The Good, The Bad and The Sad

I am going to try to simultaneously blog, teach a 5 year old his phonics AND oversee a math lesson, so if this winds up being a little disjointed you'll be all over the reason why, k? <---- See, we're already off to a great start with a massive run-on sentence that has about 50 grammatical errors, but who's keeping track? Oh, please don't keep track. :)

So, the Crew and I have been up to our eyeballs in "stuff" lately. Good stuff, bad stuff and sad stuff, actually. Here's the low-down...

The Good Stuff:
*The weather was pretty warmish for the last 2 weekends, PRAISE the Lord, so we took advantage of that. The first weekend, we took our new-to-us pop up camper and got the heck out of Dodge for a few days. It was SO good. We hiked a beautiful trail and simply breathed in the fresh air of God's nature. I don't know about you, but that's like taking a spiritual shower for me. To get away from all of the distractions of this 21st century to just "be" is sweet freedom to this girl.

*This last weekend, we did some MUCH needed yardwork. We all got plenty of exercise AND the back yard doesn't qualify us for one of Jeff Foxworthy's "You Might Be a Redneck" routines anymore. Gotta love that.

*I started reading the Little House series to the kids at night. I don't think I mentioned it here, but we turned off our cable last month. It was because we wanted to save $70 a month, but also because we just flat-out were watching too much t.v.. It was to a point that the dumb thing was pretty much NEVER off, so we ditched it. It was kinda weird for the first week or so; we just kept staring at each other like we didn't know what to do, but we've adapted relatively well since then. Now, I couldn't be more thrilled and we actually look forward to story time on the nights that we are home.

The Bad Stuff:
*Being a Weekend Warrior with yardwork makes one unable to move for the next 3 days. I am so disgustingly out of shape, y'all. I have got to get moving somehow, someway, on a relatively frequent basis. But, me + exercise = enmity. Dern. I can't talk about it anymore...

*Steroids make me crazed. Remember when I whined a week and a half ago when I was so sick? Yeah, well the Dr. gave me steroids along with my antibiotic (which is a story in and of itself, believe me). I haven't had that particular drug in my system since I was a teenager, so I was unaware that it would make me 16 kinds of psychotic. Ho-ly smoke, people! Talk about SIDE EFFECTS. Too bad THAT wasn't on the list, huh? I could be happily sitting there when all of a sudden something minor would happen and I would instantly transform into a head-spinning-pea-soup-spewing nightmare. We were ALL relieved when that worked it's way out of my body.

*So when I was weeding around the house last weekend with my BARE HANDS, I inquired of my husband, who was watching me while scrubbing the house, what he thought these 3 foot long weeds were? He replied, as if it weren't the beginning of his own personal Hell, "Probably Poison Oak". "Well. Alrighty then, Mark. Any chance you might have informed me of this A LITTLE SOONER?!" Then it dawned on him as I was glaring (he probably had a flashback), that the way they treat people covered in Poison Ivy/Oak/Whatever Else, is with. a. steroid. We could use your prayers.

The Sad Stuff:
Really, it's only one. And it's probably one that has made you sad at least once in your lifetime, too. It's cancer. I knew two fine women that passed away last week because of it, and I know several more people that are suffering terribly with it. It is so heartbreaking and scary and maddening and almost plague-like, and it can really get me down....but then I look at our Father. And I realize that He's got it ALL under control, even when it doesn't appear that way to the random observer. I may not understand it all, but I definitely believe what He says to His children, and that's that nothing EVER happens to us that isn't the very best thing for us (Rom. 8:28). So I rest.

I hope each of you are having a decent week. You bless me so much...

Love,