While we were out and about today, we saw two different sets of “fundraisers” with signs and buckets at intersections. I don’t get this. What happened to the good old days of having a car wash or selling doughnuts to make money for a cause? If I’m going to give money to a cause, I either, a) need to be well aquainted with the cause I am donating to, or b) need to be supporting someone “working” for the money.

a) All of the people we have seen out lately have had signs saying “support missions”, or something equally vague. Missions of what? Missions of destruction? Satanist missionaries? I would much rather support my own Church’s missionaries that I know who they are, where they are, and what they are doing. Can you be more specific please?

b) Since when did standing at a streetcorner with a bucket and a homemade sign become a legitimate way of raising money? Is the new wave in fundraising “everything I learned about fundraising I learned from the homeless”? Not to be insensitive, but if it worked, they might not be doing it anymore. Plus, they’re taking away from the homeless people’s possible revenue streams by hogging all of the busy intersections.

If you want me to support your cause, please either explain it to me, or show some effort in earning it. Just a thought.

I’ve had several people ask me how my hand was, so here’s the update.

Yesterday was stitch day! It had been 12 days since my “incident”, and so it was time to get my stitches removed. They told me at the ER to come back to the ER to get my stitches out. Yeah right. So I had weighed my options, and when I realized that 12 days would fall on a Thursday, I realized that I could just get Lydia to take them out for me!! She is a former nurse, and is in our Thursday night small group, and has been known to take other members of our group’s stitches out in the past. I asked her, she agreed, it was all settled.

THEN she had to go and have a baby on my stitch removal day! Thanks for leaving me hanging, Lydia!! But the fun part is that baby Radford will get to share a birthday with Chris.

I didn’t want to go to the doctor just to get stitches removed, and I CERTAINLY wasn’t going back to the ER, so I decided to see if I could take them out myself. After all, everything hurts less when you do it yourself, right? I remember when my Mom was teaching me how to pluck my eyebrows in High School. It was like murder when she did it, but when I did, it wasn’t bad at all!!

As far as my hand goes, most of the sensitivity of the cut was gone, and the only thing that concerned me was that it didn’t look like the top layer of my skin had sealed at all. I finally realized that it wasn’t going to, because it was dead skin, but the layer underneath was certainly sealed.

So I decided to give it a try. I found a pair of nail clipping scissors – the kind with really little blades. No luck – they were small enough, but not sharp enough (they are wire stitches, so it takes a good blade to cut through them). Then I tried my hair trimming scissors. Too big, but probably would have been sharp enough. Frustrated, I started to see if I could just untie them. I got a couple of knots in, but couldn’t get any farther. I wanted these dang stitches out!! Greg offered me his pocketknife, but I wasn’t sure whether he cleaned his toenails with it like my Dad does with his (Yes, all of this was during small group. We usually meet at Chuck and Lydia’s, but it was moved to our house at the last minute due to Radford’s arrival. Since Chuck is our current teacher, we had nothing planned, so we were just hanging out. The guys were playing Wii golf and the girls were visiting, and I was trying to un-knot my stitches).

Finally, Chris came up with the winning idea. Guitar string wire cutters! They’re small, they’re sharp, and they’re made to cut wire!! Perfect! He dug them out of his guitar case, and I was able to snip the stitches immediately! The pulling out of the stitches was the un-fun part. I don’t think the wire cutters made a very clean cut, because they had quite a catch to them and didn’t want to come through. But they finally came free, with a little bit of elbow grease, and I am STITCH FREEEEE!!!!

So my injury is definitely on the mend. The bruising has almost all gone (one hand just looks slightly tanner than the other), the stitches are out, the pain is gone, I just have a thick scar tissue mound around the cut now.

Since I had quite a high demand to see the picture of the original cut that I spared y’all last time, and the only person that thanked me for not showing it was Gina (whom I like to torture anyway), Here are the before and after pictures:

July 5th:

July 18th:

Now it REALLY looks like a stigmata. :)

. . . or at least for Eli-Junkies that don’t have facebook and haven’t already seen these.
Lindsay went on Tuesday to get one of our friends, who is an AMAZING photographer, to take some pics of Eli. They are stunning!!! Here they are, with no commentary from me, because they don’t need any!!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Chris!! I promised him that I would not do an ooey gooey post talking about how he is the best husband in the world (which is true of course), but would just save all of my ooey gooeyness for him in person. So, on to normal posting:

Do you remember the first time you wanted to run away from home? I remember mine. I was probably 4 or 5, got mad at my Mom for something, and insisted on running away to my Aunt Stephanie and Cousin Scott’s house. Mom drove me over there, as any good mom would do (she was probably pretty fed up with me too, and happy to have the excuse to let me go somewhere else!!). I had a blast that day and night, but then was quite disenchanted with the idea the next morning when Steph announced that it was time to go to daycare. I was ready to go home! They made me go to daycare to make sure that the consequences of running away from home stuck with me, and they did – I can’t remember another time of wanting to run away from home.

I am pretty sure that Ali had her first experience of wanting to run away from home today. I kept her up a little longer than usual so that we could go eat lunch at Zaxby’s with Daddy for his birthday. She’s usually fairly well-behaved when we go out to eat, but the combination of waking up earlier than usual and her nap being delayed longer than usual wreaked havoc with her emotions, and she was quite the pill. It was one of those meals where I got to eat about 5 bites of food, and the rest of the time was spent trying to help her eat/be happy. She was told lots of “no’s” and had many things taken away from her, like her dip for turning it upside down repeatedly (rabbit trail – a little cup of cole slaw is a GREAT dip – it gives her the pleasure of dipping, but without the unbelievable mess. I discovered this accidentally last time we went to Zaxby’s when she kept wanting to use my cole slaw as dip). At one point, nothing was making her happy, so I just had to restrain her in my lap for a few minutes. Needless to say, she was not happy with Mommy.

All the way home from lunch, she was saying “Mamma, Pop!” (Mamma is what she calls my Mom – its supposed to be Gramamma). When we got home and I came around to get her out of the car (something she’s usually excited about), she shook her head and said “uh uh. Mamma!!”.

I got her out of the car, and she wrinkled her brow, looked at me with the most confused/sad look on her face, and said pitifully, “I so sad!!!” My heart broke for her. This was the first time that she has ever verbalized her emotions to me, and she was so confused by them!! I told her that it was ok, and explained to her how we all get sad when we are sleepy, and that she will be sooo happy when she wakes up from her nap! I told her I was sorry she was sad, and all the way to bed, she said “I so sorry. I so sorry.” I’m not sure if she was sorry about being a pill at lunch or just sorry that she was sad, but I accepted her apology anyway.

So Ali and I decided that Daddy’s Birthday (tomorrow) was the perfect time to start off her art career.

Ingredients: Old bedsheet, garbage bag, bug spray, four colors of finger paint, canvas, swim diaper (didn’t end up using – you’ll see why later), a FULL box of wipes (don’t leave with a half empty box for a project like this!), a FULL roll of paper towels, already stained shirts for everyone, bug spray, towel, camera, and a random ball that somehow made it into our sheet-package of goodies. Also a swimming pool (do not bring out until art is complete, so as not to make the artist wish she were swimming instead of painting). Art is NOT low maintenance.

Relish the cleanness of this scene.
Ali thinks that the jars of paint are innocent little blocks. OH just wait.
She starts out VERY timidly. Not sure if she likes being messy, looks up and whines every now and then. “Mom, are you SURE I’m supposed to put my hands in this??”

Starting to get more comfortable with the idea.
Learning the technique of WIDE brush strokes.
Two-handed painting is the best way, right?

You must get your full body into the motion of the paint.
Starting to realize that it is also fun to paint oneself. . .
Up to the wrist in the paint jar.

Kiss the art. Love the art. Become one with the art.
Crawl onto the art.
Bum art.
Gotta taste the paint, and apply it to ALL toes.
The artist posing with the finished piece of art. Happy Birthday, Daddy!

The destruction.
Getting clean in the pool!!
Showing Daddy his present!!
Daddy is thrilled!!!
God decided that He would like a hand in the art as well. It started raining before we realized it (and the painting was drying on the deck), so it now also has spots of water art. It just adds another dimension to the artwork! The NOW finished product:

I always thought that Baby Tylenol was nice and tasty, since Ali LOVES it. I accidentally got some on my hand today and was licking it off to get rid of the sticky, and it is NASTY!! After you get through the sugary part, it tastes just like the awful aftertaste of a real Tylenol when it starts to dissolve in your mouth. I feel so bad for all of the times I’ve given it to her without something to drink afterwards – poor kid!! But she’s not complaining.

I have had two significant (to me) blogger events lately. No, no one has recognized me off the street and said “I know you!! I read your blog EVERY DAY!!!”. [sigh] A girl can dream.

Significant Event #1. I had a hit on my blog referenced from a blog that I didn’t recognize (which does happen semi-regularly, and I always go to the blog, then say “oh! I didn’t know that person was reading my blog! How cool!!”). I clicked on the link, excited to see who was referencing my blog, and Blogger rudely tells me, “You do not have permission to see this blog. You must be on the author’s reading list. You need to submit a request to the owner of the blog to be added to their reading list.” AUGH!!! What frustration!! How will I know who it is to request to be added? I have arrived. I am referenced on a blog I can’t even see. Don’t do that to me, people!! You know curiosity kills me!! I love to be referenced, don’t get me wrong, but don’t keep me from knowing who referenced me! :)

Significant Event #2. I had someone message me on facebook and say that they started a blog because “jealousy of my nice blog was driving them mad”!! Awesome!! I am glad to be a good influence to convince more people to take up this honorable task. I remember the three people whose blogs inspired me, and am so excited that I am now on someone’s blog inspiration (blogspiration??) list!!

Next significant event (should happen by the end of the week): My 10,000th view!! Blogging is so fun – it’s so objective, like me!! :)

Whoo hoo!! Maybe soon someone will recognize me off the street!! :)

Ali has gotten to where she really looks forward to her nightly bible story and prayer time (although sometimes when we ask her who she wants to pray for, she says, “uh uh”. But if we ask again, she’ll always pick one of her favorite people to pray for, Eli or AJ). We sing “The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me, I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E!!” and then she yells out, “BIBLE!!!”.

I had a stressful day yesterday – no REALLY good reasons, just several things (most of them work-related) got to me and had me all stressed out and frustrated. When I went to get Ali up from her non-nap (one of the stressors), she pointed to her bible and said “Bible!!”. So we read a story, which had nothing to do with anything that necessarily spoke into my life, but yet I still felt better – refreshed. Whenever I talk to non-Christians about the supernatural power of God’s Word, they look at me like I’m from a different planet. I explain how I can open God’s Word and it will speak exactly into my situation (and once even used my name in the passage!) and how it can make everything make sense and all better. But yesterday I realized that it’s even more evident that God’s Word can calm, soothe, and offer peace to any situation or feeling when it comes from an obscure Old Testament story read from “The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes”.

Ali and I were in my office today, and she started walking quickly to the door, which faces the laundry room. Right as she got to the door, the dryer did it’s horrible, long, loud buzz (which I don’t think she’s ever heard before since she’s usually napping when I do laundry, but today she didn’t nap long so alas she heard the buzz). She was so shocked that she immediately dropped to the floor, then quickly got up, and ran to me as fast as she could, crying all the way. She clung to me as tightly as she could, whimpering. It was such a funny looking chain of events (the running then immediate drop, up, and run all in about a second and a half) that I kind of chuckled after hugging her for a few seconds. She jerked back and looked at me, like, “How could you LAUGH at this tragedy?!?!?” so I went back to hugging her.