Sunday, November 21, 2010

Picture Lover

As the holiday season is approaching, I've already started thinking about our Christmas cards.  Making our Christmas cards is always one of my FAVORITE parts of the season.  Even before we had LL, Matt and I always sent out photo cards.  To me, they just make sending and recieving a Christmas card SO much more personal.  Every year we have used Shutterfly to make our cards.  Shutterfly is a photo website that my sister told me about several years ago, and I have never looked back!  They have great prices for printing pictures, are always running great specials, and all of our products arrive very quickly!

Recently, I eve used my Pampers Gift to Grow points to get 200 FREE prints from Shutterfly!  I got caught up on all the pictures that I hadn't printed since LL's birthday!  We also used Shutterly to make photo calendars for all of LL's grandparents as a Christmas present last year.  Anyway, I've already started browsing Shutterfly's site in anticipation of this year's Christmas card.  Here are four of the cards that I'm really loving and thinking about using this year:





Well, once again Shutterfly is being pretty awesome and they're giving away FREE Christmas cards to us bloggers!  Here's a link to the information on how to get YOUR free cards and here's a link so that you can go ahead and start looking through their Christmas cards, too!

Thanks, Shutterfly!

Monday, November 8, 2010

Seminole Fans!

One random Wednesday, I got a facebook message from an old friend Rossie.  Matt and I both grew up with her in church (she is the same age as me) so we've known her for forever.  She lives in Tallahassee with her husband and she works for FSU somewhere in the Athletic Dept.  We haven't talked to her in years, but she sees Matt posting on facebook about FSU all the time.  She and her husband have season tickets to the FSU games, but weren't going to be using them on October 16, so she sent me a message to see if we wanted them.  Duh!  When I mentioned it to Matt, he was SUPER excited about it! 

I asked Matt's mom if she would be okay with watching LL, and of course she was fine with it.  We left about 9:00 in the morning, and made it there in perfect time.  They were playing Boston College, and ended up pulling out a win.  Here's some pictures from our day:

Chief Osceola and Renegade
Waiting for the game to start!

Throwing the spear.
Finally our side of the stadium was in the shade!
During half time the band did a 70's themed show and played a bunch of awesome music.  Can you tell that they're dressed in afros and stuff?
Can you see the garnet and gold guys?  They painted that junk on their bodies!  All they are wearing is shorts!


Bobby!  Matt was super excited about this statue.  The guy behind me while I was taking this asked who he was pointing to - haha.
A big thanks again to Rossie for the tickets!  We had an awesome time and it was so good to see you again after 10+ years!  :)

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Following God's Plan / Our Big News

Alot has been happening around our household lately, but I haven't wanted to post about it until it was all said and done.  I think you'll understand why.

Matt has been working at Bethany Baptist Church since February 2005.  When we started at Bethany, everything was WONDERFUL!  The entire church was loving, kind, and accepted us as family immediately.  I developed a quickly deep relationship with our youth minister's wife and Matt and I quickly fell into the church life. 

I don't want to go into much detail, but we felt like God might be calling us elsewhere in the fall of 2008.  We put out Matt's resume and just began praying for God's guidance.  We were contacted by a church in Toccoa, GA (waaaaay up north, in the mountains) and even visited it a few times to see if we thought that was where God was leading us. 

In January of 2009, our church had a pretty big split and Matt and I were pretty devastated.  Most of the people that we were really close to left.  In February 2009 Lorelai was born, and I pulled away from the church alot. We've been through alot of ups and downs since then, but felt like God was still calling Matt to stay.  We started noticing that God was shaping us and molding us, but we didn't really know what for.  Honestly, we figured it was to take us to a different church for Matt to serve in.  In August of 2009 we became friends with Zach and Emily Parker.  Zach works for Aflac and pretty much from the beginning of our friendship, Zach has told Matt that he thinks that Matt would do wonderful at selling Aflac.  We always just brushed it off and kind of laughed about it and reminded them that Matt was called to the ministry, not to sell insurance.

Very slowly, that idea started to not be quite so absurd anymore and it seemed like God was pulling us in that direction.  Eventually, we started praying really really hard about what God wanted  us to do.  Then we started praying that God would stop us if this was not the direction to go in.  He never did.

October 3, 2010 was Matt's last day as the music minister at Bethany Baptist Church.  He has been working for Aflac for the past 4 weeks, and is really starting to do well at it.  It's a big adjustment for us - going from salary to commission is a BIG change.  But we're sure that this is God's plan for our life right now, and we're just following Him.  We are VERY excited about this opportunity, and even though it can be very stressful and is definitely NEVER where we thought we'd be, we know that God has amazing and wonderful plans for our family!!

We're enjoying visiting around to churches as a family - that is a luxury that we have never had before since Matt has been employed in a church since we were engaged (I was 18!), and I'll be sure to let you know when we decide on a church home.

But, we could sure use  your prayers.  :)