May

8

Moving Right Along.

Filed Under Recap | 16 Comments

I suppose this blog is in dire need of an update.  In a minute you will understand why it has tip-toed its way to the back burner of my priorities.

First off.  We’ve had a couple cases of strep and split open heads.  Then our house sold after one showing (miracle in this market)!  At the time I was on a last minute trip to MO visitin Jeff’s sister.  Immediately we had some pretty big decisions to make.

Our plan putting the house on the market was to downsize locally.  But in the course of a couple of weeks we realized for business reasons it was important to prayerfully consider Nashville where we used to live.  It became clear in a matter of days that our move was to be much greater than a few miles.

We decided to meet up in Nashville at the end of my stay in MO and check out the housing market, pray that God would shut or open doors, etc.  Door after door was opened and we found a house.

My last couple weeks (and next couple) have consisted of organizing, packing, planning, etc.  WHICH is not easy with a 2 year old, an almost 4 year old, and baby at 32 weeks gestation.  Sigh.

Owen turns four this weekend in the midst of everything else.  I can not believe how big he is getting and how time is flying.  FOUR!  no longer a baby.

Anyway, this was very much a little summary of all that has been going on.  Prayers would be appreciated.  It is so obvious that God’s hand is in this all that I feel I can not complain about all the work.  I know we’ll get there.  I thankfully already have a doctor in TN (where I had Owen) and can jump right in with her.  Things are and will continue to be taken care of!  Amen :)

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Mar

22

OH MY GOSH! WHERE HAVE I…

Filed Under Recap | 9 Comments

BEEN?

Seriously. I can’t find it in me to blog. Even on my review site. I’m also not taking any new design work at the moment. What happened?

Life.

Seems with being a SAHM (stay at home mom) that dabbles in WAHM (work at home mom) status means life takes priority and sometimes kick the WAHM out.

I have had a resurgence (for a week, hopefully we are done now) of pregnancy sickness. Throwing up all the precious food that was to provide me with energy rendered me a bump on the couch and not much more.

In other news we have been getting our house ready to sell (or attempting to). WHAT? Yeah it’s true. I think I have a bizarre nesting instinct to move while pregnant or right after I have had a baby. We absolutely love our house… but the size is overwhelming to me at times and we both really like the idea of downsizing right now. Yes, we are up-sizing our family and want to downsize our house. But truthfully, I never had a house this big growing up and I did just fine! We figure once we get it on the market it is in God’s hands. If he wants us to stay we won’t sell it. If he thinks downsizing is a good idea we will.

We also found a smaller house we really love, but that too is not in our hands as we are not going to buy another house unless we sell this one. Who knows what the future has in store? But I do know selling is a lot of work. Lots of cleaning and scattering out of the house for showings. Am I crazy? Maybe? Yeah, probably.

With these things, blogging just is not even on the radar. But I do hope to post some reviews next week as I have been developing a stack of things to try out and let the world know what I think of them. Until next time….

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Jan

3

Looking Back Over 2007.

Filed Under Featured, Recap | 2 Comments

I tried my best to find some form of “resolutions” from 2007 to evaluate how I did, but then I remembered I’m super funny about those things called resolutions. I’m jaded because no one keeps theirs! Including me. So mine were more of a paragraph form and harder to separate. Still I’m going to see how I did.

From a post written on January 5th, 2007.

I’m really looking forward to 2007. I look forward to really feeling myself… without being pregnant or having a to be a food source. I look forward to enjoying the boys as they grow and having dates with

Read more

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Sep

20

Low Content Blogger

Filed Under Recap, Uncategorized | 5 Comments

WOW! I have really been low on the content posts haven’t I!? Trust me, it is not that I haven’t been thinking of you. It has been a result of this notepad sitting next to me crying out for my availible moment to work through it’s content, complete and scratch off. Even as I do so the contents of “the list” seem to grow!

So many things happen during the day that I say, “OH gosh, I gotta post that!” But the thought escapes me and I never make it to the Mommy Zabs Write Post page.

On top of my load. I have had major fatigue lately. One night I went to bed at 9pm and woke up at 8am. I continued to be exhausted until about 5pm that night?! I think I need to go get my blood tested. this is just so far beyond normal.

Because of all that I have basically not been doing a whole lot more than what is required of me.

What’s high on my internet todo list right now? (a glimpse into my life)

  • Making sure a header is completed for Girly Blog Designs.
  • Getting a Bio written for 3 different sites- I have bio block ;) I find it hard to write about myself that way.
  • Help finish a contract for Wordpress Reworked.
  • Redesigns for:
    • Kristy
    • Leta
    • My Dad
    • Not China Made.Net (just adding 3rd column)
    • and yes Mommy Zabs (minor adjustment don’t worry)
  • Complete my husband’s website for his work
  • New Biz in the work (not posted in my links) Need to get it designed and up and running.
  • Gazelle Creative needs to get up… but not high on priority right now. I have a feeling this will not happen until the new year!
  • Of course there are more and this doesn’t even include the bare bones of posting.

I’ll be back, I promise. I just need to log in some good getting a babysitter time to catch up ;)

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May

14

Longer Summer Days Mean Less Time

Filed Under Blogging, Children, Entertainment, Family, Motherhood, Photos, Recap, Weather | 6 Comments

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There seems to be a corresponding relationship with the beautiful time of year arriving and a decrease in my blogging. After 2.5 years and counting in the blogosphere I also notice this happens during the holidays. I suppose it all makes sense. But I have been so good about posting everyday, and almost always 2 times a day! This may have to go down for awhile. After-all, as much as I love you all, and love this hobby… Chasing my children outdoors becomes the priority. The pool isn’t even open yet, and when It does I know I will spend a lot of time there as well.

Today was absolutely lovely. 76 degrees, low humidity, Ahhhhh. The kids actually slept in (but they have been going to bed so late!) I loved my morning coffee and spending time in the Bible. I put up the bouncer for the boys because Owen was begging for it. They played outside together so well that I was able to work on one of my back garden beds! We grabbed lunch on the go and headed to a local greenhouse. They behaved perfectly for a whole hour while I browsed trees, shrubs, and perrinials. They went down for naps and I planted 4 plants and bounced some landscape ideas off of my neighbor. In all my gardening today I only saw 2 worms… and there were no other bugs to be found. After that I woke up the boys, picked up a cousin, and headed to the gym for a spin class. Then I took a NICE LONG SHOWER there, blow dried my hair (a luxury for mommy,) and then headed out for dinner. The boys were moderately well behaved for not having dinner until 7:30. It’s 10:20 pm and just finished bathing the boys, putting them to bed, putting dishes away… and I’m finally at my computer. I’m exhausted and waiting for Jeff to get back up here so we can watch 24.

For mothers’ day the boys got me a mani/pedi:) . Jeff scheduled it for tomorrow… so I will be thoroughly enjoying that! Things are pretty amazing right now. Exhausting, but good exhausting.

I have so many things I want time enough to write about… but as my list grows my time shrinks! So hopefully I will get a chunk of time to do that and schedule them to future post!

Oh yeah, I also got a farmer tan yesterday and today, so it looks like I’m going to have to fix that before the wedding I am in this weekend! OOPS!

I’m off for now.

Goodnight blog world.

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May

12

Update & a Blogging Time-saver!

Filed Under Blogging, Family, Recap | 9 Comments

I’m back from yet another Friday off. I actually took a nap during the kids’ naptime. My day off provided me with nice rest, a much needed break. This weekend we have a wedding (that owen is in!) and the same for next weekend (a wedding I am in). This means my RSS feeder will probably be incredibly full with unread posts. I’m a little bit Type-A to say the least and seem to have a weird issues with large numbers in my parentheses! (that would be the number of the unread posts, for those unfamiliar with it.) I will just have to push past that though :)

I feel like I have read a lot lately from different friends on how time on the internet is getting to overwhelming. Several of you have newly discovered the blessing of RSS feed reading to save time! I am going to share with you another time-saver for those who post blogs! I learnerd it from Pro-Blogger who Brit & Grit tipped me to. BUT it was just this weekend that I realized Wordpress actually has a complete function for this!

Its called ‘Future Post’. It gives you the ability to write posts ahead of time and pick a time and date for it to automatically post! You may wonder why this matters if you don’t care about your traffic. Let me tell you why.

Let’s say you get 2 hours to post about once a week but you have so much you want to say, topics on your heart you want to engage discussion in. If you just go ahead and post 5 different posts in one shot you may find people only read the top one or two. The readers’ time is precious too. I know as a frequent reader that when there are too many posts on one blog to read I often don’t get through all of them. With this feature you could write all 5 but publish them on different days. That way if you write a post that is important to you it is more likely it will be read!

I was doing this before today by simply writing posts, saving them as draft, and then manually hitting PUBLISH when I wanted to post them. I sent feedback to wordpress on Thursday saying it would be great to have a way to actually schedule posts. They wrote me back saying they already have it!

If this is something that interests you, and Wordpress is your host, CLICK HERE If you use another format for your blog you may want to write their support and ask if they have the same function. So from now on you MAY see me posting on Friday, but don’t be decieved, I’m not on the internet- Its the ghost of wordpress.

I’m off to spend time with the family on this gorgeous day. Sometime this weekend I will probably post pictures of Owen in a tux and jumping in his new bouncer!

OH WAIT one more thing- I moved my blogroll to a seperate page! So if you are looking to browse blogs go above to the tab that says “BlogRollCall”. I actually may have lost one or two in the process which I’m sure I will be adding back in when I have time. Also, if you feel I have catagorized your blog incorrectly, please drop me a line or comment and I will change it.

Have a beautiful weekend!

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Apr

23

A Horizontal Weekend, Trip outside, And an Amazing Husband

Filed Under Back pain, Entertainment, Family, Motherhood, Photos, Recap, Weather | 3 Comments

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My amazing husband has left for Nashville a few days. A required trip that couldn’t be changed. He wouldn’t let me do much at all while he was here because he knew how much I would have to do with a bad back while he was gone. He did the Laundry, EVEN FOLDED IT!, he did dishes, he cleaned, changed dirty diapers, watched the kids, etc. All in an effort to keep me horizontal and healing. What a sweet guy. But now I’m having to stick it out on my own and so far so good. :) Pain, but totally manageable. I did get outside in the beautiful Spring weather a couple times this weekend. I paid for it with pain, but it was well worth breathing in the air that I have been waiting for! Bye Winter, won’t miss you! Now if only all my bulbs and blooms would recover.

I thought I would share with you some funny, cute (on Lukas’s part!) yet somewhat unflattering (my part) pictures of how I have been able to be active on the computer and spend time with the kids while keeping horizonal. :) I thought of going into photoshop and touching these up…. but I’ll give you the raw deal. PS. when I am tan-less yellow really is not my color! :)
Lukie sitting with me while I upload photos.
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Lukie getting much needed cuddles.
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My supportive familiy (minus Owen who was napping) joining me on the floor :)
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And on brighter notes, pictures from my trip outside for lunch:)
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Apr

20

Week News Cap (for my friends who don’t watch the news)

Filed Under Abortion, Barack Hussein Obama, Current Events, Election 08, Entertainment, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Iraq War, John Edwards, John McCain, Mitt Romny, Motherhood, Photos, Politics, Recap, Rudy Juliani, Socialism | 4 Comments

Cult of Communism
It seems Micheal Moore has been up to another one of his mockumenteries.
Shortly after JJ returned from his missions trip to Cuba, I mentioned in a post that Michael Moore had been there 2 weeks previous. This article from the NY Post covers it here Thanks 4simpsons and Verum Serum for tipping me to this.

supreme court
The Supreme Court of the U.S. has decided to uphold the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act! Pro-Lifers are counting it as a victory! Presidential Candidates for 2008 Praising this decision are, Mccain, Juliani and Romny. Barack Obama has strongly critisized the decision, while Hillary Clinton has proclaimed it an “erosion of our contitutional right” (Tip to Stevereenie for the quote.)
update: I found this post on The Voice Of Reason blog that quotes most of the candidates response to this supreme court decision. Please give it a read. Quotes more of the Candidates than I have listed.

14_65_041707_vatechmemorial
I find it pretty impossible you do not know what happened at Virginia Tech this week, so I will not re-cap it. But I do want to say something about is how insane it is that threats of copy-cats have happened popped around the Nation. Reportedly, 15 schools shut-down with with these threats. Are there really that many crazies running around? I guess so. Its rather un-nerving. It makes me believe we have been very blessed to not have it happen before.
Debates spawning from this story include:
1. Gun Control Laws
2. Campus Security
3. Laws regarding involuntary commiting of crazy people to mental health facilities.
4. What colleges and/or students have the right to know about the history of a student vs. privacy laws.
5. On what grounds public colleges are allowed to refuse enrollment to a mentally ill student.
6. Campus mass-communication methods.
7. Our we teaching our students to be too tolerant?
8. Whether or not NBC should have shown Killer’s manifesto.
9. Effects of Anti-depressants (I just heard this one, and am somewhat surprised by it.)
I’m sure the list will continue to grow.

People are doing the normal finger-pointing that follows tragedies like this. Some of the fingers are pointing in understandable directions… but let’s not forget that the truest blame lays on this mass murderer. (forgive me for not even wanting to use his name, and you will find no picture of him on this blog.)

Reidjpg
Senator Harry Reid (d) in a speech this week proclaimed that the war in Iraq is lost. Excuse me? Excuse me? Is he the one with the authority to proclaim this? How does this effect morale over in the mid-east? How could you possibly speak something like this when we have soldiers on the field? Popular political blogger Michelle Malkin has had an open invite for soldiers to write in responses to Harry Reid. Check them out on starting here.

alec and ireland
Actor, Alec Baldwin left a voicemail on his daughter’s cell phone that should make any parent cringe. TMZ aired it here. Alec has now tried to go to court to pull the plug on it and has issued an apology.
As a mom, on one hand I don’t want to be judgemental because I know I have lost my patience and wished I could take words or tones back. However, the excessive nature of this rant places it in the emotionally abusive catagory. My hope is that the complete embarassment of this causes this man to get some help, change, and restore relationship with his daughter.

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Jan

5

Off my Hiatus- I think.

Filed Under Entertainment, Family, Holidays, Recap | 9 Comments

Hello. I miss my blog friends so much! I just haven’t felt like blogging, and part of that could be the serious time deprivation. Much has happened since my last post- nothing dramatic really, just life in general. I still can’t see on my RSS when you, my friends, post so that has made it really hard to read blogs at all (for someone with little time). Anyway. I’m trying to blog tonight while sitting here watching a movie with my man.

So Big updates. I got a tatoo to surprise Jeff. Not simply to surprise him, but because i wanted it as well. It is his name (like he has mine) on my wrist but mine curls around to the front with a dove. The dove represents “god’s peace, because that is waht his name means, and he is full of peace. Anyway, here are some shotty phone pics from after it first was done. I’m hoping to get nicer ones taken soon since is is healed.

Top of wrist
top tattoo

Bottom of wrist
Inside tatoo

Thanksgiving, we went to Springfield for 10 days to spend it with Jeff’s family.
That was great.

For Christmas everyone came here. We had 11 visitors! It was a packed house (Jeff’s parents, sisters family, and brother in laws parents!) It made for good memories. It was pretty nice to have all my extended family (dad’s side and most of mothers’) Jeff’s entire family and even his sisters in-laws all under one roof on Christmas eve. I don’t know that a lot of families could do that so I feel blessed.

Yesterday we celebrated Lukas’s first birthday. I’m pretty amazed that a year has gone by. Things are moving so quickly. We had a “small” birthday party with “some” family and a 2 friends families. Seriously though, if my family is involved it is rarely small. For the next several they will all be tiny, but I figured this is his 1st and I wanted to have a celebration. Today we went and took 1 year old photos and Owen got so jealous. I had owen get in some of the pics and ended up with one I love of the 2 of them. :)

Lu and O Jan 5th 2006 up

And Lukie’s One year old picture :)
Lu 1 year old

So Life will be pretty much normal for a couple weeks and then we are off to see my parents in Florida for 10 days (we are going to escape up to orlando to visit my grandpa and see some old friends too!) Then we will be back foa a day then head to Colorado for 5 days to snowboard. THEN maybe we will have some normal life for a bit :)

I’m really looking forward to 2007. I look forward to really feeling myself… without being pregnant or having a to be a food source. I look forward to enjoying the boys as they grow and having dates with my husband. I look forward to lots of mornings at the gym, learning more about who God made me to be and how to live that out daily. I look forward to building stronger relationships and growing in maturity. I look forward to being free of things that have held me in the past. Gradually losing bad habits like my obsessivenss. Looking further into why sometimes I’m so sad for no reason, and why sometimes old wounds still hurt so much. And hopefully moving on from there in healing. I look forward to growing my hair out. I think I’m going to commit to not chopping it this year :) But only getting trims every few months (there’s a deep one)… I look forward to seeing of Lukas will ever grow hair :) I look forward to more memories with friends and family… finding new hobbies… breaking out my sewing machine againl, getting the garage organized, learning more recipes and having people over for dinner more. I look forward to getting into old jeans (some say my hips will eventually retract some more right!?)

That’s it for now. I think this is going to be a good year. For some reason I just have a lot of peace about it. Maybe that just because I have a dove tatood on my wrist now… ha!

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