Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy Birthday Barrett!!!


What a very special day ~ my sweet boy is now a whole year old! Very hard to believe that a year has passed since my little tax deduction came along two weeks early. :) I can't imagine our lives without our little man. I might have gotten a little more rest the last year, but it wouldn't have been nearly as fun! We are blessed beyond words to have had the last 365 days with this adorable gift from God. I pray for many more years with his sweetness. We love you Barrett O'Neal!








Barrett is lucky to share his birthday with his momma's very sweet and bestest friend, too. Happy Birthday, Kim! We love you and miss you. Give your sweet little man lots of kisses for us. :)

Happy New Year to everyone! Here's hoping that 2011 is a blessing to you all! Birthday post #2: next Friday. Yes, Miss Charlee Marie is turning three!

Monday, December 27, 2010

Ignorance is NOT Bliss!

PHEWWW! It's been a while, huh? Don't worry ~ I'm still here. :) It's just been a little busy. You see, we are the geniouses who decided to get married on December 22nd, have a baby on December 31st, another on January 7th, and Christmas is thrown in the middle, too. Talk about a busy, expensive two and a half weeks! Ha! It all gets jumbled together, unfortunately. We're making it, though, despite a case of the flu and croup. Poor Charlee came down with a very croupy cough on the 23rd, so I took her in to the doctor on Christmas Eve. She had been running a fever along with the croup, and she has literally only had a fever maybe 3 times in her life. I knew something had to be wrong. Sure enough, 1 flu swab later and we were purchasing the most expensive medication ever, Tamiflu, along with enough to prevent the whole family from getting it. I really don't know what families with 4 or 5 kids do when one of them gets the flu! That stuff was $75 for each person in our family......the day before Christmas.......guess what we got in our stockings? ;) I guess you can't put a price on your health though, right? Ha! Charlee is feeling a lot better, and the rest of us seem to have dodged the worst of it (fingers crossed).



Even though we had to suffer through the flu on Christmas Eve, we had a very wonderful and memorable holiday. Charlee and Barrett were VERY good this year ~ at least one could assume from the boucoups of presents they got! They had a ball opening presents, and Charlee still goes up to the tree and wants to open more. Gonna have to stress the GIVING part of Christmas more next year.... :) Barrett finally has some boy toys to replace all of the pink hand-me-downs. Finding a place for all of these new goodies has deemed itself difficult, though. Not to mention the many more gifts we'll add over the next two weeks from birthday parties! Sheesh! We may have to clean out some of the old ones. Chandler and I were both extremely good this year, too. ;) All in all, our Christmas was wonderful, and I couldn't have asked for a better time spent with our sweet little family.




Now, on to birthday party number 1 on Wednesday, and birthday party number 2 a week and a half later. Yes, I realize I could combine their parties, but where would the fun be in that? ;)

I set up a share site on shutterfly, and you can check out more Christmas pics here. This is a pretty generic site that I've just been uploading pictures to, so don't expect anything extraordinary or anything. ;) Two little ones leave me little computer time these days!


So, I had every intention of doing lots of Random Acts this Christmas season, but so many things seemed to hamper my ability to get them done. Poor planning on my part was the main culprit! I did, however, do a few things. One was a gift card to the cashier ringing my order at Wal-Mart the week before Christmas. Y'all, she looked weary and down-right exhausted, and who wouldn't when working at Wal-Mart the week before Christmas? I was already getting a couple of gift cards I needed for presents, so I just had her ring an extra one. When I was leaving, I handed it to her and told her "Merry Christmas". :) The way her face changed was all worth it. I prayed that God would bless her life as I walked away, and I have complete faith that He will. Not because of anything I did, but of everything He did through me, even if it was only to plant a seed. I really wanted to take Charlee and Barrett to buy coloring books and crayons and deliver them to kids at the hospital on Christmas Eve, but I figured it wasn't a good idea since Charlee had the flu. "Here you go, have a coloring book.....and the flu." Probably wouldn't go over very well. Ha! I'm hoping to take them for their birthdays. I'd like to take them for a "Random Acts" birthday like I'm planning for mine, only on a smaller scale. Probably only one thing for them while they're young. Maybe when they get older we can do one for each year. Any ideas for things I could do with them???

Now for the title of my post ~ Ignorance is NOT bliss. Ingorant. I remember when I was younger I used to always hear "ignorant" and automatically think "stupid". Totally wrong definition of the word. Igorant just means unknowing. The famous saying, "Ignorance is bliss" bothers me because I can't stand to NOT be "in the know". You know what I mean? :) I hate not knowing something. I have to go read up on it, google it, whatever, so I know what someone is talking about. It bothers me when people just believe whatever they hear. Do some research, people! Ha! Anyway, there are many, many, many people around this globe that haven't heard the name Jesus Christ before.....in their life......never even heard the name, much less the good news of the Gospel. These people are ignorant......unknowing that there is a savior who died for their sins. We could sugar-coat things and try convincing ourselves that these people will surely not lose an opportunity to spend eternity in heaven since they had no clue about Jesus or his saving grace. Is that right though? Jesus said that no one would enter the glory of heaven without Him. Noone. Not even the ignorant. I wouldn't call that ignorance blissful. Should make us ON FIRE to reach those people, no matter if we're "called" to missions or not. I'm not saying that there aren't people here in America who need to be reached. There are plenty. I'm saying that we need to have a heart for those all over the globe. The easiest way to start is to pray. I've been praying for months that God would show me what I should do about these ignorant people. Please pray with me. It's soooooo incredibly easy for me to get caught up in my day-to-day life and forget about them.