of the daily download freebie and other goodies. :)

It's pretty cool. So, at night, after the littles are in bed, I spend about 20 minutes going through the gallery to see all the pages that have been uploaded and leaving some love (and putting several in my favorites to learn something from). It's really cool!

Scrap Matters is undergoing a necessary site upgrade on Monday and much of the site will be down. We've been having some trouble with it lately having so many people on it and sucking up too much bandwidth or something like that.

Just thought I'd share something pretty exciting for me. :)

Homeschooling is so cool...

And God's gift to mom's who love to learn! Heehee! (image is linked if you want to see who all the products are from)

God is so good!

Had a wonderful quiet time with my Lord this morning. I'm studying James right now (as well as memorizing it with the kidlets) and it was... well... interesting as I took and "inventory" of the fruit of my life. Humbling!

We have a full weekend ahead of us! I'm going to scrapbook at my mom's church tomorrow morning with P.9.G. I sent her photos to Costco last night. She picked some really great ones that are current. I'm trying to live vicariously through her as I try to learn to scrapbook out of chronological order! She was "due" to scrap 1999. She has a top loading album that she is working on, so she can get things out of order.

I'm currently reading Photo Freedom by Stacy Julian. Wowzers! That's all I can really say right now, but I think this is going to let loose the creative within me. I love change, I embrace, and I think I'm ready to make the change to this new system. It's just going to take me a little while to think it through with my digital images and digital scrapbooking, because I don't print my prints out anymore. I have great software, though - Memory Manager.

I'm learning to scrap when inspiration strikes though and created this layout for a challenge last night. I linked the picture so that I can properly give credit to the wonderful ladies that create all these incredible products I use.


Have a blessed weekend and remember to capture those moments!

Cream of Millet & newest layout

Here's the Cream of Millet recipe that Tanya was asking about. this is really yummy and yes, my children really do love this!!! We eat it at least once a week. It's so cheap, so quick, and so healthy! Serve with a glass of milk!

You might need to adjust the amounts used, but keep everything in proportion or you'll end up with a mess. I need to up my recipe, because my kidlets are eating more.

6 tbps. millet
1/2 tsp. salt
2 cups water (* watch directions closely*)

Grind millet to fine flour in coffee mill. Pour 1 ½ cups water into saucepan. Bring to a boil. Whisk millet and salt into remaining ½ cup water. Gradually whisk grain mixture into boiling water. (optional: cover, remove from heat and let stand overnight for improved nutritional benefits).Return to boil.Turn heat very low, cover, and simmer until done – about 10 minutes.

And here is the layout that I ended up with for tonight's speed scrap.

Sharing

I wanted to share some of the blessing I have going on in my life.

The Lord has blessed me so much! I'm blessed with a wonderful husband, beautiful, wonderful children (5 of them to boot!), wonderful parents and sister, wonderful in-laws and wonderful friends, wonderful church family, a wonderful home and land. I'm just so very blessed!

I had a fun time with my friend Tanya Bee last night. Her birthday was a couple of weeks ago and we had yet to get together for it. We've kind of started a little tradition to take each other out on our birthdays, but with conflicting schedules and her hubby's work schedule, we had been unable to get together. So, last night, I took dinner to her and we had a great evening of fellowship. We also had yummy Greek food and a Starbucks! She's nearing the end of her pregnancy and bounced on her birth ball a lot of the time we were together talking. It was so cute, except she kept almost falling backwards!! Scaring me!!

Big P and our big kids are at the church work day today. I talked to hubby earlier and he said they were getting a lot done. I'm so glad they went.

My little boys are playing reader rabbit on the computer. Baby A is asleep. We had cream of millet this morning for breakfast.

We are simplifying again - this time it's the toys. Wanted to share this great post written by a Christian mommy that really inspired me.

I set up google reader to keep up with some of the blogs that I enjoy reading. One that I really love is Keeping the Home, but she doesn't have her RSS feed turned on and sometimes I forget to go read it. I really wish she would turn it on so that I could have all the blogs in one place.

hmm, let's see what else should I share??

we took a week off school, but we'll start back on Monday and go through until our Thanksgiving break. Still loving MFW and will be adding truth quest history to really get a God's eye view on history as a whole. That is really important to us, and I didn't feel I was doing an adequate job really helping my children get a grip on that. Truthquest History helps with summaries of how men responded to God's leading - good and bad.

Oh, wanted to share this layout I did at the speed scrap the other night. I love it and was so excited with the way it turned out. I was so relaxed during this Speed Scrap and I feel that it really made a difference in the quality of my work.

Scrap Matter just sent out their first newsletter. That's really exciting. it's 13 pages and has a full kit included -for free!

I've been checking out the very cool kits over at the Sweet Shoppe. Wowzers - they are really cool!

Oh, Big P let me purchase the book Photo Freedom from Stacy Julian, used of course, from amazon. I'll be receiving that in the next week or so and am very excited. I'm trying to think more big picture like in my scrapbooking. Still working on B.4.B.s book. I did another layout for it the other night, for a challenge. Still trying to decide if I should print 12x12 or 8x8 on that. I'm going back to CM albums. I'm just not pleased with the others. I figured out that it cost me about 9 cents more per page to use the CM albums and about $15 more for the album, than using the cheapos. Big P says it worth it since these are for our family and namely our children.

I did a couple of preschool activities with L.2.B. this morning - recognizing numbers and some letters and just having a good time with him. He's a funny boy!

Trying to figure out how to squeeze in a camping trip this month and just don't think its going to happen, but we are going for Thanksgiving.

Okay, I've rambled enough.

I wanna go!

Yesterday we had the privileged of participating in the Lord's Supper at church. What a blessed time this is. We do it every month and yet it always means so much to me. This is the first time that we have had Communion since B.4.B. has been in the service with us. He immediately started talking, "what's that?" about the cracker and "hmm, that smells good" about the juice. We would explain why he couldn't have it later. We forgot! :(

This morning, he told me "Mommy, when Jesus comes back, I want to go to Heaven with him. Mommy, I want to go to heaven with Jesus. Can we do that?" (He really does talk like this! where you can hardly get in a word edgewise) I said very confidently "Yes, when Jesus comes back, we will get to go to Heaven!" (or when we die - but I didn't want to get into that with a 4 yo).

About 2 seconds later L.2.B. pipes in, "I want to go to Cici's!"

Heaven = Cici's??? Maybe to a 2 year old! LOLOL

Matter of Scrap Challenges

I'm really enjoying the forums at Scrap Matters. And I'm so excited to be in the midst of great changes over there. They have started a whole new challenge system that ROCKS! Digi Scrapping has become my absolute favorite new hobby. I need to take some time off of it soon to get some skirts made for winter.

But, the best part of these challenges are that they can be done through the whole month - that's the ONLY time limit is that they have to be in by the month's end to count. You earn points that turn into a discount in the store! Way cool!

And since I've said that whenever possible I will do a challenge with a current album I am working on, that is what I intend to do. Unless it just isn't possible. Like one of the current challenges is a color palette challenge and the pictures must have been taking within the last year. Well, the album that I am working on goes from 2004-2005, so that won't work. But, at least I can scrap the page and save it for another album.

go check it out at Scrap Matters.

Annie Oakley Bakes

Well, I can add gun slinging pie baker to my repertoire of "Little Bit of Everything Mama". My father-in-law (Big P's real dad) gifted our family, namely our older children, with a 22 Rifle. I'm sure there is some fancy way to write that, but I don't know about it - so there ya go. Big P set up a target of painter's tape (hey, we are learning to use what we have! LOL) on the end of a tree branch quite a ways away from the back porch. He said it was more than 50 feet and from what he showed me, it looked like it was maybe 65. I hit that roll of painter's tape - twice! Standing up! He later informed me that standing up is the hardest position to shoot in.

And the baking? Well, I made pie crust today! Wooohoo! The recipe makes enough for 8 crusts and the rest is freezable. I made a blackberry-chocolate chip pie. It was incredibly delicious. I'll reduce the chocolate chips to 1/2 cup next time.

We've had a big day including a trip to the library and walmart. We went by Red Box and I was able to get The Great Discovery (Thomas) and Nim's Island. So, it was movie night tonight at our house (minus Daddy :( ) with popcorn and cheap ($1.25) pizzas. :)

Our family is gearing up for a big year with 4-H. Our children will be doing shooting sports (C will be doing rifle and shotgun and P just rifle), food and nutrition (including the food show), and swine for C, and rabbits for P! I'm so glad we have found a thing that everyone in our family can enjoy, because the thought of running children all over the place for various activities makes me feel stressed! LOL