I Missed You!

Within two weeks we’ve experienced 2 deaths in our family, my husband’s uncle then his father. My husband is from Alabama so we’ve had to take travel to both Tennessee and Alabama. Keep us in your prayers as we try to find some normalcy. 

If I am posting this message that means we’re getting back to the groove of things!

Happy New Year!!!

Usually I don’t make New Year’s resolutions but for 2013 I plan on challenging myself to genuinely love others instead of just loving my own immediate family.

Saturday I went to a funeral in Tennessee. My husband’s uncle died. I don’t like funerals. The Pastor at the church where the funeral was held gave a sermon and one statement stood out to me, particularly, “no one was a stranger.”

My husband explained to me how his uncle started his own successful 20-year-old cleaning business. First, my husband’s uncle began bartending and genuinely developing contacts and friendships with the patrons to then owning 3 cleaning businesses in 2 different states. The woman he married already had two children and he was a father to them as if naturally they were his very own.

When I met my husband’s uncle 2 years ago, he treated me as if he had known me for years. His hospitality was genuine and he was very generous and outgoing. I didn’t know he was living with cancer for 10 years already when I met him.

People-pleasing creating a false sense of happiness

This morning as I drove the kids to school my son told me how his teacher is out of school all week and he wanted to make her happy by making sure all of his work was complete and given to the substitute teacher.

This sounds good but as a person who struggles with people-pleasing I have noticed some of the same qualities I have in my son Joshua. I am fascinated by the characteristics children inherit from their parents. I never wanted my kid to be a people-pleaser. He is the child with a personality similar to my own in many ways. I can only thank my Father for opening my eyes to know this-- you can never make someone else happy. Now I am not talking about giving a gift and someone is happy about receiving a gift you gave. What I mean is to continuously please someone and then feel depressed when your efforts fall short or they are not happy with you.

Felt Christmas Stockings

I made Christmas stockings using the cheapy felt from the craft store. The felt sheets cost me 29 cents each.

We don’t have Christmas stockings. Well, we have 1 that I bought for Josh when he was first born. My niece and nephew came by for the weekend and I wanted to give them something they could take with them. I searched all over the Internet trying to find a simple tutorial on making felt stockings and a small enough pattern that would fit a standard piece of felt. The easiest thing I found was a video that said you could glue felt stockings together which you could do but I wanted to use my sewing machine. I found another blog site that said you have to buy the heavier felt because the cheap felt wouldn’t sew well.