I have to first admit that my love of crafting most definitely comes from my mom. The woman who was a preschool teacher for many years before my sisters and I came along, taught Sunday school all through my years growing up and also taught elementary in my later childhood years. I loved to craft and picked up hobbies like crocheting, free hand sketching, or scrapbooking in my teens and college years.

My friends had to smile and act surprised when I crotched them scarfs one year…or worse all the 19 family members that had to graciously accept my CHRISTmas present of hand-made pjs (thanks to a hormonal pregnant decision one day to learn how to sew just for presents).

Since Cayden entered my life, there were many things that I had to let go of, one of them being crafts. It wasn’t something I missed, or better yet, had the time to miss. But when the holidays would start to approach over the years I would get a little sad that I didn’t have the time. We could barely get Christmas cookies made and decorated. Especially since Richard and I apparently don’t know how to contain ourselves and ended up with both girls having their birthdays amid thanksgiving and christmas. Now that they are getting older I have found some time and new found interest thanks to Pinterest…hey that rhymed!

Pinterest has changed my life! Not just in the cooking department…whole other blog, but also in the crafting department!

Our first craft was salt dough ornaments…I have memories of making these as children in school or at home with my mom. It was so easy and fun to do. We had our dear friends the newsoms over and had sweet baby Jonah join in the fun!

My plan had been to do the same for the big kids but use their hands instead. I soon realized that their hands were going to make the oranments too big and heavy. Thankfully, Kelsey, who introduced me to Pinterest…thanks Kels…I have lost so many hours of my life to that site 🙂 She told me she had seen some adorable hand print santa ornaments on her pinterest. Thankfully I’m not intimated by a little need to paint 🙂

One tradition we started last year, again thanks to pinterest, was to make a canvas painting. Last year we did handprint Christmas trees, this year I found an adorable reindeer footprint one. It was NOT easy getting 3 little ones to keep their foot still enough to get a identifiable footprint…I almost walked away in frustration. Yes, I know, horrible, but sometimes the perfectionist in me is so hard to contain…thankful Richard told me to get over myself and love the imperfection kids bring. Just what I needed to hear:) When I was finished with painting the antlers and putting the year at the bottom, the top of the print needed something. Thankfully I saw a super cute idea on pinterest to make Christmas lights with thumbprints, so I added those to the top!

My last Christmas project was making Christmas shirts for my kiddos and Jonah James. I had seen an idea on Pinterest to use ribbon and just lay them flat in the shape of a tree and sew on. Richard told me he thought I should ruche(sp) them…thanks babe…I can barely sew in a straight line! So there I was spending over a hour trying to figure out how IN THE WORLD to make the ribbon ruche. Frustration and tears were taking over so I put the shirts away and decided to wait till the 3 yr old tantrum in me would be gone. The next morning I awoke with an idea and it worked!!! Yay, I had to hand stitch them by hand due to not having anywhere to set up a sewing machine that wouldn’t be inspected by 3 inquiring little minds.

I have to admit it was alot of fun, and yes work, to make these shirts. But I had so much fun, knowing all to well, I was accomplishing a right of passage that many moms accomplish. I gave up nap time and stayed up late, and poked my fingers a few too many times, I now understand why the thimble was created! I would smile and have visions of the 4 little people who I love dearly wearing these shirts, smiling and thinking they were “cool”.

More importantly as my sweet precious babies + jonah james, our honorary harney wore these to church yesterday a few days after the horrendous tragedy that happened in CT, I realized that I need to be more willing to give up “my time” to do things for the people I love. To make sure that they know how much I love and need them in my life. Today Im thankful for the safety we have here in our small community, thankful to have my son in school that hasn’t pushed God out, and thankful to hug and kiss my children daily. Best of all that God entrusted them to me and lets me wake up each day to their smiling faces!

Merry CHRISTmas!!

So richard and I were presented with an amazing opportunity to participate in a local competition in oct…I know…I am just now getting a chance to write this.

We had no idea what we were signing ourselves up for, but the thought we could spread awareness about CF and possibly walk away with some $$$ for the CF foundation was just what we needed to brave it.

It was CRAZY intense. My sister kindly watched the nursing baby and two munchkins last minute after my mom came down with the crud suddenly. We walked through those doors, hearts pounding, hands sweating, and muttering continually, “its all for ezzy, its all for ezzy”.

After our dishes were served, which I have to say the pistachio salsa we made for our stuffed pork tenderloin was the winning element along with Harney & Sons Tea (served in ezzy’s enzyme bottles)which really brought our cause home. When the winners were announced it took every single bit of strength to hold back the tears that were forming. Its all still a blur, but the overwhelming support, love and genuine interest was/is a reminder of why we live here in this small community. Countless hugs, hand shakes, even tears from complete strangers kept us there well after the competition ended. We came home after 4 hours of being away in complete awe. We held our stubbornness, hot headed tempers that come out under stress and worked effortlessly as a team. When he moved to the left, I moved to the right, when he was chopping, I was stirring. Little words came out of our mouths, we literally became one body.

The hardest part was to have to wait 2 weeks till the finale.

When we yet again received our list of required ingrediants to use in the upcoming event, the stress started to build UP. It seemed like we had used up all our ideas and I was at a complete loss. It was so much harder to try and prep this time around.

One thing I knew for certain was that I was suppose to share a song that carried our family through the dark first few months of ezzy’s diagnosis. When I felt the idea tugging at my heart and obnoxiously consuming my thoughts, I sat down and listened to the song over and over again until I could hear the notes well enough to figure it out on my guitar. For the life of me I couldn’t find the chords ANYWHERE.

The competition started with Richard and I realizing all to soon we were in over our heads. Our fellow competitors did not appear to be the amateur cooks that we were. We had hiccups along the way and unfortunately didn’t serve food that I felt we could stand behind. But before we served the food we used Richard’s awesome idea to find candy that looked like all of the pills ezzy takes before meals and we served those to each judge and asked everyone to take them in honor of ezzy. I then grabbed my guitar and went into autopilot mode. I blocked everyone out, I know bad right, but its how I survive each sunday leading worship. I mentally can’t acknowledge the people or I FREAK OUT. Before I knew it I was done singing the song, tears running down my face and knew that no matter what, we did what every parent of a CFer should do, we advocated and educated people on CF.

When the winner was announced, yeah, sure I was a little disappointed. I wanted so badly to hand over a big check to the CF foundation, I wanted to one day say that when the cure is found, that we did everything we could to help. Just when the show was about to end, the winners grabbed the microphone and announced they were not going to walk away with all the proceeds but instead split it evenly with all the competitors!!! To top it off the very person who made this announcement then approached me afterwards and told me that he was going to have us on his radio show and that there was no way of getting out of singing the song I shared.

I just had the opportunity today to send off the big fat check along with a few pictures of the competition to the CF foundation. I sat there writing out a little note with ezzy sitting next to me, laughing and pointing at the pictures of her mom and dad wearing what she calls our “ezzy shirts”. I held her close and told her that one day…one day she is going to breath just like you and me.

Since july 27th we have been waiting, watching, and praying for Ezzy.  Her lingering cough finally had an experiation date and our pulmonary doc at Seattle Children’s said it was time.  From that date until August 30th Ezzy entered one of her toughest battles since her diagnosis. She was on antibiotics during that WHOLE time and worst of all was put on steriods…STERIODS, the 8 letter bad word now in our family.  We were literally waking on egg shells around her, just to survice from day to day.  They made her moody, unpredictable, and in an almost constant state of tantrums…sounds like a typical 2 year old right?  Well just like steriods make a body builder bulk up…the steriods made her tantrums bulk up.  The downside of antibiotics also has challenging side effects as well: decreased appetite, stomach ache, naseous, dizzy, headache, dirrhea…these were just the ones I noticed or was able to get out of my 2 year old’s limited vocab.

So last week I turned a horrible number that I can barely stand to say, and hate to even type…I don’t know why this birthday is the hardest for me to swallow.  I feel like there is so much I have accomplished in these years and yet still havent…30s are scary to me, for many reasons…one of them being that it is the age when most CFers are in their latter years…Oh, Ezzy I pray that you will not be one of them.

so I have been wanting to do a blog for quite sometime and after trying to do so one day during nap time…sweat running down my face, only seeing the color red and tears about to explode…i decided to give up…then I told richard what I wanted to do and he told me to wait just a few weeks after he was done with his thesis and he would help me :)…and well here I am with a website (thanks to my tech savy hubby) and not an actual blog!

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