My one and only goal for 2011

I have been pondering what my "New Year Resolution" would be, but my hubby and I don't really like to declare resolutions that are going to fizzle by mid-January. I mean, let's face it, has anyone ever kept their resolution until the next year? Last year, my best friend Paige offered a new take on the matter. Instead of declaring a resolution, spend time praying and asking God to reveal the one area of your life that needs the most work.

My word for 2010 was FORGIVENESS. Boy, that was a really, really, really tough one. I am the queen of holding grudges...and I don't know that I have 100% forgiven some people that were at the top of my list of needing it. About mid-year, our ABF (Adult Bible Fellowship at FB North Mobile, for future reference) decided to do a study on Love and Respect in marriage...but if you apply the "respect" portion to all areas of life, i.e. respecting all people as human beings, then forgiveness just flows with it. Let's just say I'm still working on it. (Side note: I highly encourage all of my married/engaged/dating friends to read the book above, it completely changed our marriage. COMPLETELY.)  But enough about last year.

The one thing I need the most work on this year is SELFLESSNESS. (I'm being transparent here because I need some accountability from my peeps.) When I really dug into the heart of the matter of all the resolutions I wanted to set, the root of them all is self-ish-ness. Take a look:

DIETING:

• Selfishness says: "I'm hungry but I don't feel like cooking anything, I'll just eat an oatmeal cream pie."
• Selflessness says: "It's time for my family and me to eat, and since nutrition and health is really the only reason for eating, I'll get off the couch to put time and care into preparing a well-balanced meal for my family."

CLEANING:

• Selfishness says: "I can't take my eyes off of facebook (or the tv, blogging, email, and other distractions), and I really just want to sit on the couch and not do anything today. I'll put "Mopping Monday" off until tomorrow."
• Selflessness says: "My husband deserves to come home to a clean and peaceful home each day, and Carson deserves a clean floor to crawl around on. I will put aside my laziness and distractions to serve them and clean these floors. (Plus if I stay on top of my chores, they are not as hard to complete.)"

 SAVING MONEY:

• Selfishness says: "I really want that new pair of super-cute shoes, even though I'm wearing a pair that are almost identical right now. They're only $30, and we have that right now. I'll just get them and if Marc doesn't like them, then I'll bring them back." (If you know my husband, you know he HATES taking things back, so this always works in my favor.)
• Selflessness says: "Instead of spending the extra money on new shoes that I don't really need just because we have it, I'll save that money for something we really need. After all, we still have bills that are not paid off, and our savings is not anywhere near where we would like for it to be. And who knows when we will have emergency expenses such as those we experienced in December."
• Selfishness says: "I don't feel like preparing food right now, we'll just stop and get fast food while we're out. We have a little bit of extra money." -or- "While I'm here at the grocery store, I'd better get some highly processed quick foods and junky snacks for those times when I don't feel like cooking."
• Selflessness says: "I'll take the time now to prepare wholesome snacks and on-the-go foods for my family so that we don't get caught hungry and have to compromise our wallets and health."

I really could go on and on with this topic, but I think you get the picture. When setting a one-word goal, there is room for mistakes, and with plenty of prayer and dedication, selflessness will come naturally to me. Selflessness also -and most importantly- applies to the way I treat/act around/respond to others. Thinking less about my needs and wants and more about the needs and wants of others will keep me in check. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we all did this?

It certainly won't be easy, and I could use some major accountability, folks. Why does God always give me the tough ones? lol. So what's your Word of the Year? (or NY Resolution?) 

I WON! I WON!! I WON!!!

This might not be a big deal to you, but it's super huge to me: I won the De-Clutter Bug contest from the Little Joys blog!!! Wanna see my "after" pics? If you remember, I already posted my before pics, so it's only fair that I share with you the afters, right? (Please note when viewing my post with the before pics, this is what I thought was "clean" in my home.)

Without further ado:

 The living room - a few changes with the addition of our Christmas present, the new tv over the fireplace. 

 (Please disregard my handsome sleeping hubby). When these pictures were taken, we were in the process of hanging our new family photos and changing the pictures throughout the room. Hence the bare walls. 

(Here are the pics we'll be hanging.) The new tv allowed us this additional little space for a home for our computer and printer. Thanks to my Aunt Shaney for this desk!

Seriously, this bookshelf has always been cluttered to the hills with junk mail, baby toys, and random trash that would land there when we came in the door. All of that stuff has a home, and now we use it. :)

 This is Carson's toy corner. Each day, after pulling every toy out and playing with it, we put it away here so it's not cluttering our living space. 

 Notice the tile grout, please. I spent many a Cinderella night scrubbing that, thankyouverymuch. I'm far from done, but it looks like we have a new kitchen floor.

Remember the counter at the bottom left of this picture in my previous post of before pics? Yeah, it stays clean now! 

 This red hutch was not included in the before pics because I didn't view it as "dirty" - plus I just forgot. Anyway, this is a special hutch on this cleaning journey, because the top of this hutch hadn't been seen since I got pregnant. We had just been piling and piling and piling junk on it...if I didn't know where to put something, it went here. Now, thanks to Tidy Tuesday, it stays clean.

Marc's bathroom...the biggest change here is another floor renovation. Clean tile grout really makes a HUGE difference.

As do clean countertops and sinks. :)

Big changes in the spare bedroom with the removal of the huge queen bed. Now there is more room to move about, and this room is no longer the catch all for clothes I don't feel like hanging up. 

 Oh, if only you could have seen this closet before!

 You may not see a huge difference in the master. However, please note that in the before post, I considered this room clean. With unmade bed, crap all over the dresser and everything. Now we try hard to keep the bed made and the floors clean.

 My bathroom - woah the change. I take my clothes out everyday instead of leaving a pile in the floor.

See that tub to the left? Well, even though you can't see in it, know that now, because of Thorough Thursday, I can give Carson baths in the tub instead of his baby tub that he had way outgrown. I was still putting him in it because I didn't feel like his tiny body could handle the plethora of germs that MUST have been crawling in that tub with the (in)frequency of my cleanings!

More clean bathroom :)

I didn't post a pic of Carson's room in my previous post because he was asleep. But tonight I just went in anyway, got the camera ready, turned the light on for 2 seconds, snapped the pic, and turned the light back off. No flinch from him, so...

I did that again and snapped a pic of him in all his adorableness.


I read a statistic that says 97% of all moms think that their child is cuter than everyone elses. I'm in that 97% :)

Punctuation Matters

We all know that punctuation matters. I'll start by saying that I'm a bit of a stickler for correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. That's not to say that I'm correct about it, because I most definitely am not...but it is a pet peeve to read an article/facebook status/blog/etc. and see grammatical errors. Because if an error jumps out at me, then I feel like there's no excuse for it not to have been caught by the editor (for the pro publications, at least.). Right?

A few pet peeves:

• In pictures on facebook, saying "so-and-so and I" - it should be "so-and-so and me." Google it. You'll see.
• Than vs. then - it's really not that hard, is it?
• Want vs. won't - seriously? Do I really have to go there? Apparently I do.
• Improper use of the dash ( - )...I think I use it improperly, but the way I use it makes a heck of a lot more sense than they way I see it done in magazines and books. 
• Excessive comma and quotation usage. Oh my, don't even get me started on this one!
• Then there are the ones that everyone hates: they're, there, their; it's, its; who's, whose.
• And the commonly misused words: loose vs. lose; advice vs. advise; accept vs. except; effect vs. affect; sale vs. sell; you get the picture. 

Okay, that's enough. I didn't even want to get into all of that. I really just wanted to tell you this little funny for the day...it's the reason that I started this quirky little post in the first place.

I sent Marc a text today in response to him asking what I was doing and said : I'm getting ready to leave u

About 20 minutes after I sent that, I checked to see if he'd responded. Then I re-read my post and it made me laugh out loud. What it should have said was: I'm getting ready to leave. U?

I hope you get at least little smirk from it, cause I got a pretty big laugh! :)

Baby Jesus

In light of Christmas and having a baby myself, I wonder about the life of baby Jesus. My sweet angel woke up several times last night all stopped up with another winter cold. How many colds did baby Jesus get? And I can just imagine how heart-broken Mary must have felt cuddling her sweet son, who just so happened to be the Savior of the world, when he did get sick! I wonder what he must have looked like crawling, and how excited His parents were when He took His first sweet steps. I wonder if He was shy when meeting strangers at 9 months, and how well He played with other babies. I wonder if He sucked His thumb and if his teeth grew in straight. I wonder what his first solid food was, and if he liked to eat his veggies. I wonder if he hated having his diaper changed and would try to crawl away at every attempt (I also wonder if they even had diapers? I mean, what did they do back in the day?) I wonder if he liked to scream really loud, and whether or not he liked to be held and cuddled, and how much he weighed when he was born, and if he slept through the night and took good naps during the day, and how many times Mary kissed his sweet chubby cheeks and rubbed his soft baby skin.

It is completely sobering to know that Jesus was 100% human. Mary had the same unconditional and overwhelming motherly love for Him as I do for Carson. And how much pressure/privilege did she feel raising Jesus, who also happens to be 100% God? Wow.

Thank you, Father, for loving me so much that You sent your only begotten Son, that I might not die, but have life everlasting in eternity with You. What a blessing. The best Christmas gift I've ever received.

Wake UP!

Today's COD:

Sometimes I'm me. But then other times, I'm aware that I'm me. It's really weird. Tonight while rocking a sick (?) baby it dawned on me that I am me and I am living my life. It's me sitting in this chair rocking this child. And it's not just any child, he's MY child. And you know what else? I'm married! And living in our very own house. And the master bedroom is ours! You may not know what this is all about - but have you ever looked at your life from the outside-in and wondered how you ever got there? It's like 13 year old Elizabeth is looking through the window at 28 year old Elizabeth in disbelief.

Veggie Time!

I've been having trouble getting Carson to eat veggies that he previously loved since I started serving them in chunks instead of puree. Well, last night at the urging of my mother, I put them back in the food processor and didn't quite puree them, but got them into a sort of veggie paste. He ate them right up! Yay! He also drank from his sippy cup and tried some yogurt this morning. :)

But this post isn't really about that. I don't eat enough veggies. Do you? Well my aunt Lucy (and all of my mother's side of the family, really) is a health nut. She posted something on FB one day about a "green smoothie". I was super skeptical at first, but I checked out this website and decided I would give it a shot. Before I tried it, I told Amanda about it - and she was immediately on board. In fact, she had the stuff at home so she made one pretty much straight away. She called me and told me how good it was. Hm, maybe I should go ahead and try it then. Amanda also made it sound easier to make than going out and buying bunches of different green veggies, she just opened a bag of spinach for salad and dumped it in. Okay so here's the recipe that she and I adapted:

A bag of fresh spinach, 3 bananas, 3 small fuji apples (cored and chopped, peel on), and I used OJ, Amanda said she uses whatever liquid she thought would be good: green tea, water, apple juice, etc.

Ladies and gents, let me tell you...this smoothie tastes like a banana, oj, apple smoothie. NOT AT ALL LIKE spinach!!  And if you don't know about the nutrients found in spinach, you should check out these websites: Wholesome Baby Food, Self Nutrition Data, and Wikipedia.

Seriously - go now - try one. I'll wait. And once you do, leave me a comment and tell me how yummy yours is. :)

C.O.D.

I'm starting a new segment on this blog. It's called "Crazy of the Day" or C.O.D. I'm pretty random. I mean, really really super random. Every day while showering, I am left alone with my random thoughts. So, I'll try each day to share at least one random thought with you. And I want your feedback...sometimes it will be a question, or maybe a dream, and even just an observation of randomness. For instance, one day I might ask you how on earth a company could manufacture and sell an umberella for less than what my mascara costs. I mean, really?

Today's COD happens to be a dream. I think it stems from our fun night at the RMH. Here goes: I was sleeping and I awoke on the operating table. Marc was beside me and very happy - they had just delivered our second child via c-section. The baby was full term, yet I never knew I was pregnant...I never gained weight, got sick, had weird cravings, went to the check-ups, took prenatals. All of this confusion was going through my head when Marc told me our little girl was here. What would we even name her? Flash-forward (how dreams often do) and Paige was there. I looked at her with the most serious face and asked her to pinch me because I was certain I was dreaming. She took my shoulders and looked me square in the eye and said, "No sweetie, this is not a dream. This is your life, you have another baby."

You lied, Paige. It was in fact a dream. I can't believe you would dream-lie to me like that. I was fully prepared to wake myself up until you told me it was real life. There it is, folks, today's COD. See, I told you it was random.

Last night we cooked for the folks staying at the RMH. It was so very fun! We got to do our Christmas dinner and share it with some very nice people who are going through a tough time. Most of those that I spoke with had premies and were waiting on weight gain, lung development, etc so they could take their precious little ones home. The kids especially loved the cupcakes!

 Aren't these adorable reindeer cupcakes? Super easy to make if you want the idea for your kiddos.

The sign the RMH put up for us. Isn't it cute? We fall under the "& friends" category. :)

I apologize for the poor quality of the iPhone photo.  Amanda, Jennifer, Wendy, Paige and me.

Our handsome men, aka the cleanup crew. They were so awesome. Scott, Josh, and Marc.

I love this man more than anything else in this entire world! Ladies: back off!

Yep, we had a really good time. Oh, and I want that kitchen! 

A random quote to end this post:

"I guess that's the real circle of life: your parents faked their way through it, you fake your way through it, and...hopefully you don't raise a serial killer." -Phil Dunfee, Modern Family