Passport grat

I am grateful that today when I went to complete my 'working with children' check at the Post Office that I realised my Passport has actually just run out!!!! I am grateful that I can get onto it now and that I realised before I booked any tickets O.S!!!!! (Yay for being able to fill out the form on line and it was super easy!)

Plus I am grateful that it has made me become more organised with the kids passports and now we are all well underway to having them done:)

Shine!

Since arriving in Thailand, it has been a whirlwind of experiences and emotions.

Discovering where to shop, how to connect mobiles and home phone, get licenses, learn the language... the list goes on.

In particular, deciding on a church is a decision that we are currently making that takes considerable time, planning and energy. It's quite difficult to take 3 small children with us to a different church each week, not knowing what to expect or even if the service will be in English! How I miss those Sundays of familiar surroundings and people.

A time where the children were excited to attend their church program and looked forward to seeing their teachers and friends.

My grat today is for the wonderful, refreshing, challenging women's conference (Shine) I attended last weekend. It was so great to be able to get away by myself and have plenty of time to listen to the messages, sing uninterrupted, "fill up" with lots of encouragement and go back to my family feeling refreshed and ready for the next stint. This was really special for me and a time that I feel particularly grateful to have had.

Kinder Grat

I am so grateful for the beautiful teachers who have made my daughters first experiences of kinder so warm, welcoming and POSITIVE! It's fantastic how much she loves kinder and while I am not saying it will never happen - I have been thoroughly grateful I have not had to battle "I don't want to go Mummy".

I feel thrilled with the way they have integrated the children into a 2 full day per week program. It has been well thought out and very nurturing.

An extra special thing I am grateful for is my Mum who has kindly offered to collect Bella each Thursday afternoon. This routine is just perfect for her and it is with such great anticipation she looks forward to Grandma picking her up... at times I can't tell which one she is more excited about! It is just lovely for me too as I don't have to rush off at 2:45pm either...making it heaps easier for me to do a big stint of work while my little one sleeps!

Definitely lots of gratitude from me when it comes to Thursdays and Fridays!!

I Will

I will smile even when I am discouraged

I will hold my head up while I feel weary

I will remain calm though I feel windswept

I will be peaceful despite the frenzy of problems awaiting

I WILL rest my cares on the shoulder of my heavenly Father

For what else can I possibly do than this?

I WILL wake at the dawn of a new day

And choose be a reflection of the life and love that He is.

A great day!

I'm grateful for a very uplifting day with God, Ash & my church family!

Backspace Button

Have you ever typed a sentence, only to backspace and delete it?

I do this all the time…for many reasons. Sometimes it’s because what I have written has come out the wrong way - it just wasn’t what I was trying to say. Other times it’s because it is worded badly…will anyone even understand what I am getting at? Sometimes it is just because the words are bound up inside and trying to get them out is like scratching and poking at a splinter just hiding beneath the surface of the skin. Whatever the reasons, I backspace a lot!

I wonder if I could backspace in real life…what things would be different. Would I try and backspace the things I have said that were unkind, even cruel at times? I think I’d like to be able to do that. There are even some events in this past year I feel like I would like to ‘backspace’ and delete. The strange thing is however, I know God has allowed these circumstances to occur, and he is using them to help me grow. So I remind myself, does that mean these experiences aren’t painful? Does that mean that I have no emotions attached to them? No of course not. It means that I need to learn to ask God to give me the strength to endure rather than question how can I erase what has just happened to me.

Isn’t that a challenging yet fantastic phrase “God give me the strength to endure” these challenges. This is my prayer at the moment. Each day seems to bring new challenges, new struggles that remind me that I weak, frail, emotional, full of faults and failures. Each day seems to be full of things that I wish I could ‘backspace’ and do again, hoping for a different outcome. But I am confident that as I am reminded of how fragile I am at the moment, that God is my strength, he is my Father and he will help me to ENDURE and overcome. It might not be today or tomorrow but I will begin the see the changes in myself that he is doing. I will begin to see that rather than relying on a backspace to fix my messed up life, I can rely on the real AUTHOR… the one who had plans for me before I was even born. The one who is the beginning and the end and the ONE who doesn’t need a ‘backspace’ button to write the story of my life.

BUG OFF!

It's been a huge week. My hubby and I were furiously racing around getting kids in bed etc on Friday night to finally sit down and spend some time chilling out because we had hardly seen each other this week and low and behold we found a bug infestation in our house! Well it started gradually, first we noticed them in our eldest daughters bed and room. We promptly popped her into our room and began dismantling her room bit by bit. From what we could tell it looked like bedbugs. The more we read about bed bugs the more stressed we became. They nest anywhere and everywhere, you need professional bug killers, you need to HOT wash everything and dry everything in dryer. Often people just burn things or throw them out because they are so extremely difficult to get rid of. So anyway we started doing the hot wash and dry thing to try and begin the clean up process, incredibly one flippin bug made it through alive both the processes!!!!! We were feeling quite discouraged (did I mention tired?) by 2am when we realised they were in most rooms of the house and the piles of clothes and doonas bagged up kept growing. So we fell into bed for 5 hours so I could continue to dream of squishing bugs!! I should mention too that our daughter had bug bites all down her arms which is a common place bed bugs bite. I had them on my feet as I'd been in her bed the night before to settle her. (Prob upset now I think of it, because she was being eaten by those nasty critters!!!)

Anyhoo, we had found a bug inside our pillow so we were pretty worried about the bugs being inside our new mattress (our daughters was very old so we were happy to through it out).

So the next day came around very fast and we soon realised we needed help...Nana came over about lunchtime to take the girls for us and we managed to find a company to come over and spray our house. YAY. You should have seen our house...it looked like a bomb has hit it literally. You could not walk for tripping over massive 60 litre black garbage bags full of clothes, toys, doonas etc.

The bug guys were great. They said they looked very much like bed bugs but didn't think they were big enought to be bed bugs. It took them a while to decide but eventually the verdict was given...they weren't bed bugs BUT of course it was still an infestation so we had them treat the whole house. However it DID mean we didn't have to do all the washing we had originally thought so PRAISE GOD. But since a lot of the stuff was mixed in with dirty clothes, half washed half dried, some still had bugs in it...it still meant for a bit of fun at the good old Luandrette. Now there's a place that I don't frequent very often! So we came home yesterday afternoon to our house that was bug free had very literally been soaked form wall to ceiling! Yep...all the walls, floors, mattresses, couches everything!!! By about 9pm last night after drying out the house it was pretty much all back to normal....what a huge evening it was though putting the clothes away, the rooms back to normal, and thinking man if we were tired Friday night, we are EXHAUSTED now!!!

So how grateful do you think I was when we fell into bed and realised we could have a sleep in this morning because the kids were staying at Nana's house?! YEEHA! Plus, my grat is for the fact they were NOT bedbugs but just very gross bugs that could be killed easily and for the fact that the bug people could come out on the day we called them!

Most of all my grat is that THEY ARE ALL GONE NOW!!!!!