That's Life Kid!

So, as I mentioned before, we were living out a normal life. A stay at home mom homeschooling her kids. An oil and gas salesman, working long hours. How could we make a dent in the sad reality of Guatemalan people? And as we prayed those prayers, God began to form us into an answer. Our pastor here in the states gave us a friend of a friend contact in Guatemala. A pastor of a 12,000 member church in Guatemala City. His daughter agreed to meet with us for coffee in Antigua. We had no idea why we were meeting with her and she even asked us why we were meeting. We could only answer that we were taking baby steps toward anything God put in our path. As we talked, our jaws simultaneously dropped. She (a Guatemalan) had attended college in our home town. She had even tried our church out twice! Now, only God can orchestrate that. Her dad had run for president of Guatemala in the previous elections and had lost. Her family felt like God was leading them to make a big change in th...

We are a pretty normal family. I mean, if normal means we can still be kind of weird and like it that way. But, we are like anyone else. We like to take fancy family pictures. Just a side note: Do not attempt three outfit changes for your family for outside pictures. Bicyclers and runners WILL come by at inopportune moments...... We like to have fun. We love vacations and our creature comforts. It's nice to jump in our cars and go wherever we want, Target being my main destination.  But then, in the midst of normal life, God began pulling us here: This is Guatemala City dump. Over 1,000 people live right around this enormous trash pile. They work there every day and they raise their families in the middle of the smell and sight of a whole city's trash. Their kids grow up believing that this is all they will ever be and the cycle continues. Very few ever get out. What started for our family as a one time, 8 day mission trip became a passion. As our past...

So, I've been away from my blog for a while. Busyness took over. I started homeschooling our three girls. Homeschooling three girls looks a lot like my daughter's hair in the picture above. It's totally crazy. It's fun and rewarding, but it's also flat out crazy. I have been at my pinnacle when my girls compared a painting they saw to a Seurat painting and I hoped everyone around us heard. And I've been at my lowest when my oldest made me a picture of the American flag. Which she made into a triangle. Which she spelled Mrica. Which I hid in my purse so no one would judge. But I've missed getting to share from my heart. I've missed purposefully finding those little jewel moments of my day so I could share them here. And so I'm back. I'm not sure how often, but I'm back. And I can't wait to share the HUGE changes that God has made in our lives over this last year. Huge! As in, so big that we are out of our league, out of our comf...

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas week and got to spend lots of time with your loved ones. (my favorite part!) God has been speaking to my heart again. I was thinking about New Year resolutions, which I never take seriously. (for 2 years running, my only resolution was to grow my hair out, accomplished by strenuous act of not getting it cut off. Ha!) Last year, I turned 33 in December and for the first time had a serious resolution: Since, according to scholars, Jesus lived to be 33, I strove to be more like Jesus. This year, I thought about it and prayed about it, thinking, "What could be better than to attempt to be more like Jesus?" God whispered to my heart, "Be more Lisa." Wow. Talk about blow me to the ground. He spoke to me about this: Imagine a person who totally discovered, cultivated, and embraced all God made them to be. A person who had the courage to fully be that person, not caring what others thought, not wearing a mask. What a fiercely...

So after last year's somewhat involved birthday parties, I had declared that this year we would be doing simple parties for the girls. Parties involving kitty cat plates and such from Wal-mart. Then Elle requested a balloon party. Great! Easy peasy. I would buy a bunch of helium balloons and call it good. My mistake was casually typing "balloon party" into the search bar on Pinterest. : ) So many CUTE ideas. I was hooked and with Elle helping me design the event, here is what we ended up with: Cannot say enough good things about the woman who designed these invitations! For less than it would cost me to buy generic ones at Target, she worked with me, making changes several times. She even included the envelopes. Her FB site is here:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/That-Cute-Design/141701582527759 The striped party hats and cute party banner on the front of the table are from Target. The rainbow jello instructions are on Pinterest. Very, very cute, but VERY time co...

I love mixing patterns and textures! I wanted to do some more Valentine's decorating using things I already had around the house. I had some cute red and white polka dot tissue paper to start with. And I decided to use some newspaper to mix with it. I traced small hearts on each kind of paper and cut them out. I poked a hole towards the top with a pencil and my daughter Emma hung them on tree branches for me. I kind of wish I had cut more newspaper hearts, but I'm not about to "correct" Emma's work. I love how it turned out!

I wanted to make a quick, cheap Valentine's wreath for the front door. I already had coffee filters and had been wanting to make a filter wreath, so I combined that with another Pinterest idea and was pretty happy with the result! I used this tutorial: http://www.thenester.com/2010/11/making-a-coffee-filter-wreath-and-tree-and-things-of-that-nature.html Unfortunately, I didn't have enough coffee filters and my wreath wasn't nearly as full as I had intended it to be. From the street, it looks fine though! Also if you cross your eyes when looking at it up close, it looks much more full. ; ) The picture frame idea came from this tutorial:  http://daniellebartran.blogspot.com/2011/01/valentines-decor-things-i-really-want.html The best part was, I didn't even have to glitter my heart. Hobby Lobby had them for $1! I was forced to glue polka dot tissue paper around the sides since I ran out of coffee filters, but I thought it turned out pretty cute. The polka dot f...