Time To Celebrate!

Woo to the Hoo, today I turned TWO! 

Break out the confetti and the party hats, because today my blog turned two and we are celebrating!!  Wow, two years of yakking away in the virtual world of blogging and meeting great friends along the way!

Instead of getting presents, today I am giving them!  Just because I have bored you to tears on my endless random craziness for  two years, I figured y’all deserved something…HA!

Up for grabs will be two of my favorite things…

Coffee on me, a $5 Starbucks Gift Card.

And…

One of my favorite smells,

Bath & Body, Butterfly Flower lotion.

If you want to one of these, leave a comment and I will draw for names sometime between tomorrow and Tuesday morning.   

A Quick Weekend Recap & 90 Days

Wow, what a weekend….Saturday I celebrated, ahem, my 23rd birthday!  My hubby took me out of town to celebrate!!  Actually, it was a well thought out, hurry up and plan, at the last minute, we don’t have a clue, stay at home, but leave to go out of town, drive and end up where you land, kind of  trip….Makes sense, right?

Anyhoo, we ended up here…

Asheville NC at the Biltmore Estate.  It was beautiful.  We toured the house and then took a behind the scene tour.  Amazing.  That evening we also went and toured the winery and took part in wine tasting!  I can say for certain that I do not like dry wine!  HA!  It was a great day and fantastic weekend, too bad my birthday is not every weekend!  It’s nice to be so loved!!

Also, don’t forget next Monday, February 1st we will begin our 90 day trip through the Bible.  If you want to join in, come by my blog on Sunday Evening for the verses for the week and also sign up with Mister Linky to help and encourage others that are reading the Bible in 90 days.  For more information check out the original post here!  Also, grab the above button and encourage others to join us!  I can’t wait!

Lots Of Celebrating!

Today is Connie's 65th birthday. Connie is the most wonderful, sweetest, loving person that I have ever had the pleasure of being friends with. The most awesome thing is that I work with her and Hubby and I teach the 3rd grade Sunday School class together with her!! It's a good things she likes us!! He he! Anyhoo.....

Again, today she turned 65, and I am ever so devastated that she might just retire. She thinks that working till she turns 85 is a little out of the question, but if you ask me, the church walls will crumble to the ground the day she retires!! She go's way above and way beyond as a ministry assistant and right hand lady to our pastor, and we all love her so much! She is also the best proof reader this side of the Mississippi and can find a place for a semi-colon in just about any thing we have her proof! A-MAZE-ING!!

So how do you begin to throw a birthday celebration for someone like Ms Connie?? You wake up really, really early to try your best to beat her to the office. So here is how my day begin...

• Woke up at 5:30 am
  
• Get the cake to the Jeep
  
• Take the bowl of icing to the Jeep
  
• Grabbed the flowers
  
• Got the camera
  
• Purse
  
• Forgot my glasses (oops!)

Finally on the road at 6:15am heading to church making a mental note of I need to pick my contacts up from the eye doctor and I need to find something to take for this killer headache that I am going to have because I am blind as a bat, and driving with no glasses on, is quite the feat!

On the way to church, I called April, the children's director to see if she was awake and getting the balloons and streamers for Connie's office, yep, she was on her way! We decided on the phone to park on the other side of the church so when Connie got to work, she would not see our cars and hopefully the surprise would be a surprise!

I unlock the door next to the Youth room, granted I had two bags in my hands, a cake, a pot of flowers, my purse, my keys and a bowl of icing. I had so much in my hands that I could barely unlock and open the door. As soon as I opened the door and turned to turn off the alarm system, the alarm starts going off!! I forgot that the Youth room door does not have a key pad and it set off the alarm when opened! I had a mild heart attack, dropped everything, kicked off my heels and started running to the key pad, at the other door, to turn off the alarm. Then I ran to the office to unlock it and turn off that alarm to get to the phone to answer it to tell them that I was safe and that I was the one to set the alarm off!! It was a very anxiety producing moment.

So after I went back to the pile I left on the floor, I set out to get things ready for the big day. I...

• iced the cake
  
• unlocked Connie's door and set her flowers in her office
  
• made the coffee for her
  
• helped April get the loot in from her car

We then proceed to blow up countless balloons and decorate her office with streamers!! I think she was surprised!

(Really, there are streamer and balloons, you just can't see them!!)

One other surprise we had up our sleeves was we wanted to surprise her with lunch at her favorite restaurant. So we had her hubby come and pick her up for lunch. What she did not know was that he was on a mission for us. He drove real slow, went to the bank and then made a wrong turn, while the rest of the office staff raced across town to be at the restaurant waiting for her when she walked in!! Mission accomplished and it was a perfect time had by all!!

(This picture, is Cindy, the Worship Pastor's wife, entertaining the staff with a song of E-I-E-I-O, with puppet fingers!! We are so easily entertained! See how our pastor and Ms Connie is enjoying the show!!)

Check out the church sign that our Associate Pastor put up, one side said:

The other side said:

All she said was, "that Mike, he left out a semi-colon"! Ahahaha!! Too Funny!

Happy Birthday Ms. Connie, I so Luvie Duvie you!! You're the best!!!

Another Great thing about March 16th? It's Hubby's mom's birthday too!! What a great day of birthday's! Hubby's mom lives in Florida, so we did not get to celebrate with her on her special day, but I am sure, she had a great day!! Happy Birthday Mom, Love you! Check out Jenny's blog to see a picture of Hubby's mom! (Jenny is Hubby's sister.)

Busy, Busy Weekend With Pictures!!

Okay, where to start this busy weekend post....how about Friday night!! Victoria, Joey's best 'cuz, as he calls her, had a birthday Friday and she turned 11. We all went to the bowling alley to celebrate. Here is a picture of her and Joey.

For those of you that have girls and teenage girls, it is very easy to get them to smile for the camera. For me however, haveng all boys, I would have a easier time lining them for flu shots before I would ever get a smile from them!! It took forever and tons of pictures trying to get DJ and Bradley to smile while I took a picture of them with their 'cuz Breeann. I finally get a good picture of DJ smiling and Breeann does this....

So here I go again in the quest to get a decent picture of them and finally I capture this...

Trust me this was no easy task...well I take that back, DJ and Breeann was much easier than Bradley and Breeann, that took forever. Never fails, Bradley finally smiles and right on cue, Breeann does this...


UGGGGHHHHHH!! So a few more thousand picture later I finally got this of them.....


Finally a decent picture!!

So after bowling guess were we went??? Can you guess????

We actually made it through supper without incident and believe it or not, the po-po never had to make a visit....at least while we were there!!

On to Saturday!!

Our Children's Director is doing a major overhaul of the children's wing. Our church is located in Murfreesboro, so she thought it would be appropriate to transform our children's wing into "Kidzboro". Each room is being decorated into different themes consisting of a town, everything from a pizzeria, aquarium to a gas station and game room. I have the pleasure of decorating the room called "Kidzboro Backstage" which will be transformed into a Broadway backstage room. I forgot to get pictures of my entire room of the "before", so I did snap a couple of the walls that are not transformed yet, so you could get the "before" look. I do not want to post the after pictures yet until the big revel!! So here are a couple of before......with after pictures to follow soon!

I started on the room at 8:15 am on Saturday with myself thinking I would get the walls done that you cannot see, but I guess my idea of what I wanted to do was a little to big for my eyes, and I only got a fraction of it done. At 5 pm I had to stop and get ready for our mission spaghetti supper, so trust me it was a very long day!!

Also on Saturday, we had a new arrival on the farm....meet Robin!

We named her mama Susan after a lady that we go to church with, and yesterday she had the sweetest baby girl, so naturally we named her Robin, after Susan own daughter!! We're keeping with the family here!! Mama and baby are doing very well and will get to go and join the herd tomorrow!! Yay!

So that was my busy weekend. Today was very low key with church and an afternoon nap, just what I needed! Hope you had a great one!

My Blog Turned One Today!

Today, Blessings Amid Chaos, turns one! That folks, is exciting!! At least to me, that's exciting!

So what has happened in one year since I started blogging?? I think a bullet list would best suit this:

• My laundry stays in piles and heaps on the laundry room floor, because I simply do not have the time.
• My kids have learned to cook, because I simply do not have the time to cook.
• Hubby now cleans the house, because I simply do not have the time to clean.
• The dogs have learned to give themselves baths, because I simply do not have the time to be bothered by clean animals.
• Shopping? Not anymore, I simply do not have the time to shop.

You see, since I have started blogging, I simply do not have the time to do the ordinary day to day little life chores, because I am always reading and writing blogs!!

Nah, just teasing!

Since I started blogging this year, I have made the most wonderful bloggy friends. These friends are people for the most part I have never spoken a word too, but I consider a integral part of my life. You know who you are! Y'all are the people that leave me comments that make me laugh, send me e-mails when I am down to cheer me up and are just there to do what friends do. When I send out a request for a prayer for something going on in my life, y'all are the first to respond! Y'all are just wonderful people that I have meet during this year that I could not live without!

I love reading your blogs each day as well. For the longest time I just stalked most of the blogs that I have come to love, and then little by little my stalking just was not enough, and I started leaving comments, and those comments led to where I am today!

At the beginning I had a hard time writing about my life or daily events of our family. It was hard to be myself, well because sometimes I am just plain crazy and I was afraid that people would read my blog and be like, geeze, this lady needs to be committed! After I got past me fears and just started writing, I realized that y'all are just as crazy as I am!!!! Really, life in Tennessee or anywhere else, is basically the same. If you have kids, your life is crazy no matter how sane you are. And if you have children or teenagers, there is never an end to insane things to blog about, so in all honesty, I feel like I am normal because of y'all!! He he!!

In this past year, I have experience heartache due to family issues, I went on my first international mission trip to the Dominican Republic, adopted the most wonderful dog Higgins, dove into the would of a 16 year old driver in the house, and countless and numerous other life events and I was so proud to share them with all of you!!

Thanks for making my first year of blogging the most wonderful year that it was. Thanks for putting up with my soapbox moments, the happy times and the sad! I look forward to what my next year brings!

Birthday Celebration

Friday was my birthday and all week there has been some sort of celebration going on, last night included.

On Wednesday the staff threw me a mini Birthday party with a yummy chocolate cake, that sweet, sweet Ms. Connie made me. On Friday after work a group of us went out to lunch and then last night Annette my 'cuz took me to Chef Wang's, our favorite crab leg destination!

First there is a blurry picture of the card she gave me. I love cats and my nickname from Annette is Queenie, so this was the PURRfect card, it says "Hail To The Birthday Queen!" Which of course there is a cat with a crown, It's SO ME!!

Next is a picture of course of the fine dining establishment that serves scrumptious crab legs and raw oysters, my favorite!

Here is me and Annette getting ready to chow down on our crab legs!!

Here is a hideous picture of me with a big 'ol plate pf oysters!

My dilemma of the evening is deciding what I wanted my last taste of the evening to be, was it a crab leg drenched in butter, or an oyster drenched in cocktail sauce! What a choice! Thank you Annettee-Poo!

All in all, what a wonderful week I had. Did I mention that my sis-in-law sent me a Coach Bag! Yay me!! Again how wonderful it was to turn 27, ahem!

Check back in tomorrow for my ugly mug post! I am making fresh chocolate chip cookies and if I can bribe you at all..........