36 YEARS…MARRIED TO THE SAME GUY!!!

Happy Anniversary to me!! Yesterday was 36 years and counting……wow….I can think back to our wedding day, and I remember some good friends of our family, passing thru the reception line and saying, “25 years and we are still happy, don’t let anyone tell you it has to be any different” and then after they walked away and we said all the wow polite things, I looked at Keith and said, “Man, they are OLD!!” – And here we are married 36 years…….and well, uh, yah, getting OLD. Keith surprised me last night – I didn’t know he would be making it home at all and when I got home there were flowers on the table and flowers on the counter, and a candlelight dinner on the table. SWEET. Life is good, but I will just say here that life is not easy. Marriage is good, but marriage is not easy. Raising children is good, but raising children is not easy. Watching your adult kids live adult lives is good, but it is not easy. Three of our four kids have been battered with trials this last month, and the fourth had her share a little earlier in the year. Life is hard. No two ways about it. We have watched one of our kids struggle with tough, grueling health problems. The other two have struggled with serious issues of waiting on God for some needed things to happen…….and some wanted things to happen. I think it’s harder to
watch your kids struggle then it is to just go thru stuff yourself. Every day I remind myself that Jesus holds each one of them, and loves each one of them more then I do. I will tell you one thing…without knowing Jesus, I don’t think we would be here talking about 36 years together. One of the sweetest friends I have met since moving to Ohio is struggling with brain cancer. I think she is one of the sweetest people on earth. Hard hard stuff to understand. There are so many things like that that touch all of our lives…..how do you get THRU this life without God? I just don’t know. Okay- about these cards – the top one is made with the Big Shot- so much fun. I bought a dress for a baby that’s not born yet – my hairdressers baby, well actually by now she probably has been born – but I bought her a dress and sweater that I fashioned the card after – that was fun. All punches and big shot dies. The second one – with the Autumn leaves is made by stamping the leaves with versamark on designer paper and embossing with clear powder and then brayering over the top with a dark color, (chocolate chip) over and over until the design barely shows thru but is highlighted by the emboss resist. This was a fun one. I saw the technique while blog hopping one day done with other stamps – and I am sad to say I have no idea whose blog I was visiting……anyway – that is a fun technique. The blogger called it Faux Joseph’s Coat – so cool!! Then, this next one is my beloved Black Magic with a White Twist again, I can only go so long without creating a Black Magic card and then I get withdrawal. This one is done in Black Magic and then I clear embossed over the top – The background on this card is created by taking the same stamp and just stamping it over and over very close together – my favorite way to add texture to a background. This is from the new set called Charmed in SU’s spring mini catalog. If you should want to order it, you can go to my website linked on this blog and online order it from me – I will LOVE you for it – and you will LOVE me for it!! What an awesome set!! If you do order this set and let me know, I will send you several more samples via email made with it!! All these ovals come from the SU punches and Big Shot Dies. I am sort of crazy for ovals…..I will buy every oval they ever come out with. What’s up with that?? At the end of this month, I have my ladies from eastern Ohio coming to stamp away the whole weekend, like last year only this year we extended it from an overnight to a weekend – we had so much fun last year but it just went by tooo tooo quickly!! So this year we will stretch it out a bit. Well, I hope this post hasn’t been too depressing. Life is hard, but life is good. And if we remember that as Christians, we are just a passin thru…….then it makes the trip easier. Some day HE will come back, and take us to be with HIM. There will be no more tears,
no more pain, just everlasting JOY in HIS presence and we will understand then what these trials are all about. COUNT IT ALL JOY. That’s a tough thing to do, but these bodies are wasting away but inside we are becoming what HE wants us to be!! Ending here with my Happy Halloween card…..I have this one on my desk at work…..I have a card dancing in my head right now but it’s bedtime….and I am going to listen to the little voice in my head that is saying, “Go to bed you moron….you will not be able to get up tomorrow otherwise” – and that card will have to keep on dancin……and then tomorrow night I will let it out. I love stamping……don’t you??? Remember God see’s the whole picture, and we don’t and someday, someday, SOMEDAY, we will understand. I wish you all a wonderful fall…….remember God LOVES you!!