New Year...

I'm tired.  What a busy year.  From pregnancy to having these beautiful twin boys, businesses growing and changing and adding/moving locations, adding a second home in Fort Worth to travel to and from, (with boys in tow, including our Palmer)... packing and unpacking, packing and unpacking, packing and unpacking,  buying and re-buying thousands of diapers and hundreds of formula cans, kissing tiny noses a million times, soothing two million cries, feeding hundreds of Mum Mum snacks, looking under the bed for passies, changing crib sheets-- (COULD SOMEONE PLEASE INVENT SOMETHING THAT MAKES THAT EASIER AND IS ACTUALLY SOFT NOT CRUNCHY SNAP ON SHEETS?! ESPECIALLY FOR ROUND CRIBS!), TRYING to take a nap a thousand times without success, getting to nap twenty times, riding ON the console in the back seat of the car for hours while traveling and making funny faces to entertain our precious boys, taking thousands of pictures, forgetting a million things including my lists of things not to forget, smiling at tiny teeth marks in our wood furniture, kissing my hubs a couple million times... laughing five millions times,thanking the LORD and depending on Him each minute of each day to help me handle all these things... whew, what a busy year.  It was filled with blessings, faith, fun, hope, thankfulness, appreciation, challenges, success, new loves, joy, changes, forgiveness, but most of all, love; love for all these things and each day and each person we got to spend it with.  Sometimes I am not able to show my feelings as well as I wish, or say things the way I really mean, they often get stuck inside or misinterpreted, but hopefully as the time passes I get better and better about this.  Writing this blog is such a fun things for me to get to do and I am hoping for more time to do it... but not counting on it.  :)

There is only one picture with this blog, which I robbed from my sis-in-law's Facebook page, because even though it was on my list, I forgot to pack my camera battery and card reader so all my Christmas pictures are stuck on a tiny piece of plastic in my camera at the moment.  We will head back to FW soon but for now are enjoying this country time with the trees and silence and space.  We are thankful to have the opportunity to have it.

I wish a wonderful new year for each of you and may your  biggest dreams come to pass!  "Divine order", (term from Oprah-- I  know, I know, but I think she IS a very wise woman) happens each second of each day and if we look for the signs of what and where we are to be our Lord is showing it to us each step of the way.  Listen to the tiny voice that is sometimes disguised as your own, as it most likely is His.  Ecclisiastes 3:1-15, "¹ Everything that happens in this world happens at the time God chooses.

 ² He sets the time for birth and the time for death,
   the time for planting and the time for pulling up,
 ³ the time for killing and the time for healing,
   the time for tearing down and the time for building.
 ⁴ He sets the time for sorrow and the time for joy,
   the time for mourning and the time for dancing,
 ⁵ the time for making love and the time for not making love,
   the time for kissing and the time for not kissing.
 ⁶ He sets the time for finding and the time for losing,
   the time for saving and the time for throwing away,
 ⁷ the time for tearing and the time for mending,
   the time for silence and the time for talk.
 ⁸ He sets the time for love and the time for hate,
   the time for war and the time for peace.
 ⁹ What do we gain from all our work?¹⁰ I know the heavy burdens that God has laid on us.¹¹ He has set the right time for everything. He has given us a desire to know the future, but never gives us the satisfaction of fully understanding what he does.¹² So I realized that all we can do is be happy and do the best we can while we are still alive.¹³ All of us should eat and drink and enjoy what we have worked for. It is God's gift.
 ¹⁴ I know that everything God does will last forever. You can't add anything to it or take anything away from it. And one thing God does is to make us stand in awe of him.¹⁵ Whatever happens or can happen has already happened before..."

Here's to a new year and all that it has to offer... and to time!  (and to more babies!)

Love to all,
Mandy!