Lots of Birthdays!

I really don't have anything specific to write about, but since I haven't posted in awhile I figured I would write something. This week flew by for me. I made an A on my first test of the semester, so I was really excited about that. It was kinda hard for me to get back into "school mode" at first, but I finally feel like I'm completely back in it....thankfully. ; )
Wednesday was my Meme's 78th birthday (she is my mom's mom). I love her SO much!!! She is one of my biggest role models. She is such an incredible woman of God and an amazing wife, sister, aunt, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, neighbor, friend...and so much more. Her and my grandad's marriage is such an inspiration to Nic & I. I love to walk in their home to see them holding hands, flirting, & just completely enjoying each other's company...after 57 years of marriage (WOW) with 6 kids (and one child that died right before birth). She is so beautiful inside & out. I hope that I look even close to how good she looks when I am her age. I think she is so gorgeous and always dresses so cute! I love when people tell me that I resemble her in looks. It is such a huge compliment to me : )
Yesterday (January 29) was my brother's 22nd birthday, and Monday (February 2) is Katelyn's 19th Birthday. Luke's age is pretty easy for me to believe, but I can not believe that my little sister is 19!! That just seems TOO old! I guess it really feels so old to me since I'm only 20 and she's turning 19; it makes it seem like she is pretty much the same age as me. Which, I guess she is because we are only 19 months apart. I guess in my mind it's okay for me to get older, but she's not supposed to, lol. ; ) I love both of them so much!  Here is a picture of us when we were younger and one more recent (a little over a year ago):

It was ALSO my new brother and father's birthdays this month! The beginning of the year is going to be a big month for us now as far as birthday's go. It's really cool that as of June 14th (the day Nic & I got married)....the size of my family practically doubled! I now have 2 sets of parents, 2 brothers, 2 sisters....and the added bonus is my wonderful husband! ; ) I have always been a HUGE family person, so it's really neat to me to now have so many more people to get to love and go through the exciting journey of life with together. I can't wait to have nieces and nephews to start loving! The closest I have to that right now is my best friend Melissa's baby boy. He is almost 2 months old already! Here are some pictures of Kaeden's birth day on December 8, 2008:

Today I baby-sat three of my little cousins...Bruen, Matilda, & Bishop. It was a lot of fun as always.  Bishop and Matilda both recently celebrated birthdays.  Bishop made his grand entrance into the world on September 26, 2008 (he just made 4 months!) and Matilda just turned 4 on January 10. I love these kiddos. Here's pictures of the cutie pies:
Just in case you can't tell...I LOVE babies and kids!!! : ]
Then tomorrow morning I am going to watch my little cousin Nic play basketball. His game is at 9:00 in the morning across town and I have a lot of homework & studying to do, but it's his last game of the season so I really want to go. I can't wait to watch him! And hopefully I'll actually remember to bring my camera. I always leave it when I go do stuff like that and then when I get there I really regret not having it. If I remember it, I'll post a picture on here later. I want to start posting pictures with some of my posts, so that I will have them to look back on too...instead of just a bunch of writing.
Sorry for this random post. I hope everyone has a great weekend! : )

Seven AMAZING Months!!!

So this week held two special days for us. Yesterday was our 7 Month Anniversary and today Nic started his LAST semester of college!!!!! I am so excited and happy for him. I know he is so ready to be done (as am I but I still have a while to go, haha). It is going to be really nice once he graduates and for one of us to be working full time at our "real" job, lol. Then we can start saving a lot money more than what we can now and get to move into a bigger place. Not that I'm not extremely happy and grateful for where we are now; I truly am. I can't complain at all!
I guess what I'm saying is that it will be cool to start a somewhat different chapter in our lives. By that time we will have been married for almost a year....crazy! I can't believe it's already been 7 months!!!! Nic makes marriage so fun. He makes me smile and laugh ALL the time, but he also knows when to be serious...which is very important to me. We want to keep the fun & laughter in our marriage forever. It's something will we continually work at to make sure we never lose.
I started school Tuesday, and yesterday I had my longest day. I have my first class at 8 in the morning and my last class doesn't end until 8:45 that night. I was hoping we would get out early...wishful thinking, haha! So needless to say I was pretty tired once I got home (especially since we stayed up too late the night before, which I take complete blame for). Anyways, when I got home Nic met me outside and made me put a blindfold on before I could go inside. He then led me inside to an awesome night! I'm not going to go into details, because it would take me forever to write everything but it was all so sweet. My favorite parts were the candle-lit dance to the same song we had our first dance to at our wedding (exactly 7 months before that) and the home-made cookie cake he made that was DELICIOUS! Cookie cake is one our favorites : ) So he made the end of my long day so great, refreshing, and definitely romantic. I love my hubby!!
I want to make sure that I soak up all the memories and times we have these next few months before we kinda transition into another stage in our life. I love the whole "just married-college students-living in a trailer" stage that we are in right now. It is so much fun, and we are making so many awesome memories! We aren't sure exactly how long we will be living here. It mostly depends on exactly how much Nic will be making once he starts working full time and if we are just ready to move as soon as possible (we don't feel that way right now) or if we want to wait a little bit longer. If we do that we will be taking on more expenses than we have now and pay his parents more rent than we do now. We would only want to stay here one more year at the longest. Our dream would be to stay here until we are ready to buy a house and just go straight from here to a house. Of course, that would depend on a LOT of stuff, but hey, it's okay to dream : ) And we are both completely okay with moving into an apartment until we are ready to buy a house. We want to make sure that we don't rush anything and are truly ready for it financially. Of course all of this is us talking and our ideas....the plan we really want to follow more than anything is God's plan. Exactly what that is, we aren't sure right now, lol. But we will never stop praying for HIS WILL to be done in our life...not our own. His plan is wayyyyy better than anything I could ever come up with, so I want to make sure that I never try to take over something in my life instead of letting God control it and lead me on His path. Of course, I will fail at this sometimes, but hopefully it won't take me long to realize how much I'm screwing up and get it straight by giving it all back to my awesome God : )
I'm excited about this weekend. Tomorrow night we are hanging out with my cousin Allie, her boyfriend BJ, my sister, and some other family and friends. I'm not exactly sure who all is going but I know those 3 are so that's why I only said their names specifically. I'm not trying to play favorites, lol. We are going out to eat and to a movie and maybe something after if it's not too late once we get out of the movie. Then Saturday I have my little cousin Matilda's 4th birthday party. It's going to be so much fun. I love that girl!
So I don't know if any one is even going to read this, but sorry in advance if some one does. I know it's a bunch of rambling scattered all over the place and is probably really boring. The real reason I write these is so I can have somewhat of a journal of what's going on in my life and to see how God works in it. Then I can look back later and read about it.
I hope everyone enjoys their weekend and that it doesn't go by too quickly like they always seem to do ; )

A small prayer graciously answered

I said I would post about how my day with Katie went so here it is :
It went as good as I could have hoped for...thank you Jesus! I really had a great day with her, and so did she according to her. Her goodbye to me at the end of the day was, "I really had a great day. I really did. We should do it again some time soon!". That made me happy, because I very much wanted for her to enjoy her day.
Her mom dropped her off right after 7 that morning. Nic stayed with us until about 7:30, then he left for work. By that time she had already ate her breakfast and taken her medicine. Then we both just sat on the couch and talked for awhile. Then she started reading one of her books and telling me about. That lasted for a pretty long time and then she all of a sudden just put her book down and fell asleep about a minute later (literally). I can never fall asleep that fast. If I do, you know that I am completely exhausted. Anyways, she actually slept for a long time. I finally woke her up at about 10:15, because we needed to leave around 10:45 to drive across town to meet Nic for lunch. He could only leave work at a certain time, so we ate kinda early. It all worked out really well though. Once we got to Mr. Gatti's we ate and then Katie played games in their small arcade room. I drove across the road to the main office for my school to drop a class I didn't need that had been scheduled and when I got back she still had a few more tokens left. Once she was done with them we parted ways with Nic :( and headed to my parent's house. While we were there she played with the goats, fed and played with the chickens, played with the dogs, talked to the birds, messed with the cats a little bit, and "admired" the rabbit (I didn't let her take it out, because I didn't completely trust her not to be too rough, and my mom would be upset if something happened to it). Then it started raining really bad, so we stayed inside and she watched cartoons and we played around with different stuff until it was time to leave. Then we headed back (made a pit stop to get gas and return a movie on the way) and stayed at Nic's parent's house waiting for Mrs. Gail to get there. She got ready for gymnastics and when Mrs. Gail got there, they left to go to her class. That was an abbreviated version of my day. I didn't have any major problems with her, so I was very happy about that.
So you may think it was weird that I asked for prayer for my day with Katie, but I realllllly wanted us to have a good day that we both enjoyed. I think she really needs days like those with everything else that she goes through. And I think that it is SO awesome to see how God answers even our smallest, simplest prayers that seem so un-important to everyone except for the person requesting it. He is INCREDIBLE, and I don't come even close to deserving Him and His AMAZING GRACE. I love my Father in Heaven with everything in me!!!!!

First time for everything...

Tomorrow I am "watching" (babysitting) Nic's younger cousin Katie. Please pray for me. I'm kinda joking, but I'm kinda not. I love Katie very much, but she can be a handful and this will be my first time to watch her by myself. I've heard many stories and seen for myself many times how she can be defiant and very disobedient. If you know her you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Her mom is going to drop her off at Nic's parent's house around 7 in the morning. His parent's will both be gone for work by that time, and Mrs. Sue (Katie's mom) will have to leave quickly to go to work. I'm planning on spending as much time there as possible. Hopefully we'll be able to find enough games, toys, etc to keep her occupied for a good while. But I have a feeling she is going to want to go to my parent's house pretty soon after she gets there because she has been wanting to go see/play with all the chickens, birds, goats, dogs, cats, etc. Which is fine....I just don't want her to get bored over there too quickly (which after that list of animals how could some one?? haha!). Plus we could play the Xbox together. I know she likes that a LOT. I really want her to enjoy her day since it will be her last day of her holiday break from school. I think she will. I've thought of a good bit of stuff we can do together to keep her constantly busy and having fun. I'm planning on taking her to Mr. Gatti's for lunch, because I know she likes it a lot....especially the games, lol. I'm just not sure which one I'm going to take her to. I would really like to take her to the one on Essen since Nic works right there and would be able to come eat lunch with us. I know we would BOTH reallllly like that. ; ) One problem with that is that it doesn't have a big arcade/game section at all. I'm leaving that decision up to Nic (and Katie too a little bit), and we'll mostly just play it by ear. Another problem is that he might end up not being able to take another big lunch break from work, because he just took one today to go eat lunch with his good friend Travis. His family is going through a really hard time right now so he really wanted to spend some time with him. His sister just was diagnosed with malignant brain tumors (you can go to her page by the link on the right side of my blog....just click on "Whitney Taylor-Caringbridge"). Please keep her and their whole family in your prayers. She is such an AMAZING young woman!!!! Okay, so I just got really off track, but that was something really important that I wanted to say. So back to my talking about my day tomorrow:
I also need to drop a class so Nic could watch Katie for a little bit while I went across the road real quick to do that. It should only take about 15 minutes. But like I said earlier, I'll just play it by ear. I wanted to take her to the zoo, but it's supposed to be raining so we'll do that another time. Plus, Nic & I have already taken her once, so I think it would be more fun for her to do something different tomorrow. We want to try to take all our little cousins (except for Bishop...he's still too young) to the zoo one day. We think that will be a lot of fun. The only problem is that would require us taking 2 vehicles, lol. So we'll probably drag Katelyn along (Kate-here's a very early warning, haha!).
All in all I think tomorrow will be fun for both me and Katie. I am glad we will get to spend some one on one time together. I'm actually really excited about it after writing all this. I think I was a little hesitant about it at first, because the past 3 weeks I've been hearing some pretty bad stories about how she has been lately. But I think she will be just fine tomorrow, and I really don't think I'm being naive by saying that. I know I can't turn my back on her for long and leave her by herself for very long (plus a few other things I need to make sure to do), and I think if I do all that we will avoid any dilemmas....or at least be able to solve them quickly, lol.
So I hope everyone has a good day tomorrow, because I think I will and now really looking forward to it! Check back for a post about how it goes....
: )

One more week of freedom ; )

I start school a week from tomorrow. I'm not sure if I'm dreading it or if I'm ready for it to start again. I'm kinda dreading it because it's SCHOOL (ugh!). Which means I don't get to see/spend near as much time with Nic, my family, or friends. Not to mention the stress, limited sleep, and weekends filled with nothing but studying. But at the same time I think I am kinda ready for it to start again, because I'm ready to get on with my life. I don't want to stay at this stage forever. It makes me feel almost 'stagnant'. I've been in school for 15 1/2 of the 20 years of my life. That seems ridiculous to me, lol. I know I'm finally in the part that "really counts".....although I heard that my whole life, haha. I really love nursing school because it's what I REALLY want to do. I know without a doubt that I'm called by God to be a nurse AND it's what I desire. I so strongly want to be a nurse. I guess that's why I'm kinda ready to start school. The sooner I get this semester started, the sooner it will be over with and the closer I will be to graduating and actually being a nurse. I can't wait!! Actually.....I CAN wait.
As much as I am ready to be out of school and be a nurse, I don't want to get caught up in the future. I can only control the present...what I'm doing NOW. So, I am going to soak it all up and try to enjoy every second of it. I can honestly say that I absolutely LOVE this stage of my life. Being married to Nic is a dream come true. We are soooo incredibly blessed. I think we tell each other that at least once a day...not to mention all the times we think it without actually saying it, lol. Well, I am going to cut this short and go spend time with my AMAZING husband that I am writing about. : ) Oh how I love him!

I decided to create a blog...

So I randomly decided to create a blog. I really don't intend for anyone to read it. I guess I just want to try it out and see how I like it. It will be a place I can ramble about what's going on in my life and what my current prayer requests, praises, etc are. Then I can look back months, weeks, or even days later and see how God carried me through that time or how He answered my prayers.
Now I'm curious to see how often I write and how long this actually lasts, lol.