A Life After Death

I indulged in them today. I know. I know. I should have listened to AT LEAST 3 of my classes so I can catch up now that my laptop cord is fixed...but. I mean. I listened to one! And there were just so many many wonderful recipes calling my name!
Like this one and this one...oh and this one...goodness!

That's only a few of the decadent, delicious, wonderful, inspiring recipes I saw today. And my pantry is full of organic rye flour and whole wheat flour and cornmeal and my fridge is full of red peppers and scallions and tomatoes and lettuce...and I just know- i KNOW- that my chickens are dying to lay eggs for me- they tell me all the time...but that really won't be for months...but I can dream, can't I?

I am also dreaming about my tomato plants being in the garden- they are insanely huge (all 200 hundred of them) and it has been raining every day for the past week and we haven't been able to rototill the garden!

I want to become a great bread baker. My Rye was awful today. But the recipe I tried was truly uninspiring and awful- which led to me searching the internet for page upon page of truly wonderful looking recipes. This Smitten Kitchen woman excited me most of all though- she's up there for me with A Friend to Knit With!

But instead of spending the rest of my evening baking and cooking, I need to go dress hunting!!! yikes! My cousin is getting married tomorrow (and I'm eating Stuffed Flounder- pretty excited for that!) and I haven't had a minute to go dress hunting (I've worn all the dresses in my closet to family weddings or my graduation- and it's just time for a new one!)...so I am patiently waiting for my mother to come home so I can escape into that awful place called the mall where I will surely have an awful time trying on a trillion dresses...ha

I really don't know what I'm moaning about- I think it's because I really just want these instead of the chocolate chip cookies that are in my jar right now but I am out of eggs...and peanut butter...ha...but I'm just a spoiled brat.

Well...on a less shallow note, I'm truly enjoying my Bible college classes online (the whole 2 of them I've listened to!) and am excited to write my missionary biography paper! I basically listened to my Women in Church History teacher talk about all of these women who died for their faith for two hours yesterday- but it was so inspiring and sobering.

There's so much more to live for than bread and food and cleaning and chickens and gardens and soup...what a depressing life that would be at the end of the day if that was all there was to this?

Hope. What a theme that's been overflowing from my life lately- the Lord had given me a future and a hope.
Here's a new favorite verse of mine:
Romans 15:13 "Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost."

Abound in hope.
wow.
that's what I want- to abound in hope- and have joy and peace in believing! insane! Now just have it- but that the God of hope will FILL me with it!

all right- think about it
and bake some bread

the last one if a picture of my grandparents when they were young...

Well, i figure i should update since it's been forever since my last one...

I've been waiting and waiting for spring and it goes from freezing cold to 90 degrees here in like a day...yikes! So we've had a heat wave here in Philly since Saturday and it's going into tomorrow.

My family took this very heat wave to decide to redo the ENTIRE house. We switched every kid's bedroom (except mine since I don't live in that part of the house anymore) in the house for basically the first time since we built each room. It was pretty exciting but a ton of work between painting and carrying furniture up and downstairs and putting in wood floor in my sister's room (the only way she would agree to the move. WE needed her room because she has the biggest room so the boy's could share that room...) and in the middle of all that we repainted my grandmom and my entire living room.

WE finally "finished" it all as much as we can for now, but sadly I did not get my garden rototilled and so I cannot start planting, but I've been trying to get everything seeded inside. But I did take my chicks out for a little visit outdoors...

oh, did I mention my chicks?
WE got 8 chickens about three weeks ago, well, chicks, but they are already growing into hens and they are going to be beautiful and red and lay me a thousand eggs...all right, not a thousand, but a lot! i"m so excited!

Oh, also this weekend my grandmother got a pacemaker put in (besides all of the other drama going on in our house!) and that all went well, but she is very sore.

She's been pretty okay lately, insane, but okay. I'm thankful it's spring because I can hang the sheets on the line to dry since I've had to wash them EVERY single day for about a week since she started wetting the bed during the night. Yikes!

But other than that things have been pretty lovely. I got to go on a romantic picnic tea with my friends Hannah, Julianne, and Ruthie! And that is only the beginning of the wonderful adventures I plan for this summer!

First it will prayerfully start with Overnight Camp at Coatesville. Coatesville is an inner city about an hour away from me that my church has been ministering in for years and years now. The city is in the typical cycle of teen mom's getting pregnant, thier husbands going to jail young, kid's growing up with no parent figure in the house watching thier older cousin's get murdered or join gangs or end up in jail and thier older sister's having kids when thier still just kids themselves. So Jack Crans, a prison chaplain, started a camp to minister to the kid's while they are still young and to share Jesus with them and the hope that there is that is greater than the life they've gotten stuck in and how they can break this cycle. So every summer for years now my senior high youth group has done a week long day camp up there where we bus in the kids and do VBS's all week. My favorite week of the entire summer.
So for the last few months I've gotten involved in the afterschool club the Crans' do for the kids that is basically a Bible study for an hour every thursday at the camp and I've loved really being able to build a relationship with these kids instead of just seeing them every summer for a few days then leaving.
So the Crans' also do an Overnight camp for the kids every summer in June and I'm praying about helping out with the older kid's week! I'm excited and nervous.

THen the week after that I am going to Cali for 10 days with my friends Hannah and Stephanie for my Bible college friends' Donna and Aaron's wedding which I honestly cannot wait for!!!!

Then the last week of July into August is my senior high group's day camp week for Coatesville camp!
Then in August there is Surf Camp which I really hope I'll be able to do also!

Goodness...what an insanely busy summer already without ever thinking of the chickens to care for and the garden to tend and the grandmother to watch!
But it's all good.
And the Lord has given me 2 Peter 1 to hold onto and learn about so that I won't fall.
it's great.
all right
I should actually go work on my online Bible college classes that I really haven't started...yikes!

This morning my grandmom decided to put the coffee on because I was taking my jolly good time to get out of bed. I had good reason since I'd gotten up at 5:30 the morning before trying to drag the two of us to the airport in an attempt to make our 8:30 flight home.

I rolled out of bed around the time the coffee was done brewing. I wasn't surprised she had put on 12 cups but after pouring her a cup of what looked like just slightly tinted water, I took the liberty to open the lid of the coffee pot and see that for those 12 cups of water she had only placed in maybe a scoop of coffee. I dumped it out and put on my own pot of coffee, very very strong coffee because it looked like it would already be a busy day.

My grandmom and I spent the last three days visiting her daughters in Atlantic City and Myrtle Beach, and every minute since then has been insanity. The trip has really thrown her off coming home (she was absolutely fine for the majority of the time she was there- well, fine for her).

Well, let me try to think of a couple of good tales from our vacation. One of my favorites is when we send her to bed at my Aunt Charlene's house in Myrtle Beach and we get her dressed in her pajama top and send her to the bathroom to do her business. We figure she's really going because we hadn't heard her stirring for a good fifteen minutes. Finally I decide to go see what she's been up to and I find her just sitting on the toilet seat, lid closed, just waiting for me to come tell her what to do- goodness knows, we were laughing about that one for awhile. But I thought that story was so funny until every minute since she's been home she isn't able to function without me telling her what to do. She won't shower unless I make her shower. She won't sit unless I make her sit. But going to bed last night was certainly the epidemy of hilariousness-

I basically walked her through brushing her teeth and using the toilet and forcing her to put her pajamas on- I just figured getting in to bed and putting covers on was something she would be able to do on her own. I was wrong. Very wrong.
I shut the door behind her as she walked in her room and go to rest back on the living room couch for a bit and watch TV. oh....twenty minutes later my brother Jeremiah comes down and asks where grandmom is. I told him she went to bed and he goes to say goodnight- but she's not in her bed. But he hears her talking to him and she find him in the closet... with the door closed... sitting on the shoe shelf.... in her pajamas! Honestly we couldn't stop laughing. But then I try to get her to bed and for some reason she thinks she needs to climb into it...like on her hands and knees..and needs to sleep that way- yikes!

So since beginning to write this she has fallen asleep four times at the kitchen table and even as I write is sleeping. She also thinks someone had a baby because she saw some egg shells cracked on the counter. Who even knows!

I'm wondering if today, April Fools Day, might be the beginning of the downhill spiral- the little transition from dementia to alzheimers....maybe...or maybe not. Maybe she's just thrown off from the vacation and it was a little too much for her.

We did fix her up with some nice new clothes and pedicure and manicure so she'd better keep her mind for a bit to appreciate them! Honestly!

She handled the plane ride well though- well, once we were sitting together. We were seperated by a few rows at first because they plopped her down in first class because she could barely walk onto the plane. I thought she would be fine seperated from me for only an hour. But literally the minute the plane starts moving around the airport she unbuckles and hops up yelling "where's my daughter?!" And I'm already unbuckling to run and sit her down when the flight attendants jump up and sit her down. They moved me up next to her the minute the plane was done ascending and was in the air- yikes! BUt after that it was all fine.

So on another note I am starting my Bible College classes online now and got all of the awesome books in the mail so I will update on that soon.