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A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost. ~Marion C. Garretty
I’m so late in the day getting this post up, but I have to show some love to my little sister today as it is her BIRTHDAY. Happy twenty-eight years to you little Laura K. “Cricket” Womble. I am so grateful to have you in my life and I can’t wait to celebrate with you this weekend!
From our most recent visit together here in Nashville…
I may be the ONLY ONE, but I LOVE how much snow Nashville has gotten this winter and we are expected to get a few more inches this afternoon. Bring it on!
Since much of the snowfall we’ve gotten this year has happened during the work week, I’ve not been able to play in it as much as I’d like. But I hope to change that tonight. Zach and I made a trip over to the local Ace Hardware on our lunch break and purchased his and hers sleds.
I should know better than to try this whole sledding business again, based on past snow injuries. But never fear, any hill I attempt tonight will be a bunny slope compared to the downtown Nashville capital hill.
For now, I’m going to try and focus on some afternoon work while I wait anxiously for the big 2-3 inches we’ll hopefully get this afternoon.
Sincerely,
Hopeful Snow Bunny
Hello friends! Happy New Year to you all!
I know I’m not alone in making New Year’s resolutions, and mine aren’t even that original. Lose 10 pounds, work out more, eat better, save money, pay off debt, cook at home more, and and eat out less. And along with many of my fellow bloggers who have failed in keeping the blog site up-to-date, I’m also hoping to post much more often. My goal is to share easy and healthy recipes that I discover in my quest to eat better along with a few new craft ideas mixed in too.
With my darling new apron in tow,
I bring you my first easy, healthy recipe tip of the New Year. I found this while flipping through a copy of Shape magazine at the gym and now that I’ve tested it out myself, I can promise you it’s a must try. And, best of all, it couldn’t be simpler to make.
The main ingredient is this wonderful organic, cubed squash that can be found in the frozen food section of Whole Foods.
Follow the cooking instructions on the bag and you’ll have delicious squash ready to eat in under 5 minutes. The squash mashes up nicely and looks more like sweet potatoes than what you would traditionally expect squash to look like. The best suggestion from Shape was to add a spoonful of apple butter on top of the squash. A fantastic, nutritious, super simple side dish is the result…enjoy!
It’s hard for me to believe, but I am officially no longer a 20 year old. I am 30. Knowing this day was coming, I’ve spent many hours mulling over what it is I want to accomplish in this next decade, feeling the pressure to write a long list of goals and desires for where I want to go and who I want to be. But my mind keeps taking me back over the last ten years, who I’ve been and the life journeys I’ve taken and I land at a point of gratefulness and contentment. Thankful for the good times as well as the heartache and resolved that if the next ten years are nearly as full as the last have been, I will be enormously blessed.
In that vein, I ask God for his blessing on the years to come. That he would continue to use my life for his pruposes, that he would continue to show himself to me in the big and small wonders of daily life, and that he would continue to teach me and mature me into the woman he wants me to be. I can’t wait to see what’s in store.
In just 34 short days, I will be here…
That would be Little Dix Bay, in the BVI. Right about…here…
Ahhh…I feel more relaxed just posting this!! So grateful and excited to be making this trip!
For starting out today with very little planned, I think I ended up having a great first day of the Memorial Day weekend. Thanks to Crystal Watson, I got to kick it off with a perfect pancake breakfast…I just don’t think it gets better than Saturday morning brunch with friends. I also got to check a few things off my “to do” list. Not my clean the bathroom, do the laundry to do list, but the “fun things I plan to get to when I have time to do list.” The first being, I got a few summer herbs planted.
I’ve been planning to get some herbs planted for weeks now and every time I’m at the store and pay $3-4 for some fresh basil or thyme I remember that I want to get this done. Today, I got started with some sweet basil, french thyme, and dill. In addition to being herbs I seem to use often, dill and basil are supposed to freeze and dry well, which is why I picked those two. The dill was the most difficult, I actually never found a dill plant but was doing good by my third nursery to find some dill seed, so hopefully that’ll work just a well, it’ll just take a little more patience to get the finished product. I learned a few fun facts about basil that, being the novice herb grower that I am, I didn’t already know…
This was the beautiful basil selection at one of the local Green Hills nurseries:
First, basil is an annual, so it will only bloom for one life cycle and then it’s gone. You can lengthen it’s life by trimming any blooms as soon as they show up. Second, the suggestion of the nursery owner was to plant basil seed alongside my basil plants so that about the time the plant dies, the seed will be grown and ready to go. Pretty smart!
My herb “garden” is the definition of starting small, but at least it’s a start…
With the herbs planted, the roommates and I headed over to check out the Nashville Food Bloggers Bake Sale for Flood Relief, the adorable poster alone was enough to get me to come:
Upon arriving, we found an array of delectable goodies and everything was priced at $2, it was too good to be true!
Chocolate and banana cupcakes:
Vanilla almond blackberry goodies dressed in pink:
Everything was baked and donated by local Nashville food bloggers and all proceeds whet to Second Harvest of Middle Tennessee. So smart and delicious, for the full story, click here.
To top it off, I finally got to see Iron Man 2 tonight, and if it’s possible, I’m pretty sure it was even better than the first. The perfect summer blockbuster.
Now for some sweet sleep…I can’t wait to see what tomorrow holds.
I love summer, especially in Nashville, with the one exception being that we’re at least 6 hours from an ocean. Ignoring that glaring omission, summer in Nashville is always so fun. There is something musical, outdorsy, or artsy to do almost any night of the week.
One of the first signs that summer has arrived in Nashville? Outdoor movies. Friends will host movies on big screens in their back yards, starting June 2 The Nashville Scene will kick of Movies in the Park with a showing of Where the Wild Things Are, and tonight, a group near and dear to my heart, Front Porch Ministry, kicked off their Friday night Movie Night. Despite rain, mud, and sever weather threats, the movie night went on anyway and I’m so glad it did.
There was plenty of popcorn…
and frozen ice to go around.
If you’d like to spend a Friday night with a fun group of kids watching a great movie on an outdoor screen, this group will be getting together every Friday evening at 7, now through August.
A few weeks ago (5/2/10 to be exact), Nashville was hit with some historical flooding. Houses were devastated, cars were ruined, lives were lost, and most people in our city were affected in one way or another – either you experienced some amount of flooding yourself or your knew someone who did. It was everywhere we looked – TV coverage, radio fundraisers, facebook, twitter…everywhere Nashville looked, all we could see was flood damage for many days.
Now that a couple weeks have past, the story that has left the biggest mark on me hasn’t been the flood damage itself, but the way I’ve seen people give of themselves, over and above what they had to. I have witnessed this community act, and act fast, for the good of their neighbors. The desire to give financially, physically, and emotionally has been nothing short of remarkable. Even people I know who suffered a great deal themselves have put their needs aside to assist those who were worse off. Churches have stepped up in astounding ways, the local music community has jumped into action to organize fundraisers, artists have created posters and t-shirts in record time, people gave up bathing and shaving for days at a time to conserve water, and businesses have encouraged employees to take time off work to go out and serve. Just now I heard about how comedian Jerry Sienfiend gave all the proceeds from his Nashville show last week to flood relief – incredible, and not the first story of someone not from our community giving in ways they didn’t have to. Again, the immediate and heartfelt respose is like nothing I’ve ever seen. I am amazed and blessed by people’s hearts to serve and encouraged by the willing generosity. While I never fully understand why God brings devestation into our lives, I do know that he uses these times of suffering to show us how little stuff we need and how much we need each other.
A talented friend noticed and captured this spirit of generosity in the video below…it does a great job of showing off many people who felt they had no other option but to sacrifice their time and energy for their neighbors in need. It’s a beautiful thing to watch! (Props to Ben James for an awesome video).
If you are in the Nashville community and are looking for groups to serve with, I would suggest the following:
- http://www.crosspoint.tv/
- http://www.hon.org/
- http://www.fellowshipnashville.org/flood-response/opportunities/
If you live outside the Nashville community and want to help in someway, I would suggest the following:
While I don’t think it even needs to be said, I would encourage you to keep serving Nashville, keep giving back to your community and caring for your neighbor. We are a shining light for the world to see what it looks like when you care for others before yourself. It’s a beautiful sight indeed!
“The big thing is to love reality. Not live in the imagination, not in what could’ve been or what should’ve been or what can be.” – J.Vanier
I don’t know about you, but I often have my clearest, most inspired thoughts in the middle of the night. The perspective I get may be about any number of things concerning life, but most recently, it was a sense of urgency to fully embrace my life story…right now, as it is, not as it will be, or should be, but to be fully present in the now.
It is incredible how often I lose sight of how incredible life is, every part of it. The hard, the fun, the challenges, the small victories, the people, the moments…they can all be so beautiful and enjoyable if you’re only paying attention.
Now even as I write all these thoughts out, I know of a good friend who is in the midst of a very difficult family situation, something that is completely out of her control but that she must walk through. I’ve also recently been assigned the task of reading through hundreds of women’s stories and many of them are absolutely heartbreaking. Even in my own life I’ve walked through some very difficult seasons that made it challenging to embrace joy and the full depth of God’s grace and goodness. So I don’t want to pretend that everyone can just turn off the pain they are dealing with, think on the bright side, and everything will be rosy, that’s just not how life works. In Ecclesiastes 3 we read the following:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance…
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
I don’t want to ever make light of the pain and sorrow that life can inflict. There are most certainly times in life where you need time to just be numb. As Ecclesiastes says, a time to weep and a time to mourn. But I think what I’m learning can apply even in these times. Once you’ve allowed yourself to be numb as long as you need, then look to your friends, to people you trust to carry you. And when you’re ready, start to fully embrace the here and now again and grow through the pain.
My new worst fear is to get to the end of a day, month, or worse year and look back and not really know what happened with the time. I pray that I can be fully present in each moment, fully embracing the joy and sorrow of life that I’m in the midst of right now. Not waiting for life to start after I’ve paid off all my bills, bought my first house and ‘established’ myself. Rather, wrapping my arms around where God has me now and living each day intentionally and with purpose. It’s a challenge to say the least and something that I will likely struggle with on a daily basis for some time, but something that I pray will come more naturally over time.
Two weekends ago I took a rather dramatic spill while sledding and while I’m a little late in blogging about the experience, I’ve had enough questions about what happened that I thought I should post the details for the world to see.
Two Fridays ago, Nashville got a thorough covering of the cold, fluffy, white stuff. It was the most respectable snow fall we’d seen in years and after about 12 hours being cooped up inside while it all came down, Nashvillians flocked out in droves to play.
This was our front yard after a day of snowfall:
All day Saturday, I kept hearing about the great hill at the State Capitol that everyone was enjoying. So, when I got the call from my roommates on Sunday afternoon that they were playing at the hill, I couldn’t resist…I headed straight over. People were “sledding” down the hill on all sorts of homeade rafts…ironing boards, trash can lids, deflated water floats…anything that could carry them down the hill at a high rate of speed. Here’s the hill…
My roommates had a big blue inter-tube that was made of really slick plastic…perfect. Since the snow had now been sitting on the ground for a good 24 hours and since this particular hill had been put to such good sledding use by the time I arrived on Sunday afternoon, it was like a hill of solid ice and we flew down with no problem. It was awesome and breathtaking. Here I am catching my breath and trying to find my stomach again after my first trip down…
One minor problem with our hill, that I failed to notice, was that enough of the snow had melted so that the curb of the street at the bottom of the hill was now visible. It was only my second trip down the hill before I was abruptly made aware of the problem. I hit the curb at full speed and flew a good 6 feet into the air. All I could think about was my back…hoping and praying that I hadn’t done permanent damage. All the same, I kept noticing that my teeth felt weird, I couldn’t place what was different, they just felt wrong. It wasn’t till I made it to the car and checked out the mirror that I discovered the problem, I had chipped TWO TEETH! I laughed, at first, at the craziness of the whole situation. People had been sledding down this hill for two days with no trouble and I take two trips down and get injured. Then it sank it that these were MY TEETH…my front teeth at that, I started to panic. Would a dentist be able to patch me back together so that I would look good as new? And almost more frightening a thought…how much was this going to cost me?
Thankfully, God took good care of me. I got some excellent dental advice as to what I should do and my own dentist did a superb job fixing me up…in fact, you can’t even tell it ever happened. Best of all, insurance covered most of it. I still owe the chiropractor a visit to check out my back. Between this spill and another fall I took last summer, my back could use some attention. Fortunately, my good friend Missy Zahn is just as accident prone as I am, if not more, and she already has a good chiropractor in mind for me.
Here’s our group of sledders…
And to speak to the title of this post, the quote come from a darling coffee mug that my sister gave me that I drink out of almost daily. When considering whether or not to post this story, I noticed the quote again and laughed, it was a fitting enough blog title for this post that it fixed my decision that I had to tell this story.
