Today we got our first electrical bill since using the wood stove for our main heating source. Oh, did I mention we have electric heat in this house? Very expensive. Last year at this time we used 114 kWh in electricity and this year we only used 22 kWh in one month. That translates to only $120 this month compared to about $600 or so. Pretty significant savings, if you ask me! So, dear readers, if you are paying too much for oil or electric heat, please consider a wood stove. Especially if you stay home and can keep the fires burning while your hubby is out winning the bread. ;)
In other news, my in-laws were vising this past weekend. It was nice to visit with them and it also helped distract me from the start of this new cycle. Which reminds me, I don't know if I mentioned this before, but my husband and I are different nationalities. He is Filipino and I am Caucasian. Sometimes, my visits with the in-laws are kind of tough, because they can speak in their native language and have certain mannerisms that I have been known to misinterpret at times. My husband was born in the states though, and grew up speaking only English, so at least we are in a similar boat when his parents start talking to each other in their language. Sometimes I still worry, are they talking about me? My husband always assures me that they aren't, even though he can't understand what they're saying either. Oh well. The cultural differences that exist have caused me anxiety at times, but we don't really visit with them that often, so it's usually not a big deal. I was thankful to be back to just the two of us when they left though, we're back to normal here in our home and it feels good.
I took our Christmas tree down yesterday. For some reason I really like taking all the decorations down once the Christmas season is over. I really just love Spring and so taking Christmas stuff down is like one step closer to the arrival of Spring. Winter is not my favorite season. But I do put up with them for the dawn of Spring! And I love summer, too. So our house is looking more ordinary-time-ish and I'm loving it.
Well, I better get something to eat, my tummy is growling!
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Rejoice Always
Today my period came. I have been thinking of my pledge to trust God with an even greater trust than I think possible for me. And I want to learn how to rejoice in the Lord in all things. Even this.
Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! Your kindness should be known to all. The Lord is near. Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. (Phillipians 4:4-7)
Lord Jesus, you are all powerful, all knowing and all loving. I place my desires and my whole life in your hands. Teach me to trust in your beautiful plan for my life. As I over my life, I can see how you guided me and led me to where I am today. Help me not forget how my sorrow has turned to joy in so many past events. Like the time we almost bought a house that was totally not as good as the one we have now. You turned my sorrow into a greater joy than I thought possible. You always have my better interest in mind, even when I don't understand what that is. Help me to have an eternal view of my life each and every day. Give me your love and your grace, that's enough for me.
Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! Your kindness should be known to all. The Lord is near. Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. (Phillipians 4:4-7)
Lord Jesus, you are all powerful, all knowing and all loving. I place my desires and my whole life in your hands. Teach me to trust in your beautiful plan for my life. As I over my life, I can see how you guided me and led me to where I am today. Help me not forget how my sorrow has turned to joy in so many past events. Like the time we almost bought a house that was totally not as good as the one we have now. You turned my sorrow into a greater joy than I thought possible. You always have my better interest in mind, even when I don't understand what that is. Help me to have an eternal view of my life each and every day. Give me your love and your grace, that's enough for me.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
A New Year, A New Kind Of Trust
I am due for my period in a couple days. This past month our charting instructor calculated a very good cm score so I want to have hope that this month could be our month. My in laws are visiting this weekend, and I am already thinking how we could have wonderful news to share. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but both our charting instructor and my napro doctor have said they are really happy with the way my charts look.
I always want to have hope because ultimately God is the author of life. He is in control. If it's His will, then it WILL be done. No matter what this month brings, I trust in His will for me. This is a new year and I am striving to trust ever more in God, I want to have a new kind of complete and utter trust in Him who is Love itself! Thank you sweet Jesus, for the blessings you have in store for me in this new year. I am so grateful for your blessings and your love for me.
I always want to have hope because ultimately God is the author of life. He is in control. If it's His will, then it WILL be done. No matter what this month brings, I trust in His will for me. This is a new year and I am striving to trust ever more in God, I want to have a new kind of complete and utter trust in Him who is Love itself! Thank you sweet Jesus, for the blessings you have in store for me in this new year. I am so grateful for your blessings and your love for me.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
On My Blog Title
Today I was thinking of my blog title and wanted to write a little post about what it means and why I chose it for my blog.
God has many "divine names". He is Existence itself, Love itself, Truth, Justice, Mercy, Being, Knowledge and Goodness itself. All of who God is, is existence. He is Existence itself. His essence equals His existence. To say God exists is to say who and what He is. God is also fully love. His essence, or who and what He is, is Love itself. It is so hard to fully grasp this with our finite minds. But it is wonderfully amazing to contemplate it even just a little. God is Love itself!
"He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is love." 1 John 4:8
What we know of love is a small portion of Love itself and when we love, we share in a participation with Love itself. In the same fashion, through our own existence, we share in a participation of God, Existence itself. Knowing more of who and what God is, helps us to love and trust Him more.
When I think of the people who love me most, I think first of my husband, parents, cousins, and siblings. Their love for me is real and true, but it is nothing compared to the love God love's me with. For His essence, His being, is love. There is no love more real, more fully active than Love Itself.
This brings me to why I chose this title for my blog. I chose it because I want to always remind myself and others who God is. He is Love itself. With this reminder, I hope to learn to trust Him more completely and fully. I hope to remind myself each day that there is nothing God allows that is not without reason, or a purpose and some greater good. It is my hope that my dear readers are blessed with this reminder each time they read this blog. Be not afraid, put your trust in Him, for His essence is Love!
God has many "divine names". He is Existence itself, Love itself, Truth, Justice, Mercy, Being, Knowledge and Goodness itself. All of who God is, is existence. He is Existence itself. His essence equals His existence. To say God exists is to say who and what He is. God is also fully love. His essence, or who and what He is, is Love itself. It is so hard to fully grasp this with our finite minds. But it is wonderfully amazing to contemplate it even just a little. God is Love itself!
"He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is love." 1 John 4:8
What we know of love is a small portion of Love itself and when we love, we share in a participation with Love itself. In the same fashion, through our own existence, we share in a participation of God, Existence itself. Knowing more of who and what God is, helps us to love and trust Him more.
When I think of the people who love me most, I think first of my husband, parents, cousins, and siblings. Their love for me is real and true, but it is nothing compared to the love God love's me with. For His essence, His being, is love. There is no love more real, more fully active than Love Itself.
This brings me to why I chose this title for my blog. I chose it because I want to always remind myself and others who God is. He is Love itself. With this reminder, I hope to learn to trust Him more completely and fully. I hope to remind myself each day that there is nothing God allows that is not without reason, or a purpose and some greater good. It is my hope that my dear readers are blessed with this reminder each time they read this blog. Be not afraid, put your trust in Him, for His essence is Love!
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Prayer Buddy Reveal
I want to say thank you to TCIE for praying for me during my first prayer buddies! I am so grateful for all your prayers and feel especially blessed by them considering all of the heartache and suffering God is allowing you to go through. I have been following your blog, and one thing is for sure, God is molding you into something wonderful. His plan is at work in your life now and I pray with so many others that God will show you a glimpse of how beautiful His plans for you are. My husband and I are now praying for you and your husband that your journey here on out will be filled with peace and happiness. His yoke is easy and His burden is light! May God bless you, TCIE, and thanks for your prayers!
My prayer buddy this advent was Angela at Mary Grace Holmes! Angela, you and your intentions have been in my prayers each day. I have enjoyed reading your blog and getting to know you. I prayed the rosary and chaplet for you during my holy hour and have offered up my times of suffering for your intentions. May God bless you and your beautiful family! It was an honor praying for you!
My prayer buddy this advent was Angela at Mary Grace Holmes! Angela, you and your intentions have been in my prayers each day. I have enjoyed reading your blog and getting to know you. I prayed the rosary and chaplet for you during my holy hour and have offered up my times of suffering for your intentions. May God bless you and your beautiful family! It was an honor praying for you!
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Why I Cancelled FB
Today I am getting my haircut with my older sister and my mom. My sister lives in the city and is coming home for about a week. We have gotten to be closer over the years, so it's nice to have her in town to catch up. Plus, she can see our wood stove! haha I feel like I've somehow mentioned that thing in almost every post since we had it installed. My poor readers, you must be so tired of hearing about it! :)
I just read a blog post about FB recently. It reminded me of all the many, many reasons I'm not on it anymore. I thought I'd share them here and maybe encourage others to follow my lead and cancel FB. Okay, I'm not really trying to convince you all, but I do feel very strongly about my reasons for not liking it. Before I begin, I will admit that there are many good uses of FB. I think it depends on one's personality and how they use it, as with many things.
Rather than connecting me to people, FB made me feel more distant from certain friends of mine. If I hadn't checked FB for a few days, I would miss someone's post about meeting for coffee or miss a group invite for some party. Suddenly I realized I had a cell phone, work email (when I was still working), personal email and now FB that I needed to check in order to stay in communication with some friends. It's now my opinion that if I need FB to stay in touch with friends then they are not really close friends to being with.
I'm a very sensitive person. I get jealous super easy and I feel sorry for myself often. The root cause of those problems is that I compare myself to others. I've found that FB is like the comparing person's nightmare. First of all, people only post their most beautiful looking photos, I mean, why wouldn't they? And the news they post is almost always the exciting stuff going on. It's hard to feel content with your life when everyone is posting their travel, baby, wedding photos and so many wonderful tidbits of their life. I remember feeling like I wanted to post beautiful photos myself, and I know one of my motives was to make myself look good.
The time issue was another problem. It was hard to spend a short amount of time on FB. And even after signing out, I would sometimes find myself still dwelling on a comment, analyzing it to no end. Or I would become immediately dissatisfied with myself, my life, my husband, ....you name it, I could always find something that made me feel not good enough. FB had the power to suck the happiness right out of my day, without my agreeing to it. There are endless avenues of potential discontent and my husband could tell when he would come home if I had been on FB. My mood could usually say it all. It was something I read, or something I saw that threw me off. I just got really tired of my mood being so dependent on how my check in with FB went. And honestly, now that I don't have it, I have never been happier. Well, I still have my days obviously, but in general, I feel free from the comparison trap.
If you're anything like me, I would strongly encourage you to pull the FB plug. You will thank me. Your friends will begin to know that they have to call you to events because you're not on FB. You'll start actually spending time with people in real life more. You won't be moved to tears with another baby announcement. It will be easier to not compare yourself or your life to others. And those are just a few of the benefits of not having FB.
The other reason I don't have it, is because I want my life to be less open to the public. I know you can have privacy settings and I know you can only share what you want to. I don't want to post on FB when I finally conceive (God willing I do conceive someday!). That would be like me throwing my pearls to swine. Something I am hoping, praying, and struggling with is so precious and special to me. How can I just broadcast it to all of FB as if it's just another "event". Just another day, just another baby. Because that's what it would be to those reading it. I would get the normal congratulations and I know that I want so much more than just that. I would want them to have understood what I've gone through and that this wasn't just another baby announcement. Does that make any sense?
I think it started before I got engaged. So many people were getting engaged and I didn't want our engagement or marriage to be just another one shared on FB. I had a lot of personal anxiety at that time and it was so much better for me to not be on FB while I was going through a huge life changing time. Now I feel like things are no different in regards to how I feel about FB. Maybe it's too impersonal for me, I don't know. But now, those who know about my struggle to have a baby are close to me in real life or they are my readers on this blog. I prefer it that way. I think I'm better off without FB and I think if you can relate to any of what I've written you may be as well.
I just read a blog post about FB recently. It reminded me of all the many, many reasons I'm not on it anymore. I thought I'd share them here and maybe encourage others to follow my lead and cancel FB. Okay, I'm not really trying to convince you all, but I do feel very strongly about my reasons for not liking it. Before I begin, I will admit that there are many good uses of FB. I think it depends on one's personality and how they use it, as with many things.
Rather than connecting me to people, FB made me feel more distant from certain friends of mine. If I hadn't checked FB for a few days, I would miss someone's post about meeting for coffee or miss a group invite for some party. Suddenly I realized I had a cell phone, work email (when I was still working), personal email and now FB that I needed to check in order to stay in communication with some friends. It's now my opinion that if I need FB to stay in touch with friends then they are not really close friends to being with.
I'm a very sensitive person. I get jealous super easy and I feel sorry for myself often. The root cause of those problems is that I compare myself to others. I've found that FB is like the comparing person's nightmare. First of all, people only post their most beautiful looking photos, I mean, why wouldn't they? And the news they post is almost always the exciting stuff going on. It's hard to feel content with your life when everyone is posting their travel, baby, wedding photos and so many wonderful tidbits of their life. I remember feeling like I wanted to post beautiful photos myself, and I know one of my motives was to make myself look good.
The time issue was another problem. It was hard to spend a short amount of time on FB. And even after signing out, I would sometimes find myself still dwelling on a comment, analyzing it to no end. Or I would become immediately dissatisfied with myself, my life, my husband, ....you name it, I could always find something that made me feel not good enough. FB had the power to suck the happiness right out of my day, without my agreeing to it. There are endless avenues of potential discontent and my husband could tell when he would come home if I had been on FB. My mood could usually say it all. It was something I read, or something I saw that threw me off. I just got really tired of my mood being so dependent on how my check in with FB went. And honestly, now that I don't have it, I have never been happier. Well, I still have my days obviously, but in general, I feel free from the comparison trap.
If you're anything like me, I would strongly encourage you to pull the FB plug. You will thank me. Your friends will begin to know that they have to call you to events because you're not on FB. You'll start actually spending time with people in real life more. You won't be moved to tears with another baby announcement. It will be easier to not compare yourself or your life to others. And those are just a few of the benefits of not having FB.
The other reason I don't have it, is because I want my life to be less open to the public. I know you can have privacy settings and I know you can only share what you want to. I don't want to post on FB when I finally conceive (God willing I do conceive someday!). That would be like me throwing my pearls to swine. Something I am hoping, praying, and struggling with is so precious and special to me. How can I just broadcast it to all of FB as if it's just another "event". Just another day, just another baby. Because that's what it would be to those reading it. I would get the normal congratulations and I know that I want so much more than just that. I would want them to have understood what I've gone through and that this wasn't just another baby announcement. Does that make any sense?
I think it started before I got engaged. So many people were getting engaged and I didn't want our engagement or marriage to be just another one shared on FB. I had a lot of personal anxiety at that time and it was so much better for me to not be on FB while I was going through a huge life changing time. Now I feel like things are no different in regards to how I feel about FB. Maybe it's too impersonal for me, I don't know. But now, those who know about my struggle to have a baby are close to me in real life or they are my readers on this blog. I prefer it that way. I think I'm better off without FB and I think if you can relate to any of what I've written you may be as well.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Better :)
I wanted to write another post because my last one was so depressing! My Mom and I are fine now. Of course I didn't mean it when I said "don't ever call me again" but she said she knew how deeply I must have been hurting to say something like that. My Mom is always forgiving, and after we talked again about 10 minutes after I wrote the last post, I was feeling so much better. I think I was just really hurting because I want my husband and I to be the ones bringing kids over my parent's house. And since that isn't happening, and the cousin I'm not really on good terms with right now was bringing her kids over, it was an all around upsetting situation for me.
In other news, I don't think I mentioned this here before, but my husband and I sing in our church choir. We had practice tonight and I am SO excited about the music we're singing for Midnight Mass. We have a new director and she is working wonders with our group. We sound really good! I should see about recording our singing and putting it up on my blog.
I feel like I've had some very dramatic mood swings these past few days. The phone call with my Mom was one, and the other one was when we came home to our house (hubs and I) and it was freezing inside. The wood stove doesn't load itself, so unless we keep the electric heat on at least a little, our house is pretty chilly when we've been out for a while. The cold makes me so irritable, and I think I was also hungry. My poor husband had to hear me rant on about how it was such a bad idea to get this stove and I just CAN'T stay here if it's going to be this cold!!! Well, we're all better now, but I've just noticed myself being more irritable.
Then this afternoon I felt nauseous for a couple hours. You're probably already guessing that I'm putting all these things together and wondering if I could possibly be pregnant. Why would I even want to go there? I can't make myself crazy with signs and symptoms. I'm sure so many of you have been here before. I want to go there and imagine what it would be like if I did find out I was pregnant this cycle. But how can I? I feel so foolish for even entertaining the idea, and at the same time I want to. But I want it to be my reality this time! Wow, that would be so amazing!!!!
In other news, I don't think I mentioned this here before, but my husband and I sing in our church choir. We had practice tonight and I am SO excited about the music we're singing for Midnight Mass. We have a new director and she is working wonders with our group. We sound really good! I should see about recording our singing and putting it up on my blog.
I feel like I've had some very dramatic mood swings these past few days. The phone call with my Mom was one, and the other one was when we came home to our house (hubs and I) and it was freezing inside. The wood stove doesn't load itself, so unless we keep the electric heat on at least a little, our house is pretty chilly when we've been out for a while. The cold makes me so irritable, and I think I was also hungry. My poor husband had to hear me rant on about how it was such a bad idea to get this stove and I just CAN'T stay here if it's going to be this cold!!! Well, we're all better now, but I've just noticed myself being more irritable.
Then this afternoon I felt nauseous for a couple hours. You're probably already guessing that I'm putting all these things together and wondering if I could possibly be pregnant. Why would I even want to go there? I can't make myself crazy with signs and symptoms. I'm sure so many of you have been here before. I want to go there and imagine what it would be like if I did find out I was pregnant this cycle. But how can I? I feel so foolish for even entertaining the idea, and at the same time I want to. But I want it to be my reality this time! Wow, that would be so amazing!!!!
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