My 99th Post~The Liebster Award

• The Liebster Award is given to bloggers by other bloggers.

• It is intended for bloggers with less than 200 followers (basically as a way to introduce that blog to others and make new blogging friends).

• Liebster is a German word that means dearest...

1.  What has been your greatest blogging challenge?  Taking time to post is definitely challenging here.  I always have more than plenty of pictures & moments of ideas & thoughts to share.  However, it takes precious time to load & edit the pictures & type up a post. 

2.  What's your favorite guilty pleasure? This would most definitely be my mad skills of eating Ghirardelli double chocolate brownie batter with added chopped pecans, especially when I'm stressed!  It's amazing how rich desserts accompanied with a coke bring pleasure for an instant!  All of my troubles seem to vanish if only for a moment!

 3.  Which blog post are you most proud of and why?  For the 1st time ever, I just read through all of my old blog posts.  I enjoyed the birthday & trips as I was able to relive each on memory lane.  The modesty video from February 2014 is still awesome to me!  I didn't come up with it though, I just shared it with all of you.  Several more serious posts still reflect my heart.  One of my favorites is "What Else Would I Do?" from April 2012.  It centers around a quote copied from Simply 

Farmhouse & sums up the way I feel about my life perfectly:   

                                           
                                                                                "The woman who makes

a sweet, beautiful home,

filling it with love

and prayer and purity,

is doing something better

 than anything else

 her hands could find to do

                                                                            beneath the skies."                                                  

 4.  Who has inspired you most in your life?  Overall, my parents are my greatest inspiration!  Mama is the most unselfish person ever!!!  Her priority is our family being together, holidays & any day!  1st thing every morning she usually calls.  She finds out our plans & asks how she can help.  She lives to spend time with her grandbabies, who argue over who's turn it is to spend the night with them by themselves.  Both of my parents have always been hard workers.  Mama taught 1st grade for 30  years.  This way she kept our same school schedules.  She retired just in time for her 1st grandchild to be born.  When my sister & her husband delivered their twins, she literally lived with them Monday-Fridays for 6 months & kept them every day until they started to school since both of them worked.  Daddy works overtime all the time!  He foots the bill for all the family vacations & even built us all a cypress cabin on the river to enjoy.  Every weekend though his work is put aside as he is found grilling a variety of delicious meats on his way too many grills.  He makes sure we all love the outdoors.  We can fish right off the dock or hop in one of the boats.  We also enjoy all the different kinds of hunting in our area literally right out the back door of the cabin.  Lots of time we just ride the golf cart around watching the deer & hogs mow down the food plots.  They both made preparations long ago for this future.  They have worked so hard & saved to spend on us.  They make sure we all have plenty of everything.  For them I am truly inspired!  My greatest earthly desire is for my family of 7 to be just that close!   

 5.  What's your favorite book?  Besides the Bible, my favorite of all time book is Why Am I So Busy by Valorie Burton.  It was an eye opener for me!

 6.  Would you rather spend the day at the beach or junking at a flea market?  O my!  Can't a girl do BOTH???  Too hard to choose!  I LOVE any kind of shopping especially for antiques & traveling, but my favorite author would lead me to choose the latter.  Simply put, shopping really just accumulates more stuff whereas traveling with your family creates those moments in which memories are made to last forever!   

 7.  What's your favorite flower?  Daylilies must be my favorite since I have many planted.  They are beautiful bloomers & multiply with little care!  Gerber daisys would run a close 2nd for all the same reasons!

 8.  Assuming it was nice weather, would you rather go for a hike or stay indoors  

with a good book?  I would definitely choose to read!  Although I love the outdoors, we live in flat country and I am by no means the biggest fan of exercise.  I enjoy eating healthy & even walking, but hiking is out of my league.

 9.  What is your biggest priority for 2015?  As always, my heart's desire is to draw closer to the Lord.  All of these earthly things shall pass away.  I also want to make my best effort to share that love with my children.  In the end that is all that really matters!

10.  What 5 things would top your gratitude list?  When counting my blessings, our healthy family of 7, our relationship with God, the blessing of homeschooling my children, the love we share for traveling & spending time together whether it be near or far, & our beautiful property where my hardworking husband walks right over to his dream shop every day to earn our living & where our kiddos run & play definitely TOP the list!  

11.  Are you more likely to spend on a vacation or home improvements?  Lol what an easy question!  Any of you that know me know I'd definitely choose vacation!  Don't get me wrong, I love antiques and am blessed with a talented decorator for a mother.  Thanks to her, we live in a home decorated like Southern Living!  You can take the tour in an older post from September 2012.  Yet, it is a mobile home that is as old as me.  We take care of it, but it is still a trailer.  We have moved and moved it too!  We spent every bit of our savings in the last year buying our dream property & building Nathan's new taxidermy shop.  Thus, we have put off building a new home.  We are extremely happy with that decision.  The kiddos don't even want to part with it.  It's home to all of us!  I wouldn't mind building someday or buying a historic home to move here, but that is not what life is all about to me & our family.   

11 random facts about me.

I can sew.  I do not necessarily enjoy it, but I can & will do it.

I love pictures...having tons of pictures taken of my kiddos is a necessity for me.  I love looking back at the precious memories.  I love framing them all around our home & also scrapbooking (if I ever have the time that is).

I have this crazy obsession with touching up our paint in our house every year.  Originally, I painted each room myself with help from few family members.  I still like all of the colors but can't stand it to look marked up.  Thankfully Benjamin Moore paints touch up very well!  I don't even enjoy doing this, but can't make myself stop!

Of all the places I've traveled, I've only flown once & cruised once in my life time thus far.  My mama flew my sister & I to NYC several years ago.  That was absolutely the BEST!  My parents also kept our kiddos for us to cruise to the Bahamas on our 5th anniversary.  Soon will be our 14th & we haven't been anywhere big since.  Instead, we have welcomed 3 more kiddos!  :)  Maybe on our 15th we will plan something exciting again...

I am not shy.  My favorite class in school was speech & drama.  I'm pretty sure everyone else in those classes got stuck with them.

I never planned my family to be this big, but wouldn't change that for the world!  I did want several children, and we thought we were done with our 3 girls neatly spaced 3 1/2 years apart.  God planned otherwise.  I thought I would never adjust to having 3 under 3 but somehow I have learned to thrive through the craziness!  What a blessing these surprise boys have been!

  

I am not a vehicle person.  I wouldn't care a bit if I drove a pink punch bug or a big yellow bus.  To me it is just a mode of transportation & nothing more.  If it runs great, has plenty of room for all of us, doesn't break us, & isn't so dirty that it stinks terribly, I am happy with it even with a little trash in the floor board!

I don't really like animals.  I don't mind them, but I don't just love them.  What I do love is for them to be tended to by someone else.  I will buy them & it's food, pen, etc but I really don't want to take care of them.period.

As a child, I hated to read books.  I graduated salutatorian of my class with only having read 1 book for a book report on Corrie Ten Boom.  I really enjoyed it & glad I read it but honestly I picked it because it was the shortest on the list.  That all has changed in the last several years.  So for moms that their kids hate to read, there is hope!

I love to buy containers & organize.  Crazy right?  Those bins & labels just seem to call my name though.  Thankfully the Dollar Tree sells them.  You could come into our home right now to find a load of clothes that need folding on the couch, several loads in the laundry room that need washing, a few toys scattered in the floor, a dishwasher needing unloading, a few dishes that could be put into it, furniture that hasn't been dusted in several days, but you can open any drawer, cabinet, or closet and everything will be lined up & sorted very neat & orderly.  I don't where I get that from.  I just like everything to a have place.  It may not always be in it's place, but it certainly has a labeled one none the less.

We do not have cable or any type of satellite television.  We are not freaks about it.  Yes, our children know all of the major famous characters.  We do not forbid our children to never watch anything.  In fact we all probably enjoy watching too much.  We just prefer to have some reasonable amount of control over the large majority of what they view.  Images and language are impossible to erase from impressionable minds.  My older girls are addicted to Little House on the Prairie & all of ours love Veggie Tales.  I encourage my littles to watch Leap Frog & all of them to watch anything educational.  We spend a lot of quality time with one another without having a television set in our home that more than likely would constantly be turned on.    

Top Bloggers I have nominated:

Grace. Mercy. Peace. ~This blog has inspired me for years!  It is a dear friend of mine from our local homeschool group.  She introduced me the blogging world & was who encouraged me to blog!

Love Grows In Little Houses ~One of my best friends just started this blog!  It has already challenged me in mighty ways!

This is the Good Life ~A homeschool mom of many!  She has one in college, one married that is expecting, a small baby of her own, & several in between.  She encourages me that our efforts are not in vain...that it is possible for our children to grow up into sweet, responsible adults that still love their parents. 

All of you may copy & post the questions.  Don't forget the random facts either!

Simply Farmhouse ~Of course I would nominate this one too but she was the one to nominate me after her nomination!  This is my husband's aunt.  She has raised 3 girls of her own & now raising 2 girls adopted from China.  She is such an encouragement & her thoughts always challenge me to be a better wife & mother. 

All of these can be viewed from my blog's right side bar.  I enjoy all of the others in that list too, but if you click on them you will see that they are sadly more neglected than not.  A few famous ones that I enjoy include Ann Voskamp's Holy Experience, Valorie Burton's personal blog that is accessible from her web site, & Mom Mastery.  What are your favorite blogs?  Please share!!!