Love, Prayers, and a Freebie ....lol

hiya everyone....
well after the last post, several things have happened and one in particular really drove home the importance of letting those you love know it now...not tomorrow, not next time you see them, NOW....

I got a phone call at 7:30 this morning from my cousin Heather. She was calling to tell me that our 23 yr old cousin, Nathan, was driving way too fast, not wearing a seatbelt, and veered off the road and hit a culvert/bridge abutment and was killed instantly....

no time for "good-byes" or last minute "i love you"s....no time for my aunt to take his face in her hands, look him in the eye and say "baby, no matter how much you mess up or have messed up, i love you more than you will ever know".....not even a chance to sit at his hospital bedside and get out all the unsaid things in hopes that he heard it through the fog of a coma....nothing....
My uncle asked the question "Is there really a God?....because if there is I am SO mad at him right now".....my aunt replied, "yeah...there is...and i am too..."...he said "then we need to get to church because i need to know there is some hope that maybe my boy is alright now"....
Nathan left behind an almost 6 yr old son, 5 nieces and nephews, 2 sisters and a brother, and his parents....my prayer is that they had all said their "i love you"s and "you are something to me"s....
sorry to start this off with such a downer of a post, but it just feels so very important to me right now to let everyone who will hear or read know that God loves you (whether you believe or follow Him or not) and that whether it feels like it or not, there are people all around you who love you (online and off)....
If you are someone I talk to at all and I haven't told you lately, I am telling you now, I love ya...and i don't say that lightly....I would name you, but then i would, without a doubt, forget someone very important to me and i would feel like crap...so you know who you are....
please be praying for our family and friends who are mourning this loss...and please pray for traveling mercy and protection over all of us who have to travel to be together in the coming week for the funeral and such....thanks :)

ok...on to brighter things....

My kids are getting excited. Fall is upon us, the weather has changed for the better, leaves are changing and it is time to start decorating and celebrating the upcoming holidays....:) I am happy b/c it is picture takin' season again :D....
The boys will be staying with my mom & sister (they live across from one another) while I am away at the funeral and Mom is taking them to a local Canal Days festival...they are really looking forward to it (esp Elijah)....
Tink will be going with me on the 4 hour trip, which should be interesting with her new found training skills...eek!....she did "the other" all by herself TWICE tonight....so that means all day she had a grand total of ZERO accidents of ANY kind!!!! (this is the first day ever for that)....I am pretty proud of her ;)...
Mike said "i love you" to me twice tonight out of nowhere, just in passing....it made me feel pretty awesome...

now onto scrapping things....
I now have a CT :)...I will be giving the BIG announcement soon (i wanna do it with fanfare and all that jazz and not after a somber post)...but I will be on the look out for a couple guest CTMs within a week or two soooooooo I will be on watching for anyone who uses my stuff or who sports my fan blinkie (and I will have my li'l hillbilly helpers doing the same!) to fill those spots....
here is the blinkie if you wanna shot at it!

now for your freebie....this was going to be a mini-kit in my store at OneOfAKindScrapz, but with everything happening, I just wanted to give you guys something for all the nice things you have said/done for me, and I also didn't know if I would get it in the store before Halloween....so here you go....it is only slightly screamable....;)
it includes one 12x12 inch paper & 3 doodles (each one comes as just the doodle and as a sticker, for a total of 6 elements)...let Punkin Dewdell and WitchyWoo brighten up your layouts of your li'l ghouls and boos this Halloween....
click on preview to be taken to the download...
PLEASE leave some love here if you like the freebie....it really makes my day :)





I have actually scrapped a bit :)...here are some of my most recent ones....(click on preview to be taken to the credits...)
This one is of Elijah on the first day of school...even though it was the FIRST day, he was SO bored waiting on the bus without Lane, that he almost didn't know what to do with himself!...he was so nervous (i think he was a bit excited, but mostly nervous) and was really acting goofy to cover it...it was a perfect example of Bus stop Boredom...



This was for a challenge, and also for my guest spot on Kris Myers' CT....it really shows how my family deals with nearly everything...we laugh...through tears, through gritted teeth, through it all we love and we laugh in order that we might live a little better....the photos are of my daughter (lol our early attempts at potty training made her laugh at us, and us laugh through gritted teeth), my brother & sister & I at my sisters wedding after goosing each other during a photo shoot, my sons just being goofy last summer, my dh making his silly smiling face at the park, my 3 and my 2 nephews laughing after shocking each other at the end of the slide (it generates a LOT of static), my 3 laughing b/c one of them supposedly um uh "tooted" while i was taking their picture, my son going "airborne" b/c my dd "kicked" him while swinging (it was totally staged which made it all the funnier), DH Me & the kids posing for our Valentine's Day pic, and my 3 and my nephews again just laying "around"....lol see we find "funny" in everything from the day to day to the dys"fun"ctional ;)




I have so many photos of my 3 kids that i have not scrapped....these are just a few of them that I have taken in the 3 yrs since Tink was born....I really liked the way this turned out (and it was made using my Li'l Bluebirch Kit, so it made it even more special to me :D )


This one I did for the Not Just a Template Challenge at OAKS...I loved the way it turned out...
I used my Hallow-teen Paper Pack to make everything, and I used pics of Tink's first trip to the pumpkin patch...I loved using older photos that I haven't scrapped :D


and last, but not least I did an "all about me" one for the Embellishment Explosion Challenge at OAKS...these are all photos of me from Sept of 2006 until March of 2007...I no longer have my tongue ring (lol i would if Mike wasn't opposed to them probably), but it was all part of who I was and who i was becoming :)....each of the words on the layout describes a piece of me...not who I am, but why I am who I am :) did that make a lick of sense?...


remember that no matter how bad we have it....someone else has it worse...
See your trouble as your servant, not as your master and realize that often our problems are simply our prophecy...God uses our trials to build us up and put us where we need to be...so after a test, which do you choose: a testimony....or just the moanies?...;)