Sunday Sweetness

Every once in awhile, we need to stop and celebrate.

Today I am thankful for Sunday afternoon naps, baby overalls, and chocolate cake. 

My weekdays with my baby girl are sweet, but the weekends home with her & her daddy are even sweeter.

Cheers to Sunday!

Art credit goes to Curly Girl Design . I love her store and could spend hours reading through all of her cards. The way she combines her artwork and poetic phrases is inspiring, uplifting, and often times just what a girl needs to put a smile on her face!

Prayer - ACTS

As a Christian woman, I know I ought to pray. I ought to love to pray. How fantastic is it that the words spoken from my heart can be heard by the ears of the almighty Lord?! And not only heard by Him, but also treasured and considered important by Him. Yet, even in spite of knowing those facts I still have an ugly truth to confess: prayer can be hard for me. No matter how hard I try, the number of times I have fallen asleep while praying can be counted on more than two hands.

Enter Susan, a good friend of mine who once shared how much the ACTS prayer acronym changed her own prayer life. ACTS stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. It's a sweet little tool to help facilitate prayer with the Lord.  You start with adoring the Lord and worshiping Him. Then confess and repent of the sins in your life. Next, thank God for the blessings He has given you. And lastly, pray to the Lord for yourself, your family, and the other people in your life. About a year and a half ago I started using this as my own prayer tool, and today I can stand in agreement with Susan that the Lord can really use this simple prayer acronym to add a lot of beauty and intimacy to one's prayer life with Him.

Below you will find how I specifically use this tool in my prayer time. I hope it's helpful to you! I share this not out of legalism, for there are many ways to pray and worship the Lord, but out of a heart of encouragement. More than anything sister, I pray that you walk away from this blog post being reminded of how much God longs to hear your voice rise up to him in prayer. 

I keep an ACTS prayer journal and use scripture in some sections to help guide my thoughts. The journal is separated into four parts and looks something like this:

PART ONE: Adoration

• As I read through the bible I bookmark different bible verses on my phone that praise/worship/define who God is and then write them out in the journal. Then during my prayer time I simply read this verses out loud to the Lord as praise and worship.
• A few verses in my Adoration section include:
• Hosea 6:3 "Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to use as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth."
• Isaiah 45:7 "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things."
• Isaiah 37:16 "O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you have made heaven and earth."

PART TWO: Confession

• Here I list out different commands the Lord has given us in case I need some help remembering how I have sinned against the Lord in my life and where I need to repent (although more often than not sister I don't need any help in this area, my heart is so prone to sin that my confessions just comes flooding out)
• A few scriptures I include in this section:
• Exodus 20 (List out the 10 commandments)
• John 15:12 "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you."

PART THREE: Thanksgiving

• In this section I have an active list going of all the things I'm thankful to God for. 
• A few highlights on my list include:
• 12. Thank you for the surprise of my baby sleeping in this morning and the extra time I got to spend with you
• 13. Thank your for a husband that loves me so much that he calls me in the middle of the day
• 19. Thank you for creating sweet juicy peaches that I can eat straight off the tree
• 23. Thank you that you created my body to work and for the joy I received  from sweating over hedging the bushes this morning

PART FOUR: Supplication

• There are a whole bunch of ways to do this part. I keep on going prayer lists (separated by a bunch of pages) for each different family member and for other various things. I often like to use scripture as an outline for my prayers in this section.
• Examples of my pages/scripture prayers include:
• Family Prayers
• 1 Thessalonians 2:11-12
• Lord please exhort, encourage, and implore my family through your holy spirit to walk in a manner worthy of you - you who blessed us by choosing us to be a part of your kingdom and glory
• Marriage Prayers
• James 1:19
•  Lord, please change the Farmer and my hearts to be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger; for our anger does not honor you nor do you any good.
• Prayers for my Husband
• Colossians 3:23-24
• Father, in the Farmer's  job and at home please kindly remind him and bless him with a desire to work as for you and not for men. Help him to work for you Lord Christ. 
• Prayers for my Daughter
• Jani Ortlund, my pastor's wife, wrote a beautiful blog post on how to pray for your princess and this is what I use for the most part when praying for Hannah. Are you the mother of a son? Jani also wrote this post on how to pray for your little prince.
• My Personal Prayer List Page
• Prayers for Others
• When I tell friends I will pray for them, I typically add their specific prayer to a list I keep going in this section of my journal. Some days I pray through the entire list, and other days I might only hit one or two. When I see the prayer get answered (like a friend becomes pregnant!) I write how the Lord answered the prayer along with the date (it's exciting to actively see Him answer prayers again and again). 

Now your turn! Do you have any helpful prayer tips? Let's encourage each other.

Disclaimer: I don't use this journal to pray everyday nor do I always pray through every section of the journal when I do use it. I am not legalistic about this and I pray that you aren't either. In fact, one day I might set the journal aside all together and find I need a new way to encourage prayer with the Lord. This is a just a tool that the Lord has used to bless my own prayer life. Ultimately, He is the one who makes our prayer life with Him sweet/intimate and encourages us to pray.

Femininity

Every little boy needs a truck,

and every little girl needs a purse.

Dear HG,

I love how creative and fun the Lord made you!

Without any prompting or lessons on what a purse is,

you decided yesterday at the pool that

your toy bucket would make the perfect purse.

And you have been carrying it around as such ever since.

Thank you for making me smile.

Love,

Mom

A Clean Eating Life

A few weeks ago I took a challenge to eat cleanly for two weeks. For me, clean eating meant:

• No meat
• No dairy
• No sugar
• No snacking except for fruit
• Drinking only water (ie no soda, juice, lemonade), just lots and lots of water
• Low-sodium
• Whole wheat only carbs (limited amounts)

Some of my favorite meals included:

• Grilled onion&green bell pepper spinach salad with salsa
• Strawberry and walnut spinach salad
• Avocado and mango spinach salad
• Whole wheat pasta with zucchini, squash, spinach, and tomatoes sauteed  in olive oil
• Whole wheat hummus wrap with cucumber, spinach, grape tomatoes, and black beans
• Three bean soup

Top 7 things I learned:

• I love grapefruit! Half a grapefruit a day easily replaced my morning glass of orange juice. Added bonus: grapefruit is full of antioxidants and helps prevent cancer. Looks like this pink fruit is here to stay!
• Losing weight is 70% diet and only 30% exercise. While exercise is important, I never realized how much changing the way you eat can effect your weight. I lost 7lb over the course of these two weeks - and that may or may not have included a cheat milk shake here and there ;) If I had stuck 100% to the plan I bet I would have lost more weight.
• New go to breakfast: 2 eggs scrambled with salsa, 1/2 a grapefruit, and a piece of whole wheat bread with a thin layer of peanut butter. I was amazed that I could eat this much for breakfast and still shed pounds. Not once did I start my day off hungry.
• Fruit can, in fact, replace eating sweets. Before this eating plan, I never would have believed that a bowl of strawberries, blueberries, and bananas could ever be as enjoyable as a chocolate chip cookie. Surprise - it is just as enjoyable if not more!
• Cleaning eating = more energy to chase little ones around the house.
• I am a salt girl. By far one of the hardest parts of this eating plan was not going for the salt container while preparing every meal. Salt is good. It adds that extra flavor that meals need. Will I be giving up salt completely from now on? No way. But I did learn to tone it down a bit.
• Salads can taste yummy and be a stand alone meal.

Future plans:

• After two weeks of this plan I was shocked at how easy it was to fall back into my old eating habits. Certainly I would have learned something over the course of 14 days, right?? But alas, change is a slow process. 
• I'd love to continue eating this way until I reach my ideal weight, and then slowly begin adding some old favorites (like double chocolate cake) back into the weekly mix.
• Ideally, I'd like to make clean eating (for the most part) a more permanent habit. While it's not bad to have a burger, milk shake, or Oreo cookie here and there... I think the basic principles (like avoiding sugar, only eating whole wheat carbs, snacking on fruit alone, and not drinking anything besides water) are great & super healthy.

Important notes:

• "Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised." Proverbs 31:30 While being a healthy weight isn't bad by any means, it will never complete you nor I. It will never satisfy. It will never make you feel whole. Eat healthy to praise the Lord and to thank Him for the body He has given you!! Don't get too caught up in numbers and self display. 

• Change is hard, but praise the Lord that there is a God who can change us. On the days when I feel lost in my sin, unable to change my broken heart I only have to cry out to Him and say "Christ, I can't do this at all. I keep trying and I keep failing. Change me. Change my heart." And you know what sister? He can and He does! The Lord who began a good work in you (and me) will be faithful to complete it to the end. How awesome is it that we serve a Lord who can change us and bless us with new desires and a new heart. No one else that I know can do that. Ask Him and praise Him!

Clean Eating

Did you enjoy your view of my fridge? I don't think I have ever seen so many fruits and vegetables in it there at one time. Why so many? In attempt to lose a few of those extra baby lb and better my eating habits I decided it was time to try clean eating. My dear friend over at Dear Mushka inspired me with this blog post. I knew I wanted to try something similar, but I was at a loss of how I would figure out what to cook every night. I love cooking, but only with lots of dairy and lots of salt. Two things clean eating does not allow.

Enter in Beautiful Habits. She is a friend of a very dear friend of mine and, while I don't know that much about the author, I joined her challenge and received a free copy of her meal plan. Free! I like that. Plus, it mapped out exactly what I could eat for breakfast/lunch/dinner for an entire week! Perfect. It also included a balanced amount of proteins and fats. The RN in me was happy.

So there you have it. Two weeks of clean eating has commenced. In an act of sweet encouragement The Farmer even agreed to join me on this adventure. We are on day 3 now and still going strong.....for the most part. I might have added a bit of salt to the soup last night. Oops. I just love salt!

But today is a new day. Cheers to a Wednesday filled with veggies, fruit, whole grains, and peanut butter! I'll check back in with you over the next few days and at the end of our challenge to let you know the final results.

Note: Beautiful Habit's challenge is supposed to last 21 days. However, we have a trip planned to the infamous family Hog Farm over Memorial Day weekend. Do you remember my first post about my sweet Mother-in-Love? About amazing a cook she is? Needless to say, we are only doing the plan for 12 days. But 12 days is better than none right? Hopefully, I will learn a lot by then and I won't gain all of my lost weight back.

Happy "clean" eating!

Philippians 4:8

I need this verse.
In my life.
On my bedroom wall.
One of the first things I see and and am reminded to pray when I wake up morning.

In light of that - I decided to make this printable on photoshop and share it with you!! It prints off in an 8x10. I'm still figuring out how to add it as an attachment to my blog, but my little HG just woke up from her morning nap and I must run. Until then, save the image to your computer maybe?

Be blessed! And have a fantastic, lovely Monday!

The Water Challenge

As a nursing major I was forced into studying the benefits of drinking water and let me tell you they are plentiful. Google "health benefits of drinking water" and a countless number of medical pages and websites will pop up. At a glance, drinking water helps flush toxins out of our bodies, boost immune systems, relieve headaches, improve skin complexions, encourage weight loss, and can give you more energy through out the day. Wow! That's a lot of punch for a little tap.


Even though I know how healthy it is for me to drink water... I'm horrible at it! During my pregnancy I even struggled to keep guzzling the stuff down.


And so to combat my, and possibly my Farmer's (although he is much better at it than I am), bad water drinking habits we invested in some new glass water bottles and created a water challenge for ourselves! Why glass? It's easy to clean. BPA free. Won't collect nasty crud on the inside or deteriorate like my aluminum water bottles from years past. And you can pick cute covers out like the one to the left (yes,  the cuteness factor helps encourage me to drink more water, whatever it takes right?).


The challenge? The first person to drink 4 bottles full of water today gets an extra 10 dollars of personal spending money for the month. Not the most stellar prize in the world, but it added a little extra incentive to our game!


We've been texting each other pictures of our full and then empty water bottles all morning. So far, we're neck and neck in the race. 1 down - 3 to go. And you know what? It's been really fun! A nice, small, and atypical way to stay connected with each other when the mister is at work.  I've even managed to finish an entire bottle while writing this blog post :)


Can you drink 8 glasses of water today?