Helpful Hints for Life

I saw this the other day on someone else's blog and had to repost:

25 Ideas to Make Life Easier

Some of these I already knew (and I do them, too!), but I really liked the heart-shaped egg idea. My daughter's going to love it!

Trip to the mountains

A few weeks after Amelia's birthday, we took a trip to the mountains. The weather was perfect! An acquaintance from San Antonio has a cabin up there, and he was so generous to let us have it for a few days! It was a great time to relax and enjoy God's creation.





This was in Breckenridge, which we visited for the day. I told the kids that they had to have serious faces like in the old-timey photos, and they did great!

Amelia's birthday!

Well, after a crazy, but ultimately successful, move, I am free to sit down in front of my computer and do some catch-up blogging. Our past four months in Colorado have been busy, and so now begins a series of what we did while we were there.

September 15th was Amelia's birthday. This year, it was Princess-themed, and we all put on pretty dresses and played traditional princess games, like tiara pinata and pin the heart on the necklace :-) Here are some pictures from her party:






My parents even came up from TX that weekend to see us, and it was wonderful. Hard to believe Mia's going to start kindergarten in the fall! For some reason, the second kid's childhood seems to be going by faster than the first's...

Tic-tock goes the clock

"If the Lord Jehovah makes us wait, let us do so with our whole hearts; for blessed are all they that wait for Him. He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us: it tries faith, exercises patience, trains submission, and endears the blessing when it comes. The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people" -Charles Spurgeon

‎"Teach us, O Lord, the disciplines of patience, for to wait is often harder than to work." – Peter Marshall

I posted these a couple of days ago on my Facebook status. As most of you know, we are still waiting on our visas to go back overseas. We applied for them over 6 weeks ago and have still heard nothing on whether we've been approved or rejected. I know that our friends/contacts overseas are doing everything in their power to get us our visas, but I feel like we're just sitting around twiddling our thumbs until we get a green (or red) light.

The second quote really resonates with me; I am now officially in frustrated/ feeling stranded in limbo land mode. I think it has something to do with the fact that August is around the corner. I hate this feeling, this situation. It's hard on our family, especially our kids. But we have to just trust, trust, trust our God. And wake up every day with a renewed sense of resolve to hope because, to be honest, I'm pretty worn out by the end of the day. I don't know if we should get my son enrolled in school here (which starts August 16), or continue to wait this out until we get a definite 'yes' or 'no'. Is that a sign of my weak faith, or me being pragmatic? If we get a 'no', then what? Where do we go from here? Questions like these buzz around in my brain like angry flies, and I spend half the day shooing them away. Not because I don't want to deal with the answers, but because I know where they're coming from. They are seeds of doubt, and they are not being planted by the Father.

So for now, pray for patience and peace for our family. We want to be back overseas, doing what we have been called to do. Every person in our line of work has struggled with issues like this, so I know it's nothing new.

And You know the plans that You have for me
And You can't plan the end and not plan the means
And so I suppose I just need some peace
Just to get me to sleep.

Ballet

Each of the kids were allowed one activity for the month of June. Our son chose cooking class, and our daughter wanted to do ballet. The class was a bunch of 3-5 year old girls, so the ballet was not stellar, but it was really cute! I think my daughter is more suited to soccer than ballet (judging by her physique, she's going to be more Hope Solo and less Anna Pavlova.) Anyway, here are a couple of pictures of her recital last weekend:

San Fransisco

Shortly after I got back from OK, it was time for my trip to the City by the Bay to see my brother and sister-in-law. It started off a little rocky. I woke up on Saturday morning to find out that I HAD OVERSLEPT AND MISSED MY FLIGHT. Me. I am the most anal, organized person I know - at least, when it comes to traveling! I couldn't believe I had done something so stupid. After having a brief cry/ panic attack in front of my computer screen, I called American Airlines to see what I could do. Fortunately, they were really accommodating and rebooked my flight, no problem. However, I was flying out of SF that night to Santa Barbara to visit my husband's cousin, so I then missed THAT flight. This time, it was the United crew that helped me out adn rebooked me on the 7:45 flight. I got to Santa Barbara at about 10pm... only to find that the car rental place I had reservations with had just closed. Great. Enterprise was open though, so they got me a car, even upgraded me for free and threw in a car seat gratis. At this point, my cell phone locked up for no reason whatsoever, and I didn't know the code to unlock. Couldn't call hubby's cousin to tell them I was running late. SOOOO, I got out my GPS, typed in the address, and proceeded to drive down the 101 in the drizzly, foggy weather. Totally creepy. I made it there without incident at 11 pm, borrowed Jeannette's cell phone to see if I could get mine unlocked... and found that customer service for T-Mobile had closed about 10 minutes before. Drat. Went to bed frustrated, but safe and sound!

The next day was much nicer. We went to the beach, church, the mission, and just hung around. It was great getting to know the Wynnes!
La Purisima Mission in Lompoc, CA

Samantha and I by the beach. Couldn't go down to the shore because a bunch of endangered birds were nesting or something. Stupid birds.
Harvey and Jeannette. I loved Harvey's sense of humor and Jeannette's hospitality. They are wonderful people and I hope I get a chance to visit them again in the future!

After my visit with the... cousin-in-laws?... I made it back up to SF to visit my bro and his wife. Chris and Em are really great people, and it was so nice to see where they live, what they've been doing, and how God is working in their lives. Yes, yes, more pictures! Stop talking, Sharon!

Cute baby in San Fransisco! For some reason, this picture reminds me of Monsters Vs. Aliens when Ginormica is fighting the giant robot alien.
Great pic of the Golden Gate Bridge. Chris and I walked it. Samantha screamed the entire time. Apparently, she hates strollers. Lesson learned.
Why do I have a random Asian couple in my photos? Because look at those clothes! They're AWESOME.
My bro, my sis-in-law, and me at my Aunt Judy's house.
And here's our hostess, my Aunt Judy! She invited us to dinner and made enough to feed an army. We all left with very full (but very happy) tummies!

So, all in all, the trip was a success. Hubby said that if I had to screw up travel plans, this was the right one to mess up! And things worked out in the end. So, rough beginning, and OH! Totally rough ending. Did I mention Samantha caught pneumonia the last day of our trip, and we ended up spending four days in the hospital once we returned to San Antonio?! Yeah, that was lousy. Poor baby! She's doing great now.

Memorial Day weekend

In May my dad, the kids and I traveled up to Oklahoma to see my grandma in Stillwater, OK, and my grandpa in Tulsa. It was a nice drive up the familiar I-35 route, through Austin (which now has a toll road so we can bypass traffic - Yippee!!!), Fort Worth, and on up into Oklahoma. Here are a few pics from our trip:
David keeping his baby sister entertained. Grandma getting the camera ready.
I love this picture; it reminds me of my childhood and grandma reading us all sorts of stories. My favorite? She changed up the stories and would tell us "The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig", which we found HILARIOUS. It was my first experience with reverse fairy tales.
Kids are great at making up games in the car. This one is "Rapunzel" and they are using my Moby wrap. They took turns wearing the hair, and one would be Rapunzel and the other would be Mother Gothel. It was really cute!
Amelia promptly got out of the car and started running around in grandma's front yard. Oops!

It was good to see my grandma; she came down in 2007 when we were stateside, but that was the last time I had seen her. The trip was brief, but well worth it! It's always a pleasure to see her.

We got back Monday afternoon, and the family headed over to a friend's house for Memorial Day BBQ. The kids swam, we all ate way too much food, and a good time was had by all!

Samantha: the newest Miller

Samantha Zoe Miller was born on December 12, 2010, after a rear-end collision that sent me into early labor. She was in the NICU for eight days, but emerged healthy and happy (at least we think so)!

Baby (one month old) and daddy
Samantha at two months

She is almost three months old, and it's hard to believe. Time has flown so quickly with this one. She is smiling and cooing like most babies her age, and she absolutely LOVES her big sister. I think David's a little too intense for her, but she seems to like him most of the time.

This past weekend we celebrated her baptism. We decided to have it at our house this time, instead of church, as we wanted our neighbors to attend and we felt they would be more inclined to walk across the street than drive downtown early on a Sunday morning. Samantha was so good and didn't even cry when Bp. Frey baptized her! I credit my friend Miriam with that - she did a great job as godmother, keeping the little one entertained and even feeding her with a bottle while I got things set up.