If you could keep me in your prayers, I would really appreciate it. This has been a very long and difficult year for me. It has put a strain on all of my relationships and I am having to focus my attentions on repairing the damage as much as it is within my ability to do so. I am looking to God to supply me with what I don’t have. And I am hoping that the people I love in my life will be willing to meet me half way.

Note to Secret Sister: Thank you so much for remembering me with little surprises at my door each week. Your notes have especially uplifted me during this time. Please do not think that I have forgotten you in my prayers.

The very next day I received the wonderful prayer journal and set of pens. However did you know that I can never find any pens around here anymore? We won’t even discuss the games of hide-and-go-seek we play with pencils. Thank you so much for the prayer journal. I used to keep my prayer journal in a blank book, but this is so much nicer.

Thank you for all of the lovely gifts, but I especially thank you for the unseen ones. The prayers you send up for me and thoughts you keep of me. You are always in my morning prayers and I think of you often throughout the day. God bless and keep you and your family.

Thirteen of my Favorite Things that Begin with the Letter T 

I was asked if I would like to participate in a meme by Rose over at World Outside My Window. Technically I was supposed to ask her to assign me a letter of the alphabet and then I was to name ten things that I “love” that begin with that particular letter. I decided to go ahead and use the letter assigned to her, though, since it dovetailed so nicely with my Thursday Thirteen assignment. If anyone wants me to send them a letter, though, feel free to leave a request in the comments section. Here we go!

1. Tea. Hot with sugar and milk.

2. Thermal underwear

3. Tide with bleach. In my humble opinion, the best laundry detergent.

4. Boston Terriers

5. Two-year-olds. I don’t think they’re terrible at all.

6. Tire swings. Although, I can’t really swing on them now that I only wear dresses.

7. Thrift stores

8. Coconut Jam Tarts

9. Watching the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! with my husband on rainy Saturday afternoons.

10. Tulip trees

11. The book To Kill a Mockingbird

12. Turnips & carrots

13. Truth

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Thirteen Things About Me 

1. I really can’t stand to be cold and I am especially not fond of February through March or indoor places that prefer for it to feel like February when the temperature outside is a perfectly acceptable 75-85 degrees.

2. I adore warm spring days especially when I can find a patch of sun and throw down a blanket in the grass to nap upon.

3. I can’t stand to wear anything binding about my waist. I have always found pants and especially jeans horribly uncomfortable.

4. My favorite dresses have pleats at the waist and not gathers. Elasticized waists are out of the question. They don’t seem to know their rightful place about my waist.

5. I can’t stand hair in my face. My hair tends to fall forward giving me a Cousin It appearance and bangs bother me. I am very content wearing my hair up in a bun.

6. I deal daily in Boston Terrier emissions. Banjo makes up for it, though, as a radiant lap warmer.

7. I spend my days with two girls who are presently competing to see who can sing “la” the longest and the loudest. Clara appears to be winning.

8. I am always hovering between wanting a best friend and wanting to be left alone. A best friend is hard work. A friendship like that requires a large emotional investment (not to mention quite an investment of time). Of course, lacking a best friend often leaves me lonesome. And yet I like being alone. Whatever shall I do?

9. I think that sometimes when one has a family and a church family, one’s life is full enough without having a best friend. God fills the gaps. There’s no better investment of emotion and time than in Him.

10. Today is the day our Christmas tree is coming down. Before it takes root.

11. Don’t poke your eyes out because you had to see another Christmas picture. It’s okay. It’s coming down. Really.

12. My favorite holiday is Easter even though we don’t celebrate it in the church. We prefer to celebrate Christ risen every day of the year and not tie it to one specific day of the year. I still like the idea of a day to celebrate spring, though. After having made it through February and March, I feel much blessed when spring arrives.

13. If I don’t get off of here right now, my husband will be very disappointed to see the tree still decorated and standing in our living room and I might have to post another picture of it, so I bid you farewell!

4:40 Update: Ding! Dong! The tree is gone! Yippee!

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1. 8 large white bath towels

2. 8 white hand towels

3. 8 white washcloths

4. 4 white king-sized pillow cases

5. 1 warm throw blanket (to replace the “binky” Banjo stole from me)

6. 1 case of Dr. Pepper Berries & Cream soda

7. 1 large box of Dots (Hey! Nobody told me they came in wild berry flavor!)

8. 2 rolls of Necco Wafers (You can take a tour of how these candies are made here.)

9. a good book on learning to crochet (so I can learn how to make my own headcoverings)

1. When I was young, we lived next door to a very old, distinguished-looking, library and my father used to bring home a stack of books as tall as I was each week. Books to read aloud to me. Some of my fondest memories are of sitting curled up in my father’s lap while he read all sorts of books to me.

2. My favorite flower is the lily-of-the-valley, but I am also quite fond of lilacs and hydrangeas. When I was growing up in New Hampshire, we had a large lilac bush that was heavenly. It was nearly as tall as our barn which it grew beside. Lily-of-the-valley grew wild in great patches in the shade of the woods.

3. I am in the middle of reading Northanger Abbey. I am taking an extraordinarily long time finishing this book for some reason. My daughter, Lily, has already finished it and is waiting impatiently for me to finish it, too. She doesn’t want to give anything away. I need to hurry along with it because I have already committed to reading four other books before the end of January. I have also been contacted by a book publisher to review five more books on my blog. If I thought I needed something to get me back into reading, I certainly have it now.

4. I am actually looking forward to eating fish sticks, macaroni and cheese and green beans for supper tonight.

6. When I was Clara’s age, my favorite thing to do during recess was to either finger knit or use a wooden spool with four nails in it that my grandmother made for me to knit long coils with. I also enjoyed playing with the kindergarteners on their playground. I always liked being around young children. The other girls would play soccer, but I was not much of an athlete. Interestingly enough, the girls played what was called “goal” soccer and the boys would play “base” soccer. “Goal” soccer was considered a “girls’ game”, but it is what we know of as traditional soccer today. “Base” soccer was similar to baseball except the boys used their foot instead of a bat and a soccer ball instead of a baseball.

7. When I was Lily’s age, my best friend was “going steady” with a boy for the first time. I always felt as though he disliked me and wouldn’t mind getting rid of me entirely. He probably wouldn’t have.

8. I know haiku and I am not afraid to use it.

9. When I was little, I believed that the trees made the wind by pushing the air around with their branches.

10. One of the first words I ever read was on the back of a truck parked in a church parking lot next door to my house. (Yes, we had a library to the left of us and a church to the right). I was riding my tricycle around in the parking lot with my dad. The word was “Chevrolet”. I told him, “Look! It says “chevrolet”!”. Except I said it phonetically.

11. My husband is home! I must go prepare our fish stick feast!

12. My husband wants me to tell you I have beautiful eyes. Can you tell I am running out of ideas? I must be very boring.

13. Ask me something about myself so I have some good TT fodder for next week! (Yeah, I know that wasn’t exactly enlightening, but I am running out of ideas.)

1. The pretty pies my daughter, Clara, prepared from scratch.

Psalm 46:10

This week is the American Holiday, Thanksgiving! I know that there are several BFS Classmates from all over the world but I hope that you will join in our celebration of giving thanks.
Our assignment this week is to blog about your plans for Thanksgiving Day…..share your day in any creative form. Please try to include family traditions, your menus, who carves your turkey, do you save the wishbone, the list could go on and on.

I was having a difficult time with this assignment because as a family we really don’t have any Thanksgiving traditions to speak of. For years we used to get together with several other families in our congregation that didn’t have any family nearby for Thanksgiving. We would all sign up to bring various traditional dishes and meet at the building to spend the day together. There doesn’t seem to be as great a need for it, apparently, so we no longer do that.
I tried to think about the Thanksgiving traditions from my childhood, but they felt too painful to contemplate right now. My mother is dying from Alzheimer’s and, since she was so central to our Thanksgiving traditions, it made me rather mournful to think about it all.
My mother was a very good cook and she planned far in advance. I, on the other hand, do not always enjoy my forays into the kitchen and have never really put together an entire Thanksgiving dinner on my own. This entire past week I could not think of one thing to say about how our family was going to go about celebrating Thanksgiving.
Thankfully, my beautiful girls stepped in with some wonderful ideas as to how we should celebrate the day. Clara, who has always enjoyed cooking, made a list and went to the store tonight with her father so that she could get up early tomorrow and start making pies. From scratch! She’s picked out some rather interesting ones from our Southern Living cookbook. One is an apple-cranberry pie and the other is a cherry-berry pie. Lily, who is a wonderful romantic and is rather good at thinking of how things ought to be, has come up with some new traditions for our family. She has suggested that we play very many games and watch The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe together. Lily went to see the movie at the theater and we have had the DVD forever, it seems. We were all just waiting for a nice day for all of us to watch it together. Lily’s ideas seemed most agreeable to all.
Now, my little secret. I have ordered a fully pre-cooked Thanksgiving dinner! Laugh if you must, but think of how much more time I will get to spend with my family. And for that I am very thankful.

Currently in our world today, there is still of lot of persecution. I believe that most of us, blogging here, are enjoying our freedoms, to not only believe what we choose to believe but more importanty we can do it openly and without fear that we will be made a public disply and tortured. We can write our thoughts and feelings and even quote scriptures freely. We can go to a library and choose a book to read of our choice. I am very grateful to all those who have served or are currently serving in any military to protect these freedoms.
This week’s assignment is taking a deeper look into our spiritual lives and the warfare that we are individually facing. I’d like everyone to seriously think and then blog about a situation in your life where you know that the enemy is attacking you and challenging your spiritual growth. What area in your life are you feeling burdened or challenged? The purpose of the assignment is to use this as a tool to arm ourselves better for this battle not to make you uncomfortable. If this is too personal for you, share an area in your life that you have perservered in a spirtual battle or share your feelings on freedoms in general.
ARM YOURSELVES and take time this week to thank our past battles that have created and protected our freedoms that we enjoy today. Try to visit at least one fellow Blogger Classmate and leave a comment to encourage them in this battle.