Tired

Do you ever just feel tired? It's been three weeks and I feel...not rested. Listless. Blah.

Can I tell you something that it's not? I'm not depressed. I'm very touchy on that subject. I was depressed when I was 14 and doctors hear me say that (you have to disclose these things) and immediately dismiss any of my concerns. Oh, it was because of that. I get so frustrated that I cry and that obviously doesn't help my case.

I think I know what I want, but how do I know that's what I'm meant to do? Steve is getting the rejection letters and everything is just the way it was.

Hebrews 11 is good. To have faith that God is faithful.

And I believe He is. I'm not sad. I know that when He needs it to happen, it will. I'm not angry...I've been here for three years and Abraham did this all for like, 100. It's just that I'm tired and nothing seems to be making me less tired.

Vote For Girls Power 2 Cure Inc.

I've met some really awesome people through blogs. One of them is Kelly. She has two children: Brooklyn, who has Rett syndrome, and Boston. Kelly works for Girls Power 2 Cure, which is trying to cure Rett syndrome. They're part of Chase Community Giving on Facebook.

Here's what Kelly has to say about it:

What's the big deal? Well, this will knock your socks off! First place gets a $250,000 grant and 2-5th place gets a $100,000 grant! This would be an amazing step forward for our organization, as well as all the girls suffering from Rett Syndrome.

Our mission is to grow every dollar that comes into Girl Power 2 Cure ten times before we grant it to support the research projects of the Rett Syndrome Research Trust.

Here is what we need you to do:

Place a vote for us! Go to http://www.gp2c.org/ to get started! Not on Facebook? It is as easy as entering your name and email to get an account set up.

Then, spread the word! Ask your Facebook friends to vote, post on your blog, Tweet it, email your contacts, sing it from the rooftops, whatever you've got!

Remember, just go to http://www.gp2c.org/ to learn all about this and cast your vote. This is an amazing way to show your support and bring awareness to our organization at the same time.

If you want to go straight to the Facebook page, check it out below!

To vote, click here.

Gone Tomorrow!!!

Hair Today...

Gone Today!

That's right...it's the end of the road and I'm shaving my head tonight.

If you want to see my progress so far, check out this link:
http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/mypage/participantid/403897

Otherwise, check back in a day or two for bald photos!!!

Prayer Request

My sister was dating a guy for three years and he was fine. He was okay. She broke up with him and he's now boarding on stalking her.

He has a conceal and carry permit.

Please pray for her safety.

He Always Knows What To Say To Me

Agime, a woman I love to talk to at work, is from Albania and was talking about how her son needed a good Albanian woman (and then apologized to me since I'm American) and I texted my husband to say that I was feeling like a bad wife. Here's what he said:

You are a great wife! We are not in Eastern Europe, women burnt bras so men would do housework.

He is the most ridiculous man in my life and I wouldn't have it any other way! I love you, Steve!

A Fisherman's Prayer

Dear God, be good to me.
The sea is so wide and my boat is so small.

I want...

I want to eat meat.
I want to buy beer with my husband.
I want to get raspberries and fruits!!

But it's not within the budget. So we'll have to wait a few more weeks.

It's interesting. We're not even being too too strict (my sister-in-law and her boyfriend, as well as their child are coming to visit us and you know, those things go out the window with guests) and it's still hard!

A word of advice: if printing coupons from a computer, make sure that you use a darker black or a color printer. There are little circles in those online coupons and, at least at Shop Rite, if they can't see them (I was the only one who could out of 4 of us), they won't take your coupon.

An example of our not being strict:


I took my husband to Boston to celebrate his birthday a bit late (or, you know, 3 months late) and we didn't spend too too much there, except for dinner. :) I know, I know! I'll be better.

To Be Bald

I always told my husband that I was just going to shave my head. Or that I had shaved my head. And he would always say 'No!' or 'Yeah, right.'

Well...I've got 11 days before I'm doing it and he'll be watching. :)

My husband said that he was a conscientious objector to my head shaving and I finally got him to say why.



It's our 11 year dating anniversary coming up. He's been with me through thick and thin (and I mean that in all sorts of ways). We grew up in a small town and well...I was fat (though he would say he never noticed that and he thinks I'm crazy) and I was a nerd and I was made fun of.

And my husband said that he didn't want me to be fun of like that. To get the stares like I used to. In high school, I even got pointed and laughed at. When I brought it up in class, someone said, 'If you don't want people to talk about you, you shouldn't dress like that.' My response was, 'I don't care if people talk about it, but I thought we were older than pointing and laughing.'

We were. But that's besides the point. ;)

My husband was afraid I would get that. At the same time, we do live in New York City and I think that if I had an arm growing out of my head, people still wouldn't notice.

I've got 11 days and we now have 13 shavees!! Wish me luck! I'll take any and all prayers that we hit our goal of $10,000. As for my hair, BRING IT ON, BABY!!

If you want to see my progress so far, please visit here:
http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/mypage/participantid/403897

The Blame Game

There's a service every other Thursday at our church where people give the message. Today is my day! I'm a bit nervous, but I thought I'd share my message with you.

It's a bit long, but it is supposed to be like a 10 minute sermon. It's on blaming God.
________________________________________________________________________________

I was at a Sara Groves concert and she told us a story about Vedran Smajlović, a cellist who was part of the Sarajevo String Quartet. He was sitting at his window one day when he watched a bomb fall from the sky onto a bread line, killing 22 people.


I have to wonder if he asked where God was in that moment.


MSNBC was reporting on Haiti and the story that I remember most was a 2-year-old girl being treated for gonorrehea after being raped.


Where was God for her?


Steve and I walked through a slum in Ethiopia, where they were burning dead dogs and rubber where the children were playing and where a woman brought me into her home to show me a picture of her young son, no older than 8 years old, who had died 4 months earlier from the same disease she was dying from.


Sometimes, you just want to look to the sky and scream, 'Why?'


There are so many things that happen in this world that we just can't explain and the words of Jeremiah seem very, very far away. Jeremiah 29:11 says, 'For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.' But there are days when we can't see that promise, days when loved ones die, when we lose our jobs, when we see a disaster that couldn't have been avoided. We turn to God and say, 'it's all your fault.'


We've been doing that for years. YEARS. Even Adam and Eve took to blaming God. In Genesis 12, Adam says "The woman YOU put here with me—SHE gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." Does it get any more pointed then that? YOU did this. You.


We’ve perfected it over time, I think. We blame the restaurants that we’re overweight, we blame the government for the greed of banks. I think it’s more frightening when we blame things like Hurricaine Katrina on abortion, the earthquake in Haiti on the voodoo of their ancestors or the deaths of our soldiers because the United States is beginning to accept homosexuals in society.


When we look at the world and the pain we find in it, it’s easier to accept that God is angry with us, rather than a loving God who would so willingly let us suffer. But, as I was thinking about this, I came to think that maybe it’s easier to blame a loving God, because we feel that He should have been for us. Anger is what we deserve, but when He says that He loves us...and we get THIS...it’s hard to comprehend.


Ellie Wiesel's 'Night,' a book that follows Mr. Wiesel’s horror-filled years in a concentration camp, speaks so clearly to the pain we feel in this world and how we turn to God, in our inability to understand how He could love us and still bring us to this point, and just say, 'How could You?'


A pain so acute and biting, so soul-wrenching that Weisel quotes one of his fellow concentration camp members as saying 'I've got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He's the only one who's kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.'


But I don't think God is indifferent to our suffering. And for as much as Weisel threw his anger at God, I think there was a part of him that understood the pain as well. Later on, he describes watching a 14-year-old boy being hanged from the gallows:


Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

"For God's sake, where is God?"

And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where is He? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."


God feels our pain. God knows our suffering. The cross reminds us of that. Jesus suffered and died for us, he felt pain, he was tempted. He felt anguish and frustration and he cried out to God, take this cup away from me! Not only did Jesus ask for the cup to be taken away, but he asked for it to be taken and knew the reason behind his pain. Jesus knew why. It’s somewhat comforting to know that even God’s son cried out, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ even though He knew it was for the best, that it was what needed to happen.


Adam and Eve blamed God because it was easier to say that God hurt us rather than look at themselves and see the evil that was within. I don’t think that God wants to be away from us. But when Adam and Eve let sin into the world, God had to walk out of the garden. In His perfection, it hurt to see imperfection take over his beautiful creation. But he couldn’t leave us alone and He never really has.


God has shown us throughout the Old and New Testaments how the bad in our lives makes us who we are, how the bad in the world, can sometimes be what saves us. He cures in a way that we can’t understand when our hearts are aching. Moses was a murderer who was driven out of the only home he’d ever known. Abraham waited for years and years and YEARS before God blessed him with what he’d always wanted. David was an adulterer. In their darkest moments, they may have felt deserted, but they grabbed on to God’s promises and refused to let go. And God wouldn’t leave them. They were His beloved. And so are we, even when we hurt.


I’ve always had a problem with that, being loved. I’ve never really loved myself. I am critical of who I am and how I look. I overanalyze whether I lied to a homeless person about having money or whether or not my butt is too big or if I should just swallow my pride and not get angry with my boss. I am not good enough for God. I guess that’s blaming God too. Less of a turning to the sky, but more of a turning to the mirror. To look at God’s creation and say that it’s just not good enough.


That’s a bit easier to understand, when we compact it into and onto ourselves. If only I had been two feet taller or 10 pounds lighter. If only I was kinder or more normal. If only. I wonder if the lepers Jesus healed ever looked at their blistered hands and feet and say, ‘God, if only...’ Jesus understood and Jesus saw past all of those worldly things, society’s disgust and pride, and sees past those worldly things in each and every one of us. Jesus knows our fear and our hurt and knows what it means to say, ‘God, if only...’ and has offered to carry that burden for us. To guide us in our faith to trust that God’s plan will always turn out all right.


Faith is not knowing that everything will be blindingly brilliant, that our lives will be beacons to those around us and that we will have those 2.5 children and a white picket fence and live happily ever after. Faith is not having all the answers. Faith is knowing that we will see pain, that we will experience unanswerable suffering, suffering that feels so heavy and unending, but that we are not suffering alone. We have never suffered alone and we never will. The cross assures us of that.


God will bring us comfort like streams in the desert and pull us to the other side through our pain in ways we would never have imagined. The cellist of Sarajevo took his cello into the crater of the bomb and played in mourning for 22 days for the people who had died in the bread line. As the shells and the bombs fell all around him, he played to honor those people and his act is credited as helping bring the atrocities of the Siege of Sarajevo to the international press. The image I see in the mirror is a little bit more beautiful each day. And the people we met in Ethiopia...I think they changed our hearts more than we could ever change theirs.


Our God is a God of love, of promises and of new beginnings, in both our dire and everyday circumstances. There will always be hurt, but we will always make it through. Because He knows the plans He has for us, plans to prosper us and not to harm us, plans to give us hope and a future.

So...How's It Been Going?

Well, so far, so good!

Though we did splurge on a quart of ice cream. But it was on sale for $2.50!

So far, we've been able to keep within our budget. We've started printing out coupons and looking at our grocery store flier and paying attention to the coupons that our grocery store gave us (I got a free thing of mashed potatoes! How awesome is that?!)

I've made two recipes: 1) my husband normally eats breakfast bars (which are really freaking expensive!) and he was running out, so I made him chocolate-chocolate chip muffins to take to work. They turned out really well and I was able to freeze some so that he could eat them over a few weeks and not all in one week.

Recipe number 2 is a miracle recipe...and I say that because my husband HATES soup, but he said that he'd be willing to try it.

So here you go:

Potato And Cheese Soup

I didn't follow all the directions completely. Like I pureed some of the soup instead of adding cornstarch. It wasn't as thick as I would have liked it, but I didn't want to go buy cornstarch.

I also added some cayenne pepper to it, which added a nice flavor. I liked it!

The cheese was weird and didn't completely melt like it should have. Don't use Kraft 2% shreds in this.


Ingredients

* 6 potatoes - peeled and cubed
* 1 carrot, chopped
* water to cover
* 3 stalks celery, chopped
* 1 onion, chopped
* 1/2 cup margarine
* 4 cups milk
* salt and pepper to taste
* 2 tablespoons chicken soup base
* 8 ounces processed cheese food, cubed
* 1 tablespoon cornstarch
* 1/2 cup milk

Directions

1. In a large pot over high heat, combine the potatoes and carrot with water to cover and boil for 10 to 15 minutes, or until tender.
2. In a separate large skillet over medium heat, saute the celery and onion in the margarine for about 10 minutes.
3. Drain all but about 2 cups of the water from the potatoes and carrots and replace with milk. Reduce heat to low and season with salt and pepper to taste.
4. Transfer the onion and celery mixture to the pot and stir in the chicken soup base. Heat slowly, then add the cheese. Allow the cheese to melt, stirring all together well.
5. In a small bowl, dissolve the cornstarch in the 1/2 cup milk and pour into the soup. Mix well until thickened.

I have a photo...I'll have to add it sometime...

The Rules

So it's hard to do $2 a day without setting any ground rules. Especially since everyone and their brother decided that they wanted to do dinner with us this month. So we decided to set a few rules.

1) We have $28 a week between us and it can be used in whatever way we want/need.

2) If we go out to eat, we need to stick within that $28 a week budget UNLESS:
a) someone pays for us or;
b) we pay for everyone, thus making it a gift.

3) Since I purchased groceries before we decided to do this, we need to use as much out of our fridge and

4) We need to stick with vegan/vegetarian/pescatarian recipes. Red meat is expensive and most people only eat it for special occasions.

Those are the rules so far! And so far, the only thing I've made is peanut butter and jelly. I'm hoping to make something good over the weekend, but we're running around like crazy people for a bit.

I will say that our first week, we've only spent $5 on a gallon of milk, so we're doing pretty well.

How are you all doing? :) How's your week been?