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Jesus summed up God’s law quite simply: “…’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind a nd with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31)
By now we’ve all heard about the awful earthquake in Haiti. There’s so much need there its indescribable. I won’t try. We’ve been blessed tremendously and can use this time of trouble to love our neighbor. Its not only our duty, its our privilege.
Here’s the deal.
In an effort to help Haiti, we’re offering a new sign design (inspired by Julie at Joy’s Hope) and will be donating $10 of the purchase of this sign to Compassion International Haiti Disaster Relief. Check out what is going on in Haiti via Compassion’s blog. To give directly to Compassion’s Haiti relief, go here.
We’ll periodically update the blog with the progress from this little fundraiser, so check back often.
The sign we’re offering says “Love God. Love Others.” as a reminder of Jesus’ command. Its a good reminder for all of us each day. The sign measures 3.5” x 20”. The sign edges are routed and distressed with a painted background and vinyl lettering. It will be glazed and sealed with a high-quality sealer and come ready to hang. You choose your background color and text color from the options below. The sample sign shown below has a marine blue background with cream colored text. Purchase price is $20 plus $6.75 shipping, and $10 will be donated to Compassion’s disaster relief fund for Haiti.
Background Colors
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Text Colors
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black
brown (khaki)
antique white
robin’s egg blue
marine blue
red
sage green
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 Choose any color for lettering from our color chart.
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Photo by GHOSH
We’ve lived in 3 houses since we’ve been married and we’ve been fortunate enough for two of them to have forsythia bushes. I’ve long heard that forsythia was easy to force indoors…one of the earliest plants you can have bloom indoors…even in the winter. And every year I remember that right about the time I notice a plethora of tiny yellow blooms…in my yard…UGH!
This year, however, I am breaking that cycle…a few weeks ago I remembered to head out to my forsythia and check for buds…they were there, so I trimmed a handful of branches which I then brought inside and plunked into a pitcher on my kitchen counter…and then crossed my fingers and waited.
   
After about a week, the buds began to show yellow.
And now…the blooms are really opening up. I LOVE it! So if you have a forsythia bush & it’s not blooming, it’s not too late…cut a few branches and you can soon be enjoying blooms inside too!
January 2009
April 2009
July 2009
October 2009
January 2010
What a difference a year makes! Our sweet girlie has grown so quickly and learned so much! We’re so incredibly thankful to have her as part of our family & can’t wait to see what the next year{s} hold! Love you Cameo!
 Over Christmas break, I received The Sweet By & By from Thomas Nelson to review. I don’t read a lot of fiction…not because I don’t enjoy it {I do}, but mostly because I just don’t have enough time to read as it is. {I had hoped to read 18 books last year as part of my 2009 goals…off the top of my head, I counted 7 that I read…obviously didn’t hit my goal, but I’m sure better than if I hadn’t made a goal!} I also avoid some fiction because of how much trash there is in a lot of novels…explicit sex, filthy language…garbage that I don’t want to fill my mind with. The Sweet By & By by Sarah Evans & Rachel Hauck was a welcome refresher…it was a great story of redemption on so many levels.
Jade’s story is told in a combination of present day & flashbacks to her past…as her story unfolds, the glimpses into her past paint a tortured soul…a soul loved by God and drawn to Him. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and look forward to passing it on to friends and family. I eagerly await the next book by Sara Evans.
If you’re like us you have plenty of crap stuff around your house. Having home-based businesses can make it 10 times worse. Our mailbox looks like a paper mill threw up on most days. Tack on top of that all the magazines you get, technical publications, newspapers, endless piles of to do lists and notes, and let’s not forget all the advertisements that show up through various shapes and forms – well, let’s just say there can be way too much paper floating around.
So, here’s a couple of options for helping to reduce the paper clutter:
1. Use notebooks or bound calendars. Instead of endless stacks of post it notes, try keeping a notebook, bound journal, or calendar around and making ALL your notes, to-dos, appointments, and shopping lists in this one central location. The beauty of having a bound book of some sort is that you don’t have loose papers floating around and you always know where to look for that important phone number or email address.
Another idea: try using your phone, pda, or computer for your info. Most phones now do a pretty good job of keeping up with all kinds of contact info and calendar appointments. Marry your phone with gmail and you may have the ability to have calendar reminders sent to you via text messages as well as being able to update your calendar via your phone while on the go. Can you keep notes or task lists in your phone? You might be surprised what you can besides make calls. If you use your phone for this kind of info, you might want to check out services like myfunambol.com to automatically backup all the data on your phone.
2. Throw stuff away. You really don’t have to keep all those empty envelopes. And is it really necessary to keep those ads, donation requests, credit card offers……. If you’re not going to use it today, just throw it away as soon as you walk in the door. Keep a trash can outside or in the garage and dump it before you ever bring it inside. Good thing about trash can near your car its always easy to throw away the extra drink cups, napkins, and papers that tend to build up in your car. Also, don’t be afraid to fill up your local gas station’s cans – that’s why they put them there near the gas pump.
3. Scan stuff. If you have papers you’d like to hang on to file them away or scan them to your computer and chuck the paper. Whether you’re using paper files or scanned files, be sure you have a well-organized filing area so you can find the documents you may look for later. If you’re scanning, use a file name that’s a good description of what you’ve scanned. Also use keywords or subject descriptions so you can use the search functions of the computer to locate files later. It takes time to set up a good filing system, but in the end you’ll have the info you need, when you need it, and it will be safely out of the way in the meantime.
4. Use email to reduce the paper you’re using. Most companies will email bills and statements in lieu of snail-mail. That keeps paper from even showing up – my kind of solution. 
Its cold out these days, so why not use the time to get ahead of the game and get your clutter under control. Leave a comment with any tips you might have for us as well. I’m off to scan. See ya.
Brad
 Last year I decided to make 2009 Goals instead of New Year’s Resolutions…I haven’t fine-tuned my goals for 2010 completely, but #1 is ready to go. When I heard about folks reading the Bible through in 90 days last fall – I thought it was awesome…but our fall was so jam packed, I knew there was no way I could participate.
I heard folks talking about it again on Twitter at the end of ‘09 and after much thought…I decided this was a great decision for me. I knew that in order to complete this challenge I would have to be extremely intentional…and that has been one of my greatest problems with reading my Bible consistently…I haven’t been intentional enough. Managing two kiddos, working from home, keeping up with the house…being a procrastinator and not a great time manager…leads to way too many days when my Bible doesn’t get opened. I read the Bible through several times in a summer when I did a discipleship program in college, so I know I can complete this…and so far, days 1-4 have been great. I love that reading the Bible is the forefront of my mind…I’m looking forward to seeing this goal through. I’ll be posting some of my thoughts and reflections here on the weekends…I hope you’ll join me.
Would you consider the 90 day challenge?
    
We had a fabulous Christmas season – we decorated slowly and in spurts here & there…our big tree didn’t make it up until a few days before Christmas, but we’ve enjoyed it all tremendously nonetheless! Walker at 3 years and 3 months is old enough to really start getting it and to enjoy each and every part of it. He has loved the “decorations” – we have 5 trees up throughout the house…in addition to our big one, I robbed the 2 I usually keep on our front porch and put them inside just off the kitchen where we could enjoy them much more…we picked up another small one on clearance at Target and put it in our bedroom and found another {that I absolutely adore} with colored ball lights on it at Lowes. The lights have been so fun & festive & have been enjoyed by all.
Walker has been super interested in our nativity sets…most poignantly Baby Jesus…he loves looking at the nativities and seeing the baby. He loves talking about Baby Jesus…born in the manger and the star in the sky. When we came home from church on Christmas Eve, he then kept talking about Jesus “the Savior of the World”…momentarily He became the “squirrelled of the world” in the car, but thankfully that didn’t last for long…we’re now back to the Savior of the World. Mimi & Pop gave him the Little People nativity for Christmas and he has been having so much fun being able to play with it.
Cameron enjoyed the lights, pulling as many ornaments as possible off of the tree & ripping into the paper on Christmas morning. Aunt Sylvia gave Walker an oversized jingle bell to hang on the tree and Cameo has LOVED carrying it around, jingling it into everything she sees. It has been such a blessing to have her here with us this year – it’s so hard to remember that this time last year we were awaiting her arrival – oh how the time flies!
  
As 2009 draws to a close, we are so incredibly grateful for how richly God has blessed our precious family of 4…it has been an action packed year with many changes for our family. We welcomed Cameo on January 21st…our construction business slowed down tremendously, yet God has provided immeasurably more than we could ever have imagined…in May we tried a new path and started selling vinyl wall decals…in August we completed one of our long-term goals long before we ever imagined possible…in November we took vinyls one step farther and decided to start making signs to sell at our local holiday fair…our Etsy shop has hit 99 sales in 2009…our children are healthy & happy…we are blessed. I thank God for all He has entrusted us with and can’t wait to see where He takes us in the coming year. Thanks be to God, great things He hath done!
can’t believe that our baby has already hit 11 months…where does the time go?
I’ve been meaning to post pictures from the Holiday Fair for weeks now…but life has just been crazy! We’ve been scarce around the blog for weeks…getting ready for the Holiday Fair at the CFC…and then handling all the custom orders that we got there…jumping in to sign making has been a whirlwind, but great fun. We don’t have any/many of our signs listed in our shop yet, but if you saw something at the Fair that you’d to order or are looking for a custom sign – feel free to shoot me an email. We’re now also selling locally at Palmetto Home & Garden; we’ve done lots of custom signs over the last few weeks…more pics are soon to come, but in the meantime…here are a few from the fair!
 
 
 Walker, aka Bob the Builder {who obviously wouldn’t wear his hard hat to play…everybody knows that!} rode a ginormous horse for one quick turn around the “pony” rides…he wasn’t so sure of the size of the horse and the horse (while it was only 20 mins into the festival) wasn’t too keen on being ridden. He had his eyes on the jumpies the entire time!
They had a *fabulous* obstacle jumpie that W fell in love with and played on time & time again…in fact, we had to drag him off of it when it was time to leave…famous last words…”one more time…”
Cameo was a sweet pea…probably the most observant sweet pea ever…she definitely loved taking it all in!
Here’s W on another jumpy – this one had a slide and it took him no time at all to master climbing up & then coming down the slide.
Besides the jumpies, W loved lots of the carnival games…he is into balls big time right now and wanted to play every game where he could possibly throw a ball.
Here he is wondering where the balls went after he got some through the hole.
 When he played one game early on, the guy running it tried to give him some candy, which Brad said he didn’t need…he just wanted to throw the ball. Later, just before we left, W played one more throwing game, and the guys running it switched out just before he started…when his turn was over, the guy from before when he didn’t get candy said “here you go” and handed him this dinosaur…we were all amazed, as we hadn’t seen any other big prizes up until that point…Cameo was quite enthralled.
While we didn’t have the best weather, it drizzled off and on the entire time, Walker had TONS of fun & it was so amazing to see how quickly he took to the obstacle jumpy…they had a similar one last year and we didn’t even let him get on it, because it just seemed too big. I’d say that was probably one of his favorite parts this year…can’t wait til Cameo can get on all the jumpies and play with him!
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