Kansas City to Madison

Over the weekend I discovered my love for DVD players. We were on a 10-12 hour car trip back home from Kansas City stopping briefly in St. Louis so we could visit the Arch. About two hours out of Kansas City the " Are we there yet" question was getting asked. This did not bode well. Number 1 had already gotten her hair pulled and so she plugged herself into the MP3 player and dug out her leftover school work. Now you have to understand her.. she LOVES school but hates homework so this was a big thing. By the time we finally reached St. Louis we had already had 3 potty stops and a HUGE crayon fight and the head ripped off a Princess doll and listened to every veggietales cd we had. Four hours into the trip and Tim and I were already discussing who would get to be left in St. Louis and who would have to take the kids home :). We decided to stick it out a little while longer.. naptime is here they've been potty and fed Surely they will nap right? Nope. They colored all over the van beat each other with coloring books and took the wax from the baby belle cheese mommy gave them to bribe them into silence and smooshed it into the speakers! At this point Tim put my Folk music C.D. on to try and stop the steam from coming out of my ears. #1 is still buried in her own little world trying her best to ignore the fact she is stuck in a car with her sisters. The only thing she says other than can I grab a coke is "when we get home can I go straight to my mamma's house". We finally get to Clarksville Tn. There is a BAD accident traffic backed up for miles. So we stop to gas up and take the little ones potty. Tim drags me kicking and screaming back into the car which i'm now calling the 5th level of hell. Tim has also decided that he is going to blaze his own path around the traffic. I think okay we have GPS how bad can this get. HE TURNS IT OFF. Trusting his own manly instinct he try's to drive through Clarksville back to the interstate by passing the traffic. By now I can feel the gray hairs coming. I now have Van Morrison playing as loud as I can in some desperate attempt to block out the fighting children coming from behind me. We get through to Nashville FINALLY. The girls still haven't taken a nap and # 1 has finally taken off the headphones although i think that might have had something to do with the fact she ran out of work and battery power. :) She then proceeds to ask what is the big deal with learning how to sew and take care of a house. Then she says that Daddy is much more important in our house because Stay at homes don't really do anything. hmm... Time for Elizabethtown soundtrack. By now it's 9pm the girls are now giggling hysterically about something imaginary on #1's head they still haven't taken a nap and #1 has now changed her statement to Daddy has brain smarts and not common since and meme has common since and not brain smarts. hmmm... i think i am going to replay Elizabethtown. Finally we are home safe and sound. The little girls finally fell asleep 20 min from home. We carry in the littlest who lifts her head up just long enough to say hi Geni im home and pass back out. We get them all tucked into bed and I watch them sleep I remember why I love them so much. Until they woke me up at 6am.

Me, my life, my family

My husband and I met for the first time at Books-A-Million six years ago. I'm not going to say it was love at first sight but it kinda was. A few days later I met his daughter and he met my parents and my dog Genesis Leigh. Two months later we were married. We have our ups and downs but more often than not we end up laughing at each other during our disagreements. I am a former pre school teacher who is now a stay at home mom, We have two children (girls) together and his daughter who lives with us. Last year we adopted a puppy named Indiana. It is a crazy life often filled with temper fits and pouting but we absoultly love it, and wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

a day in the life of toddlers

Open the front door and see dirty dishes piled high after a


 dinner made by little hands. Cheese- it and Cheerio crumbs 


all over the carept left by hungry bellies. Index cards left by


 learning minds. Markers left out drying by creative minds.


 Laundry waiting to be washed and a mountian waiting to be


 folded left by days full of mud puddles and learning how to

"puddle" our bikes. Wet towles and lotion left by what were


 mud monsters now reveled to be angels. Bottles and cups 


left in little hidey holes where they were forgotten. Girl scout ,


 soccer, and gymnastic uniforms and equipment,thrown down


 after an exhausting day. Pots , Pans and Silverware left by


 exploring hands. Baby dolls and overturned strollers left


 abandoned by little mommies. Prom dresses, crowns and high


 heels left by little princesses. Make-up and toy cameras left

out by "America's Next Top Models". This is my day and my

 house everyday, and I would not 


change it one bit

If you don't forward this...

If there is one thing that makes me angry it's being told that if i don't foward something that i don't care or I am not a Christian. A lot of those kinds of emails were written with hatred. Hatred breeds hurt and more hatred. People look at me like i am crazy when i say things like that but it does. God teaches us to LOVE one another and to TEACH others how much He loves them. How are we teaching or showing love by passing along things that tell us to hate someone or something? There is a song that comes to my mind thanks to my daughters recent addiciton to Musicals.. Rodgers and Hammerstine wrote a song for South Pacific call you must be taught how to hate. When the movie came out they wanted to cut that song out... and R& H basically said no song no movie. This song rings true... we do have to be taught how to hate. Loving is natural, it's a gift God gave us. We are born loving not hating. We learn how to hate through what we see and read as we grow. i'm not advocating turning a blind eye to what goes on around us but do we have to pay attention with hate in our hearts? We can't change the world with hatred.. look at what that gets us. Love is what changes things. Love takes time to grow but grows strong.. Hatred is a weed that spreads quickly and is hard to get rid of. When you get these kinds of emails or when you read or watch something just think about if it is spreading hate or LOVE.

Marriages fall apart

Marriage issues
As time goes past and we all get older more and more friends are get divorced. Is it so hard for couples to understand that marriage is a sacrament between you both and God? I'm not trying to start a fight but why would you even bother to get married if you were not going to honor that promise to keep God in the center of your marriage?? Why is it so hard to maintain a relationship?
Relationships are hard and keeping God in the center is even harder. We live in a WANT society. We all WANT. We want dinner out. We want time away. We just plain want. It's hard to focus on someone else's needs when we want so much. When we make that promise to be with someone for the rest of our lives we promise to put their needs above ours. It's hard to remember but this is the person we have made a promise to love and take care of for the rest of our lives. Everyone has different needs it's important to talk to your spouse and discover what their needs are. Needs can be vastly different but finding a way to bridge those differences with Gods help is what helps to keep a relationship together. Men and Women are two parts of the same whole. We are supposed to be different but still fit together! We don't know our place in our own relationship. God gave each of a purpose and a job in our relationship . The husband is the head of the household the wife should be respectful of that. I think to often we don't respect the jobs gave us in our marriages. Mine is running the house in such a manner that it allows my husband to do his job and not have to be concerned with doing that as well. When it comes to household decisions he respects my authority and I try to respect when he makes decisions he feels are in the family's best interest. He asks my opinion since we are partners but still he gets the final vote and I as his wife must respect that.
We also introduce adultery into our lives. We as a society debate with each other about what constitutes adultery. To me adultery isn't always having sex with someone not your spouse. Adultery can be that friend of the opposite sex that want us to talk to them about our day and our lives and soon we are sharing things with them and not with our partner. Pretty soon we start comparing them with our spouse and it starts an avalanche of problems in our relationships. Adultery can be as simple as masturbating alone, you may start doing it thinking about your spouse but soon its someone else not to mention then we don't want to have sex with our spouse. When we allow ourselves to step on to this path we just start losing our balance and slide down the hill. It's like a gateway drug... just once wont hurt.. right?? WRONG! When we allow ourselves to let porn into our homes we are making our selves numb to what power they have over us, we are becoming voyeurs of something God made to be between and husband and a wife. By buying it we promote it. It's tough to stand back and think about it but we are sharing parts of ourselves with someone other than the person God chose for us even if it's in our own mind.
Think about women's clothing.. it is designed to draw mens eyes. We don't consciously think about it but we are encouraging lustful thought in other men. This is the body that God made for our spouse! Now think about when you look around in stores how do you see them starting to make young ladies and little girls clothing? It's gotten to the point it's hard to find something modest for your children to wear. We are supposed to encourage them to save themselves for marriage and the man God has for them but lets dress them like hookers! that will only harm our daughters in their walk with God. These things slowly start to eat away at our relationships without us even knowing it! We need to step back and look at the things influencing our lives and relationships and we need to decide if they are helping to bring us closer to God and each other or just tearing us away. If they are tearing us apart we need to work together with God to help separate the problem and heal the relationship

Letting go

letting go.....
Letting go is hard. We love to be in control of our lives. We keep our issues, adictions, troubles and illness to ourselves for fear of judgement. We all find it difficult to ask for help not just from God but from our friends and family. We chew on the problem trying to figgure out how to fix it how to solve all our problems ourselves. We allow our stress and bitterness and hate to literally eat us alive. Why? We know that giving our problems to God letting him solve them will make our lives better, us healtier and happier. Instead we play God with our own issues. We chew on the problem trying to figgure out how to fix it how to solve all our problems ourselves.In my efforts to reduse the stress and anxioty in my life i have discovered we need to
1. Admit the truth- that we are not responsible to affect change or correct problems that our beyond us thats gods job
2. Release over responsibilty- we can not make our lives or others lives perfect
3. That we are not perfect- we stumble in our walk daily but we ask for gods help and are forgiven
4. Learn to say No- we have to allow ourselves to say no or i can't to problems out of our reach
5. confess our faith
6. accept that we are not the one in control
7. Hand our problems over to God
8. Declair that God is the one in charge of our lives not us
9. Accept loss- not everything goes our way but God will still be there to love and care for us
10. surrender- surrender control
As a busy mother I have daily issues with letting go. I have learnd the hard way that i need to relsese my problems and ask for gods help in my daily walk. I feel like i need to be perfect in all i do. I should be super mom! But trying to be super mom really affected my family. I have had to face the reality that im not perfect and that God and my family do not expect perfection. They only expect love.

Emotional Devotional

Emotional Devotional


I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee

Hebrews 13:5

There have been some very dark times in my life. Times when I was never sure if God was truely there watching over me and if he was why were these things happening. When I was 18 I ran away from home and moved to Texas. At first things were great i was young and having fun living the life. I wasn't on drugs or getting tatoos, just having fun. As I started growing from a teenager into a woman the fabric of my life started fraying.. I got married hoping that marriage would help an also crumbling relationship. The man I married was more vocal about my flaws and the things that were inportant to me. My once sturdy self confidence was crumbling. Everything that i liked from my friends to my hobbies was constantly critisized. At least once a week He told me he wasn't sure if we should be married. I prayed and prayed for answers and hoped it was just a phase. One day I came home from work and was told abrubtly that his best-friend was moving in and i needed to find somewhere else to live. I asked God how this had happened..why was i not able to hold my life together.What was so wrong with me. I moved back to Huntsville a very diffrent person from the one who had left. I wanted nothing to do with God. My mother knowing the power of God would drag me out of bed every Sunday dragging my butt to church. I started to pray and started to heal. I learned that God had been there all along and what happend was part of Gods plan for me. One very normal day God put the man he had intened for me in my path. This man needed me in his life as much as I needed him in mine. He had strong beliefs and was good inside and out but he had issues of his own. Soon after we were married we got involved in a very ugly custody battle for his daughter. We went through things in the first year of our marriage that I pray others never have to. We prayed every night for Gods will to be done even as scared as we were that Gods will would not be the way we would have liked it to have been. God taught us how to work together and how to lean on each other when the other was spiritually weak. We reunited with family that my husband had not spoken to in a year. We had a baby. Dispite all the obstacals that we had been challanged with we had persevered. We allowed God to guide us instead of guiding ourselves and simply praying. God never forsakes us dispite the challages that we face even when they seem insumountable