Word of God, Speak! AFFIRMATIONS of TRUTH for Your Soul

Oh. My. Goodness, y'all! I just can't! God has truly outdone Himself this time! So amazing! I am in shock!

Here's a video I did LIVE on FB to announce the amazingness of my FIRST BOOK being PUBLISHED!!!! (The ordering link and remainder of the blog post are just below the video if you scroll down!)


If you have been following my blog from its humble beginnings so many years ago to the more recent days of its dormancy (my life has gotten quite a bit crazier over the years!), then you KNOW this has been a LOOONG time coming!

BUT GOD! He put this together in His amazing way! Something I never planned, intended, nor imagined! Yet it's just exactly what I PERSONALLY needed right now and I KNOW it's what so so many need as well right now!

If you resonate with it as I described it in the video and gave you a sneak preview, please do click below to order it and even consider sharing about it and/or giving it as a much-needed gift to those in your circle! (and do let me know if you have any issues in the ordering process so I can help you through it! My email is Decide2day2live at gmail dot com )

CLICK HERE TO ORDER MY VERY FIRST BOOK!!! THANK YOU!

Thank you in advance for all of your love, support, encouragement, and most of all PRAYERS!!!

Because of Who He is,
Haelie

Call to Prayer

Hi everyone!

I haven't gotten my new site fully set up yet, so I don't think I have a way you can subscribe to it yet other than its Facebook page.

In the meantime, just wanted you to check out the new post I wrote over there today:

Call to Prayer

Merry Christmas!

Can we celebrate Christmas here?

As a matter of fact, #yeswecan! 

So, before I continue on with my somewhat chronological introduction to Qatar for you, I will introduce you to our exposure to and experience with celebrating Christmas here.

And before I do that, I would like to introduce you to the surprise I have been promising you! 

No, I am not having another baby. Lol! 

I have been working on a new blog to share with you! :) No, I am not deserting this blog. It will still be here and I will eventually come back to it and freshen it up as I have been hoping and planning to do for quite some time.

However, in the meantime, I thought that this new time in our life really called for a new, fresh blog on a different platform (meaning different functionality and all). 

It's still not perfect (and never will be), and I'm still getting settled in there, so please bear with me as I make changes along the way to make it more of what I hope for it to be for you and me.

All that said, I am ready to share it with you! I have even backloaded a couple of posts to make it feel more "homey". I even created an "About" page that I hope you check out when you are there. And, I am working on a Facebook page and even a Twitter account and a Gmail for it.

I have named it "Interrupted by Grace", which you can read more about on the "About" page. Please jump over there now and enjoy being Interrupted by Grace!

School Daze and Beignets

If I thought August was a blur, I was wrong. 

September. 

Did September happen?!

So glad I have pics to prove it remember it. 

Lest you forget, this was the month that we were counting down the days to the big flight to see Daddy and move over here to this land that was once foreign to us---and is now our home-away-from-home.

To begin the rewind of this month, I will remind you (or tell you if you missed it) that we started homeschool for the first time ever during the very last week of August. We worked together on getting our homeschooling groove going the best we could before shaking up our lives even more with the big move.

All that said, here are a few pics of those early homeschooling days. 

 (I say that like I'm a veteran homeschool mom now. I'm not. Every day is a new day. Thankful that His mercies are new every morning!)

One of his first papers written for his Institute for Excellence in Writing homeschool writing class.
I love the Aesop Fable he selected to write about and the moral of it.

My uncle who is also a science teacher helped him dissect owl pellets one evening! Yucko! But they had a wonderful time and found lots of bony treasures!
And in case you didn't know---owl pellets are the vomit of owls, not the poop.
Yes, I know. Makes you want to barf.
Just had to share so you would be as enlightened as I was.

Their bony treasures. Skeleton parts of tiny animals the owl ate. Guess owls are not vegetarians.

Okay, so now that you are good and grossed out, I just have to throw in a sweet mommy/daughter toes pic. :) 

My sister painted Baby Girl's toenails. Not an easy job!

One day Big Brother and I made an unplanned, impromptu visit to his daddy's college alma mater. I attended there as well for my first couple of years of college, then switched to the local nursing school to complete my bachelor's degree in nursing. My husband, however, was able to complete his full degree at the same school and graduated when our son was just a few months old. :)

 

This was the building (in left picture) where my husband completed most of his upper-level coursework as well as where he worked a student-worker job.
He was a Kinesiology major. He is now a Strength & Conditioning Coach.
We owe a lot to the great education we both got at this school. Great place!
Look at us now!
(Hubby's the 3rd from the right. Has his hands in his pockets.)
Worldwide travelers, thanks to his career.
I've traveled a bit with mine as well and could have traveled farther with it but chose not to so that I could be the kiddos mommy full-time. :)

Back to science! This kiddo loves science! I love that he loves science! Anything we can do to foster that love and learning, we will.

Soooo, at his request and at the suggestion of my uncle, my son and I did the "Gatorade DNA extraction lab." Google it. (This is the one we used, but there are several options out there.) 

Very easy and pretty cool. We didn't have Gatorade, so we did the alternative version with salt water. (He needed to gargle salt water anyway for a mouth ulcer he had.) He wants to use real Gatorade next time, though. ;)

 

 

You may not be able to see it, but the little white speck and stringy looking things are tiny strands of his DNA from inside his mouth. Cool! Gross! Eeew! I mean, COOL!

And now that you're grossed out again---or intrigued, whatever---here are some more cute Baby Girl pics. (Do you like how I help you out that way?)

In the first ones, she is doing what we call flossing her teeth. She loves to pull that string through them. :) Guess maybe she was trying to extract her DNA, too. lol! (Sorry for the blurry ones. Have to move fast to catch her cuteness.)

So, we have covered the School Daze. 

Now, on to the Beignets!

During our last full weekend in America, we went on another road trip!

We just had to visit our beloved NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana) one last time. No, really, we just had to visit some sweet relatives one last time. My in-laws, myself, and the two kiddos loaded up and headed south, even stopping to put one last load in our storage in South Louisiana along the way.

We spent the weekend with my husband's brother and his sweet family.

While we were there, the ladies and the kiddos took one last trip to City Park and visited Morning Call for one last order of yummy beignets!!! :)

My boy is a photo-bomber!

Trying to get a massive selfie with lots of kiddos is not easy! :)

One last attempt at that group kiddo shot :)

And now, I will leave you with some precious pics my mother-in-law took of Baby Girl in a dress that my mother-in-law wore as a baby. If I'm not mistaken, I believe it was specially handmade for her. :)

And, of course, she just had to get really comfortable for one last shot.

The rewind has been fun! Hope you enjoyed it as well! 

The next post you see, and many more to come, will be of our new life in the deserts of Doha! (Qatar, that is.) Oh, and not sure if you remember, but I mentioned I have been working on a big surprize for you. I'll have to share that in the next post as well. 

See you soon---from the Middle East!

Until next time...

Zoom! Did you see that?!

Zzzoooommm!!!!

Did you see that?!

Me neither.

Oh, yeah. It was the rest of August flying by.

With that said, here are a few of the random pics I came across from the second half of August.

Enjoy!

Another picture dilemma. I can hardly get non-blurry pictures of her because she is ALWAYS moving! ;) The ones above were my attempt at her modeling some cute leggings a sweet friend of mine from South Louisiana had sent us for her. So, here is the much-delayed sharing of the cute pics.

Hanging out with her brother and playing with his Minecraft Diamond Swords and his Jurassic World Velociraptor Claws. She still plays with them often. :)

Playing with an electrcity conduction experiment toy he got for his birthday from a cousin.

It lights up when the current is being conducted through the object(s) touching each end. 

He is a good conductor of electricity. :)

 Baby Girl taking a bath in her big Duckie. She says "Duck" and "Kak Kak! (Quack Quack!)".

 I can't for the life of me remember why we drew what looks like whiskers on her sweet, chubby cheeks. Neither can her brother. But it's cute anyway. :)

-~-

On another note, the kids and I went with my mother-in-law to an antique store one day. Believe it or not, my son loves to go to antique stores.

Anyway, while we were there I just had to take a pic of a couple of cute signs and such that they had.

My husband must have made the one on the right... ;)

The one on the left is in honor of our former dog...Sadie, the mini-dauchshund. 

She lives with a new family in New Orleans now. 

The one on the right, well, it just says it all. lol! 

In case you can't read it, it says, 

"Louisiana Girls. Just like you, only prettier." 

The one on the left is more profound. Kind of hard to read with the glare, but definitely a must-read.
"It is not great men who change the world, but weak men in the hands of a Great God."
I added the one on the right, because it fits quite well with the sentiment as well as with our lives.

-~-

Cousins! :)

We had the blessing of hanging out with lots of sweet cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, etc., etc., etc. while we were in Northwest Louisiana!

 

So sweet!

And of course, some more front porch pics with grandparents at my sweet in-laws' home...

And finally, some sweet, food-face smiles in, of all places, Walmart! 

(Never thought I would miss that place, but I do. I miss Target more, though.)

So, there you have it! Again! 

Getting so much closer to finally being able to share lots of our Middle East life in Qatar with you!

Until next time...