J-O-B

I have some big news today.

Two weeks ago, my boss Karen told me that our Administrator needed to talk to me.

She asked me to take a full-time, permanent job!

Until now, my job has been part-time (23-30 hours/week) and temporary.  I started the job filling in for a girl in Basic Training for 9 months.  After "training" her after she got back, I had 0 hours for two weeks while waiting for another girl to go on maternity leave.  But when she gets back in September, they had no way of giving me any hours.

Starting Monday the 28, I will be working the front desk in the morning and the front office in the afternoons.   I'll have insurance, benefits, sick days....  a big girl job.  

God's timing is so cool...  the first day allowed me to go to Camp with our youth group.

And the timing also allowed another Activities girl to work for 5 weeks while 3 of us are gone and before she starts Missions Training

I will miss Activities so much, but right now (pre-kids) is the time for me to have a full-time job so we can save up as much as possible.  Plus I'm planning on eating lunch in their office every day.  :)

GOD has been so good to us.

 

What Have You Been Doing Lately?

Well, I'm back!  We have had a busy and crazy July so far and it's going to get more crazy before it calms down.  Here are some updates from our month...

We were in the O'Fallon Parade on the 4th of July to advertise our church and VBS.  We passed out over 4000 flyers with candy attached... Super fun yet hot!  4th of July night, we went to Dan and Susan's for dinner and games with some friends at church, then we went to hang out with some youth group teens and play games with them.  Fun night!

 We went to the wedding of two of our friends from church on 7/7.  It was so nice and I love weddings and getting to remember our special day and how blessed I am to be married to my best friend.  We also got to dance to our First Dance song, "You are So Beautiful".  I think I might request this song at every wedding we go to from now on...

 We had VBS at church last week.  It went AMAZING.  Steven helped head it up and we were so happy with the results... the kids raised over $700 for our missionary which resulted in Steven and the Worship Band all dying their hair neon colors.  And we prayed for 101 kids and God gave us 102!  Most importantly, 5 kids got saved.  It was a great (yet exhausting) week.

AND this past weekend, my bff Kelly came in from North Carolina!  We had a great week with her.  She got here Friday at 9:30 am and we went non-stop until I dropped her off with her aunt today in Columbia.  We went to see Aladdin at the Muny, she took Barkley to DG with me when I worked 4 hours (and one of our Residents threatened to shoot him), we went to Main St. in St. Charles,  went to Panera twice, ate at Chipotle and Five Guys, went shopping, got "Grandma's Cookies", slept in, and even saw the Wienermobile twice in one day!

Kelly is such a special friend to me.  She lived across the street in 5th and 6th grade... and has lived in North Carolina ever sense!   The distance has not gotten in the way of our friendship, though, which is how I know we'll be friends for MANY years to come.

 

Beautiful Day

A few weeks ago, Steven and I went to the Royals/Cardinals game in St. Louis!

The Cardinals has this amazing program where they give "Clergymen" two free tickets to any/all games! (except Cubs games).  This was our first time taking advantage but I think we will more often now.

It was so fun to go and see our home team play our new "home" team.  Steven wore his Royals shirt and cap, and we enjoyed spotting a few others with their Royals gear on in St Louis as well!

The Stadium was just re-done and it was amazing... So cool with it being downtown and with the Arch right behind the score board!

Obviously, these free seats were in the 3rd Pavilion, but it was actually nice to be up so high because the air was circulating so well and we could feel the breeze on such a hot day.

We paid $5 for parking, and the Stadium lets you bring in outside food/drink so we brought in sandwiches from Jimmy John's!

I mentioned on Facebook that we were at the game, and some of our youth group kids called Steven that they were there too and they had two empty seats with them!  So we joined them after the 2nd inning.  Their seats were much closer than ours but it was like we were sitting in a sauna.

It was a crazy, high-scoring game, but the Royals ended up losing at the last minute.  But it was still a fun day out!  I definitely want to do it again sometime.

Thanks for the free tickets, Busch Stadium.  :)

The B-I-B-L-E

It has been a while since I've written last... but this last project I did was worth the post!

I have had my eye on making a cover for my Bible.  I've only used it a year so far but I was ready for it to be a little more unique and have some personality to it since it's used so much!

I found a few people who had made Bible Covers on Pinterest (here and here), but the tutorials were very minimal and I liked different attributes of both the ones I found.  I ended up combining them and kind of putting my own spin on it and figuring it out as I went along!

My goal was to have it done by Camp (the end of this month) but I finished it today!

 I made it with a velcro closure so I can have varying amounts of papers, bulletins, etc inside. (and the amazing flower button is velcro'ed on also so I can wash the cover if needed!)

Finally, I left the ruffle strip on the spine open, so that I can always have a pen and highlighter with my Bible!

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and can't wait to bring it with me to church Wednesday.  :)

I Can be Your Friend

A few weeks ago, I made a sock monkey for my cousin's baby, Liam (who you may remember from their recent visit).

After I finished, I did some thinking and decided that button eyes are probably not the best thing to put on a toy for a 9 month old.

Rather than simply taking off the button eyes and sewing new ones, I went to Target, bought more socks, and started over, ending with this cutie:

 Sewn on felt eyes... much safer!  And I just love the Zebra print.

When I got this pair of socks, I got a little grabby looking at all of the cute ones... After I got too far into making 4 sock monkeys at a time, I kind of regretted it (quite a time consuming project!!) but now that they are done, they are cute!

Best friends!

I mailed my child-friendly monkey off to my nephew (or third cousin twice removed... "nephew" is easier!).  I hope that he likes it and that his mama can have peace of mind leaving him in a room with it!

I'm now left with these guys...

I'm considering making an Etsy shop down the road... probably pretty far down the road...  do you think anyone would want to buy these? 

 

Simple Gifts

This year, I am in charge of the volunteer room for our VBS volunteers.  We'll have a designated room for those who are helping to come and store their stuff and get a little snack or drink, and we wanted to have something special for them every night so they know how much we appreciate their hard work and time!

I set a budget of $15 a night for 45 volunteers. VBS isn't not for another month, but I just finished up the four nights of "gifts" so I wanted to share them with you!

"We appreciate you S'more than you know!"

They are jumbo-sized marshmellows, a mini-Hershey bar, and two graham cracker halves.

"Thank you for being an Egg-Cellent volunteer!  You have made this year's VBS Egg-stra special!"

Inside the eggs are 2-3 pieces of chocolate candy... an assortment of Kit-Kats, Snickers, and Reese's.  I bought these Jumbo eggs when they were 80% off after Easter!

"Our volunteers are Extra- ordinary!"

I found 6 different flavors of Extra gum, wrapped in cute colorful ribbon.

"Our volunteers are the Stars of our VBS!"

Inside are 10 Starbursts.

I think they turned out pretty cute!

 

Stairway to Heaven

The bad news is that I don't have any shifts on the schedule until my coworker has her baby. He is due next week and I was going to go home this week but wanted to make sure I was "just a phone call away" in case he came. Turns out I should have gone home!

The good news is that I have had so much time at home as of late, that I have gotten fairly caught up on blogging! I even have not one but TWO posts scheduled to post automatically so that the new blogs are more spread out haha! As you can tell, not a lot is going on here, but I wanted to share our latest home renovation (that we did over a month ago and I just took pictures of).

These were our stairs for the first 11 months we lived here:

"unfinished" would be an understatement.

We got an estimate of $550 to finish them.  We made several trips to Home Depot the home improvement store and talked with at least 5 of their employees before coming up with a creative and honestly, genius way for us to fix them ourselves for under $100.

It's still not totally done but it looks a million times better!  The cracked and uneven spaces, or even gaps, are all covered and it came together nicely.  We still need to stain the railing and the entryway the same dark color as our stair treads and floor.  We have all of the stuff to do but staining such a large, prominant area is intimidating!