League nite

Ok so last nite we bowled in our league called "Lousy Bowlers Club" for the first time and our first league. It started at 8:30 last nite and we spent like 30 minutes of just play old weird people joking around with each other about weird stuff. Finally they gave us the league rules and to our surprise it is not based off your score but on how well you can maintain your bowling average week to week and it is 12 weeks LONG! Help us now. It is $24 a week for our team, which we named the Collins and if we miss a week we still have to pay. The winner will win like $100 at the end of the 12 weeks. How do they win, I have NO idea. We almost left like 50 times last nite bc there was too much weirdness but we decided to stay and just play around. Although that is hard for us to do bc we are so competitive w our bowling. (us lil geeks) Anyway we started bowling and I tell you what- these people are averaging like 98 scores! And Mandrae is averaging a 200! But again it is based off how well u maintain your average and not how good u r. This is not the way we prefer to be scored but whatever! We did bowl aweful last nite though. We didnt even get to start til around 10 pm bc they talk too much and had no idea who was in the league or which teams everyone is on. But seriously I am telling you guys these people are WEIRD! Beyond the gothic or goofy weird. They are like SERIOUS WEIRD. I was speechless. I have never seen so many crazy crazy weird people in one place and then add to that all of them being drunk and you have our bowling league!!!
Yeah it was interesting! very interesting!
The only good news it that we got to share a lane w the only normal couple in the league (well besides ourselves of course :) ). It is an older couple and they are pretty good. They were alot of fun. It is a new experience and something we will NEVER forget!
I cant even explain how weird these people are. They talk like little cartoon characters walking around and wear who knows what kinda clothing and just throw the ball down the lane.
Anyway we will see how next week goes. It was a LONG nite and hopefully next week will be better but is always funny at first and then just plain annoying by the end of the nite.
Until next time...............................................................

best sermon ever!!!

So pastor Womack preached on marriage on sunday and I have to say that I learned so so much. I thought that I knew all I could about the topic and what the Bible says but I was wrong. Here are my notes, they are awesome!!!

Destiny Church Sermon
February 22, 2009
How to respond when you regret saying “I Do”

First things first: Do not act married without the covenant of being married before God. The covenant doesn’t start til you say “I Do.”

Once you say I Do you have made a covenant before God regardless of where you got married. God expects us to keep this covenant made before Him. It is his will.

Once you are in the marriage and decide that you want out or that you don’t love that person or cannot make it together, think about this:

Do not go from victim to violator. If you are a victim in the marriage keep it that way and do not decide to make the other person the victim as well. Pray for Gods help in changing the violator in the marriage.
Do not take things into your own hands because then you say, “God we do not need your help.”
Do not repay evil with evil.
Do not pay back someone that has wronged you. God has it under control. God’s wrath will repay them. Leave it to God.
Let go of the negative actions and emotions and leave it to God.
God might bring these issues into your life to see how mature you are.
Remain with your spouse until God releases you. Do not leave before God has a chance to do His work. If God is nudging your heart then He has work left to be done.

When can you leave?
Moses says in the New Testament that the 3 reasons that you can get divorce are:
Immorality, adultery, and marrying an unbeliever that wants out.
But what does God say about this?
God disagrees with divorce altogether!
Moses only wrote this because the peoples hearts were hardened and needed a way out.
If you are looking for a way out now and you married an unbeliever why look for God’s way now when you violated God in the first place by marrying unequally yoked to a non believer.
Moses did this because people on their own cant move on alone and they have hard hearts but DO NOT change God’s will. God can change hearts.
As Christians we cannot tell someone to get a divorce and then tell someone that what you say comes from God, because it does not. We have no right to tell someone to get a divorce and then expect them to look at us as a follower of God. That is going against God’s will.
There are ramifications of leaving someone outside of God’s plan. He says to honor the vow- PERIOD. It is God’s law.
Just because you quit does not mean that God quit!

You cant divorce but you can separate with a plan.
If you do decide to separate- do not live single lifestyle.
When to separate:
When an unbeliever in the marriage wants out.
When the marriage is endangering physical and medical well being.
When the believers heart is hardened.

Always separate before thinking of a divorce. If separation does not work then take the church so that they can go before God on the issue.
This is a big life impacting decision and need to allow God to do His work for complete joy in the relationship.

If you do decide to divorce, remember to, divorce with dignity and take care of business legally and spiritually.

Funny video about women and parking :)- no offense

new pics of boots

My lil boots likes to pretend to be real cute and put her arms behind her head to make herself cuter. It works and here I caught her in the moment. Sometimes she gets her lil arms stuck behind her head when she does it, but I guess that is the price to pay to look cute. :)

The house

Ok here are pics of the house, if you guys have not seen it. I think i covered almost every part of the house but I forgot the front of the house. sorry.



Here is the new coffee table we got from Big Lots. It was like 75% cheaper here than it was at Ashley Furniture. It was a steal.

This is the new pub table we got at like 95% off at a billiards store. The chair cushions dont match but it was CHEAP. So we were happy. And the wood matches the pool table perfectly. Gma we might need your help on the chair covers. :)

This is the guest bedroom.



These are pics of the office.

Entry way

Kitchen

Our bedroom

Our bathroom

Tv in the living room

boots pics

Remodel

When we got new furniture for our living room it looked all wrong and so we decided to get new pictures and drapes to go in the living room to make it look better with the new furniture. Actually to be honest, I thought it looked manly and begged baby for new drapes FOREVER and so for my birthday he bought me the drapes and then he wanted pictures that matched the drapes and so we added pictures and plants to make it look homier. Here are the pics:

February 4th- 1 year anniversary

So I celebrated my one year anniversary on February 4th. Ok well I didnt really do anything but as of Feb. 4th I have been working for Mercedes-Benz Financial/ Daimler Truck Financial for 1 year as a permanent employee and 3 months as a temporary employee. YAY! :)

They gave me this plaque, a pen and a jump drive with their logo on it.

Postponed

FYI.... Sorry no funny stories about our fellow bowling partners because our bowling league was postponed to next Tuesday. So I will share the funniness with you all next week.

Not boots!

No sorry these are not pics of boots. They are just the same breed as her. I am working on getting pics of her up. Coming soon. They are adorable though! I want another one and if I dont have a baby this month, I quit and am demanding a lil puppy like this. :)

CUTE!

I thought I would share the cutest puppies in the world!

Lame Old Couple

Guess what we are doing tonite!
We are joining a bowling league at the bowling alley right by our house bc we bowl so much and are so competitive that we decided that we should just be in a league and we are starting small. We are in a league called “The Lousy Bowlers.” Yeah yeah Mandrae is really good but they wanted us to join and so I guess we will just have to win. Ha ha. I hope so. Well anyway we start tonite at 7:30 and we will bowl 3 games. I am not too sure what you win or when you win it but I know it lasts around 18 weeks. On Sunday when we went bowling I averaged around a 170 and baby averaged a 200 like always and we were competing w the 2 women beside us but they didn’t know that we were. Every game Mandrae made sure we beat their combined score (since they were professional bowlers) and we didn’t. But I guess it really wasn’t fair since they didn’t know that we were competing. O well. Anyway wish us luck. I will let u know tomorrow how we did.

lil jumping boys

So the other day baby looked out the window up stairs in our house and saw the funniest thing ever and if I would have seen it I think I would have been laughing for a few days bc when he told me the story I couldn’t stop laughing for like 4 hours. Ok so he was upstairs and saw these lil things just flying thru the neighborhood backyards. And then he realized that it was 2 lil boys racing and seeing who could climb up and down everyones fence and check out all the backyards in the neighborhood. It was our good friend Trina’s lil boy and his friend. And I am in shock bc these boys are like 5 or younger and they are climbing our fences and the fences in the neighborhood are really tall. I cant even get over it and not even sure if Mandrae can! So the lil boys stopped in our neighbors yard next door to rest and just sat there and Mandrae hung his head out and told them to get out of the yard and they looked around for his voice and got scared and started the yard hopping race again! It was hilarious to think about and even funnier to see I am sure. Man I wish I was there.

Valentine's Day 2009

On Valentine’s Day, Me and baby were planning on going to the shooting range to shoot some targets because Mandrae has wanted to do that for a while. (and I was watching Desperate Housewives and saw Bre and Catherine in a shooting range and it looked so fun) Anyway we were originally told that it costs $9 a person to shoot and then come to find out that that is true but u have to rent the guns for $50 each! Crazy huh? So we didn’t get to do anything out of the normal on Valentines Day as we had hoped. Mandrae worked in the morning and then we went to the movies and watched “Taken.” And it was really good. We ate our pickle popsicles and ate candy. Then we went to eat dinner at Olive Garden. Mandrae got me a balloon and box of chocolates with a puppy on the cover and I got him a designer watch. (and praise the Lord he wears it all the time and it matches all his dress clothes) We were starving after our hour and a half wait at Olive Garden and ate our food in 5 minutes and then went home for the after party. :) I will stop there.

YAY!

Yay! Mandrae found out yesterday that he got the supervisor position at his work and he starts on Monday. So to celebrate we went to the Rig Steakhouse to eat last nite. While we were eating he got a phone call from his best friend from high school and he said that he was on his way to the Dallas Mavericks vs. Boston Celtics game at the American Airlines arena. Mandrae (baby) loves the Boston Celtics and has always want to see them play in person and so we left money on the table for our drinks and took off. The game started at 8:30 and we got there at exactly 8:30. The only problem was we didn’t have any tickets for the game. Well like always we drove around downtown for almost 15 minutes looking for parking. At this point we didn’t care how much it costs we just wanted to park. This was the busiest I had seen downtown Dallas for a Mavericks game. The game was sold out and so I guess a lot of people wanted to see them play too. Anyway we finally found a parking spot for $10 and walked our 3 blocks to the game, hoping there were scalpers selling tickets. We turned the corner and some guy was standing there selling $80 tickets. We only brought $40 with us and that was all we could spend. So we said no way and then he said ok $60 and I told him we don’t have that much. Sorry. So we walked about a block and he came chasing after us and saying I will take $40. So we bought the tickets and found out that they were originally $9 tickets! But it was okay, at least we got in the game! Anyway as we got closer to the arena we saw like 20 scalpers standing there begging people to buy tickets and they were apparently court side. (yeah right) We finally got in the game and we only missed like 2 minutes of it. The game was a great game. The mavericks were up by 15 almost the entire game. Then in the 3rd quarter the Boston Celtics coach was thrown out and Kevin Garnett fouled out and had to sit and then the Mavericks started to do really bad. Long story short they LOST! It was very discouraging. The mavericks had it all set up for them to win. It was harder to lose than to win that game with the advantage they had! O well. So the game ended at midnight. We walked the 3 blocks back to our car and I was still in my dress from work and my heals since we didn’t get a chance to go home and change and I have blisters all over my feet from walking in those heals all that way. It was horrible. Once we got back to our car it took us 30 minutes just to get outta the parking lot! It was the worst. We were only centimeters next to psycho drivers that were flipping people off and running them over to get out of the parking lot and we still had a long way home and so Mandrae played right along to get first outta the parking lot but in order to not get hit or shot we had to give in some too. J So yeah anyway it was good evening at the game, even though we didn’t get home and to bed til around 1:30 a.m. I am paying for it today but we had fun. And don’t forget the exciting news- Mandrae got a supervisor position!!! YAY!

Boots Toots!

Yesterday, we came to the conclusion that Bebe (boots) cannot ride in the car anymore! We have had enough. It started out just once in a while but now has gotten to be too much. The second the car starts to move on car trips with boots she feels the need to TOOT! And now I dont mean the cute lil toot that babies or puppies do that makes the cute lil sound. I mean the nasty kind that smells so bad that you think that the hair in your nose burnt off from the stink. So warning to all of you that might be taking boots in the car with you. DONT DO IT! She is deadly. :)

Fireplace Stupidity!

Ok get this!!! About a week ago I have to say that my husband did one of the dumbest things of all time! (no offense baby- I LOVE U!) So we were sitting down after work watching tv and we wanted to start a fire. We had gone to wal-mart and home depot and no one had fire starters. Everyone was out. (and we were out of gmas egg cartons- we love those by the way!) So Mandrae started the fire by starting a piece of newspaper on fire. Well it was really icy outside and the fireplace must have been iced over bc the smoke was filling the house and not go our the chimney. So we had to put the fire out. Well normally we put it out with a cup of water but Mandrae had a brilliant idea that day! He decided to just take out the flaming newspaper with his hand. So he took it out and it burst into more flames and he said to himself, I can make it to the sink! So he got up and started to walk to the sink but the fire started to burn his hands so he started to jump up and down and wave his arms. Well while this is happening I am sitting on the couch with my jaw dropped in awe of the stupidity of the situation and in shock with nothing to say or do. There are about 25 lil pieces of fire flying all over our living room but he keeps going. I look back and there are more all over our tile and burnt newspaper all over our countertop and pretty much one drop of newspaper in our sink. Anyway there are lil burning pieces of newspaper all over our carpet at this point and a huge flame right by my feet and I am just sitting there in shock! This was crazy! Let me tell you, God really is good bc our house should have burned down that nite! Anyway SOMEHOW (by the grace of God) the flames all burnt out and only one left a hole in the carpet. So Mandrae spent all nite cutting the top of the carpet off so that we have a hole in our floor but at least it is not black. We are truly blessed to still have a house. Moral to the story: Just use water to put out fire- it might stink and cause more smoke but you will still have a house.

"Can we please have a baby?"

Ok so lately I have been bugging my husband over and over for a little baby. He is not ready and wants to have like one million dollars in the bank before we do that and our house and cars and student loans all paid off. Well by then I will probably be dead or in a retirement home so that didnt sit too well with me. Plus I just turned 25 and am already too old and wanted to have a baby when I was 22. So anyway I was all over Mandrae about having a baby. I started to pray about it and ask God to somehow to make me have a baby through my birth control bc I dont believe in tricking him by not taking birth control and not telling him. That is just wrong, although I had thought about it alot. :) So anyway one day I was praying in church about it bc my best friend had a baby and my sister had a baby and I was just baby crazy by then. God started to convict me that I should not be taking birth control and that we were living in total faith and trust in every other area of our life for Christ except this one. We were going to decide when was best for us to have a baby. I talked to Mandrae one night about that and told him if we are going to dedicate our life to Christ in total faith we had to do it in all areas, including when we have a baby. Only God can know when we are physically, emotionally and mentally ready to have a baby. So that night I went off birth control. Now that I think about it, when you are living a holy and pleasing life in total surrender to God then God will only give you what is best for your life and why would I ever decide on my own when is the best time to have a child? That is crazy. I trusted God to give me a husband, I trusted him to find me a house, I trusted him with a job, and I trust him with my life and so why would I not trust Him with our children? So we are now in total surrender to Gods timing on when we will have a little one. Yes, I am anxious and gittery to have a lil one but God knows best and when He does bless us with one, it will be the most perfect timing. God is always good and has filled me with so much joy and I cant wait to see what He has in store for me next. :)

Marriage Testimony

I wanted to share all the ways that God is working in our life since we got married on May 23, 2007. So we moved to Fort Worth, TX about a week after we got married on June 1, 2007 and we did not have jobs, didnt know anyone here, didnt know our way around, and just started our life all over. It was kind of scary but at the same time it was exciting. We searched for jobs for about a month and then Mandrae found a job at Geosphere. Geosphere is a travel company and it was the easiest job he has ever had. All he had to do was sit down with people that came into the building for a time share presentation and sell them the package. Well about a week later I became the receptionist at the same company. They were really nice to us and we had GREAT hours and pretty awesome pay. It was a really bad work environment though. They did alot of things that were really unprofessional and well I guess some things that were illegal. So yeah anyway then I was promoted to the account/ payroll clerk and I got a pay raise of DOUBLE! :) It was amazing money. We paid all of my credit cards off with the pay that we were making. Life was good but marriage was also hard for us our first year. We were adjusting to each others annoying traits and at the same time trying to grow in Christ together and find a church together. The search for the church was a headache and we could not agree on a church we liked and we had tried out around 50+ churches in the area. We also started looking for a house because our lease was almost up and we were sick of paying rent and we were making good money at the time. So we found our dream home and signed the contract to have it built. We went and picked out all the different colors for the house and the appliances. It was alot of fun. Well one day we went to work and when we got there the owner told us to go home and that we would start work again next week per they were getting a new product to sell and had to tye up some loose ends. So we had a vacation for about a week and then went back to work. At this point the office was empty and the owners were gone. We soon realized that the business was shut down and our last 2 weeks of pay was not coming. We were devastated. Our last paycheck went all towards my cc balance of around $2000 and we were banking on our pay to pay rent that month. So we were without a job and had to go now 4 weeks without any pay. We then filed unemployment and started our new job search. We were expecting $4000 for our last 2 weeks of work and so were then $4000 in the hole. We found out that the owners of Geosphere had taken the profits from the business and run with it. So we started our job search and within a week God blessed Mandrae (baby) with a job with Chrysler Financial. I searched everywhere and finally went through a temp agency and found a job with Mercedes-Benz Financial, which happened to be in the same building. :) (GOD IS GOOD) In the mean time we needed to pay rent and didnt have any money. We had to get another cc and write a cc check to pay rent. Then wait another 2 weeks for Mandraes first check. We thought for sure we would be on the streets by then with a house in the process of being built. BUT God is GOOD! Unemployment started to come in so we could eat and pay other bills. Then we started to get paid regularly. Our incomes just barely qualified for our loan on our new home and life started to look up again. Through all of this we prayed and stayed faithful to God. Our house was supposed to be completed in December of 2007 and it was not ready. We were anxious to get in and frustrated to be overpaying our apartment complex because we had to move to month to month payments with the apartment (which are like 40% more than normal). I was frustrated because our apartments had rats and there were rapes and shootings in our complex and I just wanted out of there. Well finally in May 2008 we were able to move into our brand new home. It ended up being a blessing that it took so long (due to rain and weather- God knows what He is doing) because we were able to get some bills lowered and pay some things off ahead of time before we took on really high mortgage payments. Also our house was a great deal, we got in right when the economy was allowing for the best housing prices in years and we got $11000 in upgrades for free. So we finally moved in and started to go to a church that was just okay to us down the road. We didnt really know anyone there and no one ever talked to us. Then our neighbors moved in next door and told us about their church. We tried it out and the first day the pastor took us to lunch after church. The pastor and his wife were amazing and the church had EVERYTHING we were looking for. It had the singing and awesome and interesting preaching that was from the WORD! So now we attend Destiny Church in Forest Hill and it is the best thing that has happened to us in our marriage. We joined a small group and grew quickly and strong in our relationship with Christ. We learned so so much. I started to struggle and get picked on at work and God has taught us so much within our second year of marriage that I could write a book about all the things that I have learned in Christ. Our marriage is fun, exciting, strong, encouraging and better than I could imagine now. We have a gorgeous home that God blessed us with and stable jobs. We are truly blessed and God is faithful. He provides for his children in every way imaginable.