When God Speaks....

He knows what to say.

"Through the Lords' mercies we are not consumed,
because His compassions fail not.
They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
'The Lord is my portion,' says my soul,
'Therefore I hope in Him!'
The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,
to the soul who seeks Him."

Lamentations 3: 22-25

"For You formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother's womb.
I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,
Marvelous are Your works,
And that my soul knows very well.
My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the eart.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance, being yet unformed.
And in You book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them"

Psalm 139:13-16

Honestly, these last couple of days have been hard. I am physically recovered and doing very well and emotionally I am getting there, but some points of the day are harder then others. If I don't hear anything from the doctor today I am in the clear, so maybe after today my healing will be even better. I never thought that you could miss someone you never met. I was wrong, but God is still faithful. He has brought Dan and me closer because of this and my love for Maddison has grown to even stronger levels that I didn't know existed. My heart still hurts yes, but I have hope and I have no idea where I would be without it.

Praise God for His faithfulness and love. He is the giver of all things and He has the strength that we do not.

Recent Events

Well, this was supposed to be a happy announcement, however this past week has changed that. On February 8 Dan & I found out that I was pregnant with baby #2. All was going well and the expected due date was October 16. Last week Saturday (March 5) I started experiencing some spotting, which led to a trip to the ER and two doctors appointments last week. In short, March 11 I lost the baby at about 8 1/2 weeks.

The past week has been rough as we had no answers to our questions until Friday, when we discovered for sure that I was experiencing a miscarriage. It's not an easy thing to go through, but it is what happens on occasion and we have had lots of support from friends and family. The picture to the right is of the flowers that my parents bought Dan & me yesterday after everything happened. I think my mom knows me well!!!

Well, well, well....

How life goes by quickly! My baby has turned one. Her first birthday was on February 12 and we had a grand time! Dan's parents and sister came up, so for the weekend we had 4 kids under the age of 3 in the house. Talk about busy!!! We didn't do much for a party, as she is only one and won't remember any of this anyway. We had family over for cake after supper and then opened gifts. By the end of the gift opening Maddison was ready for bed! I made my first birthday cake ever (well, for a kid anyway...) and it turned out great. Because Maddison LOVES puppies and anything that goes "woof" I decided to make a dog cake. So to the internet I went and found instructions and whatnot for a dog cake. Then I used Emily as inspiration for the frosting and went from there. It actually turned out really well and I was quite pleased with it!

Seeing as this is the first post of 2011, I have to say that we have enjoyed our year so far! After the huge snowfall in the middle of January I decided to buy Dan a snowblower, so we now have a snowblower! We also bought me a new computer because my old one was rapidly wearing out. It's nice to be able to turn on my computer now and know it will turn on! We've gone skating a couple of times and discovered that Maddison loves it! She just grins and laughs as we skate around pulling her on the sled. It's very cool! Her newest accomplishment (as of today) is taking a few steps between me and Dan! It's very cute to watch!!

We've had quite a busy year already with the church, but it seems to have slowed down in the past couple of weeks, so that's nice. God has already used this year to stretch us and teach us many things, so it is looking to be quite the year!!

So Happy New Year, Happy Valentines day, and Happy family day!!!!

Some thoughts....

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2010&version=NKJV

This has been on my heart for quite some time, but I have never sat down to write about it. Over the past year I have struggled somewhat in keeping up my daily walk with the Lord. To be brutally honest, I basically didn't have any daily time with the Lord. I prayed and trusted in what He was doing, but devotions and taking time to grow were not in the picture. There is an online parenting forum that I like to browse (it's not a Christian site) and it never ceases to amaze me what people believe about Christianity. Every so often on the site there is a "discussion" about religion and when reading responses, it hurts me to see the hurt in our world. So a couple months ago I kind of hit rock bottom. I knew I had to get back to daily time with the Lord (as much as possible considering I do have a 10 month old who sometimes makes it quite impossible) so I started reading the Psalms. I got to Psalm 10 and was struck by the truth of that Psalm and our current world. I don't have the time to type it out now, but I have linked Psalm 10 from an online Bible if you want to read it. The truth is, no matter how hurt this world gets, no matter how tough it seems, God will prevail and in that we can rejoice.

To add one more piece to this, I have a friend who is living in southern BC serving at a church with her husband. In her blog she wrote today about the blessing of buying groceries for one particular man (http://moresweetthansour.blogspot.com/2010/12/grocery-list.html). It struck me that this is what Psalm 10 is also about. God is using my friend and this ministry to be a "helper to the fatherless" so to speak. It's compassion. It's understanding that God sees the bigger picture. It's knowing that when we do our part, God uses that for His glory no matter how small that part may be.

It's Winter!!!

We have now entered my favorite time of the year. It's winter and Christmas is coming. My house is wonderfully decorated with Christmas lights, greenery, the nativity scene and, of course, the tree!!!! We continued our Christmas tradition of heading out into the woods to get the tree and this time Maddison was with us. She did great and didn't complain about the cold at all. It was a great day and we had fun finding and decorating the tree. That said, once we had it up, it fell down the next day! So we had to re-decorate, but it was still fun.

Life has been truckin' along just nicely. We have probably 6 inches or so of snow on the ground and more falling as I type, so that's been good finally. We are doing some re-training for our dog Emily as she is not reacting to Maddison all that well at all, but we have seen some progress so that is good. Maddison is keeping us busy doing her baby things. She pulls herself up onto every piece of furniture and LOVES to play the piano. If the lid is open, she's there! It's quite cute actually and I've gotten quite a few pictures of her there. She's also crawling everywhere and basically discovering that the world is much bigger then the living room! She enjoys going out on the sled for walks, which Emily also enjoys, and will just sit there and look at everything as we move along.

Dan and me have been busy but not, if that makes any sense. We've had some sound stuff that we've done, the Ladies Tea and a couple of Sundays to fill, but for the most part it's been a little bit slower then usual in between his weeks of call. He goes on call again next week, so that will make for an interesting week I'm sure, and then the week after that is Christmas, so it's getting close! We are completely done our shopping for the year, so now it's just getting the stuff wrapped and under the tree, which won't happen until the 23rd or so.

Anyway, just thought I would pop in and update a little bit for you. Merry Christmas!!!!

Well it's about time

So, I finally have some time to do some blogging!!! It's been kind of a crazy summer and life just kind of flew by, but even though I have bathrooms to clean and floors to sweep and mop, I can't do that right now, so blogging it is!!!

My last big post was about our Winnipeg trip. So since then, we done a camping trip with my family to Moberly Lake, BC for my grandpa's 80th birthday, a week of holidays camping and staying with Dan's family in Lloyd and Meadow Lake, a weekend in Didsbury with my brother and Aunt's and Uncle's, and many different fun things throughout the summer.

Our biggest thing we did a lot of this summer was renovations. We have replaced our electrical pannel, added a fan into our bedroom and a light into the hall, put new windows in, done some landscaping, and, the reason why I am blogging now instead of cleaning, making our living room window into a modified bay window. We also put a hole into our wall between the living room and kitchen in order to open it up a bit more. I love that hole!!!! I am sick to death of dust and messiness in my house, but now at least for a few months I won't have any more. We only have a door to replace yet this year, and hopefully that will be done sooner rather then later.

We have also done a lot with the sound ministry this summer and Dan is finally feeling like things are happening there, which is nice!!! We now have 5 sound people for the church, which is very nice because that cuts the workload down a lot. We have seen improvments in communication and procedures that we would like followed with the sound ministry and it is nice to see that these things are happening.

I have been working part-time all summer and it has been enough, praise the Lord, so that we don't need a renter for our basement. And because we bought my parents old piano, we had to move the TV downstairs, so now our entire house is ours and it has just been a huge relief!!!! We bought a new couch/loveseat/chair set for upstairs and moved the old ones downstairs, as well as all our DVD's and CD's. The drums and guitars are also all downstairs. So upstairs is now much more of a living area and the downstairs our recreational area, and that is exactly how we wanted it!!!

Maddison has been busy growing and learning and cutting teeth. We finally saw the first tooth break through over the Labor day weekend, and even though we lost a lot of sleep with that tooth, it was good to finally see it in. She currently loves to stand up and use her exersaucer and jolly jumper and she is also trying to crawl. I would rather she not crawl, but I know that I'm not going to win that battle because Dan wants her to crawl and is helping teach her. Little does he know that a mobile baby is not the relaxing baby we now have!!

Fall has come and tomorrow we are having family pictures taken, so that will be fun! We also have my bosses wedding next weekend, so next Saturday night Maddison is having a sleepover at Grandma & Grandpa's and we get a night without baby!!! I am very much looking forward to that, but am also really hoping that Maddison does good for my parents!

And that is about it. Short and sweet right? Hopefully now this fall I'll have more time to blog and be able to keep you updated more.

Thoughts from Maddison

Well, I have let Maddison "type" on the computer a couple of times now, but for some reason I can't seem to get it to copy onto my blog.... I'll keep working on that.... and write a little bit more later!