This month’s theme is friendship.  Of course when I think of friendship I think of my friends, Sonya, Angie, Melinda, Tonketa, Monica, Sharon, Felicia, Tamika B, Tamika M, my girl Nicole, Toya, Deborah, Sheila…just to name a few.  They are awesome friends.  With our busy schedules we don’t talk everyday and see each other even less, but no matter what we will always be friends.  Tonketa and I have been friends for about 23 years.  That’s a long time.  The only other friend I’ve had longer is my hubby.  Lifelong friendships are rare and wonderful.

I hope that my daughters will also develop lifelong friendships.

Here are a few images of my girls and their friends.

Please head over to my friend Lisa Deering’s blog to see how she view’s friendship this month.

Pleasure, joy, exhilaration, bliss, contentedness, delight, enjoyment, satisfaction….happiness.

Happiness can mean so many things to different people.  One of the things that makes me happy is watching my girls grow up.  It is being there for their successes and picking them up when they fall. Its having life lesson chats with them and most of all its it seeing them when they are happy.

Here is my youngest daughter one day after church enjoying a day in the back yard.

Click here to check out my friend Lisa Deering’s blog to see how she views happiness this month.

I have a sweet tooth and I LOVE candy especially sour candy.  So when I saw our theme for this month I thought it was a great excuse for me to visit our new neighborhood candy store.  This is a cute little store in Indian Trail.  They have all kinds of candies there and they sell baked goods too.  You can even have birthday parties there so I’ll need to keep that in mind for the future.  So here are my pictures for this months theme:

Sweetness and Love

Don’t forget to go check out Lisa J’s blog to see how she views sweetness and love this month.   See you next time.

January’s theme is New Beginnings.  I really wanted to get up early one morning and take a picture of a sunrise or something like that, but I have a hard time dragging myself out of bed early on the weekends after going through of week of struggling to get to work at 6:30am.  So I let that idea go.

Nothing says new beginnings like a new year.  We spent New Years Eve with my husband’s family and friends from church.  We had a good time and tired to make it back home before midnight.  We barely made it.  As you can see my two youngest daughters were totally knocked out.

So that’s the way I see new beginnings this month…

Please go over to check Lisa J’s blog’s to see how she see’s new beginnings this month, and don’t forget to come back next month.

The 30 days of gratitude forced me to think about something everyday that I am grateful for.  Although I only posted one thing in each post, I could always come up with more.  This gave me an opportunity to reflect on how truly blessed I am.  I can always come up with things that are not right, that I don’t like, or how I want things to be different.  Taking a moment everyday to really focus on what I am thankful and grateful for makes everything else seem small.

Through this exercise I looked at my situation compared to others and realized how much I have to be grateful for.  I realize that no matter what my situation is, there is always someone who would love to be in my shoes.

I will end my 30 days of gratitude with a top 10 list:

1. I am grateful that Jesus died for our sins
2. I am grateful for my life health and strength (that’s what you always hear someone say it church but it is true)
3. I am grateful for my good husband who is loving caring and very supportive of my dreams and goals.
4. I am grateful for my children and their health.  I am grateful that I do not have any serious problems with my children. (I know this is two things but I’m trying to stick with 10)
5. I am grateful for my parents and what they have done for me and how they raised me.
6. I am grateful for my grandma. She keeps my youngest daughter everyday and picks my middle daughter from school every Friday.
7. I am grateful for my brother and his love for me.
8. I am grateful for my friends and the friendship they give.
9. I am grateful for my job.
10. I am grateful for my neighbors.

My new challenge to myself is to take a moment at the end of everyday to think of one thing that I am grateful and thankful for and write it down in a gratitude journal.  No matter how bad the day may have been there is always something to be grateful for.

For this post I chose a picture of my girls that I took this past Sunday.  I was excited about how well it turned out because it was my first time using off camera flash.  I got the card template from Ashe Design.

I don’t have a picture for today’s post, but I just wanted to share that fact.  When I hear about stories of others and their job searches, I am just grateful to God that he has shown me and my family favor with steady employment.

And I am thankful that the Lord has blessed me to see another year. I had a really wonderful day today.  My husband and girls serenaded me with the happy birthday song, we went out to breakfast and then we decorated the house for Christmas.  I am truly blessed to have the family that I have.

I had some time alone today and was able to get a lot done at home.  I didn’t get everything done as I set out to do but I made great progress.

My picture today really doesn’t have anything to do with my post.  It’s just a picture of some of my vegetables I grew in my garden this summer.

Today I took my daughters, nieces and my little cousin to see Happy Feet 2.  I’m happy and thankful that I kind of have the energy to do things like that with and for my girls.  I grateful that my daughters have cousins close to their age because when I was growing up, I was the youngest cousin and was left behind a lot. I’m also grateful to have been able to have a thanks giving dinner with my family and spend time with them (which is something we should do more often).

We had a wonderful thanksgiving day yesterday and a really nice day today.  It was a wonderful way to kick off the holiday season.