Valentine's Giveaway

The gals over at Crazy Lady Primitives are having a wonderful Valentine's giveaway. Be sure to stop by their blog and enter your name. You could win these heartfelt heart shelf sitters!

Coveted Prayers

It’s been kind of a crazy week here on the home front. As some of you may recall from my last post, our kitty, Adventure has been in and out of the vets since last Friday. We knew something was wrong with her but her appointment on Friday didn’t show anything so we brought her home and over the weekend she got much worse. I was so afraid something was going to happen to her on Sunday and we couldn’t bring her to the vets because they’re closed over the weekend and we had 14 inches of snow dropped on us all day on Sunday so traveling would have been terrible anyway.

I brought her in first thing on Monday morning and they did a series of blood tests and x-rays. The vet thought that she might be blocked so he gave her some barium to see if she’d pass it by morning. If she didn’t pass it he would go in and operate to see what they could find. She spent Monday night at the vets and on Tuesday they said she’d passed a giant hairball so she was okay to come home. YAY!

I picked her up on Tuesday morning and she seemed okay but didn’t seem to start acting any better. By Friday I called them again because she was getting worse again and I didn’t want the weekend to go by without her being checked out. Into the vet’s Amanda and I go again with her and they did another set of x-rays and thought there was still something in there so she ended up having to have surgery at 4:00 that afternoon. We picked her up Saturday morning and now she’s resting at home again. We’re watching her very closely. Hopefully she’ll be starting to feel better soon. They removed some very hard poops mixed with hair and some green colored matter that couldn’t be passed between her large and small intestines. I think the green matter might have been one of those toy mice. We had a bright green one. So now she’s got about 20 staples in her belly. I do hope she’ll start getting better though.




Also, my brother in law has been in the hospital all week and just found out that he has pancreatic cancer. He has a tumor on his pancreas that they are going to try to shrink with a series of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. When it gets smaller they will go in and do surgery to remove it. This has been devastating news for the whole family and of course especially my sister. They have two older children who are grown and out of the house but they also have three younger children, the twins being 8 and the third being 9 years old. They don’t have any health insurance and my sister is just a waitress at a small restaurant here in town. He is in construction and is limited right now as to what he can do. Once the chemo treatments start, we’re really not sure how it will affect him. I know that God's hand is in everything, including this. He would never let one of His children go through sickness without being right by their side.


Please say a prayer for him and his family. His name is Michael Berard.

This morning we woke to -20 degrees but thankfully the sun was out so it was pretty warm in the house. We went for a snowmobile ride this afternoon and it was my first ride of the season! Christopher has been out several times with his friends and Daryl just went out for the first time yesterday. Amanda and I chose to stay home with little miss Adventure to be sure she would be okay.


We had a fabulous time riding through the woods. We went to my mom's in the next town over and gave her a surprise visit. It felt good to get out and see the beauty of God's creation and not think about all the cares of the past week. In my next post, I'll share some pictures that friends of our got up north of some wild Lynx that were crossing the road where they were snowmobiling so I hope you'll come back to visit me soon. Until then, stay warm and snug and may God richly bless your lives. Hugs & blessings~ Birgit

Catching up on projects, happenings and weather

Well, I can't believe so much time has passed since my last blog post. Life seems to roll on, sometimes at a pace much faster than I enjoy. I've been busy with tax preparations for my business and our personal and we celebrated my son's 17th birthday just last weekend. Now we're in preparations for my dd's birthday coming up on Valentine's day. Our poor little kitty, Adventure, has been in and out of the vet's office and is still in there and we got dumped on with a ton of snow over the weekend. I'm not complaining, but there just always seems to be something going on. My head is spinning as much now as it did during the holiday time. At any rate, I'm here and trying to focus my thoughts because I really have so much I wanted to share with you but I don't even know where to begin.

I'll start with Christopher's 17th birthday. I can't believe my baby is 17 years old already. It seems like just yesterday I was holding him in the hospital waiting to bring him home, unfortunately in weather just like we're having now. Here he is getting ready to blow out his candles.


Along with the super cold temperature's we've been having, Mother Nature just dumped about 14 inches of snow on us. We woke one morning to -30 degrees and our furnace had kicked off sometime during the night so we had no heat or hot water for hours until it came back up to temperature. The furnice ran for 5 hours straight after my dh reset it because everything was calling for heat... including us. Thankfully, we lit a fire in the woodstove and it didn't take long for us to warm up in the living room. Needless to say, we spent most of the day right there, the guys watching tv, Amanda playing with the cats and reading while I worked on a stitchery, which I'll share with you.



I made three of these stitcheries. One for my M-I-L and one for her sister, my A-I-L since they both like angels and then I made one to add to my website. I stained the one for my website, but kept theirs natural since they don't care for things as dark and distressed and I do.

I also made this Love stitchery, which I thought came out really cute after adding the dark red homespun to it.



Amanda had to have a gift to give for a gift swap that her cheerleading team was having and since the traveling has not been the greatest and $$ being tight as it is, we opted to get creative together and make something. This is what we made; an altered canvas frame, a matching journal with space for a picture on the front and a tin that we filled with chocolate nuggets to coordinate with the set.



I don't know, if you were a young, teenage girl would you like it? Amanda was happy with how everything came out. Her favorite part was adding the glitter to everything to make it sparkle. She loves glitter and it's rubbing off on me! Here's a close up of each of the things we made.

Here's the chocolate tin open


And here's the chocolate tin closed so you can see the cover.


This is the artist canvas that we altered...



And here's the matching journal...


More than the gift, I cherish the time that she and I spent on it together. She doesn't get into crafting much with me at all, but I think I'm rubbing off on her too. Just last night she made a button stitchery for her bedroom and wants to make one for each of her grandma's for Mother's Day.

So, I mentioned that we got dumped on with snow. Here's a picture that my son, Christopher took yesterday late in the day while it was still snowing.




And here's the picture he took this morning. You can see how much more snow we got during the night. Aside from about 4 inches, that was all from one storm.



Here's a picture of two of our birdfeeders that I've been keeping filled for our feathered friends. The birds enjoy the suet in winter time because it gives them energy and fat that they need to keep warm. I've been sure to add a lot of suet to their diet as well as fresh water that I change about 5 times a day since we don't have a heated bird bath. I use a plastic plant pot saucer filled half way with fresh water. When it freezes over, I just dump it and refill it so they can get a drink if they need it too since I'm sure everything is frozen up solid.



Lastly, I mentioned that our kitty Adventure has been in and out of the vet's office.




She's still in there today while they do blood work and x-rays. It started about a week ago, that she was moving very cautiously and wouldn't jump and leap onto things like she normally would. She stopped playing and just sleeps non-stop. I brought her to the vet's on Friday and they checked her all out and said there doesn't appear to be any signs of anything, that maybe we should observe her over the weekend. Well, over the weekend she got worse and hid out in the basement. If we tried to touch her or pick her up she cried like she was in pain and saying don't you dare and touch me! I was so worried that something terrible was going to happen to her over the weekend. Of course we could bring her to the emergency room for pets which is about an hour away in the city and we were in the middle of a big snowstorm! So now we are waiting for a phone call to find out what they find. I hope she'll be okay. She's actually Amanda's cat and she is her baby. Our pets are like family and we hate to see them sick so please say a little prayer for our Adventure.

Thanks for stopping by and listening to my rambling's. I hope you all have a blessed week. Hugs~ Birgit