I can't wait...

...for warmer weather to be here for good. I bought these adorable flip flops for Amber tonight at Target. They are circo brand, which I love everything from them!

Amber looks so cute in them!

Before and After

A lot of new changes coming to our house this year hopefully. Some of those changes will be on all the sliding closet doors in all 3 bedroom by changing them to bifold doors. Getting the middle bedroom to look more decent and like an office instead of a huge closet that it is right now! Staining the concrete on our covered patio and changing the hideous florescent light out there to a ceiling fan. That's left on the list but we knocked out a pretty big project that was on the list this past weekend. It was repainting both bathrooms and taking the shower doors down in both bathrooms. We can not stand shower doors. They are hard to clean and just bulky. Our bathroom was painted a blue color but a light blue and it just reminded me of a hospital and the feeling was just a cold feeling. Amber's bathroom just had stark white walls and blue tile. Well we don't want to spend a whole lot of money so we kept her blue tiles and painted the walls a brown and went with a blue and brown theme.

So here are the before pictures of our bathroom:

Here are the afters of our bathroom:

I forgot to take a picture of the before for Amber's bathroom so just imagine the walls white:

This picture is during the process:

Here is an after:

FIRE!

Interesting story:

I went to the grocery store this afternoon or let me rephrase, I BRAVED the grocery store this afternoon with all the crazies out there getting food in preparation of the snow storm. If you wanted to buy some ground beef, to bad, it was all gone! Took me awhile to find a parking spot and there were hardly any baskets left, however that is not what this story is about. I got home and started getting things out of the car. Amber was crying at the door because she just woke up from her nap and apparently she woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Anyway, I thought I saw smoke coming out of our neighbor garbage can and when I got to our door I said to Ricky I think there is smoke, and I turned around and didn't see any but saw smoke coming from their chimney. So I thought that the smoke was just blowing in the wind and it made it look like it was coming from the garbage, besides my baby was crying and I had groceries to unload way more important! So I head inside, and thankfully we hadn't closed our blinds yet so we could still see outside. We began to unload the groceries and I glance outside and see a neighbor from across the street running to our neighbors door and knocking on it, and I also notice that there is smoke coming from the garbage!! I open the door and go outside and the neighbor form across the street starts asking if we have a hose,  we do and by this time the garbage has nice flames coming from it!!! So I start to unroll the hose and I then try to turn it on but can't so I run inside to get Ricky he tries and can't. Then our neighbor tries and can't, it was frozen!! Lots of flames are coming from the garbage at this point. So we all run inside and find the biggest bowls we can and start filling them with water! Finally the neighbor found a fire extinguisher and put it out that way. Apparently the husband put some ashes in there but he said the ashes were from a day ago and he thought they weren't hot anymore. They were just thankful that we and the other neighbor sprung to action! That could have gone waaaay worse! So I can now say I helped put out a fire!

Looking back and forward

Today is 1/1/11, pretty neat. As I think back on 2010 I am amazed at what God brought our way. We had some major changes happen. The biggest being moving back to Memphis. We did not see that one coming at all! I was reading through my blogs recently from last year and read the one I did just about a year ago and I said in there that we will see what God has in store for us because it seems like we always look back and say, "wow didn't see that coming" after that post about a month later we gave the news to our families that we were moving back. It was a wonderful decision and we are so truly blessed to be back. God yet again, like I'm shocked or something, watched out for us. I was still working in St. Joe and bringing Amber to work. It was pretty stressful doing that. I was stressed working there even without her. I honestly didn't know how long it was going to work and was really worried because I needed to work to make ends meet. Ricky wasn't happy with the ways things were turning out at his place of employment and didn't see a great future there either. So he started applying for jobs and just randomly applied for the Commercial Appeal. And here we are back in Memphis. :) So we moved back in March, sold our house in June, celebrated Amber's first birthday at the beginning of August, and bought our house here at the end of August! Phew! God answered prayers along the way, I didn't have to work anymore, we didn't lose money on selling our house, and we got a great deal on the house we are in now! To God be all the glory!

Looking forward now, I have goals and plans of my own and I'm also excited to look back a year from now and say wow look what God did! Things I would like to accomplish this year is to read the bible through and to stick with it in a year. I started last year and sadly I only made it to March I think. Well, its a new year and today is the first day so when I'm done with this I need to read the first one. Its the chronological Bible and I pray I don't get behind, that is what really hurts ya. I have plans to hopefully read 4 books this year. I know some of you are probably thinking JUST 4?!? I am a slow reader and I don't always read every day. So yes 4 books, that will be good for me. I'm currently reading "Dare to Discipline" by Dr. James Dobson. I have also started reading "Bringing up Girls" also by Dr. James Dobson.  The next book I want to read is "Radical" by David Platt. I have heard a lot of good things about this book so I'm excited to read that one. Lastly, its a fun book that was on sale really cheap so I went ahead and bought it even though we don't own a minivan :) "Date Night in a Minivan".

I also want to redo the bathrooms in our house. No major construction just things we can handle. Both bathrooms have shower doors. I CAN'T STAND shower doors. So they will be torn down. Amber's bathroom is going to be a blue and brown theme b/c the tile in there is blue so we are going to paint the walls a brown color. As for our bathroom the shower doors will be taken down and the walls will be painted and I'm hoping to lay some laminate wood flooring down in ours. The tile that is in there looks dirty and its not. Its like they put some grout on the floor and didn't get it up so now it looks dirty all the time. So I'm thinking some sort of green color on the walls and then we would just lay the floor right over the existing floor so it shouldn't be to hard.

This year we will be celebrating Ricky's 30th birthday, Amber's 2nd birthday and our 7 year anniversary! What fun!