You have not 'cause you eat not.

The title is a great example of my husband's vast...wisdom. :)

My husband is not a pig by any means, but he does enjoy his food...and his snacks...and sometimes the snacks of those around him. Apparently my children are picking up on this, as Sara Beth (in her most serious 3-year-old voice) warned me today while we were loading the car at Harris Teeter:

Mama, when we get home we hafta keep the fruit nuggets a srecret so Daddy won't eat 'em all.

Fruit nuggets, by the way, are a bit hard to describe...they look almost like Chicklets (remember those???) except they're chewy and made from organic fruit and fruit juice. So not quite fruit snacks but not quite fruit either. The strawberry ones are yummy, if I do say so myself!

And for reference, I only ate the one my son offered me. :D

What Time Is It?

It's time once again for...



I've been a bit out-of-the-loop for the past week or so, but I'm sure there are plenty of things I haven't done lately...

I absolutely did not almost lose my religion last Friday morning when my precious baby boy slammed his little baby head right into my nose! I also didn't spend the next ten minutes or so crying in my bed because it hurt so. very. bad.

Our whole family did not pull over in the parking lot of an empty building that I'm convinced was located in the absolute middle of nowhere so that my daughter could have her first outdoor potty experience. And said experience did not involve a bucket pulled from the beach bag in the back of our van.

While we were spending our mornings lounging on the beach, I did not seriously consider donning the bikini I wore on my honeymoon six years and three kids ago. In fact, I most definitely didn't even pack the skimpy little thing because what self-conscious woman with repositioned body parts would ever think of such a thing???

Oh, and there is not another urinating-in-an-inappropriate-receptacle story to go along with our vacation...but if there were I would definitely have to keep it to myself to protect the innocent and those involved against their will.

And no, that was not a tease. :)

For more bloggers in denial, visit MckMama!

Blogging from the road

Actually I'm blogging from the water since we're all aboard the Southport ferry!

We are all quite tanned (except Chris, who has good reason to fear the sun) and today we visited the aquarium at Ft. Fisher. Sara Beth is mostly loving her little dance camp and Chris is taking me to see Transformers 2 tonight...and yes, I'm pretty excited about that!

And now, back to the vacationing!

Not Me Monday (via email)

I only have one today:

I am not spending the week lounging at the beach with the fam. We have not already been sea-splashed and sand-coated for today. And there are no adorable tan lines on my little ones' buns!

Not me.

For some real admissions, visit www.mycharmingkids.net!

Consider the Lord

Disclaimer: I originally wrote this as an e-mail to a friend of mine. So, Friend, if you're reading this, I apologize for managing the Department of Redundancy Dept. :D

It's amazing what you "know" but never pay attention to. I guess I should probably say it's amazing the things you breeze over until God draws you to them. Today I read this out of Ephesians and I think I fell in love (again):

"Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever. Amen!"--Ephesians 3:20-21

Just how often have I thought I knew what was best for my life? And how dumb was that? So often I pray for the good thing three feet in front of me when God has so much more waiting at the end of the next mile. How stupid I am...and how wondrous the matchless grace of Jesus. In my own little bubble, I can imagine that I am educated, I am smart, I have a handle on this life (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, anyone?)--and yet when I look up from all the me of my life, I should weep at the enormous love God must have for me to allow me to act the way I do through a single day.

Where is my mind each day that I don't consider this? Because I don't. I start my day in hesitation and dread of what will attack me and I finish it regretting the things I watched myself do. And yet in my mind I know that the very SPIRIT OF GOD is hovering inside me waiting for me to recognize Him and to move out of the way of His work. In my mind. I know He desires abundance for me, peace within me, and gracious obedience from me...how is it that I fill my days working so hard to negate each of those things? To him be the glory in the church (not the building...but also the building)...how beautiful that statement sounds! How glorious and incredible that would be! How pitiful I am at bringing it. And yet, how marvelous and wonderful and uplifting to know that He is "able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine"; and that "his power...is at work within us". How incredible it is to have consistent, pervading, all-encompassing hope in every moment this side of eternity because of what awaits us on the other side. AND because of the knowledge that our battle to realize that eternal hope is already decided.

I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Nazarene, and wonder how He could love me--a sinner, condemmed, unclean. How marvelous! How wonderful! And my song shall ever be how marvelous, how wonderful, is my Savior's love for me!

Not Me! Monday

I think I'm jumping on a pretty large bandwagon here. Thanks to a post my friend Jennifer made last week, I have discovered this blog, which is written by a pretty amazing, interesting woman who is a source of inspiration for many. Each week, MckMama hosts a blog carnival where her many of her readers make posts about a single theme--it's called Not Me! Monday and the point is to blog about all the things you did not do over the past week because you would be horribly embarrassed to admit them. Of course, you did do them, but that's the fun of the whole thing. So here are some of the things I absolutely did not do this past week and a few I definitely will not be doing in the coming week.

I most certainly did not spend the entire week working on laundry, only to have clean-but-unfolded clothes laying neatly in stacks on the backs of my living room chairs. And my husband is also not digging for clean undies in the laundry basket.

My husband and I did not spend our Sunday evening watching the movie Happy Feet after the kids went to bed. And said movie is totally not made for kids nor did we DV-R it just for our children to watch and then end up watching the whole thing by ourselves with no children present.

I have not discovered in the past couple of weeks that I can sleep in my contacts without any adverse effects, thereby stretching my daily wear contacts into three- or four-day ones. I always do what my optometrist tells me where my eye care is concerned and I would never resort to simply doing what I can get away with just because I would rather not mess with my eye!

And finally...

My firstborn baby son will absolutely, positively, most definitely NOT be turning five this coming Thursday. He is not beyond excited that his birthday party is at the local skating rink, and I am not wholeheartedly considering sending reminder calls to his preschool friends to make sure anyone who's in town shows up! He also does not read better than some third graders I have known, can not completely dress himself or (mostly) brush his own teeth, and he is not adorably cute and sweet in his semi-grown-up ways. My baby son will forever remain the half-bald, chubby-cheeked, totally dependent little toddler he is in my mind. Yes.

So there you have it. Is there something you didn't do this week that you feel like getting off your chest? Join the fun!

Oh, and I do not just love how the orange Not Me! Monday button matches the orange banner in my blog header. I am not OCD like that. Nope. Not at all. :D

What's Missing?

Notice something(s) missing from the sidebar? I was playing around with template options and those particular items have disappeared into the Twilight Zone. I am using the wrong computer to upload them again...and I'm going to bed, so my small following will just have to do without said items for right now.



Do you actually know what's missing???

And finally it ends (the vacation, that is)

The final day of our trip, we visited The Biltmore House. Chris had never been, which I just thought was a travesty, and I barely remember going my 8th grade year of elementary school. It was large, and beautiful, and very...opulent. "They" don't allow you to take pictures inside the house, so we're at a loss there. But, I do have some very nice pictures of some of the beautiful flowers in their expansive gardens. We enjoyed ourselves immensely walking around with our little audio tour headsets. Of course, everyone we saw was also walking around with the dorky-looking things on too, so it was okay. Once it was over and we were exhausted, we headed home. And after we retrieved our younglings from the grandparents, we headed home...for real. :)

Enjoy the flowers (and the postcard-worthy shot I snagged of the House itself)!

'Round and 'Round and 'Round We Go

Morning in the Dickerson household has been something like this:




Wash, rinse, repeat. They're making me dizzy!

On a different note, Adam is completely dressed in things I very vividly remember Luke wearing, which is very cute but it is also sad to think that A-man is now the size Luke was when we thought he was so big. He loves the shirt, too: "Trwain. Choo-choo. Mm-hmm."

The Trip, day 2

So, after the aforementioned coffee and bagel we drove to Marshall, NC.

Never heard of it? Me either. But they do have awesome recreational activities there:



I know you can't see it...but that's me. In the front of a raft. In the middle of a class IV rapid on the French Broad River. Woo hoo! I'm pretty sure this was taken just before I thought I was going to fall out of the raft and grabbed the rope on the side for dear life.

I'd never been whitewater rafting before but Chris, being the manly ex-youth minister he is, has been several times. So I thought this would be something neat to do together--and it was! I had lots of fun (so did he, I think) and no one got sent overboard, so it turned out really well. But don't you know that we chose to travel to the mountains on the two chilliest days of the past several weeks??? The day before we got there, 80 degrees. The day we left, 80 degrees. This day, when we were soaking wet and there was a wind strong enough to make my ears hurt and it was raining not on us but at us...

...this day was about 65. Go figure. Still fun, though!

After all that excitement, there was a good bit of this:



*not my actual husband*


Once we'd had enough of that we headed for dinner in what my uncle called "South Asheville". We had reservations at a restaurant called Frankie Bones, and we had them there for a very specific reason--their Early Dining menu. My husband ate prime rib, some really good potatoes, and a Caesar salad. I had a wonderful chicken/vegetable/pasta dish that was too large for me to finish and a salad as well. Our drinks (sweet tea--is there anything else to drink with dinner?) were even included. The cost?

His dinner: $14.99
My dinner: $13.99

This was an AWESOME find! No, I don't have a picture of our food. Sorry to disappoint. :)

The day did not end with dinner...our "dessert stomachs" were still very empty. And my uncles certainly had the cure for that! We met at their house, which has an AMAZING view, and they drove us to downtown Asheville. It reminded me a lot of Chapel Hill--you know, 5,000 people and 200 parking spots. Our ultimate destination was a place called the Chocolate Lounge. Oh yeah. Before we got there, though, we stopped at a different chocolatier where each of us had a mouth-watering truffle. Skip ahead about a block and a half and we all had ice cream too. Notice a pattern? And we still haven't made it to the Chocolate Lounge! We stopped to see the Drum Circle, a Friday night occurrence in Asheville. It was...very interesting. There was definitely a time in my life (when I was much younger, much less inhibited, and much more naive about people's perceptions) when I would have really gotten into the whole scene. But not now. And not in a white linen skirt. I do have a picture of the crowd, the capturing of which made me look even more like a tourist:





And then...the icing on the cake. We arrived at the Chocolate Lounge, where there lay a plethora of adorable little things that looked something like this:





As full as I was from dinner (and truffles and lemon sorbet...) I managed to scarf another truffle, about half of a luscious brownie topped with cinnamon and cayenne pepper (very interesting taste--hurt so good!), half of one of my uncle's truffles, and several bites of a lavender creme brulee. Oh, and some decaf coffee that I purposefully doctored to consist more of milk and sugar than coffee. Nearly too stuffed to talk, we headed back to my uncles' house and relaxed (as much as possible with their very large dogs) on the couch watching TV. Then we finally headed back to the Grove Park, collected our things for check-out the next morning, and collapsed into bed. Ahhh...

Still more to come about the last day, but not nearly as much activity as this one!!!

I know, I know

I am fully aware that there is another day and a half left to post about from my little trip with spub...but my head is in a small vice grip right now and there will be no wrestling with photo placement or post layout at this time. I have really cool pictures of what we did on Friday, though, and they will be posted!

...as soon as my head doesn't feel like it's imploding upon itself.

Back to our regularly-scheduled program...

We've officially been home for 24 hours now, and life seems very much...normal. Except that I have a little leap in my heart thinking about our time spent alone together. So as promised here are some of the details of our little getaway (complete with illustrations)! We spent our time away in Asheville, which was extremely relaxing and beautiful despite the fact that I filled up a lot of our trip with various activities! I'll start with just Thursday, because really a blog post only needs to be so long.

First off, we spent lots of time here:

Once we got near Hickory, I let Chris guess what we were doing. Apparently I was not quite as secretive as I thought because he was able to guess not only where we were going (because he just knew that's where the exit I gave him was and what was about that distance from Durham), but also the two main activities I had planned. Oh well. He could not guess where we would be staying, though:

That's a view of the Gove Park Inn looking up from the spa area. This place is...incredible. There's gorgeous stonework everywhere, beautiful views, and more neat places inside the Inn itself than we could even find! Awesome...relaxing...beautiful. Kudos to my uncle for helping us get the best deal possible on staying at this wonderful place and for buying us the most amazing dinner I've ever eaten:

Now we didn't actually eat what was in this picture, but it was definitely just as nice and there's not enough room on this entire page to show you everything we ate. It took us three hours to eat our complete four-course dinner, which was a good speed because I doubt I would have been able to eat half of it at a normal pace. My husband picked antelope as his main course dish...he's such a guy! We ate so much at dinner I was seriously debating breakfast the next morning, but we did gladly accept hot coffee and a nicely-toasted bagel from my other uncle before heading off for a morning of high adventure! Stay tuned...

The Game is Afoot

Just be warned: I am kidnapping my husband in the morning. We will be dispensing the children upon the grandparents approximately midday, at which time we will leave for destinations unknown (to him, anyway). We will return Saturday. Mobile communication devices will accompany us, but I make no promises as to their utilization. The blog will reflect our activities once we have returned.

This message will self destruct in 5

4

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>poof<

Things I Love About Hope Mills

Since I don't actually live in Durham anymore and I am by no means unhappy living here, I think Hope Mills deserves its own list! See Durham's list here.

1. Our house. It's pretty awesome.
2. Green Springs...and the music we sing there!
3. Produce that comes from people who actually grow it!
4. At least there's ONE Harris Teeter!
5. Big T's shaved ice. I just wish my favorite flavor wasn't bright red so I didn't look like a total goofball after eating it and turning all the surfaces near my mouth that same shade!
6. Krispy Kreme. I know where this one is...I just can't go there after dark!
7. The Splash Pad!
8. Our pediatrician. Yeah that one's weird, but I really do like her.
9. Feeling like we're actually making our own life in a new town.
10. Being home...in a different place. :)

The Ultimate Irony

Today I won free groceries from Harris Teeter! Now, you would think this would be a great thing, right? Well, it would...except I only went to buy things that were nearly free since this is Triple Coupon week and my total was a grand $ .82! I guess they didn't lose any money on me!