Happy Thanksgiving~!

Wishing you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving and a wonderful day filled with friends, family and of course, food!

1 Chronicles 16:34
O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever.

Blessings,
Missy

Christmas is Coming!

Hey Everyone! Are you getting ready for Christmas?! 
I'm finally not feeling so totally overwhelmed! My decorations are up, my gifts are almost completely purchased, and the ones I do have are wrapped. I'm finished with Christmas cards, and have mailed out the ones I can't hand out at church. I feel like I'm at least on track. :0)
We're having a big Music Ministry party at our house on December 15th, so I have to start focusing on that.  My house is SO dirty! (ok, maybe I am a smidge overwhelmed on that part, but it'll be ok...I just keep telling myself to breathe...there's lots of time) I also have a friend coming over to help me the day before the party, so that will help a lot. :0)
We have some Christmas traditions we do every year that we haven't exactly started on.  We ALWAYS make a gingerbread house, and of course bake cookies.

This is my little man, age 4, making cookies with me :0)  (I can't believe he's already 11!!!)


 We also always get our boys advent calendars.  This year, I got my little guy a Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar...he'll love that...just not sure how I'll incorporate the Bible into it yet! lol  Gonna have to use my imagination!
What traditions do you all do every year?  I 'd love to hear from you and maybe even use some of yours to start new traditions in our home.

Blessings!
Missy

Happy 4th of July!!

Happy 4th of July everyone!!

Hope you get to spend the day with the ones you love!

Blessings
Missy

Happy Anniversary and Happy Valentines Day!

Hey everyone!  Guess what?!….

 
Today my hubby and I are celebrating our 27th anniversary!  Yep, we were married on Valentines Day 27 years ago today!  I was 17 and he was 19…and no we didn’t “have” to get married, we were just head over heels in love.  :0) 
Our wedding day was one I’ll never forget!   First off, my poor hubby-to-be had to work…his boss wouldn’t let him off for his own wedding day….who does that to a person??!!  To top that off, he was SICK…I mean really sick….he had a fever and everything. He was so sick, his groomsmen had to dress him! 

So you’re probably thinking it couldn’t get any worse right?  WRONG! 


We got a HUGE snow storm…I’m talking over a foot and had to send 4 wheel drive vehicles out to pick up people in our bridal party.   

We finally got everyone to the church (and unbelievably had a good turn out in the pews too) and got it all underway.   My love was up front waiting for me, and my daddy walked me down the aisle.  You’d think everything would have been smooth sailing from there on out wouldn’t you?  Nope, not exactly.  I’m a singer, so I sang  the song, “You are flesh of my flesh” to my honey and someone was supposed to hit the record button so we’d have this precious moment in our lives on tape….but did they? Nope…we have no audio or video of our beautiful day….hope he was listening good to me singing, cause it was a one time deal!  lol       (if you’d like to hear the song, go HERE and click on the first song)

We were also supposed to have someone fill our glass up with grape juice so we could take our first communion together, but they forgot, so we had to “pretend” to drink the juice, cause the glass was empty! Oh well!

Then there was the kiss. (this is a good part of the wedding!)  :0) 
Apparently, according to our pastor at the time, the stage got about 15 degrees hotter when I laid THE kiss on my honey! 
(This isn’t our wedding pic, but I’m thinking it was something like this……you know, fireworks and all!) :0)


Our pastor said of everyone he’s ever married we still hold the #1 spot for the best kiss!!  He’s performed a LOT of weddings…including his own kids, and we still hold the top spot!  I think we need some kind of trophy for that don’t you?! lol   OH…our pastor was also performing our wedding on his anniversary. He and his wife were married on valentines day as well!

The wedding was finally finished and everything that could have gone wrong, pretty much did, but we were still married….and were were over the moon happy!  We were supposed to go south to a nice little place in TN for our honey moon, but the roads were impassable so we had to spend our honeymoon in Northern KY in a Holiday Inn!  Some day we’ll have a real honeymoon to make up for what we didn’t get then, but even if we don’t, we’re still married and we’re still happy as larks.  This just goes to show you that even when things seem tumultuous and aren’t going quite right in the moment, they can still turn out beautiful in the end.   It’s kind of like that with life too.  You may be going through some terrible things right now, but God sees the big picture and knows the outcome.  We only see the back of the needlepoint picture of life….the knots and the hanging threads, but God is using all those moments in our lives…good and bad, to weave a beautiful piece of artwork.  He sees the finished side….he sees the beauty.  We just have to trust him and know that “all things work together for good to those that love the Lord”.  Romans 8:28.

 

So, I’d like to take this moment in time  to wish my beautiful and loving husband a happy 27th anniversary! I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life making new memories with you!

Blessings
Missy

PS…I forgot to tell you…I hadn’t eaten anything all day the day of our wedding except the bite of cake at the reception, so I was starving!! We arrived at our hotel at 10:05…..room service closed at 10:00 and TJ was too sick to drive to get me anything and I couldn’t drive a stick shift…. I called my mom to say hey….they were eating hot pizza. 

Par for the course.

Technorati Tags: valentines day,anniversary,perfect gift

Things you don’t know about me…

Happy New Year!

Can you believe it’s 2012 already…time goes by so quickly and the older I get the faster it goes.  Does it seem that way to you too?

I thought, to start off the new year, I would tell you some things about me that you don’t know.   Not sure anyone will be interested, but these are things that made me who I am today, so you might know me better if you read them. :0)

In the hospital where I was born, I was the last baby to be born there.  There was a set of twins, then me….then the hospital was torn down and I believe there’s a Kmart there today. lol 

I was pretty poor growing up, but I don’t think I ever knew it, my parents always tried to make my childhood special.  I remember my daddy coming home one day with a box…it was a baby alive doll box.  I thought it was just a box because I wasn’t used to getting toys out of the blue, but my mom and dad took their last $10.00 in the bank and bought me that doll.  I kept it for a LONG time, but if you remember baby alive dolls, you could feed them real food….let’s just say I fed mine and it didn’t come out, and baby alive doll food stinks when it’s left inside the doll.  YUCK!  

I grew up in a little house out in the country…..we had an outhouse, a smokehouse, a pigpen, (with a pig named Arnold),      a garden, a well and a pond.  I remember one time I was playing with dish liquid, trying to make bubbles,  and I spilled the bottle and it came within inches of dripping in the well…oh boy did I get in trouble!  I would have ruined our drinking water if it had gotten in the well….. God was looking out for me even then! lol

I learned how to ride a bike when we lived in that house.  A purple bike with a banana seat and a high back.  It looked sort of like this, but with a high bar in the back…

I had to learn how to ride my bike in the grass….with a hill….and a fence.  I can assure you I hit the fence more times than I can count trying ride around the house and flying down the hill. I finally figured out how to ride my bike and ran in the house exclaiming, “I rode around the house nine times”!  I was so excited.  

I recently went back to the old farm to take pictures of the house, but it had been torn down and big barn is there now.  I sat in the middle of the road and cried…..it’s hard to see your childhood home torn down.  BUT our pond was still there.  I had a pet duck that used to swim in the pond…my dad was skimming rocks in it and hit the duck in the head by accident. I thought sure he had killed it because it’s little webbed feet went up in the air and it was down head first in the pond. I suppose it was just addled a bit, because it eventually came back up and was ok.  I sure have a lot of good memories of that old place! One summer we had a chicken disappear, we couldn’t figure out what on earth happened to her. One day she came strolling back to the farm with a trail of baby chicks behind her….now how fun is that?! I kind of miss living on a farm.

We eventually moved from there into a trailer park….my mom made it into the prettiest home.  She has a knack for that.

I made a lot of good friends living there….one of which was a boy named Michael Todd Johnson.  We got along really well (ok, most of the time), but I remember one day he stepped on my foot with football cleats on and cut my foot open. I mean really OPEN.  He picked me up and carried me to Mrs. McCall’s house….she was a little old lady that lived in the park, she used to be a nurse, so she cleaned it up and put steri-strips or butterfly bandages on it.  He apologized to me for years for doing that…I still have a scar.    Ok….you remember I said Michael Todd and I didn’t get along ALL of the time?  Once before school, he took my umbrella at the bus stop, and was poking me with it..then he hid it and wouldn’t give it back.   I can’t believe I’m telling you all this, but I punched him in the nose….he went home with a bloody nose and missed school that day.   He never took anything of mine again, and we were very good friends for years!  LOL  Oh…and I’ve never punched anyone in the nose ever again!  :0)

We lived in that trailer park from the time I was about 10 until I was 15.  I met my hubby (TJ) right before we moved from that trailer park into our first house…a real house that was ours.   I remember he came over to visit us in the trailer and we already had everything packed up…I think he thought we were REALLY poor because when we eventually got moved into the new house, he looked really surprised to see pretty things all set up in the house.   I only lived in that house for a short time because my hubby and I were married young.  I was only 17 and he was 19 when we got married.   We had our first son 3 1/2 years later, and 2 more sons later on.   We’ll be celebrating 27 years of marriage on Valentines Day….I told you time goes by fast.  Now here we are celebrating New Years Day 2012…not sure where all those years went, but I know I enjoyed every single one of them. 

I am so grateful to have a nice home and beautiful things now, and to have a husband that goes to work every day to provide for us. I guess I just wanted to start off this new year with a grateful and happy heart while reminiscing about what’s made me who I am today.

I hope the new year holds peace, prosperity, health and happiness for each one of you!
May God bless you in this new year~!

Missy

Technorati Tags: 2012,Happy New Year,vintage baby alive,banana seat bike,farm animals

Christmas Foyer Window

Hey guys!   Today I wanted to show you my Christmasfied foyer.
I started out by hanging our white fuzzy stockings…I filled them with some old toys from years gone by. :0)

See the pink lantern?  I got it marked down at TJ Maxx for $7.00….it was red, which would be fine for traditional Christmas colors….but I’m a pink girl, so it got spray painted pink. Besides, I’m using it all year long, so it definitely couldn’t have stayed red…Ya'll know my house has no red in it at all! lol (oh and it has a flameless candle in it, which makes for a festive little light at night!)

The little pink trees came from Michaels last year after Christmas…they were half off….I bought three.  I love my old glitter tree…I don’t even remember where it came from, but it’s a Christmas staple in our home now.

Here are my Dollar Tree vases I made filled with fake snow…also from the Dollar Tree.  Have you seen it?   It came in a little clear baggy inside a can and it was a fine powder….you add water and poof, you have snow! (ok..you have to mix it up..then poof!) :0)
I added my white bottle brush trees and a couple of old books for some height and voila’! (I sound like a magician…poof and voila’!) LOL

OH…you see that cute little snowman?  My middle son made that in 5th grade….I treasure the things my kids made growing up. He’s 19 now and I wouldn’t take anything for all his little Christmas projects we’ve made together. 

So that was my Christmas-y foyer!
I’ll do another Christmas post later this week and show you a few little vignettes around our home.

Merry Christmas!
Missy

Technorati Tags: how to decorate for Christmas,Christmas mantle,tj maxx,Christmas foyer

Christmas Gift Idea….Delicious and Fun!

I told you all about our wonderful Choir Christmas party we had last weekend, and wanted to share the treats I made for each choir and band member.  I found this idea from Pinterest and thought it was a fantastic idea for a gift for a lot of people.
By the way, if you aren’t on Pinterest, if you’ll leave me your email address, I can send you an invitation…if you click HERE, you can follow my boards too!


First I went on Ebay and found two buckets of these Wilton Cookie Cutters…they ended up being less than $20, which is pretty doggone good for 36 gifts!


Then my mom helped me out by baking me her FAMOUS Coca Cola cake in a shallow pan. (hers is better than Cracker Barrels any day of the week!!) This recipe works great because the icing is like fudge and accepts the cookie cutters without getting smashed. This reminds me…. I need to get her recipe!!  (you could also do this with fudge!)

I took each cookie cutter and arranged them on top of the pan of cake first, so I could maximize the amount of cookie cutters I could get on top of the cake.

Then I gently pushed them down  into the cake.  I went ahead and did them all at once, so I wouldn’t mess up any of the cake, taking them out one at a time. 

I used a little icing spatula to remove each of the cookie cutters. Guess who got to eat the little pieces that were left?!  Oh yeah baby, we all munched on that!  (this picture is making my mouth water….that icing tastes exactly like rich, creamy fudge!)

After I lifted the cake filled cookie cutters out of the pan, I wiped off the outside of each one so it wasn’t too smudgy….you want to make a nice presentation. :0) 

You can decorate them with candy etc, if you’d like at this point.


I bought some really cute little bags to put my goodies in….



Then I put one cake filled cookie cutter in each bag and had an assembly line going with Carson…I bagged, he twist tied.  :0)


We actually took it a step farther and made hand made gift tags and put them on with red pipe cleaners, but I forgot to take a pic of that part and I had already given them all away when I remembered.  Sorry…bad blogger!  lol

I thought this was a wonderful idea for giving gifts in large numbers.  You could give them out to your neighbors, church choir, friends or whatever. 
Have a Merry Christmas…it’s getting closer!!  (Carson lets me know this each day!)  lol
Missy

Technorati Tags: christmas,how to make gifts for a group,What can I give a group of friends,Christmas cookie cutters,cookie cutters,coca cola cake

Our Christmas Mantle

I can’t wait to show you all the decorating I’ve been doing for Christmas, but first I have to share with you the crazy, but fun week I’ve had!  Wednesday night at  church it was my turn to take part of the snack, but apparently we had more bringing snack than we realized…we had SO much food that we ended up sharing with the men’s class in the other room! lol  Then Thursday was our bi-weekly homeschool co-op group at church…we always have fun when we all get together. :0)  Friday night was our annual ladies ornament exchange…we play dirty santa and steal each other’s gifts, and the third time it’s stolen the gift is dead and belongs to that person…what a hoot seeing a bunch of ladies from church “stealing” from each other.  It was all in fun and we had a ball…and ate WAY too much!  Saturday night was the Christmas party at our house for the choir/band/media groups at church! I was a bad blogger and didn’t take a single picture, but it’s because we were having SO much fun it was ridiculous!  We had platters and crockpots of food covering every surface in the kitchen…our church people can cook!  I believe at last count we had 31 people, but we had some others drop in and out all throughout the night, so I’m still not sure of the accurate count.  I handed out door prizes all throughout the night and we just had a wonderful time fellowshipping!  You’d think by now we were done partying wouldn’t you?! Nope…we had our 45th Anniversary at our church on Sunday….what a day! We had most of the pastors represented from all 45 years and had multiple speakers all through the day.  We had an amazing spread for lunch and stayed until about 4:00 in the afternoon, but didn’t have church that night, so we stayed home and watched movies, snacked and played games.  What a crazy fun week! (that’s why I’ve been missing in action on this blog…I didn’t have a spare second!)

Ok…now on to Christmas décor!….hopefully you stayed with me through that whole novel I just wrote! lol
Today I want to show you my Christmas mantle….I love it!

I decided to use my vintage skates, crystal garland, and the cutest little fluffy owls you’ve ever seen! (oh and that window is one of the ones I told you about my mom asking the guy in the drive thru of the bank for! lol)

Here’s a little broader shot so you can see everything.  That chair usually goes where my Christmas tree is sitting now, so I just scooted it over in front of the fireplace because we needed that extra seat for the party and I won’t be using the fireplace for a while anyway.

I got the NOEL letters last year, after Christmas, from Walmart for .25 each…I LOVE them!  You should have seen me after decorating with them though….I had glitter all over my face. :0)

Here are those adorable little owls I was telling you about.  I have to tell you that I got them from last years ornament exchange….and yes, I did have to steal them for the 3rd time to make sure they went home with me. (don’t judge me!)  LOL See their sweet little nest with the golden glitter eggs….so stinkin’ cute!
(they came from Pier 1)

See the little trees on the ends of the mantle?  I got those from the Dollar Tree….I bought silver and gold and stacked them, because I knew I wanted to have both colors on the mantle and I thought it would be a good way to tie them both together…I think it worked out just fine.

I nestled some gold balls, poinsettias and berries into some greenery that I lit up with white lights.  I made sure to arrange things at different heights and levels so your eye would have  a smooth transition from one item to the next.

OH, I have to tell you what Carson said when he came in the room after I had finished the mantle.  Here’s the conversation:

Carson- “mom”?
Me- “yes, Carson”
Carson- “I just have to tell you….”
Me- “tell me what honey”?
Carson- “I just have to tell you, I think that mantle is your best work ever”.
Me-

That made my day!

One final look…..

I wanted to get all my decorating finished early this year so I could take time and enjoy the holidays with my family.  I want to make sure my kids remember the true reason for this beautiful season……..
Jesus came to this earth as an infant babe to offer himself as a sacrifice that we might have eternal life….HE was the first Christmas gift.   Let’s all take the time to stop and remember the first Christmas gift, the one true gift,  as we give to the ones we love this year.

Merry CHRISTmas everyone!

Missy

Technorati Tags: How to decorate a mantle,how to decorate a mantel,Christmas decorations,Christmas tree,how to decorate for christmas,ice skates,decorating with owls,owls

Gingerbread House Tradition... Treasures and Trinkets Thursday!

Gingerbread and Treasures and Trinkets Thursday!

My little man and I have had a Christmas

tradition of making cookies

and building a gingerbread house for as far

back as I can remember.

It's so nice to have something

to look forward to each year.

Here is our 2010

Gingerbread House Tour!

:0)

This  is my little man's,

"mommy, are you seriously going to put this

picture in your blog" look.

(oh yes I am!)

Ain't he the sweetest?!~

Ok, Ok....I know you didn't come to see my little man,

so here is what we do!

Since we don't eat the gingerbread houses,

I generally buy a kit on clearance after

Christmas for the next year. I keep it in the garage and

so far we've been lucky...they've kept just fine.

(you could also pay full price too, but I'm cheap!)

LOL

This is Carson helping me cut up the little green

gum drops to add to our little wreath above

the door. This is the first year

we've ever thought of doing a wreath!

Didn't the wreath turn out cute!

Oh my, so adorable!

The bow is just a gum drop cut up too!

We did candles in the windows too.

Just icing and a teeny tiny slice of a gumdrop for the flame!

(that was my favorite feature this year!)

Up close shot of the wreath....

Major look of satisfaction going on in

this picture!

Yep, he's always so proud of his work!

What traditions do you have in your family?

I would love to hear about them!

Have a Very Merry CHRISTmas!!

Missy

Now Link up something for

Treasures & Trinkets Thursday!

Rules...

Link up something you love and

grab my button for your blog if you're

feeling generous!

:0)

I'm putting this out early, cause I'm taking the

rest of the week off for Christmas!

Hope you guys have a wonderful

CHRISTmas this year!