Extra in The Ordinary

After working full time for 13 years, always dropping my girls off at either school or daycare, and not seeing them until abut 9 hours later, today, I'm not. Today, I realize, I'm at a coffee shop at 10am on  a Thursday. I could never do that before. Normally I'd be in a meeting, gladly brain storming the best best way for the company to make more money. Business is in my blood. I liked it. But today, I'm not. I didn't like leaving my kids all the time. So, after 13 years of waking up around 4:30am and only having 2 hours or less with my kids in the evening, today I'm in a different situation. Today,  I dropped them off for a 2 hour, once a week art class. It's the only place I have to "drop them off" to this week, because now I'm a stay at home mom. Soon I'll pick them up and we will eat lunch together. Not a rushed dinner. We don't have to skip the details of their day. I have time to talk to them. I know their hopes and dream...

Busy day? Wondering what will fill the gaps that never seem filled...it's Jesus.I love this video. My favorite line is "God plus nothing is everything"!!

This summer would easily classify, so far as one of the BUSIEST EVER. Work is busy. VBS was busy. We've traveled. I've traveled for work. Art camp. More work. Special Project. Birthday parties. House work. But past all of the busyness, there's something happening that will matter after the busyness is gone.  When the days get shorter and the pool closes, one of my sweetest summer memories will be the week we spent with Mr. M, my 6 year old nephew. He's here to visit from Minnesota. I'm so glad he is here. We've watched movies. We've built with legos. We've gone skating. Went to church ("there's as many people in here as there are songs to sing. (sad face)") We've played outside. We've ridden a large carousel. We've shopped till we dropped. And the entire time, he's constantly surprising me by opening up and letting me get to know him a little. What a treat this has been. Past the busyness of summer, i...

Ok, so if you missed my last post, we started a soap business from home. We're making the soap for ourselves anyways, and the soap is so wonderful that we decided to make it available for sale. You'd have to know that my husband is a chef, and he's using his skills on making soap, so every bar is like a symphony of scent and texture. It's good soap. Here's what we did this weekend: We figured our our packaging, and a small free gift for every order. We did a cost analysis on ingredients and packaging so we could get prices right. This may sound boring to some of you, but if you know us....we both love this sort of thing. The Coffee scrub bar was re-named the Vanilla Latte Bar, since it smells more like vanilla (but has coffee in it). The price was set at $5 per bar for 4.5 ounces. Again, I just love this bar- my favorite so far. It's probably because it has coffee in it, and that's all it takes.  Husband (the Soap Chef and CEO) made a new soap bar...

From one mom to another, let's just say I can meet you right where you are today. You have a million things to do, several little shoulders to hug and mouths to feed (ones much bigger than the others), and far too few hours to get it all done, and very little (or zero) time to refresh yourself mentally, physically, or spiritually. "Me time" is rare for moms, and that's ok. If it were up to us, and we had a bottomless pit of energy, we'd probably never stop to take car of ourselves. God gave us that instinct to care of our families first. Our precious kids need so much of our attention while we are with them. I remember needing lots of attention when I was a kid, too. There's just only so much one brain and one body can take, right? Some days I feel like this: (yes, even in my frustrated moments I'm probably thinking about coffee) Of course, when we get to this point of frustration, we have a choice. We can spiral down the negative nancy, the sky is...

Dear Zig, Thank you for the legacy of love, service, dedication, positivity, passion, and enthusiasm you leave for many generations into the future to enjoy. Thank you for caring enough about us all to make it your passion to share your pearls of wisdom with us, and to help us be motivated and more successful. I know the lucky angels rejoiced when they got to escort you home, and your homecoming was surely a grand event. We all look forward to seeing you, someday, at the TOP. Sincerely, Tink Zig Ziglar will be remembered and missed by millions. Many of us that have been or will be influenced by his life’s work of motivational and positive books, videos, audio CDs, and much more. In a world where it’s easy to forget how fortunate we are, and forget what a miraculous creation of God we are, we all need positive reminders. As Zig said, we need a “check up from the neck up”. What I personally appreciate most about Zig is that he was firmly committed ...

In the midst of a stressful election, I'd like to help everyone remember a core truth. The President is no doubt important, but the President of the United States is not the only position or person leading us. He's not the only leader that matters. Governors matter, Judges matter, elders of the church matter, bosses matter, fathers matter, and husbands matter. For many of us with Godly husbands, they matter a LOT. They are the ones leading our households day in and day out in the God-ward direction. They may not get a final say in gas prices or the unemployment rate, but they are building our families. The bottom line is that they are protecting our lives and souls with their whole selves. Mr. Extraordinary is my husband, and today I'll focus on the extraordinary Christian leadership he continues to provide for our family... A few things about Mr. Extraordinary: He loves his wife and little girls wit...

Have you ever learned a lesson from your child? It's usually the parent teaching the child, but I think God gives us kids to teach us the lessons we didn't even know we needed to learn. My girls teach me lessons all the time, and I'm sure you have learned similar lessons from your own kiddos. Here are a few of my favorites: Be a goober as often as possible - I'm usually the serious one, but after having two of the funniest goobers on earth (and being married to one), I'm finally learning how to NOT be so serious all the time. (as is evident by my mustache wearing IPK above). God gives us lots of chances - Punkin' must have learned this at school, and she says it a lot at home. It's a welcome reminder to me that as long as we are walking towards God and seeking him earnestly, He has wide open arms, ready to give us another chance. If you are sorry, act like it - When my kids do something wrong, and especially if they accidentally hurt someone, their re...

Dear Beautiful You (yes you),  Happy Friday! As our little Punkin' says- "it's my favorite week of the day!".  Now that there are more than 1 of you, I'll take a moment to apologize for this blog mess. I'm updating the look and feel, moving things around, and it looks like a completely different site. I still don't have it just right yet, so that's just a heads up. Tomorrow it might be neon pink or something. Is this a midlife blog crisis? I don't think I'm quite old enough for that yet. Oh wait. Anyways.....  Ahhhh I really do not like messes. If it feels chaotic I like to throw it away. BUT I love it when you visit me, and it's just way too like me to not have a "clean house" for you to see.  To explain, I decided to update my blog to make it just an ounce more personal. I try way too hard to appear like I have it all together. The truth is that I don't! Try as I might; God's strength is perfected in my wea...

The “Abundance mindset” is similar to the Dan Sullivan 10X mindset (President and founder of Strategic Coach) in many ways. Dan Sullivan also talks about the mind boggling leaps of technological advancements since the discoveries that have allowed computer chip capacity to increase. He refers to it as endless global change. This trend is formally referred to as Moore's law. In an age of endless global change, the only way to plan for success and continue to be leaders is to plan with at least 10x growth in mind. This opens our brains to new possibilities. Often, the ceiling of complexity or confusion we experience is self imposed. Once we give ourselves time and brain space to think things through, and we open our mind to ABUNDANCE, our brains can then go to work doing what they do best. The average person uses about 10% of their brain capacity, and I don’t know about you, but I’m interested in unlocking the other 90%.  10x wasn’t good enough for...

This week a family at our church lost their 15 month old baby boy, baby Henry, and so today I'd like to start out by saying my heart goes out to them, and I think I've prayed for them at least 3 times today already. Their loss causes all of us to recalibrate, stop for a moment and ask ourselves, what are we doing here? If life can be so short, how are we redeeming the time to make every second count? What's the point? How can God allow such pain and loss? This past summer I read a book, Heaven is for Real, and today I'm so glad to have that story under my belt. It's a story about a little boy who has an experience during a traumatic surgery, and afterwards (about a year later) he starts gradually telling his parents about seeing Jesus. Then he starts to tell them about heaven and the others he saw there, including his miscaried sister he never knew about. Now, I don't claim to know if that little boy really went to heaven or not, but the book gave me chills. I...