Snap-EZ Blog

This was taken last Sunday morning! Elizabeth is wearing an adorable dress I found at my favorite consignment store. She just look cute enough to kiss!

She’s enjoying her favorite snack – pretzels!

Take a look at this photo and guess what Elizabeth is doing!

Scroll down for the answer once you have guessed!

Did you guess playing hide and seek?

Did you guess peek a boo?

Did you guess praying?

Well if you did you’re wrong – it you guessed sleeping, then you are right!

I knew she was tired when she came in for lunch, but wanted her to eat before she laid down for her nap. She did eat some cheese and then fell sound asleep! Too cute!

You give them things that are their own – we did this last Christmas. We gave each of the kids their own nice set of towels – each having a different color. We also ordered hand painted and decorated ceramic tiles from Holly at Name Tiles – I found her doing the Great Cloth Diaper Hunt last November. So finally, last week I got this all looking the way I wanted it.

Each child has a 3 prong hook (1 for each towel, washcloth, handtowel, and bath towel), and their name tile mounted on the wall above the hook, with half a travel toothbrush holder mounted to the wall under the name tile for holding their tooth brush (and keeping them out of the reach of toddlers!).

The kids love it, and miracle of miracles, it has stayed nice and everyone is finding it easier to brush their teeth because they know exactly where their toothbrush is (Ok, sometime they forget to put them away, but at least it’s not in a drawer with everyone’s current toothbrush and all the ones from the last 3 years! LOL!).

Here’s picture of all this:

I must give credit for the inspiration to my dear friend Heidi, who is at this moment on her way to Iowa – not for a vacation, but to live – we’ll miss her! She had towels made up for her children a couple of years ago – each one had their names embroidered on it with a little stick person that looked like them (matching hair color and holding something that that child liked!).

And if you are the observant type, yes, there are only 8 sets – of course our oldest is not living at home, but is actually in Korea right now, and our oldest son living at home doesn’t like to use the “kids” bathroom – but that’s OK because the hook racks came with 4 hooks each, so it worked out better that way!

Anyway – thought you might like to see my work of love!

Well, they are not always this bad, but many times I end up getting behind in my laundry. I did this just last week and spent countless hours folding and putting away laundry so it wouldn’t be out when we had that birthday party!

A while ago, I was doing this very same thing and staying up until after midnight folding clothes and when I got done, I was so impressed with my mountain of laundry, I decided it was time to take a picture or two of it.

This is our 8 foot office table that serves as our diningroom table. Mind you, that this is only the clothes of the youngest 7 of our children, our oldest two living at home are responsible for their laundry!

Hope you think of these photos next time you think you have a lot of laundry to do!

Now imagine getting it all put away and starting over again!

OK, enough putting my laundry out – at least it was clean laundry!

We had a really fun birthday on the 17th. We had a Princess Party. No not a Disney infested thing – a “Daughters of the King” party!

All the girls that came received a beautiful cape with holographic butterflies and shiny sequines on a flowing black crepe. They also got a tiera hair comb. We then got permission to apply mascara and lipstick as well as nail polish to really make the girls feel special!

After everyone was all set, we had them all sit down and we had such a nice talk. It was about how so many princess’s today are beautiful on the outside, but ugly on the inside – selfish, vain young girls who think of nothing other than clothes, makeup, and spending more money. But as daughters of the King, Our Almightly God, we must remember that He does not look at what the world looks at, but at our hearts and minds!

So we then talked about how each of the things we did to make our outsides beautiful could represent something on the inside of us that we must take care to make and keep beatiful!

The tiera was on our heads, so we thought that that could be a symbol or keeping our minds pure and thinking on the things above – heavenly things.

The Mascara we put on beautified out eyes, and we should take care that our eyes remain pure – being careful not to look at others as being inferior to ourselves, taking care not to expose out eye to evil things, and also to make sure that we use our eyes to convey love to others, the love of God!

The lipstick was to beautify our mouths. In the Bible it talks a lot about how important it is to keep our speach pure – to avoid saying bad words or hurting people by what we say or lying. But it also says that we should use out mouths to praise out Heavenly Father as well as to tell others of His love for them. We can also use our mouths to encourage others and to build them up.

We also wore a cape. God talks about putting on the full armor of God – Eph 6:10-17 (NIV) …Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armour of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled round your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (I found this quote on http://www.acts17-11.com/armor.html)

God also give us a robe of righteousness in exchange for our rags of sin – Christ blood also covers our sin and makes us presentable for coming into the presence of God (both now in prayer and when we go to heaven).

Lastly, we put on fingernail polish. At the party, I forgot this one, so now I can redeem myself here! We can use our hands for good and not evil. We can use out hands to do the things of God – care for those in need, take care of our family, give affection to those who are hurting, raise them in praise to God, and so much more!

One other really neat thing that happened that day as I was making the capes was I realized that there were butterflies on the capes. Just the week before, when I took our daughters to our church’s “Keepers of the Home” meeting, we learned that butterflies can be used as a symbol or reminder of how God has made us into new creations – we were once ugly in our sin like a catapillar, but when we came to God and found forgiveness, He made us into a new creature like the beautiful butterfly that once was an ugly catapillar! Isn’t that beautiful!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed thinking on these things as much as the girls and I did! Here are a few photos from the birthday party:

Here’s the birthday girl, Rebekah, opening gifts – Jessica spent over an hour putting her long hair into rollers the night before!

Here are some of our princesses – aren’t they beautiful!

Here is Jessica, the cake baker and decorator, lighting the candle, the birthday girl, Rebekah, is next to her.

Here’s a better picture of the cake – didn’t she do a great job – I’m so proud of her!

And here is our show stealer – isn’t she just the cutest thing! Boy is she growing fast, little Elizabeth is seriously into toddler mode and doesn’t stop running and climbing until she crashed for naptime and bedtime!

Well, I hope you enjoyed this as much as we did! I guess you can’t since you can’t taste the cake! LOL!!