valentines day birthday hunk of love

Omar does alot of things right. Holidays dont always fit in that category. I guess its probably a guy thing, but while I spend months and months thinking and praying and creating and saving for his gifts, he generally goes out the day of and buys the first thing he sees. We have talked about this, and he is definitely getting better. Yesterday, he showed up at our front door pretending ot be a delivery man and delivered the BIGGEST, most BEAUTIFUL, bouquet of flowers that I have ever ever ever seen in my whole entire existence. My cell phone picture of them does not do them justice. I have seen alot of flowers in my life, and these are by far the most amazing. 

see?

Omar and my dad generally celebrate their birthdays together. This year we went to Joe's Crab Shack, and laughed our faces off when they made them both put on wings and wear crowns and "parade" around the restaurant. It was amazing. Im not easily impressed by these kinds of shenanigans, but it was incredible:

My wonderful, delicious, husband turned 26 today. He is the best thing in the whole world times infinity, and I can't believe what an adventure we are on together. He combines the passion of a Shakespearean lover with the obnoxiousness of an annoying little brother in such an exact match for my heart. He still gives me that "WTF? Were married?!?!?!" feeling almost daily. Love it. y

p.s. on a side note, we are having the most economically friendly weekend ever. on friday, we went to sushi where we used a $25 dollar off coupon. on valentines day we had a picnic at the park with the two little girls i nanny for while their parents celebrated v-day on their own, and they bought us panera in addition to us getting paid. then, last night we used an amazing gift card to go to the delicious and normally way out of our price range, Mon Ami Gabi restaurant in the Paris hotel. today we are using a gift card i got for my birthday to get pedicures and then using a free birthday burger coupon from Red Robin to eat lunch. so legit.

my funny valentine

to my valentine birthday,

my beanie baba babushkie,

my darlingest of all darlings and silliest of all sillies,

before i met you i was a little confused

(okay, alot confused)

about marriage and the way marriage looks in real life-

i had disney dreams and i read alot of books

ALOT of books

and love looked like passionate longing and intense amounts of insecurity

 and white horses

 and girls with long names

and in all the stories they lived happily ever after the day they said

"i do"

and i always wondered if marriage was the end, the finale, the way to say that they made it.

the pictures they painted were perfectly balanced and wonderfully tragic and

i expected you to ride in on a chariot of gold and climb up my hair

and i didnt realize that happily ever after was only the beginning.

everyone else has taught me to be frantic and urgent

and to live live live live until you cant take it anymore, and i try to wrap you up in that,

but you,

in all of your flawed brilliance and masculine beauty,

you taught me how to really live happily ever after

because

you make me so calm when the world screams crazy,

and you showed me how to like pepper

and you fixed the tailpipe on my car

you tell me the most boring bedtime stories ever

and you criticize the way i mop

you look at me like you know me

like you know what happens to me on the inside

you hate it when i get my way,

but you (almost) always let me

you are so good at cooking meat so that its not too chewy or lemony or spicy

just right

and you clean the chocolate syrup off my chin at baskin robbins

and you never let your finger nails get too long, but you always have to be reminded about your toes

and you  forget to set your alarm clock almost every day

but never forget to excitedly scream my name when i walk in the front door

you push me and push me and push me until i lose my patience and i cant take it anymore

but you open your arms and i envelop me in kisses and

you always always always say you are sorry first

and i know that im a mess and im unpredictable and all over the place

but you are my rock, and my anchor and my home

 my happily ever after.

a severe mercy

once upon a time, there was a young man that taught me how to live, to love, and to be loved. he taught me how to be whole, how to treat others, how to treat myself. he reminded me of what it was like to twirl in circles and have someone be amazed at my beauty and innocence. and through his absolute understanding of all of those things, he guided me directly to the foot of the cross, drew me into the presence of my savior and into the whirlwind of unconditonal love that has come with having a relationship with Jesus.

when we were 17, i convinced him to skip class one day and he sat me down in the back of our high school theatre and read the bible to me. on valentines day, he took me to a fancy restaurant and gave me dessert before dinner. he called me every night and played "i'll be" by edwin mccain on his guitar until i fell asleep. once, he blindfolded me and when i opened my eyes we were at disney on ice, where he spent his entire paycheck on overpriced snow cones and buzz lightyear t-shirts. reading over my old journals, it seems so weird to be writing these things as memoirs to a man who has been dead for the last two years. it seems almost impossible that this is my little way of keeping him alive. there is a book called "a severe mercy" and it talks about the gift of mercy in the presence of death, and how god sometimes allows very dark things to keep us from even darker things and when i think about what my life would have looked like if i had never met him, or what it would have looked like had i never given into the sin that separated me from him, it gives me chills. what a severe mercy. God, whose own hand ordained cole in my life, and yet allowed me to stumble far enough away from Him to keep me from being the widowed woman picking up the pieces. 

mourning is a funny thing. in a way, i feel guilty for being sad. i lost him before he was gone through the breaking of his heart because of my own selfishness and missed him before i knew just how long the longing for his presence in my life would be void. sometimes i think that it isnt my place to mourn,but  it isnt a romantic kind of longing, or a physical longing, or even an emotional one, just a deep, deep, hole in the earth where his presence brought so much joy to so many. 

and while i am deeply and fully in love with Omar, i attribute all that i know of love to the faithfulness of another man. Cole Stafford, thank you for teaching me to love my Savior and guiding me into understanding what love is. all that i know of goodness can be traced back to your faithfulness to God. thank you for sharing part of your short life with me.  i will never be the same.

4/11/85 to 2/5/08

verb: its what you do.

so, once upon a time i worked at a restaurant and it was awful. after that i made a rule for my entire life about jobs: the only job i will ever have is one i would do even if i wasnt being paid to do it.

i realize that this is not feasible for most people. it is not feasible for me either. it is partially about attitude and partially about choice.  

attitude comes from here:

{It is not what we do, but how much love we put into the doing. If I belong to Christ and at that moment He wants me to be cleaning the toilets, or taking care of the sufferers from leprosy, or talking to the President of the United States, it is all the same; because I am being what God wants me to be, and doing what He wants me to do.
I belong to Him.}

mother theresa

choice comes from the decision to choose to work for less money or a less than perfect schedule to be in an environment that i dont dread going to.

my job now? i look forward to it. i get excited about it. and who wouldnt? i get paid to dance and sing and play with playdough and have picnics in thomas the tank engine tents and throw colorful scarves up in the air and see if who can catch them first and tickle fests and rasberries and be with the sweetest girls in the world. and then im like, how the heck am i getting paid to do this? and last year when i was teaching students with disabilities and taking them on adventures and laughing and crying and growing, i felt the exact same way.

one thing that changed my life was a book i read in Australia about being a twentysomething, and a question was asked: if you could get paid 10 million dollars a year to have any job, what would it be?

and the more i think about it, the more i want to pursue what god created me to do. because money dies with you. and fame only lasts a couple hundred years if youre lucky. 

i just think its really really really important to do what you love at (almost) any cost. and if that isnt possible (or even if it is) i think its just as important to love what you do, regardless. 

{If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lives a great street sweeper who did his job well.}

Martin Luther King Jr.

something from nothing

so, i made this: 

 

and this:

 

 (this flower is more lime than celery in real life, and dont mind no-makeup saturday)

so, i found some old hand me downs that never quite fit right. they were either a color i loved or a fabric i loved so i couldnt part with them, and so they sat in my closet for way too long until this morning. 

i roughly used this tutorial:

http://www.designspongeonline.com/2009/12/party-flower.html 

(by roughly, i mean that i cant really handle step by step instructions and im really impatient so i layered the fabric and free hand cut all four at once for each part. also, i didnt feel like trying to buy matching thread so i ripped a piece of thread out of the article of clothing that i was cutting up and that worked perfectly. oh and i used 10 cent felt for the back. so, total cost: 10 cents.  actually like .01 cents because i only used a little tiny piece of the felt. anyway, my point is that its really easy and cheap and kind of fun.)

by the third one it takes ten minutes a pop. score!

to prosper you and not to harm you

we've got some big plans in the making. and some small ones. and some medium sized ones that could potentially be either big or small ones. just a bunch of ideas and thoughts and dreams jumbled all up in our hearts, pleading with our Maker to guide us in the right direction. the direction that leads us closer to His will and plan for our life, and farther from our own desires. i think about that song by Jon Foreman {your love is strong- its on my new sidebar playlist } that goes "why do i worry? why do i freak out? your love is strong...." and i totally totally get that. worries and trying to figure out our lives, when we have never known whats best for us. He has led us in every which way except for the ones that we planned, and here we are completely provided for and purposeful and in a place of growth and strength stemming form following His will, and we dont want to lose that. we want to be free in Him, and trust him enough to GO when he says GO.

anyway, here is my heart:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

haiti part 2

"Church groups are singing throughout the city all through the night in prayer. It is a beautiful sound in the middle of a horrible tragedy." -- From Twitter user troylivesay in Port-au-Prince at 03:09 a.m. Wednesday

if you want to cry,

click here. 

if you want to help,

click here.

(we just spent $20 on 117 meals through Feed My Starving Children,

World Vision is awesome too.)