Branches for a Friend

My friend's birthday was this past week, and I offered to paint her something. This was a good way to make myself sit down and paint instead of just relaxing or going somewhere on the weekend. I saw these type paintings online, and wanted to see how one would look if I did it. It turned out great, although the dots took longer than I imagined. You want them to be random, but not with the same color side by side. So I couldn't just paint one color, then the next, but I had to go back and forth between colors to make sure I had enough room for the varying sizes and have them not be the same color side by side. I am planning on doing something similar for myself with either a blue or green background.

Color Splash

I recently downloaded a new app on my Iphone. It is called colorsplash. I love it. For a couple of dollars you can use your finger to take ordinary photos and create extraordinary photos. It allows you to select areas of your photo to be color or gray toned, and using your finger is so much easier than using a mouse. Although color to gray is the only feature, I think it is great application. Here are few images I created using this app while playing with Chloe on Friday.

Happy Birthday Dustin

Today is my hubby's birthday. He has been into skeet shooting lately; so, I made him a cake with skeets and shotgun shells. I guess this is going to be a tradition. Every birthday make a cake with his favorite hobby of the moment. I love you, Dustin!




























I covered small disks of cake for the skeets and molded the shotgun shells with gum-paste. All of this is eatable, not that I like eating gum-paste. The cake was pretty yummy, if I do say so myself.

Encouragement

A friend of mine is having an encouragement blog giveaway. She wanted each person to do something special to show someone you love them. Dustin is going to New Orleans today for a football game with the men at church, so he was sleeping in. Before I left this morning I fixed a few of his favorite breakfast foods and brought him breakfast in bed. I left him a note letting him know that I love him and appreciate what he does for us as a family. He was snoring when I brought it in, so I got a picture for my post. I hope he woke up and ate it before it got cold. I made sure to make a little noise before I left to get him going a bit. :)

Part of the challenge also was to tell what you would tell someone in need of encouragement in a troubled time. I would tell them to trust in the Lord. John 14:1-4 says, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going." This verse also gives us the most encouraging promise of all, that He has prepared for us a place and has allowed us to go to heaven. We don't deserve His grace, but it is there for the taking. His grace gives us peace. In a time of need, just think of the grace that is set out before you, and that He is the true source of peace in anyone's life. No soul is at peace without God's Grace. Spread the joy!

Spiders and Trees

I have had the pleasure of watching two of the sweetest boys you'd ever meet grow up. I have been babysitting them for the past few years and they have just shot up like weeds. When I started babysitting them the youngest, Conner, was 3 and the oldest, Dawson, was 6. Now Conner is 6 and Dawson is 9. Wow, how time flies. Anyways, here lately I have been keeping them a lot because their restaurant has been short staffed. Which gives me an excuse to get to play with them again. The past weekends have been filled with lots of adventures, from spiders to trees.

One weekend as I was pulling down the driveway to take them home, I spotted a huge web in my yard. So we had to inspect, and sure enough in the middle was a nice sized spider. By the looks on their faces the boys weren't too excited to see that spider, but they thought it was neat none the less. We were all so nervous being so close to that creepy crawly thing, that as soon as it realized we really did notice him there, and darted up the web into the nearby tree, we all ran like mad to get back in the car. It was funny turning around in the car to see their ghost-like faces, just to die out laughing that we just ran from a thing that was not even on percent of our size. Another weekend had the boys learning to climb trees. You'd think living in the hills surrounded by woods they'd at least climbed a tree here or there, but since most their trees are massive pine trees with all their branches high up top, these boys had never climbed a tree. What a shame. Since I have a nice sized magnolia tree in my front yard, we saw prime "tree-estate" ready for the climbing. Needless to say, when time came for dinner, they were asking "can we please go climb the tree after dinner. Ahhh fun times, just to be a kid again.


We will have to see what adventures we can get into this coming weekend.