The faith of a child

Kindle ebook link

The fate of our souls is something I think most of us wonder about.  What will happen when I die?  Is there really a Heaven?  If there is, what is it like?

I've been in utter turmoil for a long, long time about the answers to these questions. 

However, as I lay down Friday night, I was blanketed in the kind of peace I haven't felt since I was a child - before I started questioning everything.  That peace was the result of reading the book pictured above.  

If you struggle with your faith, worry about your soul, question whether there is a God or a Heaven, are simply curious, or even if you have a rock solid, unshakable faith in God - read this book. 

To put it very simply, it changed the way I want to approach the rest of my life and solidified the faith that was instilled in me as a child.  The faith that I have been very busy destroying as an adult.

I'm thankful to Claire for recommending this book to me, and I'm thankful to the Burpo family for sharing their story.  (I've put a link to the ebook for the Kindle in the caption above.)

P.S. Also, it's an easy read.  It is very well written.  I read the entire book in one night.  It's not preachy or uncomfortable or hard to understand.  It's very sweet and comforting (although you will cry if you are a crier).

Anabel Lynn

It's Anabel's birthday.  She would have been 4 today. 

When I closed my eyes to wish Anabel a happy birthday this morning, my mind flooded with an image of my sister tip-toeing into a bedroom where my little angel was asleep.  Anabel was snuggled up under the covers with a mass of curls all around her head, framing her sweet face.  

Kayde, my sister, woke Anabel up by wrapping her in her arms and kissing her cheeks while giggling, "Happy Birthday!" into her curls.  

I then saw flashes of my daughter running around a (beautiful) house in a party dress while my sister was in the kitchen preparing food for a party and Anabel blowing out candles on a homemade cake.

They're happy and they're together.  I know it, and that makes me smile.

Happy Birthday, my dear, sweet daughter.  You are missed greatly and thought of often.  We love you!

The War at Home

Michael and I went on our weekend getaway this past weekend.  It was ah-mazing.  There are pictures on my camera, but I don't have the cord necessary to upload them and show them to you.  So, sorry about your luck.

Anyway, we were all compatible and lovey-dovey and pretty sickening and annoyingly in love.  So, I forgot that sometimes we do not love the same things.  Suffice it to say, my guard was down.

For a bit of background, you should know, our movie neutral ground is comedies and action films.  That's what we can safely watch together without one of us resenting the other one for a week and plotting revenge with a movie the other will hate.  The treacherous, land-mine-covered, non-neutral movie ground is chick flicks (my choice) and anything that will give me nightmares (his choice).  

This is going to make you respect me less, but so be it.  Lifetime-type movies fall in the category of crap that gives me nightmares.  They're always so twisted and horrible and gut-wrenching, and I hate them every, single time.  The trick is that they come packaged as chick flicks, and I sometimes fall for it.  My tip-off last night should have been that the lead character was played by Sally Field. 

After we put Silas to bed, we got on Netflix, and I asked to watch Eat, Pray, Love or some documentary about some lost tapes of George Harrison that turned up.  He innocently suggested I might like An Eye for an Eye instead because it's a vigilante justice movie (also in the vein of crap I like) and a chick flick (and he would rather be punched repeatedly in the face than watch Eat, Pray, Love).  

He had already seen An Eye for an Eye before and failed to mention that I would be crying/horrified within the first 10 minutes of the movie (no, seriously, sobbing-and-checking-on-my-child-50-times horrified).  

He tricked me y'all.  He tricked me into watching the most creepy, twisted movie I've seen in a while by selling it to me as a chick flick (and on the heels of our "I-love-you-so-much-let's-make-the-rest-of-the-world-vomit-at-out-sweetness" weekend).

I had to stay up past my bedtime and watch a Trailer Park Boys movie just so I could sleep.  Now I'm at work chugging coffee and doing Google searches for "girliest movie ever."

This means war.

My buddy and me, revised

I have a confession.  Last week, I started writing a post about my friend who is playfully hateful to me for being such a "boy" (for lack of a better way to express it) all the time.  Since I told him I was going to put him on blast on my blog,  he has asked me every day whether/when I'm going to do it.  He's worked himself up into a frenzy, and now I'm just kind of torturing him.

Without further ado, here is what you've been so worried about, friend:

Do you have a gay male friend who talks bad about your eyebrows and tells you that you're butch and informs you that you need to take a Tide pen to your shoes and constantly "shh's" you because you're so loud?  I do.  I think he even called me frumpy once.

Don't get me wrong, he has his good points.  He's a wealth of information about decorating and dressing myself, but all the information he imparts seems to be bouncing off of me and hitting the floor.  

I think he's monumentally disappointed that I conduct myself in a manner befitting a character from In the Middle rather than one from Will and Grace. He's probably secretly resenting me for being in no way, shape or form "fabulous." 

Frankly, he can take a number and get in line. 

The truth is, that if he was really my Will and I was really his Grace, he'd realize that I'm hopeless when left to my own devices and just stage an intervention already. 

Update: He also plays mind games and makes you think you've hurt his feelings for posting things about him on your blog and causes you to delete your posts and write him hand-written apologies in near tears only to then laugh in your face for believing his feelings were ever really hurt.  Evil genius.

My elevator rant

Wanna know something else I don't like?  (Clearly because this blog is full of things that annoy me.)

Elevators.  

There are so many things to loathe about them.  Like they're gross and claustrophobic and always smell weird and sometimes people talk on their cell phones in them when they're crowded - and worse - sometimes people make awkward elevator small talk with me (I hate all awkward small talk).

One of my biggest pet peeves is being trapped on an elevator with several other people and their perfumes and their take out food and their cell phones and their awkward small talk for any longer than ten seconds. 

I have to take two separate elevators to get from my car to my office when I drive myself to work, so I also take issue with whoever designed this building.  Do better if you design buildings for a living or if you ride elevators ever at all.  Hang up your phone, wear less perfume and quit talking to me about the weather.

I've been published

Finally, someone has recognized the genius of my work and published me. 

Update:  It did not occur to me that someone may think I was talking about myself.  No, I'm not Melissa.  I'm not trying to cleverly communicate anything to you other than the fact that UrbanDictionary.com allowed me to define a word that my friends and I started using while I was pregnant with Silas. 

For the gamer in my life

My husband is a gamer.  There, I said it.  I married a gamer.

Anyway, he's always trying to get me to play different video games with him, but I grew up with Nintendo consoles, and (this is not a slam to Nintendo at all - they will always be my #1) Nintendo games are usually far less complex than PlayStation games.

For instance, when I play Call of Duty (which for anyone who has not been blessed to live with a gamer is a game that basically entails hiding behind burned-out cars and shooting people), I inevitably wind up getting shot 436 times while I'm trying to figure out how to point my gun at whoever is shooting me (but I'm pulling the trigger, so I'm shooting walls and the ground and random passers-by and sometimes I end up waking the baby for venting my frustration at the game).

So, since I have clearly failed at playing his favorite game, Michael has been on the hunt to find a video game we can play together.  

This week, I have watched trailers and played demos like it's my job, but I have not been able to help but notice that none of what has been created for Sony's PlayStation takes me back to my childhood love of Mario and Luigi.
  

Until....

that creepy little doll walked in and won my heart and caused me to deem the creator of Little Big Planet (2 - Little Big Planet 2 was actually what I played) a genius.  

If you live with a gamer and you are video-game-playing-challenged but want to reach out to your gamer, YouTube Little Big Planet or Google it or just go buy it.  Not one time did I find myself trapped in a bombed-out building shooting a gun at a ceiling.  Not once.