Sick Husband

So...I took Mackenzie to urgent care last night, as he was showing all the signs of the flu. He started coughing on Friday night. Turned into more coughing, chills, body aches, dizziness, fever, watery eyes, nausea and by Sunday his temp was at 101.9. The doc said he's got all the signs of H1N1 and told him to stay home for the rest of the week. He's a pretty healthy guy overall, rarely gets sick. So, it's sad to see him like this. Please say a prayer for him, if you can! I'm a little worried about getting it but, I'm at the point where I've already been exposed. So now, it's just waiting to see what happens.

In the mean time, I made a yummy chicken soup, which I'll share the recipe with you later and we'll be taking lots of vitamins!



Hope you all have a wonderful rest of the week. I'm going to take the rest of the week off from blogging to take care of my husband and to catch up on school work! I'll try to come by and visit you all and I'll be back for Worship and Praise Sunday!

My Hubby's Favorite Cookie

Oatmeal Raisin has always been one of my husband's favorite cookies. So, I decided to make them for him. He likes his cookies soft and chewy, so I went on my mission to find the softest cookie recipe.

Courtesy of Allrecipes.com, I think I found a good one!

In a large bowl, cream together until smooth, 1/2 cup softened butter, 1/2 cup butter flavored shortening, 1 cup packed brown sugar, 1/2 cup granulated sugar, 2 eggs, and 1 tsp vanilla.

In a separate bowl, combine 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp ground cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ground cloves, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

Slowly turn the flour mixture into the wet mixture.

Then, stir in 1 cup raisins and 3 cups rolled or old-fashioned oats.

Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls on to ungreased baking sheets. Bake at 350 degrees F for about 9-10 minutes. Allow the cookies to cool for 2 minutes before transferring to baking sheets. Enjoy!

Yum! They turned out soft and chewy. Best of all, they got my husbands stamp of approval!

Late Easter Celebration

Last Sunday, Mackenzie and I went over to his aunt and uncle's (Sharon's side) to celebrate Easter. They asked to celebrate a week late due to the fact that a boy their daughter Whitney is seeing/courting, was in town for a visit. They wanted us all to meet him. He was such a sweet guy and seemed perfect for Whitney.

We really enjoy spending time with Mackenzie's Mom's side of the family. They are such wonderful, caring, God-loving people. We've been really blessed by all of them and I've had such a great time getting to know them all better.

Here is some of the group (mainly the kids) getting ready to go on the Easter egg hunt. It was fun hiding the eggs in unsuspecting places!

Filling their plates with delicious food!

Later we took a walk down to a near by, public, football field to watch some of the guys play.

My husband decided to ride a bike next to us while we were walking. He started doing a bunch of funny tricks.

He makes me laugh!
This is a quality that I really love about him and I know that he will always keep me laughing.

The three sisters, Sharon, Kathi, and Kelli.

We saw these 3 VW Bugs lined up on our way down and I just had to take a picture. I love how vintage and rusty looking they are. It's my husbands dream to fix one up someday.

Do you remeber the bike picture from my post on Monday? This was the day I rode with him. He told me he would give me a ride on his handle bars. I was a little apprehensive at first but had fun once I got on! I'd never actually ridden on handle bars before!

And finally, as I was talking with Sharon, Kathi, and Mackenzie, I noticed our shadows and though it would make a neat picture!

Have a blessed day!

Voice to Spirit

Hi all! Can I just say that the weather has been beautiful here? I absolutely love the sun, being from Southern California. However, where I live in Oregon now, we don't get too much of it. So, I like to take advantage of it when it is here!

Yesterday afternoon I went for a nice walk and decided to bring my camera along with me. Here are some of the pictures I took. Unfortunately, I didn't plan right and my camera battery died right in the middle of my walk.

I loved how the sun was shining through this tree.

In other news, the reason for the title of this post...many of you have asked about the cd that my husband and I put together. It's been almost a year now since we released it. Our group is called Voice to Spirit and the title of the cd is "Songs for a Broken City". It is a Christian Electronic-Style Worship CD. We covered/remixed 6 contemporary worship songs and wrote 9 of our own. 2 of the ones we wrote are co-written by both Mackenzie and myself. The rest are Mackenzie's own work, a few of them are instrumental.

We held a release party with about 30 of our friends and family members last June. Our intentions have been to do more events but due to our recent marriage and wedding last October keeping us really busy, we weren't able to schedule any concerts. Our hope is to travel to churches and youth groups to share our music. We'd also like to create a new cd in the future. Music has always been a passion of both Mackenzie and mine. We're fortunate enough to play in the worship team at our church.

Anyway, my loving husband gave me the code to paste the link to preview our music on Itunes. You may have to download itunes if you don't already have it on your computer. Once you get to our page, you can double-click on the song title and listen to a sample of our music. I'm sorry it's not the whole songs, but at least you can get a preview! I hope you are blessed! Here's the link:

Songs for a Broken City Voice To Spirit Genre: Electronic Worship (P) 2008 S.I. Productions

I'm sorry the link and spacing are so big! My husband is working on making it smaller but for now, this will do! Once it is smaller, I will place a link in my sidebar.

Have a blessed day!

Six Months!!

This past Saturday, Mackenzie and I celebrated our
6 month anniversary! Yay!

We decided to celebrate by going out to a nice dinner, to one of our favorite restaurants and seeing a movie.

It has been so gorgeous here lately and we really wanted to sit outside at the restaurant. However, the wait for outside seating was really long and we wanted to be able to get to our movie on time. We did however have a window seat that looked right out on the river. So beautiful.


I'm sorry this picture of us is so blurry! It's the only one I have of us at the restaurant. We asked the waiter to take it and he quickly walked away...oh well! Can you tell that there is a beautiful view in the background?

Have a wonderful Monday and enjoy the sunny weather, if you have it!

My Love

Can I tell you a little bit about my sweet, hard-working husband?

We've been married only 5 months but I've seen so much growth and strength in my husband. I'm blessed to have him and couldn't imagine life without him!

First, my husband is so handy and and very much a hard worker:



The above pictures are of Mackenzie and his brother Cameron in the process of fixing up our first home. We bought a manufactured home to start building our equity and boy was this house a can of worms! It took a lot of hard work. My husband with the help of me, his parents, and brothers did all of this work. It saved us a lot of money to do it ourselves (himself!) than to pay for someone else to do it. Some of the things that needed to be done: ripping up smelly carpet, replacing two walls due to dry rot, replacing a floor due to dry rot, DEEP cleaning, new doors, trim, culk, paint...etc. We still need to tile the bathrooms and work on the exterior of the house (painting and landscaping). But, I owe it all to my hard working husband! You are amazing honey! (By the way, I will try to do a post soon on the remodel of our house...I've been holding off on that but will soon!)

Second, my husband is so sweet and romantic to me:

He leaves me little love notes like these. I found this little note on my computer screen when I came home from work one day.

He brings me home flowers like these.

These sweet gifts like the note and flowers don't happen everyday but they make me feel so happy and loved. I feel loved everyday by him but when he takes the time to write me a little note, it means the world to me to know that he was thinking of me!

Third, he makes me laugh:






Fourth, He loves the Lord more than he loves me and that is so important to me:

Recently he's been doing some research and truth seeking. It has been so awesome to see him become stronger in the Word and in his relationship with God. In addition to his individual time with the Lord, he's involved in two separate bible studies. He amazes me.

Ok, so that was more than just a little bit about my husband, but I just couldn't resist!

I love you my favorite and I'm so blessed to call you my husband! Thank you for giving me so much love.

I want to encourage you ladies to pray for your husbands if you haven't started already. It's so important not only for them but for your relationship. I stumbled across 31 days of prayer for your husband that another blogger had linked to. You can find it here.

Have a blessed weekend!

Mackenzie's Fishing Trip with Dad and Hayden!

The weekend is 2 days away! I'm so excited and ready for it! We're having my best friend and her husband over for dinner on Saturday evening, but other than that, I'm just excited to relax!

Anyway...
On the day of the Valentine's tea that I hosted with my sweet Mother-in-love Sharon, Mackenzie, his dad Eric, and brother Hayden went fishing up north for Sturgeon.

Mackenzie and I are not huge fish eaters. He only likes white meat and me well, let's just say I'm going to need to be optimistic about eating fish for awhile! FYI, sturgeon is a white meat fish.

However, his dad is an expert fisherman and hunter! This is one of his dad's favorite hobbies and it was a wonderful way for Mackenzie and Eric to spend some time together. From what I heard, Eric was so excited to be able to spend some quality time with his son. Mackenzie was excited as well!

They caught 2 sturgeon! This was a pretty good day for them!

There they are, each about 3 feet long. There are laws on catching Sturgeon. One, you must have a fishing license. Two, each person can only catch a total of 5 sturgeon per year. And three, you may only catch one sturgeon per person for each fishing trip. There's also a limit on the size of the fish but I'm not quite sure what that is. If you are familiar with sturgeon, you know that they can grow to be huge fish! After taking 3 or so pictures, Mackenzie was really anxious for me to be done...he said the fish were both really heavy!

Ok, this picture grosses me out! But I wanted to show you some of the features of the sturgeon. They are such an interesting looking fish!

I'm so proud of my husband! This will really help us save money on buying meat, if I can learn to like it! :) Fish also has so many health benefits as you may know. We're going to research different ways to cook the fish, to find a way that we like it. Any ideas for a non-fish liking person? haha

Have a wonderful Thursday!

My Talented Husband

So, I have to brag a bit today about my husband. He is so talented and I am absolutely proud of him! Mackenzie is a Digital Arts major at the local university. What that entails is, editing videos, creating/building websites, graphic design, creating videos and music. His passion is music and we've created a Christian electronic-style worship cd together.

Anyway, he had to do a project for one of his classes and I wanted to share this video with you all. It's part of a bigger project but basically he's filmed himself playing the different instruments to a song he created. As the instruments come in on the song, they are shown on the video. It's only a part of the song but it gives you an idea of his work. Here it is:





What surprises me about Mackenzie, and I love, is that he is so humble about his work. He has created many videos, graphics, songs, and he rarely shows them to anyone but me and his family. (Not including our CD) He's his worst critic, but he does a fantastic job, in my opinion!

Music has always been his biggest passion in this whole field and that's what his ultimate goal is to do. He's learning a lot in this program but it really comes pretty naturally to him. I just wanted to share about this today to let you know how proud I am of him. I pray the Lord leads him to the right workplace, where he can truly do what he loves.

Here's a few other graphics he's made:

There's just a bit of his work! Hope you enjoyed it!

Also, please join me this Sunday for Worship and Praise Sunday. Share a favorite worship song of yours! Please read more details here!