A quick run home to put on a cute shirt…

And throw on my favorite pair of jeans…

I had to grab a little something to keep me awake for the two hour drive…

And, of course, a little birthday card…

All equals one very excited (and very surprised!) birthday girl!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: can you believe that’s what my grandmother looks like? Some of those genes better be in my bloodstream, by goodness.

P.S. – She read yesterday’s post and said I’m totally still in the will, so great news, right?

Today is my grandmother’s birthday. I already know I’m in trouble for telling you that. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t even read these words yet, seeing I haven’t pressed “publish” so no one has even seen this other than me. She probably just knows I wrote those words and, ZAP!, I’m in trouble.

Now I’m in even more trouble because I posted a picture. Sure, it’s the same picture I posted the last time I wrote about her, but that’s on purpose: I’m afraid to post a different one of her for fear I’ll be written out of the family will.  Mainly because, the last time I posted a picture of her, she told me that if I ever posted another picture of her on my blog, I’d be written out of the family will.

So, same picture. Still in the family will. I’d call that a win-win situation, no?

I don’t have a large family, but out of all of them, Josie knows the most about my life. We talk two or three times a week and, whenever anything good (or bad) happens in my life, it’s usually her number I’m first to dial. She listens to anything and everything I have to say and never makes me feel like it isn’t important, even if it is just silly things that probably aren’t important.

I loved her as a child because she was Josie. I was raised to call all of my grandparents by their first names, so she’s always just been Josie to me (I didn’t realize other kids didn’t call their grandparents by their first names until I was in middle school!). As a child, I was in awe of how beautiful she was — and glamorous, too. I used to play dress-up in her old dresses and, to this day, I don’t think I’ve ever worn clothes I felt were more beautiful than those old dresses. They were Josie’s dresses and, because of that, they were gorgeous.

As I’ve grown up, Josie’s role in my life has grown, too. When I think back over the last decade of my life, I can easily order the memories by phone calls made to Josie. There was the call the night before I left for college and her horrified gasp when she found out I had packed anything yet. And then the call that I was settled into my dorm, followed by a phone call two weeks later informing her that I couldn’t stand my roommate. I called her after my first final exam, the one I was sure I failed, and I called her after the last exam, too. I called her when Starlite had it’s first event and when that silly boy took me on a date to McDonald’s (she was properly horrified as any good grandmother should be).

I called her when I went to my first college formal and I called her afterward, too, mainly just because I knew she’d actually care how my dress held up on the dance floor.  I called her when I was afraid I was going to fail my college math course and I called her when I made an A in my first hardcore religion course.  I called her when I moved into my first off-campus apartment and I called her when I didn’t know how to make potatoes one night.   I called her when I applied for graduation and I called her the morning she drove in to see me walk across the stage.  I called her throughout grad school and then, when it was time to walk across that graduation stage again, I called her at the hotel she was staying at to make sure she was on her way to the auditorium.

To this day, she’s still my favorite person to call on important days and on normal days, too.  But today?  Today is a important day because it’s her birthday and, even though I can’t be there with her because of my work schedule, I’ll still call just like I always do.

Happy Birthday, Josie.  I hope that one day my granddaughter loves me half as much as I love you.

I had to go by Hobby Lobby earlier today to pick up something for work.  While I was there, I noticed they’ve put the Christmas decorations out which, you know, totally makes sense given there’s only six months left for us to stock up.

Have you ever seen these oversized ornaments before?  It’s hard to tell from the picture, but these candy-shaped little darlings are almost the length of my arm!  I don’t own any yet, but once I begin having children, I have definite plans to start buying them.  What will I do with them?  I’m so glad you asked.

I want to make it a tradition that, during the night before the month of December begins each year, I hang them from the ceiling in the hallway outside my children’s bedrooms.  Add a few equally oversized candy canes and they’ll walk out of their doorways into a little Christmas wonderland each December morning of their childhoods.

My future children’s childhoods… what a wild thought.

Today’s guest post is from one of my real-life friends, Tiffany Zajas. Tiffany and I met when she began volunteering in Starlite’s office, particularly helping out in my little corner of the office. She was a tremendous help to me and I’m so happy that, as time has passed by, we’ve become friends. I love Tiffany’s blog because in addition to showcasing her love for her husband and every other person in her life, she also occasionally talks about projects she’s been working on. I asked her if she would give us a peek at one of those projects and she took it a step further, giving us a step-by-step tutorial on how to make some of the cutest homemade invitations I’ve seen in a long time (Tiffany actually sells her creations, too, for those of us who don’t exactly have time to make our own). I love seeing that I have something from her in my mailbox! – amy beth

Hello Ministry So Fab readers!

When Amy Beth asked me to write a guest post for her lovely blog while she was away on her oh-so-fabulous-Eg*pt-trip, I got super excited to share with you a little project I’ve been working on.

My husband, Jonathan, is graduating from college soon, and we are both very excited about this! Because of our excitement and our love for celebrating all things in life… I made him some handmade graduation festivities invitations to give to our close friends and family!

And I have decided to share my invite making adventure with you!

In addition to our love for celebrating all things in life, husband and I have quite the love for photography. So, of course the grad invites had to include a photograph.

I came to the conclusion that an old-fashioned photo booth strip would be perfect. You can either use real photo booth strips or make your own. We decided to make our own, so I set up my tripod and camera and we took some silly photos.

Once we had the photographs ready, I put them on my computer and did some quick editing to make them black & white. Then, using this template from sugarplum paperie I created our photo strips in Adobe Photoshop.

If you do not own Adobe Photoshop, you can download a trial version here, or try Gimp and Paint as free alternatives to Photoshop. Another option would be to make faux polaroids using the nifty tool you can get for free from Poladroid.

The photo booth strip template is made for 5x7s, but I resized them to print off on 4x6s. Either one would work for this.

Once the photo booth strips were made, I printed them off at a local 1-hour photo place. Cut them up, and they were ready to put on the invites!

For the invites themselves, I cut a bunch of 8½ x 11 red cardstock into thirds.

Pasted the photo booth strips to the front using an acid-free glue stick.

For the back of the invitations I cut a bunch of squares out of regular white office paper.

Glued three of the squares to the back, and wrote all of the festivity information on the white squares with my trusty ultra fine point Sharpies!

And, voila! The invitations are complete and ready to mail out in business letter envelopes!

Now all that is left to do is to plan husband’s graduation party and celebrate this wonderful milestone in life.

To read more about Tiffany’s creative (and darling!) life, visit her here.

Well, the good news is that I’m fully moved into my new place. The even better news is that I was actually moved in by late Friday night, something that seems fairly impossible given the fact that I was at my job all day on Friday.

Oh, but with God all things are possible. Especially when He gets my friend Kelly involved.

Dear Kelly, I am sorry this is the only picture I have of you from our 39 hours together and thus am forced to use it to photographically demonstrate who you are to the bloggy readers. Love, amy beth.

My loves, I am about to tell you a story that you are just not going to believe. As you know, I got back home in the middle of the night between Wednesday and Thursday. I went to bed around 3 a.m. and had to be at work at 8 a.m. I then worked a full day and, upon leaving work, got a call from my friend Kelly informing me that she had asked to have Friday off from work and would be driving in (from six hours away) to move my house for me while I was at work on Friday.

Um, yeah. Whoa, right?

She arrived at 1:30 in the morning and was up bright and early the next morning, already starting to get stuff ready to be moved. I had to go to work, so I was dealing with a little guilt over the fact that MY FRIEND WAS MOVING MY JUNK FOR ME.

If that wasn’t enough (and prepare yourselves because this is huge), Kelly brought me breakfast to my office because I didn’t have a chance to eat before I went into work that morning.

Have you ever heard of such friendship? I mean, seriously.

I called Kelly a few times throughout the day, mainly to say “Hey, it’s me, I still feel guilty” only to be greeted with “Guess what? Your entire first floor of your house is packed up!” or “I just dropped a load off at the new place!” By the time I got off work that evening, Kelly had moved a ton of stuff and almost everything else in the house was ready to be loaded onto a truck by a couple of guys from my church and my favorite male cousin (also: my only male cousin), Israel.

Five hours later, I was completely moved. I know.

Let’s just put it in numbers for you: since coming to college, I have moved nine times. I hate moving (mainly because it reminds me that I don’t really have roots anywhere and then I’m like ‘What am I doing with my life? WHERE ARE MY ROOTS?!?’), but I was honestly dreading this move even more than the others because it meant that, after basically ignoring the nursery for these past seven months, I had to deal with it.

I’ve slowly gone through the different things left in it (I donated what was left to a local crisis pregnancy center after a ton of you suggested it), but I still hadn’t taken apart the crib and changing table. When it came time to do it on Friday night, Kelly went in there and just did it for me. When she came out a bit later and told me it was done, it honestly felt like this huge burden had been taken off my shoulders. I’m almost ashamed to tell you just how relieved I felt when I realized everything was finally gone.

But it wasn’t just that. It was just the whole entire thing, really. I worked almost 20 hours in two days, had very little sleep, and was trying to figure out how in the world I was going to move my stuff. For someone to take a personal day at work, drive six hours (I mean, really, think about that), move my stuff for me, and then have to leave the next day… it just blows my mind. She didn’t just move my stuff, but also left drinks in my fridge, hooked my washing machine up, hung curtains in my new bedroom, sorted through boxes, etc. Kelly has been a good friend to me for years, but nothing — NOTHING — has ever meant as much to me as what she did for me this past weekend.

I can’t wait to show you the new place but, right now, I’ve still got a ton of boxes to go through (this is the week I work 70-something hours for work). As soon as I start to get entire rooms done, maybe we can have a little Tour de Amy Beth’s House? In the meantime, I have a burning question for you: what do you think about this comforter / sheet set for my bed? I need a new one and, while I realize this is a kids set, I THINK I AM IN LOVE WITH IT (click on picture to enlarge).

Thoughts? Opinions? Raging feelings of jealousy because you too wish you had a twin bed that you could outfit with a sweet set ‘o children’s bedsheets?

I’ve been convicted of an area of sin in my life over the past couple of months and it’s been the most eye-opening (and humbling) experience for me to see how very little I wanted to deal with it when I confronted myself about it. It’s not one of those things that should be ignored or glossed over. It’s a character issue, connected to a lot of heart issues.

Ignoring it has proven to be the wrong tactic. All that did was give it time to grow roots, some of which are capable of choking the very life out of the good things in my life. I don’t want to be that girl.

I woke up this morning with God’s grace on my mind, mainly because I needed it. I never want to treat it as “cheap grace.” I never want to take it for granted. I never want to take advantage of it.

I’ve just never really “got” it, to be honest. Grace has felt a little like a concept I should have gotten back in Sunday School, not some abstract idea that I’m still unsure of at 24. I can’t define grace and that bothers the intellectual side of me.

All I know is that I want to be the girl who can look her God in the eyes and know no shame.

Maybe that’s the definition I’ve been looking for this whole time.

A is for Age… 24 (but only for about one more month!)

B is for Bed… I’m still (happily) rocking the twin bed.  At least I never get lonely in it!

C is for Chore… Absolutely love doing laundry. LOVE IT.

D is for Dog… I’m still a little embarrassed of the way I sounded in that video from earlier this week.

E is for Essential… Right now? Sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep.

F is for Favorite… Thing of the moment? Unexpected emails.

G is for Gold… I don’t wear gold jewelry; silver, please.

H is for Height… I actually don’t know. Maybe 5’5? Or 5’6? Seriously, no clue.

I is for Instrument… Lately I’ve been loving the cello, especially when there’s piano involved.

J is for Job… Love, love, love mine. It’s nice to actually look forward to going to work each morning.

K is for Kids… I have been missing those wee little triplets lately.

L is for Living… Wait ’til you see my new living room. I just LOVE my new house!

M is for Mustard… Don’t like mustard, but get this: just tried honey mustard the other day!

N is for Nickname… Hmm. I need one. Suggestions?

O is for Overnight… I moved into my new place overnight.  Whoa!

P is for Pasta… I had the best pasta of my life whilst on the cruise ship in Eg*pt. So good!

Q is for Quote… Hmm.  Why don’t you tell me your favorite this time?

R is for Right… But sometimes you can be wrong.

S is for Sibling… I miss mine.  A lot.

T is for Time… I never wear a watch.  Ever.  Weird?

U is for Under… Under the water, but of course.  That’s where all the fish are!

V is for Vegetable… Corn, please.

W is for Watermelon… I had a lot of it in Eg*pt, but it sure didn’t taste like our watermelon.

X is for X-Ray… If someone did an x-ray of your hair and you had used a lot of hairspray in it, would it show up on the screen?

Y is for Yummy… We had pizza while moving last night.  You can never go wrong with pizza, right?

Z is for Zoo… Planning another little visit there this fall with my MacKenzie!

I am so out of it right now that I apparently not only feel it necessary to write post titles that are not only corny, but actually started out writing this post with “Hey, did you see that the title of this post rhymes? Lag and drag? Ponytail and fail? DID ANYONE NOTICE HOW COOL THAT IS?”

I had a feeling I was going to get to spend a bit of quality time with my friend jet lag and I was correct. For some reason, I always struggle with jet lag and culture shock when I come back to the states. The smallest things are the biggest deals — like, driving to work and deciding what to eat for lunch and going outside my house without a gun-toting security guard meeting me in the driveway. Everything just feels… strange.

I will say this though: I got some sleep last night and, if that wasn’t enough, an angel of mercy showed up on my doorstep at 1:30 a.m., but more about that on Monday.

So, whilst I work on getting my act together, let’s talk about something non-trip related for a second (oh, there’s more trip posts coming along with a few more guest posts, too).

First of all, 197 pictures from my trip are now up in an album on my Facebook page. I’ve set the album as viewable by anyone and will leave it that way for a few days before making it private again (in other words, if we aren’t friends on Facebook, you can still go look at the photos for the next few days by clicking here).

After I told you a few days ago about the interview I did with Exemplify magazine, several of you emailed me to say that you couldn’t figure out how to actually find the interview in the magazine. I was just getting ready to start emailing you all back with instructions when I got an email letting me know that the interview was posted on the magazine’s blog! So, if you were one of the ones trying to read it but couldn’t find it (or had difficulty reading it in column format), just click here to see the entire interview by itself.

Also, just cause I got a bunch of funny comments from friends who saw the picture that went along with the interview, I have to tell you that photo is from my senior year of college, so it’s a wee bit old. I didn’t have time to get a photo done for it before I left for Eg*pt, so you get to see the college-era ABB who didn’t even know what a “blog” was back then. If someone had of told me in college that I end up writing a blog, I probably would have said “Why? What in the world would I write about other than my hair or something silly like that?”

(Speaking of that: I got up at 5 a.m. yesterday morning after a record 3.5 hours of sleep because, in breaking news that I may not have mentioned yet today, I have jet lag. I didn’t have to be at work ’til 8 a.m., but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and really fixed my hair for the first time in three weeks. I seem to have gotten a bit rusty on my flat iron skills after three weeks of ponytails.)

(Yes, plenty of side ponytails whilst in Eg*pt. Hello, it’s still the summer of the side ponytail.)

(And don’t you forget it.)

You can barely see anything at all, mainly because as soon as I actually see the puppies, I abandon my camera on my bedroom floor because who has time for holding a camera when you’re seeing your wee little puppies for the first time in almost three weeks? But really, I think it’s the audio that’s the real gem here.

Other items of interest:

1. If you aren’t a pet lover, you should probably not watch. It’ll make you sick to your stomach when you hear how many times I say “Oh, mama missed you so much!”

2. Yes, that’s Rocky Top that I start humming as I’m reading the note that Anna left taped to my bedroom door. I had no idea I hummed that until I watched this video for the first time. I guess I just had good ‘ol Tennessee on the brain.

3. I love those two puppies something fierce.

Well, I’m back in the London airport again, this time on a computer in a little coffee shop.  It has a timer telling me how many minutes and seconds of internet time I have left and, to be honest, it’s making me a bit nervous.  I can’t blog under pressure like this!  Also: the keyboard and I seem to have different opinions about where certain letters and punctuation should be located, which makes it a wee bit difficult to type quickly ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE IS A CLOCK COUNTING DOWN THE SECONDS LEFT.

As you’ve probably guessed from the above paragraph, I’m on my way home!  I’m leaving before the students, mainly because I have to be back for a big event at work.  So, whilst they were asleep this morning, I snuck out in the dark to head to the airport.  I just finished a 4.5 hour flight and now have a 9 hour one stretching out in front of me.  I love to fly, especially when it’s with British flight attendants.  On that note: guess who scored extra fruit on her breakfast tray this morning probably because she was using a fake British accent that impressed the flight attendants to no end? 

I had a great trip and still have plenty to tell you about it, which I’ll do over the next few days (I’ve still got some friends helping out with guest posts, too, so that I can take time settling back in!).  I’m a bit nervous about heading back to the states simply because I have a 70-ish hour work week ahead of me next week… as well as moving to my new house!  I have no idea how it’s all going to get done, but it always does.  It sure would be helpful if Snuggles y Cuddles have spent their time at home packing up our house, but something tells me they’ve instead spent it playing with Nina, one of my college girls who has been house sitting for me.

Speaking of those puppies, I am so excited to see them I can barely stand it.  I’ve made myself not think about them on the trip for fear of crying (you’re making fun of me now, I can sense it) and I’m happy to report that I only teared up twice at the thought of them during this entire trip!  If you had of told me that I would be an animal person five years ago, I would have laughed at you.  Couldn’t stand the things, except for killer whales, of course.  And now?  Now I’m basically head over heels for a couple of five lb. balls of fur that have chewed up no less than three pairs of my ballet flats during their short lives. 

Leaving Cate in Eg*pt felt strange, of course.  We did, however, get plenty of extra bonding time WHEN WE HAD TO GO TO THE EMERGENGY ROOM LAST NIGHT.  Y’all, I could not make it up if I tried.  When we went back out for another round of snorkeling during our few days at the Red Sea, Cate got stung by something.  She noticed it but honestly didn’t feel that bad at first.  By yesterday, though, she was sick as could be.  Our hosts in Eg*pt insisted that she go to the hospital and it was a very good thing — by the time we got there, she was drifting in and out of consciousness.  She’s good now, but I’m going to let her tell you the story on her blog first.  Can’t be stealing her thunder now that she has a blog of her own.

I just checked the countdown and it looks like I only have a couple of minutes left, so I better get off here and head towards my gate.  I’ll check in with you again tomorrow, but in the meantime, will you tell me what you’ve been up to these last few weeks?  Little things, big things — I want to hear them all, right there in the comments.  It’ll give me something to look forward to reading when I get off this next flight!

Well, that is if I get off.  If I can find myself a male British flight attendant looking for a girlfriend with a killer fake accent, I’ll be on the first flight back to London.