When it Rains it Pours

Okay, so this post is much to go in the memory books for Samantha Grace and for myself to remember what a week it has and will be for her first Easter and first birthday. Yes, it is true that here in Montgomery it has been pouring rain off and on since last Thursday (with two beautiful days of sunshine stuck in between on Friday and Saturday). But the title of this post has more to do with the events that have taken place over the past few days to create an adventure of a week.

I started off the week with what seemed like a very manageable to-do list for the week that was until we had a little mishap which caused some extra outings that had to be completed on Monday. Then on Sunday, as well as the day that we discovered the BIG OOPS!, I proceeded to gracefully fall down the front stairs after the first service on Sunday morning. At first I thought all was fine, especially this morning (Monday), because I didn't feel any pain any more; for, I had been having sharp pains run through my big toe and continue to an area in my foot that I have screws from a previous foot surgery. So I continued on with a normal weekly routine of getting up for an early morning run. I continued to feel great, every now and then I would feel a twinge of pain but nothing too major to be concerned over. Then when I got home I was taking a shower and thought I noticed some dirt in between my toes from the flip flops I had been wearing Sunday evening at church. So I began to do what any other hygenic person would do...scrub...scrub...OWWW! Yeah, it wasn't dirt. I look between my big toe and second toe and noticed that I had a deep purple bruise between my toes. As I got out of the shower and as the day has progressed the pain has continued to stream throughout my big toe into the entire right most side of my left foot. Needless to say I will be seeing an orthopedic doctor Tuesday for an x-ray.

The week should continue as normal except our front desk secretary at church has recently retired; therefore, being the go-getter that I am willing volunteered to fill-in whenever needed. And would you guess my first day is Friday, this Friday, when I will have a house full of company. Luckily, I will also have a house full of helping hands. I told Josh that this will be a time for any body else that feels they need to "fix" something for the party to get into the kitchen.

I say all this because I want this to be a memorable weekend for everyone, so I don't want anything to be a hinderance. But I can already see where Satan is trying to spoil my positive attitude, but I am not going to let him get to me. The picture of Samantha Grace at the top of this post is what I felt like this morning when everything came crashing in; I don't know about you but I always do better with visuals.

P.S. Did I also mention I am also waiting to find out about a job that I interviewed for?

solid stance squat

A couple of days ago Joshua unveiled to me that Samantha Grace stood on her own while holding a paper box lid over her head. I have to admit that I just didn't believe him because almost two days have gone by and I have yet to see this mild ston occur. So this morning after I got my little Wonder Woman dressed, I noticed that she had taken the perfect squat position next to her wipe box. Then with what Herculean strength she could muster she attempted the same trick she did with the paper box; however, I have to say that the wipe box played an awful trick...it was full! So she went backwards on her bumm much like if you were holding onto a door knob when someone was trying to keep you out of some place and then all of the sudden they let go.

So I decided to try an experiment. I got an empty wipe box out of her closet and traded her for a much lighter load. She loved teasing me with the several attempts of picking up the box...such a joker!

However, she wasn't finished yet. After leaving abruptly from the box lifting event, she moved on to the basket-o-toys event. At this venue, she proceeded to balance herself on some shape matching game we have for her then let go! I was so proud, but where was that silly video camera. Oh, yeah, on the charger.

Off to the charger I went while praying that this event could occur again. As I entered the room, Josh tried so hard, bless his heart, to get her to do it again. Finally after much coaxing we were ready to give up and just wait for another opportune moment. That was until Samantha Grace was persuaded by Green Bucket to try once more. This time she stood proudly for a grand total of probably 3 seconds, looked around in utter shock then gracefully sat back down. OH! Did I forget to tell you that I caught it on camera this time! (A post will come as soon as Josh downloads the video.)

Another praise today is that Stellan has had a wonderful night and day thus far. He has been out of SVT for over 15 hours. Continue to lift him up in prayer and follow his story on his site www.mycharmingkids.net.

Cows, Spaghetti O's and Dad's Hidden Talent

For those of you that don't know, Josh and I both grew up in Tennessee. When we were growing up, we both lived in areas of towns where one minute you could be surrounded by total suburbia then the next be in complete country. In fact, when my family built their first house in Knoxville, we bought our property from my dad's barber (who had sold it to our developer) and he, the barber, actually used to be a farmer. And surrounding our property for the longest time were pastures and fields of cows or the best blueberries ever! So when we bought our house a year ago, we were delighted to see that backing up to our house was this enormous cow pasture. We thought what a great learning experience this will be for Samantha Grace one day.

Well, it has come to be extremely profitable to not only to us (we miss the wide open country fields quite a bit at times) but also to Samantha Grace. As soon as we walk out the back door now she will start pointing to the pasture and "mooing" like a cow. It is quite cute. Now I do have to admit that when we ask her what a dog says she proceeds to "moo" like a cow too, but we are working on it. Below is a picture of some of our cow friends to live behind us.

All of this is to bring up the fact that last night I discovered, after being with Josh for almost 9 years, that he has a hidden talent. You know most men pride themselves in being able to do the turkey call, the duck call or whatever call might be applicable when hunting. Well, not Josh Duke. Nope, we discovered last night that Josh has the perfect pitch and tamber to call cows. Below are a couple short video clips of his magnificent call and the cows response. I have to say that this was quite surprising to all of us.







The videos do not adequately show that the cows were quite a distance away when Josh started his cow call. Then one-by-one, the bull of course leading the way, came up to our fence. The neatest thing was that due to the tendency of cows being extremely skittish we usually can't pet them. Josh bravely went up to one and petted it with Samantha Grace like a horse. I was quite impressed on both Josh's and the cow's part. After all of this adventure our one looming question is what do you feed a cow besides grass? We don't want to hinder their completely organic diet of grass because we all now we have enough problems with some farmers pumping insane amounts of hormones into these beautiful creatures. Any suggestions would be great because I am thinking that these cows will be back for more entertainment by the infamous COW CALLER. I end this entry by leaving you with some of the most recent adventures with Samantha Grace at home. Since she will be a year in 13 days, I finally folded and gave her Spaghetti O's for the first time. I also decided to start a tradition with something that was made by her Mimi. Mimi painted a little bench with her name on it shortly after she was born, so I decided to each year close to her birthday take her picture sitting and standing by the bench. So below you can see some of the pictures from our improtu photo session. More professional pictures are to come.


As I close, I ask from the bottom of my heart that you continue to pray for a little baby boy by the name of Stellan McKinney who live in Minnesota. He is very sick and needs our prayers. You can follow his story by clicking on the button on my blog titled "Praying for Stellan."

Carnegie Hall here we come...

As most of you who know my husband and I can imagine, Samantha Grace LOVES music. I mean she even "boogies" to the Free Credit Report.com commercials that come on television. The other day she and I were at Target trying to pick out a birthday card for daddy, and she would just stand up in the cart and start dancing. I couldn't figure out what was going on until I finally saw these three little kids with their grandmother looking at those cards that play music. Samantha Grace can also hear music in a store long before Josh or I can and usually 9/10 times can be rocking to the correct beat. Well, since I teach piano privately from and home and at church, she is constantly hearing that noise. So as she has gotten older it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach from the home. Because she thinks each time someone is playing that it is also her turn to play with them. Therefore, the other day she was wanting to sit at the piano bench by herself and play. (Of course, I stood close by to oversee her every move.) She sat down, turned around to face the keys, didn't move the music that I had been playing from earlier in the day, points to the music and then begins to play. Presumably getting bored with just sitting and playing, she decides to stand, sort of, and play. Then once she held her hands up, signaling to me that she wanted down, she proceeded to creep back over to the piano and blindly play the keys from a standing position. This is all to wonder...do we have a possible musical prodigy on our hands. Well, of course, Josh and I would love to think so, but we are trying our best not to force it upon her. We have dreams of her playing cello someday, but I have to admit deep down inside I do hope she takes up some type of athletic activity. All this is to say that Carnegie Hall might be on our short list very soon....that is our short list in our dreams of course. Until then, "There's a sweet, sweet sound in [our] ears..."

Stomach Bugs, Races, Grandparents and the Zoo

So I haven't posted any of our adventures in quite sometime, but one shouldn't worry because there have been quite a few. Almost two weeks ago, Samantha Grace contracted her first viral infection...in the car. Yes, I have never parked my car so fast for fear of her aspirating vomit back into her lungs, which would then cause pneumonia. For she was strapped securely in her car seat at the time of the nasty little bugs attack. Thankfully, we only had one vomit episode and several of what we have name bottom explosions (i.e., diaherra). I do better with the bottom explosions than the other.

Once we thought we were completely out of the woods, we took a short weekend trip to Atlanta to visit my family. The weather did not show off for us that weekend, for like much of the southeastern portion of the U.S., we danced with the rain all weekend long. But nonetheless we had a good time. Consignment sales, outdoor malls, and a must-have trip to Harry's (my favorite organic food store)!

I must add in the midst of all this craziness, I have also made the big decision to go back to work next year; therefore, I am currently in the midst of interviews at a private school in town. Details about this matter will, hopefully, be coming soon!

Follow our trip to Atlanta and thinking we had completely exterminated all of the stomach bugs, I came down with a horrific viral infection much worse than Samantha Grace. By the end of Monday, I was no longer able to pick-up and hold Samantha Grace. Needless to say the doc put me on some nice nausea/vomitting medication which knocked me out for the remainder of the night. Thankfully, this viral infection is only a 24 hour bug. Unfortunately later in the week Joshua contracted a very mild case of the same thing. This bug, however, seems to be hanging its littel fuzzy head around a little longer, for I and Josh are still having some major digestional issues. So we ask for your prayers as eating is becoming quite a chore around our house, not fun.

Following the viral bug, I had the honor to run in a local charity 5K in honor of my friend's precious twins who have been in the NICU for the past 5 1/2 weeks. Their names are John Colvin and Sidney Elizabeth. They are so precious! We have a ministry here in Montgomery and Birmingham called the Footprints Ministry that ministers to families of NICU babies. This is such a special ministry to me not only through my friend but also because Samantha Grace was so borderline to being in NICU. Praise the Lord that my doctor made such wise decisions at the time of her birth. So despite having had a viral infection, I ran the race with endurance and determination. I finished in 25 minutes, which I felt pretty good about since I had not ran pretty much all week like I like to run.

After the race, we enjoyed taking Samantha Grace with Josh's parents to her first trip to the Montgomery Zoo. I have to say we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of zoo that our city has to offer. For those reading that don't know, Montgomery is not one of the largest major cities in Alabama despite being the capitol. It is actually one of the smaller major cities sitting right over 200,000 people. We enjoyed seeing the girraffes, elephants, and one of Samantha Grace's favorites was what we referred to as the big kitty cat the black cougar.

As I mentioned as I opend this blog posting, we have had quite an exciting past two weeks. We are looking forward to celebrating Samantha Grace's first birthday in about 3 weeks along with her first Easter. Yep, all in the same weekend too! Soon I will post pictures from our grand adventures. But for now we will have to say, "Bye! Bye!"

Two Teeth

Well, my worries are over. I thought for the longest time that we were going to be celebrating Samantha-Grace's first birthday being toothless, for all of our little friends some who are even 3 months younger than us already had at least 2 teeth. But after waving the magic Tooth Fairy wand each day, they have finally greeted us with their presence. I have to say after the first one came, I learned some very valuable lessons about how Samantha-Grace's body reacts to the changes going on inside. Needless to say our new best friend during teething season is Gripe Water. We seem to have an extremem accidity level in our stomach that does not handle much of anything very well. So a few doses of Gripe Water seems to do the trick each time. I will post cute teeth pictures as soon as they have fully come in and Samantha-Grace shows them off!

A Nice Change with a Dab of a Miracle

After reading a friend's blog today, I realized I had failed to post a recent entry about our latest adventure. As many of you Facebook faithfuls know, my family and I journeyed to the beach last weekend. This was a trip of both business and pleasure. I was elated that the business part was at the beginning of the trip, so that we could enjoy the remainder of the trip relaxing.

We were so blessed to be given a "condo" for the weekend by some friends of ours in our local church. I say condo very lightly because it was a 3 bedroom 3 bath plus a loft 2200 sq.ft. "condo". Needless to say we were very surprised and blessed when we arrived. We arrived late on Thursday evening, but not to late to enjoy one of mine and Joshua's sinful pleasures, BlueBell Ice Cream. Yes, we stopped at the local grocery store on our way in (the condo is 11 miles from the closest grocery) and picked up two pints of ice cream.

On Friday and Saturday, we literally felt like we were doing nothing. After Joshua attended some dangling business items, we journeyed down to a blustery beach front. Samantha Grace was not too sure about the sand between her toes. I have my fears that we have a prissy girl on our hands. Below is a picture of Samantha-Grace and me exploring the sand just before a large wave pushed in and soaked my shorts.



We also discovered that our friends evidently had the mack daddy of all golf carts in the neighborhood. I will say that it was large (3 rows and off road tires), but we didn't realize it was that fancy. At least we didn't realize it until all the "Snow Birds" (Senior Citizens who "migrate" south for the winter) would stop us in the neighborhood to admire the cart. Samantha-Grace favored driving the cart rather than riding in it. Below is a picture of her trying to find the horn to beep.



After a relaxing and enjoyable dinner at Lulu's (a restaraunt owned by Jimmy Buffett's sister), we dove into an oldie but goodie movie "The Breakfast Club". Needless to say, I was exhausted and fell asleep after 30 minutes. On Saturday we leasurely took our time exiting what seemed like a very relaxing weekend. This is when the miracle took place.

Once back to Montgomery, I sadly handed the keys back to our friend within the same breath she told me she had a story to tell me. She said that Saturday night (around 2 AM) the house next to theirs at the beach burned down. I truly believe it was the good Lord telling us to come home on Saturday and not leave extra early on Sunday for church. The other amazing thing is that with the houses practically being right on top of each other, we figured there would be some damage on the east side of the house; but, much to our amazement and the wonderful work of the Gulf Shores Fire Department the house was left without mark or blemish!