God knows my favorite color

Our kitchen truly is the center of our home.  It is where we cook and eat, homeschool and make crafts.  The walls are lined with little fingerprints, spills and crayon art.

I have been wanting to paint for the last year and a half that we have lived here but it was never within our budget.  Every time I tried to save up for it, something else always came up.

It was hard to be patient and I tried to be content, but this is where I spend most of my day, every day and the stained walls were really getting to me.

A few weeks ago I was going through the stack of paint samples that I had been collecting.  I finally decided on one, "Sanctuary" by Behr, and stuck it on my fridge.  I was determined to save up for it this time, even if only with my change jar.

One morning over coffee, my sister-in-law's eyes began to sparkle, "Do you want to paint your kitchen?"  She ran up to her attic, pulled out the cans of leftover paint she had and marched over to my house. (She recently moved in next door!)

The next thing I know, she is brushing dark green color on my kitchen wall.

Her home is beautiful with rich, warm colors, but I know they are too dark for my husband's taste.  I really liked it but she suggested that we add a little white to it.  She poured her whole gallon of green paint into a bucket of white and when she stirred it, it became this beautiful and soft green; the color of rosemary.

I grabbed the paint chip off of my fridge and held it up to where she had brushed it on the wall.  It was a perfect match!  We could not have made it any closer if we had tried.

I started to cry.  Here were 3 gallons of paint, in my favorite color, just handed to me.

God gave me "Sanctuary" just to make me smile.

I hope you had a very blessed Mother's day!

Our NICU story

I didn't fully grasp the depth of a mother's love until I stood over my sick child in his hospital bed.

Our firstborn was a perfectly healthy 7 lb, 6 oz baby boy.  We brought him home from the hospital two days later.  The next morning we received a phone call from our pediatrician.  His blood test had come back abnormal, and we were told to rush him to Children's Hospital.

My head was spinning.  I just couldn't understand.  He looked fine, but over the next 12 hours as we sat in the ER, he became lethargic and refused to eat.  He was admitted to the hospital for observation and IV fluids.

During the night his monitors started beeping frantically and nurses rushed into our room.  They swept him away, leaving my husband and I alone and completely in shock.

We had so many questions and no one had answers.

I locked myself in the bathroom and just sobbed.  Was our baby gone forever?  I felt completely helpless.

We prayed through the night, but our words felt so empty.  I watched the sun rise and hoped that it had all been a bad dream.

We were brought in to see him.  His tiny frame covered in tubes and wires.  His body was shutting down.  His heart rate had dropped and he had moments when he stopped breathing.

He was then admitted to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

The NICU is a scary place.  It is the reality of life and death on the most innocent little ones.  It is a place where nothing seems fair.  But it is also a place of miracles.  A place you can be so thankful for and yet never want to see ever again.

Our baby boy was healed.  He is now 8 years old and stands nearly as tall as me. 

I don't know why the NICU was part of his story, our story, but he is a walking miracle.  My heart goes out to all the mamas that are there and that is why I am so excited to share a new project with you. 

NICU Daze written by my friend Elizabeth Norton and Megan Crume is a 30 day devotional for NICU families.  It is written by two mothers who have been there and want to share their story in order to breathe a little peace and hope into the most hopeless of moments.

It also features my artwork on the cover!  It is a drawing that I made during my first pregnancy and then had it sitting by our baby's bed in the NICU.  

It is currently available for Kindle only and debuts on Mother's day.  All proceeds made on Sunday, May 13th, 2012 will go to the Ronald McDonald house; a home away from home for many NICU families.

Sunshine in my kitchen

I love beautiful things.  I am guilty of ripping pictures out of magazines and cutting up junk mail advertisements, just for the beauty I see in it.  I save greeting cards and scraps of pretty wrapping paper to use in other projects. 

I love to make cards for friends and I've even used these pictures to make a pretty cover for my Bible and journals. 

Here is my latest project:

I have been saving this picture of a sunflower for something special...and then I saw my ugly knife butcher block and decided it needed a makeover. 

I grabbed my bottle of ModPodge and set to work.  I applied a thin coat to the block, smoothed out the picture and then added another coat to seal.  Once that was dry, I added a few more coats to protect the image.  Super simple...but it added a little sunshine to my kitchen!