Extra in The Ordinary

My husband has been wanting a German Short Haired Pointer for YEARS. He backpacks and wanted a dog that could take the long hikes in stride. He waited. We saved. We planned secretly, and then here she is. Meet Zelda.  He texted me mid morning with a super cute series of pictures of GSP female pups. He said he MIGHT go look at puppies after work, even though we were pretty sure we still wanted to wait a couple of months to bring a new puppy home. I said I was fine with it. We were just looking. However, I knew that once he saw these pups he'd be in love, and I was ok with that. There's just something about a new puppy suprise. Kids need them at least a few times in their lives. Moms need them. Dads need them. Yes, dad needed one. He was running super late coming home from work so I called to check on him. He says, "we are having trouble getting her to come into the car". Yep, he bought a pup. "She" is definitely the new GSP baby. What was my reaction? ...

If you live in Houston and have a fourth grader in homeschool, you need to read this. Taste of Texas (the restaurant) gives a tour and history lesson free to fourth graders. Mostly it's private schools that take advantage, but they also open it up to home schoolers. It was well worth our time and very inspirational for us. Nina and Edd Hendee are the owners of Taste of Texas, and they hosted the tour. I love that they do the tour themselves and they don't delegate it to one of their managers. We went of February 15, and both owners were at the restaurant bright and early the next morning with stories of a very busy Valentines night the evening before. Nina says she comes every morning at 7:30 to walk around the building and pray over it. She also kissed her husband in front of all the kids. They were super sweet to each other despite being busy and stressed.  Nina Hendee is a Texas history relic collector. The Taste of Texas restaurant is basically a museum; I don't...

After years of living with the usual debts (school loans, car loans, credit cards, etc), but working towards paying them off..... for the past 7 years....we finally paid them off. We are debt free!! Yes, Dave Ramsey was our initial inspiration (we read the book and listened to the radio show). And then the others that have worked towards being debt free became our inspiration. Especially stories of people being able to pay all of their debts despite hardships like being a single mom, cancer, loss of jobs, etc. They thing they all had in common was focus and determination. We knew that if they could do it, we could do it too!  I'm not sure why it took so long, other than we decided to do it our own way and parts of it took longer than they should have, but what matters is that we did it. We did it even though it wasn't easy, and it wasn't convenient. It wasn't fun and it wasn't fashionable, but it DID bring us closer together as a couple and has reduced our s...