A Letter to My Boy

Dear Son,

As we near Easter I am reminded of how much our heavenly Father loved His Son, and though I have no clue what you will look like or even if you've been born, I love you dearly. As I think about what I dream for you, I quickly come to the most important dream and that is for you to accept Christ as your Savior. Just thinking about the day when I get to baptize you brings tears to my eyes.

We talk about you a million times a day. People are so excited about you. Your grandparents can't wait to meet you, the people at church can't wait to meet you, our friends are so excited about meeting you, even my coworkers are constantly asking about you.

My prayer for you tonight:

Heavenly Father,
Please watch over our little boy, Reed. Keep him safe and warm. Help him to feel our loving arms around him as only you can do. God, please let us know about him soon. Father we pray that you will give us a picture to hold, a face to see as we pray, a hand to trace with our finger, and eyes that we can stare into endlessly. Give us patience as you quietly work in this delicate situation. May Reed's life be honoring to You and help us to raise him to love and respect You.
Amen

I love you little Reed, good night.

love, dad

Living Room Carpet

I know that not everybody cares about what our carpet looks like, but there are some readers who do. Here's a picture of our dining room and below are two pictures of our living room.





We had supper tonight at our friends Kyle and Shannon's and little boy Jacob. We worked on planning some of VBX and talked about how we are going to help with VBS. Shannon is our children's minister at church. Now we are watching the end of American Idol. Melinda is definitely the best, but I wonder if she will make it. It seems like most of the time they vote the best ones off, so that someone else may have a chance to win it. Plus, Melinda's a home town girl.

Too Many Clothes

I cleaned out our closet this morning while the carpet layers were downstairs working. I emptied the whole closet out and started organizing. As I did it, I came up with a great big pile of clothes that we don't wear anymore. The pile grew quite large as you can see in the picture above. I even got rid of at least 5 pairs of shoes! That's hard for me.

We will take the clothes to Dyersburg Mission where they give us an itemized list and good values for our clothes. If anyone out there is like me and detests the words "garage sale," this is the place for you! Now our guest closet is full of stuff that that needs to go to the mission.



Even after the purge of clothes, our closet is still completely full! What is the deal? Are my initials JFS? At least I hope that's what I think his initials are.



Now, I have to go vacuum the living room before Abbey gets home! The carpet looks really nice. A picture will come soon! By the way, we chose the carpet color that was "caramel."

The New Carpet is Awesome!

The new carpet is in and we are excited. It looks so much better. Tonight, Jeff, Holly and their beautiful daughters Hannah and Ashlyn came over and helped us move the living room furniture out so that the carpet layers could get to work first thing in the morning on the downstairs. The upstairs looks incredible!





Reed is going to love his new carpet, don't you think? It is so soft to walk on.







So, now that we have the carpet done, all of you need to come out and visit. You can spend the night and enjoy the new carpet for yourselves. I will post pictures tomorrow of the downstairs.

All of us here at LandLife would like to wish a very HAPPY ANNIVERSARY to our wonderful friends Frank and Sheila! They have been married for 40 years today!

I Hate Moving!

We're getting the new carpet tomorrow upstairs, and so we had to do a little rearranging this afternoon after church. After we got everything done, Abbey was pooped.





You might have been wondering where we put all of the stuff! Well, we put everything in our bathrooms. Currently, we left our shower and my vanity uncovered so that we can get ready tomorrow. The other bathroom is completely full! We took our "humongous" new bed down and moved our old mattress to the floor of our bedroom, where we will be sleeping tonight.





Just in case you were wondering whether we really got the rooms emptied out, I decided to put some pictures out of the empty rooms. They are now empty and ready for the carpet guy. I hope that he will be here first thing in the morning. I am taking the day off to make sure that I can be here for things to get done. Once he gets the upstairs bedrooms done, he will do the stairs and then downstairs.

A Gristy Weekend

We went to the Gristy's this weekend and got to spend some time with our very good friends. It was a lot of fun to get to be around them for a while.



Abbie enjoyed sitting in the dark this morning. It really wasn't all that dark, but for some reason this picture is really dark. Last night we had a very enjoyable evening. We went to a new eatery and had 5 "tapas." Then we looked around at the art gallery's in the rest of the renovated hotel. We purchased a new painting (pictures will come later) and a pottery cross.



Wes is always playing the guitar whenever he gets bored. This morning while he was waiting on Abbey to get ready he decided to pick a few tunes. After we left the restaurant last night, we went to another restaurant for desserts. We had the dessert platter which included Tiramisu, Chocolate Decadence, Apple Prailine Pie, and Chocolate Cheesecake. It was wonderful!



We headed to breakfast once everyone was ready.



We headed to Do Dah's Donuts. Notice the open sign. Although it was 10:00 AM and they were open, they did not have any donuts left! Apparently this is not out of the ordinary for this place. You would think that they would figure it out.



This is us leaving Do Dah's.



So, when you can't eat Donuts for breakfast where do you go? Chick-fil-a, of course.



The Abbey/ie's preparing to eat breakfast.



This is the place where Wes works. It's a church! His office is in the farmhouse, where all the other staff is located. It is a really neat place for an office. The building behind is the "barn" where they have a meeting area, several classrooms, and a breakroom. It is really neat.




This is going to be their classrooms and temporary sanctuary. They have been meeting in a local school for quite some time. It is very exciting. The church is going to really enjoy their new facilities and Wes and Abbie really love the church. That is wonderful.



Who would have thought that the Gristy's would love their dogs as much as they do? It's amazing!

Last Night

Sorry about the lack of blog last night. Abbey and I went to eat supper with our friends Jeff and Holly and the Sprinkles. We went to Cheddar's, where at times, we wondered if we were ever going to get our food. I must say, however, that the appetizers were wonderful. We had Spinach Dip and the Wright's ordered Onion Rings. They were really good.

Today, Abbey and I are going to Jackson, TN to see our friends Wes and Abbie from Texas. We're excited to go and spend the night with them. It will be fun.

I forgot to put this picture on the blog with the Walty posts. This is the view that made Walt so sad, the balloon going far, far away. Walt was not consoled when we told him the balloon was going to Taiwan to see Reed. Hmmm. Go figure.



Some have asked, "Did we get Walt another balloon?" Yes, we did, but he didn't like it! Finally after several minutes he warmed up to his new friend, Red Balloon II.

How to Lose a Balloon in 10 Seconds

"Don't want to!"

"You're going to lose it Walt, if you don't let me tie it on your wrist."

"Don't want to!"

"Fine!"

And now ... the rest of the story.





"Ha ha! Putty! I am still holding on to it. See I haven't lost it."





"Look, I can trick the balloon. I can turn and it doesn't know where I go!"





"Whew! I'm glad I caught it! That's all need is for Putty to say, 'Told you so!' "





"Putty, I just let go for 1 second! Why's it going far, far away!"





"My life is over! Nothing will ever be the same! My red balloon! It was my favorite! Nothing will make it better!"

And that my friends ... is the rest of the story!

Our Time with Walt

I'm trying something new tonight with this blog thing. I have been trying to upload pictures of Walt for 2 days now, and it is still not working, so I have resorted to going back to picasa and direct linking them. Hopefully this will work!


When you ask Walt to smile for the camera, this is what we got! I was pretty sure that judging from the pictures on Walt's World that he knew how to "cheese."



Walt loved to dump his blocks out on the floor. Then I told him to put the bucket on his head. Keeping with his OCDness, from then on, he would dump the blocks and then put the bucket on his head.



"Here he comes to save the day! SUPER WALT!"



This is Walt "helping" Abbey put the blocks up before we went to supper. Supper at Backyard Burger is a different post altogether!



What in the world is going on is his mind? That is a really odd look, Walt! I think it is "I'm just trying to be cool. I can't make the girls think I am just all fun and games."



With a smile like that, no wonder Putty got him a really loud truck for him to play with!

Dinner at Home (3 Posts in one day!)

Abbey cooked a delicious dinner this evening. She made porkchops with green beans, corn, and cornbread. It was a wonderful meal.

I think Abbey had a lot of fun during the impromptu photo shoot. She did ask me to provide a disclaimer that because it is Spring Break, she did not do her hair or makeup today. I think she's beautiful no matter what, especially when she is smiling.

It was so beautiful today, we ate outside on our deck. I love our backyard. I was just telling Abbey how much I love our neighborhood and that was even moreso after we went walking once we got the dishes done. It was fun. When we got home, we saw a neighbor who has just gotten her new baby girl from Korea. She is so pretty. She is a very happy baby.

What do you think she was thinking in this picture?


I think we look best in natural light, what do you think?