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Showing posts from December, 2008

New Year's Eve

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome in the new, be blessed in the coming year!

Thankful Thursday ~ Christmas Past

A Thankful Thursday post on Christmas Day? Yes, indeed! Log onto to Grace Alone and be inspired as we celebrate the birthday of Jesus today! The theme is thanking God for a special Christmas memory of the past. A past Christmas memory for me that is meaningful was the Christmas I got engaged to my husband. It was hard to focus on the true meaning of Christmas that year. Family traditions surrounded us, but all I wanted to do was be with my man and dream about our future wedding day and talk about the life we would build together. Christmas morning came and my fiance knocked on the front door very early and whisked me off to the first church service so we could spend the whole day together. It was snowing when he picked me up and still snowing when he took me home that night. So we planned a summer wedding! Today, our daughters are grown, and we became grandparents this year. It's been a wonderful life of career challenges, raising children and working at keeping our love

Thankful Thursday

I've been enjoying the thankful random thoughts at Grace Alone. There is so much to thank God for at this wonderful time of year! I would like to thank Jesus for becoming a man even though he was God. As I meditate on my manger scene, I think about the John 1:14 verse …”and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” Jesus, the Word, became flesh. He was born of a woman, nurtured to adulthood, and died on the cross so that we who accept his sacrifice for our sin can be free. He’s the perfect sacrifice! The cross is a simple message, but loaded with power as I dwell on the humility of Jesus. I’m so thankful. Jesus rescued me!

A Holiday With Lots of Family!

We’ve been enjoying an early Christmas celebration with family from Chicago who spent ten days with us. We’ve enjoyed laughing, baking, cooking, crying, sunny days, and overcast days together. Our many activities ranged from eating out at the Cheesecake Factory to a lot of cooking together in my kitchen with my Italian brother-in-love, baking Christmas cookies with my Sis like we use to do when we were little, a cooking lesson for Polish Sausage & Saurkraut, making homemade Christmas cards for the troops, hiking in Sedona, attending the Christmas Display of Lights at the Los Abrigados Resort in Sedona, and driving up to Flagstaff for a day at the Mall. We spent a few days in San Diego to see Susanna and her parents! They took all of us out for Mexican food when we arrived. Carrie planned fun activities for us the next day, too, including homemade waffles, a trip to Coronado to see the ocean, and opening her home to the neighbors for a pizza party with lots of homemade Biscotti

Family Fun in San Diego

Coronado Beach

Los Abrigados Christmas Light Walk

Hiking

An Arizona Hike

I haven't been hiking much this fall, but I had lunch with some friends, Peggy and Mary Jane, who told me all about their fun hike to Cockscomb Butte. These are a few favorote photos of mine. We've been enjoying a very mild autumn here in the Verde Valley. It's been perfect for hiking.

Thanksgiving Memories 2008

We spent Thanksgiving in the traditional fashion with recipes we’ve grown to love over the past years, lots of photo ops, games and tense moments that typical families face when we’re not all alike or maybe too much alike! We have so much to be thankful for: each other, our jobs, good health, and the amazing grace of Jesus! We’re overcomers and this year we had to overcome a power outage the day before Thanksgiving for four hours and 2.5 inches of accumulative rain, which, where we live, could have been a problem but wasn’t. Traveling with a baby was not easy, but oh, so worth it. We play a game in our family called the Ungame. It keeps our communication alive and reminds us to listen to one another. The story of this game’s beginning is interesting. The creator, Rhea Zakich, lost her voice for several months and was frustrated by how hard it was to communicate with her family. She would write questions on slips of paper of what she wanted to ask her family and what she hoped