Cafe de Valentine

I've never tried to post a video before so I have no clue if this will work. I heard this song this morning for the second time on the radio. The radio announcer before the song said that the lead singer wrote this song after a rough patch in his marriage. I can't help but think as great as our marriage is, if we could be proactive about these things. I also wonder how many couples we do life with on a regular basis that may have issues below the surface that they never lead on about from the outside. Husbands and Fathers have a really tough job Biblical in the family. I can only imagine what's it's like to lead a spouse much less a family, but I also acknowledge that us wives don't always make this easy on the poor guys. Do we allow him to lead? Do we allow him to love us? Do we allow him to fight for us? Do we still allow him to dream? If we allow him to do so, do we make it easy? Do we speak to him as if he's still the love of our lives? Do we serve him as...

Our church is doing a series on the Song of Solomon book. We do this every few years as a church family for a few reasons. It is never a bad thing to hear the bible again and again, not to mention that we cover all the different aspects of relationship and I wasn't in the same place last time we did this series as I am now, so it's great to hear it all again for where I am now! The first week was on healthy Godly attraction and the second week was on healthy dating/courtship and this last Sunday was on Marriage. Of course, in my current walk of life, this is one that I was most looking forward to. I will preface this whole post by saying most of this I'm pulling straight from the sermon (I took notes) by Brad Bell (our Senior Pastor at The Well Community Church) please feel free to visit our church website and click the media tab on the top right to listen to any of the sermons online. I promise if you're married that this week's will be the best 30-40 min you'...

so i was reading a post today over at Big Mama's blog (if you haven't read her blog lately, you should. she's hysterical and funny about all the things that we often find "discouraging". bigmamablog .com) she was talking about gals in their early twenties. mostly single gals and the struggles that comes with finding a husband. i was interested because that was me for many years and i have a huge heart for girls in that role. however i also think that your heart beats for different things as your stage of life changes. while i still have a passion for wanting girls to be patient in that in find their own fit in life and be content where they are rather than long for the married phase, i now have a burning desire for married gals. marriage is a huge joy in my life. i found an amazing husband who loves me, serves me, provides for me, helps around the house, does ALL the yard work, takes me on little get aways, handles our finances, got me out of dept, taught me how ...

i've learned one valuable lesson being married for over two years now. i mean, i've learned a lot about marriage and about myself as a wife... but the key lesson learned has been how everything is now experienced TOGETHER. every trial, every stress, every change, every illness, every emotion, every sleepless night... EVERYTHING. i have noticed this little by little, but even more so over the last month. ryan is now in his third week on the new job. one was total overwhelming melt down. he had no clue what to expect, where he would be placed, who his supervisor would be etc. the first two days was more prep work than job related: getting sworn in, signing paperwork, getting his badge, choosing health insurance etc. the third day was figuring out what department he would be working in, his general job description, getting his office (see below post by r) etc. day three and four were some general training seminars for his department with his fellow co-workers where he heard some ...

while our whole goal for our weekends lately is to relax and de-stress my husband, i find that doing fun things often helps as well. this weekend we managed to sleep in BOTH saturday and sunday (which is a big deal for r, as he doesn't usually sleep longer than 6 hours) which i'm hoping gave us a good jump start to the week. friday night we had dinner and dessert with jeff and candi (our good friends and upstairs neighbors) and played a game of cards (which the girls won, finally!). saturday night we went to the FSU homecoming game... and we WON! and yesterday proved to be an enjoyable day at the movies. we saw the movie "fireproof" with kirk cameron. the movie is a low budget christian film about marriage and love done biblically. i was interested in seeing it from the time it came out, however i really hadn't made the effort to go, i wasn't in a hurry. i figured being a christian low budget film, that the acting would be terrible (which it started a bit roug...