I think, today, I will choose to relish the fact that no matter where I am in the house, no matter what task I may be doing (showering, on the phone, folding laundry, cooking dinner) the boys always manage to find me and want to stay where I am. Of course this isn’t the case 100% of the time, but I would definitely say more times than not. They could play in their room, they could go outside, they could choose to avoid Mommy, but instead they choose me.

Even this morning as I sat at the computer for a little while, the boys had eaten breakfast and were playing trains and hand-held video games and within minutes of sitting down at my desk, they were all three on the floor of the office carrying on with what they were already doing.

Joshua was playing his DS.

Owen was playing trains.

Jesse was watching Joshua and enjoying these little goodies I brought home from a Christmas party last night.

But all three were content to be where Mommy was.

I can’t help but hear the Father say,

My precious child,
It so pleases me when you have so much going on around you, so many things to be done, people to see, and places to go, but you choose Me. You know that in My presence is fullness of joy. It is there that you find peace and strength and refuge. You can still go about your daily doings, but choose my presence in the midst of it.

Today I choose His presence and plan to carry it with me to the post office, our school room, and to another Christmas party tonight.

~audrey

Back before our foster parenting days, I would take the boys out for “date nights”. They always, always chose Starbucks and browsing through stores like Target or the mall. We really enjoyed those outings, but we simply haven’t time over the past year. Joshua has been begging me for a date night now that our foster children are gone. I finally obliged.

We were going to head to Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee but I remembered I had some gift cards in my purse, so we ended up at Olive Garden instead. It was so much fun. I love spending time with my boys individually and I don’t do it often enough. Joshua ordered chicken fingers and I ordered my usual; eggplant parmesan.

We both drank water to save room for dessert. Would you believe, out of ALL the delicious desserts on the Olive Garden menu, my son chose the caramel hazelnut macchiato?? I would say, “That’s my boy!”, but even I do not pass up a good dessert for coffee. He didn’t regret his decision and the waiter was able to make it decaf.

I enjoyed my tiramisu and even ordered a slice of black tie mousse cake to-go for Josh. From the restaurant we went to the grocery store to get everything we’d need to bake Christmas goodies the next day. As we were walking into the store, it started snowing! It was SO cold that night.

I had a wonderful time with Joshua and look forward to seeing how God grows and changes our relationship as he gets older. I can hardly believe he’ll be eight in two months. EIGHT!

Happy Wednesday!

~audrey

I’ve been really excited about today. Monday. I don’t have the twins today and I had big plans.

I expected to completely catch up on laundry.

Change the beds.

Bake Christmas goodies all day long.

Watch a movie with the boys.

Stay in our jammies; never too far from a space heater (much needed in our 40 year old home).

What I did not expect was for our front spigot to burst from the frigid temperatures, flooding our front yard and bringing my poor hubby home from work before lunch. Ironically, the same exact thing happened last year…to the same spigot.

We called a plumber and they quoted us $240! Are you kidding me?!? Who wants to go to medical school when plumbers can charge $200/hour!? Needless to say, I got on the phone and finally spoke with a friend whose husband was a plumber back in the day. Her husband called Josh and told him what to buy and where to buy it. Wanna know what it cost us to replace both the front and back spigots??

$4

Enough said.

Three hours later, my water is finally turned back on, Josh is back at work and will probably have to stay there until 8pm to get his projects finished, and I am no longer in the mood to bake. I did manage to make about 3 dozen snowball cookies and two dozen gingerbread men before the plumbing fiasco. The rest will have to wait until tomorrow…with two cute, little, girlie twins running around the kitchen.

For now, I will return to my bedroom where the last two loads of laundry wait to be folded and put away.

Happy Monday!

~audrey

As I sat down at the computer and began uploading my favorites and my bookmarks (from when Josh killed our computer and then somewhat resurrected it), I began reading post after post on websites about everything from parenting, marriage, health, homeschooling, worship, ministry, etc.

I started longing for more hours in the day. More time to do all of the things I would do if this were a perfect world and every item on my to-do list got marked off every single day.

Every meal would be prepared by my hands.

I would exercise in some form, every day.

Cards and baked good would be brought to neighbors and friends; just because it’s so fun to bless others and let them know that you’re thinking of them and praying for them.

My house would be clean every day.

There would be no need for laundry baskets because I would do one load a day and that would keep me caught up. (HAHAHAHA!!)

I would have a regular time slot in my weekly schedule for sewing, scrapbooking, and writing.

I would have two hours each morning to spend in worship, prayer, and God’s word. Not just reading it, but studying it and memorizing it as if someone could take my Bible at any moment and I’d never have one in my hands again for as long as I live.

We would have families over for dinner two or three nights a week, because there’s nothing quite like the fellowship of kindred spirits around the dinner table.

I would wear a size six. (haha, this is ‘in a PERFECT world’, right?)

My children would beg to sit and read with me for an hour each day and we wouldn’t even own a television.

I think I could go on and on, but I’ll stop here.

All of this to say, I think some change is in order at the Wilkerson home. I’m not even sure what yet, but spending a lot of time trying to figure it out. Simplifying is definitely at the top of the list and so is organization. More on this later I suppose.

Happy, sleepy, rainy Sunday

~audrey

The weekend kind of threw me off a bit. Here are days 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Day Four:

A Star for Jesus

Day Five:

The Berenstain Bears Meet Santa Bear

Day Six:

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

Day Seven:

Jan Brett’s The Night Before Christmas (she’s one of my favorite secular children’s authors)

~audrey

I recently caught a clip of The Biggest Loser and I heard Bob telling a contestant that what he thought and felt in his mind was going to effect the way he felt physically, 100% of the time.

Our old pastor once said, “It’s a lot easier to act your way into a feeling than it is to feel your way into an action.” So if you’re not happy, try putting a smile on your face and leave it there. You’ll be amazed how that changes your attitude. The same goes for our walk with the Lord. You can have a heart as good as gold and desire to do all the right things, but if you aren’t meditating on His word and cleansing your mind with Truth…well, you know what comes out instead.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t missed having cable this past year. I can look back now and see how much of my time the television consumed. I watched good things like TLC, HGTV, and the Discovery Channel, but now I choose conversation with my husband and children, or worship music while I fold clothes. Even the commercials for products you don’t want or need can leave you with a sense of dissatisfaction and discontent. It has made a big difference in my children as well. It is Christmas time and my children have no idea what the latest movies are or what toys Nickelodeon has been pushing. Don’t get me wrong, I chose cable for the first seven years of our marriage and enjoyed it very much. I’m simply reflecting on the past year without it.

Yesterday we made some Christmas cookies. I think there is a day next week when the twins won’t be here and if that’s the case, I intend to spend most of that day baking for neighbors and the boys’ Sunday school teachers. All we did yesterday was make a batch of sugar cookies.

I love cooking and baking so I enjoy having a few different aprons to choose from. Makes me feel a little more like the old farm wife that I am in my head. LOL! This one is my favorite and best of all, it was only $7.99 from TJMaxx!

We ended the day making Santa pictures with their hand prints. I thought they turned out cute.

I should be getting our Christmas cards in the mail soon and I look forward to showing you…even though some of you will be getting one in the mail. 🙂

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. Philippians 4:8-9

~audrey

What a whirlwind weekend if ever I’ve had one!

Tara and I had a wonderful time traveling; catching up and laughing so hard we almost wet our pants a few times…you know that’s not hard to do after having a few children!

A lot of these pictures are blurry since neither of us brought our cameras so we were snapping everything with our phones. 🙁

I don’t even know where to start regarding the conference. I’m going to have to break it down into a few different posts. Our hotel was .4 miles from the conference center so we walked to and from and that was quite nice. We were shocked at how many homeless people were on the streets of Birmingham late Friday night as we went out to get dinner after the conference. We prayed that God would protect Tara’s car over night. Imagine our shock when we put our luggage in the car the next morning and two cars in front of us had their windows busted out. Our hearts were broken for the women who had their weekends disrupted by such violation and we were equally grateful that God chose to protect our vehicle.

There were 13,900 women at this conference. You can only imagine our worship time with Travis Cottrell when the band stopped playing and 13,900 women were singing the chorus to Revelation Song.

Oh.My.Goodness.

I knew there were quite a few bloggers at the conference, and by that I mean bloggers that I follow; well-known bloggers in the Christian “mommy” community. One blogger in particular that I was really hoping to see was Kelly Stamps from Kelly’s Korner Blog. There was not a whole lot of hope in finding her out of almost 14,000 women, over half of which were blondes!

On the last day of the conference there was a memo on the big screens: Siestas please meet at the sound booth following the conference. If you aren’t a Beth Moore blogger you wouldn’t have any idea what that meant. But about 80 of us knew who that was referring to and we excitedly gathered around the sound booth and waited….and waited…and waited. We even got to speak with Priscilla Shirer as we waited!

Finally we were shuffled down a long hallway with Beth Moore at the end. She spoke to us in groups of 20 or 30 and we took several group pictures with Beth. She should be posting them online soon and we’ll be able to link you to them. But even more exciting than that, after all of the Beth Moore hustle and bustle and excitement, Tara and I were heading for the exit and I squealed: “There’s Kelly!” Of course I introduced myself as a reader and we took a quick picture.

Thank you Kelly for being so sweet to the strange blonde in the hallway! It was so fun to meet you. Blogging has definitely created an indescribable sisterhood of godly women sharing life with one another.

We got home Saturday night around midnight. I didn’t have a key so I had to go to the back yard and bang on our window to wake Josh up and let me in! It was quite a sight.

Sunday was crazy, busy. Church, lunch, Christmas rehearsal, short nap, and off to our shift on Extreme Makeover Home Edition.

It was windy and 40 degrees. There were way more volunteers than there was work. At one point, I think the big guys were just trying to think of work to keep us busy, so they had us form a big line of about 20 volunteers and we created an assembly line passing bricks across the build site onto a pallet. This picture is horrible, but you get the idea:

Here are a few pics of the unfinished house:

This is a very poor neighborhood and ABC is doing incredible things for many of the neighbors in addition to the recipient of the makeover. Many homes have received a new roof, new windows, new doors, and even brand new washers and dryers! Way to go ABC! What an incredible gift to the community.

We got home and were in bed by 1am. We didn’t end up having to stay for the entire shift since there were so many workers sitting around doing nothing. Imagine my utter relief when the twins’ mom text me at 7:30am to tell me one of the girls has pink eye so she was keeping them home today. I slept in until 9am and finally got up, very sore and with a splitting headache. I’m looking forward to going back to the build site tonight with Ashley for just a few hours.

It was such a blessing to have the entire day to catch up on house stuff. I cleaned for a while and the boys and I spent about an hour and a half reviewing first semester memory work, as well as a little spelling and math. I may even try to get a nap before preparing dinner. More pictures tomorrow! It sure is going to be cold tonight!

~audrey

I sat at the computer from 6am-8am this morning…just catching up on my blog reading and ordering Christmas cards.

…then I poured myself a cup of coffee and ate my leftover buffalo chicken calzone for breakfast. It was just as good as last night.

~audrey

Joshua opened: The Christmas Hat this morning.

I edited his picture a bit since he was half naked. 🙂 I love Picnic!

~audrey

Alabama is probably the last state in the US that I would pick to visit if given a choice. However, three incredible women of God have chosen to reside there for the next 24 hours, so I’m headin’ to Birmingham.

A few months ago after I went to the Going Beyond event featuring Priscilla Shirer, my dear friend Tara asked me if I’d be interested in going to the Deeper Still conference in Birmingham in early December. I’ve done two Bible studies that correspond with Deeper Still. The conferences feature Kay Arthur, Priscilla Shirer, and Beth Moore. Immediately my mind began to race about whether or not I could afford it, whether or not we’d still have foster children, what would the hotel cost, etc, etc… One thing led to another, Tara was able to get a free hotel room because her husband travels a lot with his job, I realized that we would very likely not have foster children in December, and Josh said he thought I should go….so I’m leaving today at noon!

It’s pitiful, but one of my first thoughts was, “FIVE HOURS IN THE CAR WITH UNINTERRUPTED ADULT CONVERSATION!! HEAVEN!!” This trip will be different from Going Beyond because I’ll be a lot farther from home and I won’t be in a group. Tara and I haven’t had any time to spend together in almost a year and I thoroughly look forward to catching up, laughing together, and encouraging one another in the Lord. Please be praying for us for the next 24 hours. The weather should be beautiful in Birmingham and our hotel is only half a mile from the conference center, so we intend to walk (and save $12/day on parking!). We even joked about bringing our own sandwiches and protein bars so we can save money on food. But the more I thought about it I realized: Food is mainly expensive because when I go out to eat, I’m feeding at least SEVEN people!!

All that to say, I am very excited about this weekend. I’ve been up since 5am and it’s now only 6:15. I’ve reverted back to my morning coffee, although I feel it is mostly psychological (because I really do enjoy the taste SO much) so I intend to buy decaf once this bag runs out. Any how, I think I’ll make my coffee now. Have a wonderful weekend! Between the conference today and tomorrow, church on Sunday, cleaning two offices, and working the 8pm-2am shift for Extreme Home Makeover Sunday night, I’m not sure I’ll have time to post anything else until Monday or Tuesday! I’m going to have to squeeze some naps in there somewhere!

Happy Friday!

~audrey