For Her Daddy

Maya's Daddy is in Mississippi and we are in Kansas. She is missing him. He is missing her. Today in the car she was riding in the back seat by herself. Out of nowhere I hear this little clicking noise I've never heard her say before. She went along for quite a while, and throughout the evening, each time we clicked at her, she would click back at us. I thought her daddy might enjoy seeing and hearing her newest trick. (and a little bit of her chatter, too)

Pumpkin Patch: Mississippi Style

I must confess, life in Mississippi has been hard for me. The hubs seems to know everyone in town, always running into people he went to high school with, or church with, while I am constantly meeting new people (my favorite thing). While we were there, I was really starting to feel the longing for a friend. Someone that I knew, not because they already had a relationship with Matt, just because they wanted to be friends with me. I was so grateful when I met Elizabeth and she invited Maya and I to visit a pumpkin patch. Of course I was too busy photographing my adorable child to get any pics of Elizabeth, but Elizabeth, if you're out there, thank you.

Can you tell we're in Mississippi? No one else has cotton at their pumpkin patch!Beep Beep!

Poor baby: can you tell she was totally teething this day?

New skill: pointing

Do you see that left hand? She is about to put corn in her mouth. That's what she spent most of the time trying to do. She's tricky. Gotta watch this one . . . And again, with the corn eating . . .

She really liked the box of corn. Who knew a kid in a box of corn could be so cute?

Adoption

Adoption has been on my mind a lot over the last few years. I'm praying that we will be able to adopt in the future. I can't remember a time when I didn't feel like I was supposed to adopt a child. With our living overseas, it will not be easy, or cheap, but I believe God is going to work out the details. I just read a great post here written by a friend. She put into writing so many of the statistics on the global orphan crisis as well as the reason why believers should care. Check it out--it is sooo important that the church begin to take up this responsibility and practice true religion, as scripture defines it.

Challenge Turned Inspiration

I confess: I've been watching too much HGTV. We can't get it where we live, so while we're here in the states, I've been sorting of binging. I also confess: I've struggled with a woe is me attitude. First I must say: Our apartment in our country is SO nice. We've got three bedrooms, and everyone who has come to visit us has been really surprised by how nice it is (I think a little part of each of our friends and family believes we live in a hut somewhere in Africa, you know?). I am so grateful for our home. But as many of you know, it's easy to begin to believe the lie that someone else has it better. That what I have is not good enough or pretty enough or new enough or nice enough. Especially if you spend too much time watching HGTV. So the other day I was mentally bemoaning the decorating challenges of our apartment. The bedrooms are small. We don't have closets, therefore we have to have huge armoires (how do you spell that?) in order to have any storage. We have weird concrete/plaster walls and it's hard to hang stuff up. There's no moisture barrier, so any outside walls have issues (i.e. mold grows on our walls sometimes). We have A/C units on the walls because there is no central heat or air where we live. I could go on. But I won't. Because God gave me a gentle prompting the other day that I needed to get over my whiney self and see all of these problems as possibilities. So yeah, it's a bit harder than decorating in the U.S. And yeah, I can't just go to Home Depot or Target, or even WalMart. And yeah, it's really challenging to try to even find a store that sells fabric or drapery hardware. But how boring would that be if I could just walk into one store and buy everything I need?! Then my house would look like everyone else's! It is so much more exciting to decorate when there are some hurdles and challenges to overcome, right? I am honing my skill as a decorator by working in demanding conditions! I am very creative! I can come up with something! I can make the most of any situation! God tells me to rejoice and be glad and to give thanks in every circumstance! And my joy is not directly linked to the convenience or ease of my life! PSHAW!

So then, all of a sudden, I was excited about figuring out better ways to work with what we have and to make it beautiful! So here's what I am going to tackle first. The living room. We painted before we moved in and I'm happy with the color, so we're sticking with that. It's a nice light khaki. Not too yellow, not too grey. Just right. We got our great furniture used, from friends, when we arrived (and they gave it to us at a steal of a price! We have been so grateful for them--furniture is expensive where we live!). Because of the cost of new stuff, and the wear on the stuff we have, we may try to save money and get new stuffing guts put into what we have to make it feel more new. We got a hand-me-down coffee table that is very practical (has lots of storage) so we'll hang onto it. The paper-lantern lighting will have to stay too (the odds that we'll have to move again make investing in getting new fixtures wired kind of a bad idea). We got the rug to match the furniture, so it's staying. What we need to do now is accessorize with some sort of nesting tables (we serve a lot of tea and other hot drinks here, so having a bunch of small tables is really important) and some end tables for some (hopefully) lamps, some curtains, a new console for our TV (because the one we have is way dangerous and top heavy now that we'll be going back with a toddler). Here, why don't you have a look at the room first: Looking into the room, this is what you see. The windows have a rolling shade thing that is actually on the outside of the window, so we use that when we need privacy or shade.

This is the view to the right--this is actually a patio door, and just out of view on the right is the dining room. The patio door also has the rolling shade outside of the door. The white box above the door is because of the rolling shade. Just out of view in this picture is an A/C unit above the door.

Our current sofa pillows and a shot of the rug.

Detail shot of the rug.

Under the rug we have pretty marble floors (I think that's what they are?)


So, here are some of the "challenges":

1. At any time, the landlord could raise the rent and we would have to move, so we need to be smart about anything that is too custom to this space (i.e. we need freestanding furniture and need to do anything like installing curtains on the cheap, and we'll have to take it all down when we move). Anything we do here needs to work other places too because moving often is a reality here.
2. We often have large groups of people over and end up using all of our living room furniture, plus all of our (classy!) plastic chairs that are currently our dining room chairs, and we end up using every bit of space that we have in our living room. We also use our living room as a gym and do lots of workout videos in there and have to scoot all of our furniture out of the way (therefore: no big furniture that eats into the space in the room).
3. As I mentioned above, there's an A/C unit on the wall above the patio door that changes where the curtains could be hung.
4. You may have noticed that there's a weird wall jut (is that how you spell jut?) to the left of the patio door. Originally I wanted to do matching curtains on the window and the patio and take them all the way to the corner where the two meet, but that's not gonna work b/c of the weird wall jut--if we do curtains on the patio door, we'll have to hang them really narrow, inside where the wall comes out.
5. When you first look into the room, you see the living room and the dining room all at once and there is another patio door out to the same patio that comes off of the dining room. Does that mean i need to put matching curtains on the dining room patio door, if i put curtains on the living room patio door?

That's all i can think of for now. . . I was thinking of buying fabric for the curtains while we're here in the states, and I have the measurements of the window and the door, can someone tell me what the formula is for how much fabric I need? Is it the width of the opening, plus half again?

Tell me what you think . . . Also fabric color suggestions are very welcome as well! We are going through Atlanta next week and I'm hoping to buy the fabric there, so I've got to figure all of this out fast. Also, I would love to find some amazingly on sale cheap fabric to upholster some imaginary dining room chair bottoms--anyone know how much fabric I should get for each chair I would want to buy and cover? Just in case I find some amazingly on sale?

The "Tote and Float" and Other Adventures on the Tenessee Tom Bigbee River

Trying to get these pictures while my toddler toddled around on a dock was neither a safe nor a wise undertaking. But the light and water were so irresistalbe! Imagine what I'll be able to do (and risk) when I get my new camera!

That's our R.V. set-up in the background. (Have I mentioned I like camping Jacobsen style? Roughing it is for the birds. . . )

my little sun-bathing beauty

Ah yes, we've been exploring the Tenessee Tom Bigbee River. And doing some camping, Jacobsen style, which means that we set up the RV on a campsite with full hook-ups, down by the river (yes, "down by the river") and we fill it with food and drink, and then we don't actually sleep there, we just drive over to the state park whenever we want to spend some time out on the river, and we bring either the boat or some jet ski's and Matt and his dad Ernie (a.k.a. Paw Paw) launch them into the river. On our first day out, we were out in the boat when we ran across a patch of mud and silt, and the impeller sucked in the mud and then the mud got into the engine block and settled in like concrete. The engine overheated almost immediatly, and we ended up stranded. Lucky for us, we were right around the bend from "The Tote and Float".
The Tote and Float

We docked at the Tote and Float and enjoyed a cool beverage while a very sweet couple gave Matt a ride over to the state park on the other side of the river, where the truck and boat trailer were parked, so we could get the boat loaded up.
Maya enjoyed many aspects of "The Tikki Bar" . . .

If you're gonna get stranded, this was a great place to do it! I was embarrassed that I didn't even have a tshirt on the boat to cover up in, but this was clearly a "No shirt, no shoes, no problem" kind of place!

Trip to Florida

We made a recent trip to Florida to spend some time with the folks at First Baptist, Panama City, and it was wonderful. What a wonderful body they are. We were encouraged and blessed by our time with them, and hope that they were as well! Here are some pics from the sweet beach day they scheduled for us! (i know, right?!)

Changes In Diet

doe eyes

Yep, that's a little grass in the corner of her mouth. And do you see that leaf in her hand? About 20 minutes later when Grammie was trying to feed her breakfast, Maya kept gagging and gagging. I had cut up some melon into TINY pieces and thought, surely she's not gagging on those itty bitty pieces of melon. She hardly ate any breakfast and as I came into the kitchen to get her down from the high chair she looked up at me and I saw something in her mouth. I fought the iron jaws of death and did a finger sweep. Yeah, you see that leaf in her hand? It was in her mouth all through breakfast! No wonder she was gagging! The thing was probably poking her in the throat! How did she keep it in there all that time?!

Thankfully, I caught her before she put this critter in her mouth (it was way bigger than it looks in this picture, if you can believe that!). Nasty. More eating grass, but isn't the lighting nice? This is what we do when Mommy wishes she were still sleeping--we do a sunrise photo shoot in the grass. The lighting is really amazing at this hour. . .

No way my kid can be this old already. No way. I'm in complete denial. She just looks sooooo grown up here it hurts! And these? Yes, they are shoes. This is the first time I have purchased shoes for Maya. She loves to walk all the time, and there are some places you'd just rather not have your sweet baby's skin touching, you know? We've been pretty laid back about barefooting it all the time, but we decided it's time. And since she's outgrown all the cute shoes she was given as a teeny baby, we went to WalMart and got these little sparkly ones. She likes looking at them, but not wearing them. Which I'm okay with. Because I am in denial that she is big enough to wear them anyway. I was feeling really sad about how big they look and how big she is, then to show scale, I laid them next to the bread (below) and then felt much better about the whole thing. I wonder how big my shoes would look next to a loaf of bread . . .