Ok, so I’d tried blogger originally….didn’t care for it much. Tried wordpress now and after some consideration I’ve decided I don’t care for it much either. So I’m back on blogger…..on my original site again.
So if you follow me here (unlikely 
) then check me out at my new-old home. www.saramarlar.blogspot.com
I appologize for my wishy-washy ways.
I’m sitting here on New Years day with my cuddly puppy dog in my lap (she’s about 60 pounds, by the way), my usually un-lovey grown dog lying next to me and my amazing husband sitting on the other side of me. This is happiness. This is love.
There’s still a small void in our lives though; one that hopefully will soon be filled with a baby. I had no idea just how much I wanted to hold a sweet baby in my arms–my sweet baby–until we lost one. But there is a promise of hope.
And I rather like this quote…..”The heart stretched out by sorrow, God later fills with joy.” Mother Theresa
We’re back home now….Vegas home, not Texas home. It’s nice to be back for a few reasons: 1) we have our own bed, 2) we eat healthier when we’re here, 3) yeah….that’s about it.
We had a really awesome time in Texas. Friday (the 17th) I got off of work at 1pm, headed home, helped finish loading up the car and getting ready to leave and left. We were on the road by 3pm, which I found pretty good considering it took me over 30 minutes to get home from work and then we still had quite a bit to do once I was here. Then we had to get gas, air up the tires, etc. Such a big ordeal to leave town!
We drove straight through and got to Texas right around 9:30am Saturday morning. That’d be 7:30am Vegas time, so all-in-all it took us 16 1/2 hours to drive. Not too bad. We passed through lots of below 20 degree weather, but somehow didn’t encounter any ice! Wow, right? We were blessed in that way!
We got to Matt’s dads house and unloaded our car….into our new car! His step-mom had it waiting for us. Yay! Let me just say, driving 16 1/2 hours across 4 states in a 2 door Honda Civic with 2 60+ pound dogs and 2 grown humans isn’t a fun thing to do! Our new little SUV was greatly appreciated at this point! LOL! We got a 2011 GMC Terrain. Pretty cute.
From there we proceeded to drive an additional 4 hours to Dallas with my brother-in-law & sister-in-law to see a Cowboys game! WOOHOO! We played the Redskins and won! HOORAY! That was our big Christmas gift to one another–the game. 
Such a great time!
After this we had 3 days with each family. My family got us first–we had Sophie with us & Ralph luckily stayed with Matt’s brother. There were 5 dogs, 3 little boys and 8 adults in my parents house while we were there. Talk about chaos! But a good kinda chaos….you know, they kind you miss when it’s gone? 3 days simply was not enough!
Matt’s dad got us next. This was totally different! Such peace and quiet. Wow! Talk about extremes! LOL! I also immensely enjoyed these 3 days. They have a tradition of watching “White Christmas” every year. It was my first time to ever see this movie, and I have to say, I liked it.
And finally, Matt’s mom got us last. They are a good mixture of his dad’s family and my family in terms of the chaos. More people than at the FIL’s, but much less than at my parents’. And again, immensely enjoyable.
I’m happy to be back home because we have our own things again, and our own bed…..but otherwise, I can’t wait for another visit!
I’m sooo excited to go home to Texas for Christmas!! We’ve been counting down the days….also known as the “sleeps”. LOL! And we’ve only got ONE to go!! I can’t wait! There’s nothing quite like family at Christmas time. And this year is going to be the best! I have much more family to spend it with now that I’m married.
It’s our first Christmas together; and like Matt’s first birthday since we’ve been married; I intend to make our first Christmas together special too. I love the holidays. 
Tomorrow is Matthew’s birthday. His first birthday since we got married. And I intend to make it special for him. He’s getting homemade biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast, chicken fried steak & mashed potatoes for dinner (both per his request) and tonight I made a chocolate cake (completely from scratch; including the chocolate buttercream icing!!–be impressed )
I had wonderful intentions of making a 2-tier round cake and decorating it nicely. However, he requested a certain recipe for the cake that I’ve never used before, and….let’s just say it’s a bit crumbly. So one of my cakes fell to pieces when I tried to get it out of the pan! I was sooo sad! The other started to do the same thing, so instead it got iced IN the pan. I still decorated it like I’d wanted–only not as great as I could have had it been OUT of the pan. Bummer. But he loves it and that’s what matters.
The plus side of the crumbly cake issue was that we got to sample some of it tonight. And let me tell you…..IT’S YUMMY!!
And now we’re sitting on the couch snuggled up to one another watching “Despicable Me”. It’s super sweet.
I recently started reading a new blog (new to me that is) called “girltalk“. It is written by a group of Christian women. One of the first posts I read is titled “To Tell the Truth“. It talks about fears, and the fact that by listening to our fears we are choosing to believe God is lying. Wow. (This is where the “I’ve been humbled” title comes into play for me…)
There are so many times that I let my fears win the battle or the “what-ifs” take control. Due to circumstances within my past, I have not allowed God to truly take hold of my life. I’ve been afraid of these lies Satan places in my path. And sadly, these fears (lies) have won and I have allowed myself to basically call God a liar. Wow! (yes, again I say wow!)
To believe that God will not protect me the way He says He will; that He can’t fix things in my life; that He won’t really provide for our family–it’s somewhat like I’ve slapped Him in the face. And that makes me take a step back and really think about things. I don’t ever, ever want to do that! And I feel ashamed for ever having allowed myself to do that!
It’s a big struggle for me to give up control over my life. That is….to give up the perception of control; I know I don’t truly have control in any way, just the belief that I do. ha! I guess this is something I need to work on a bit more.
Fear no longer wins; lies no longer prevail; I must trust God for all things.
and feeling like sharing my list of things I’m oh so very thankful for. I have a very long list of thankfuls. But topping it off are:
1) my Jesus. He’s pretty amazing and has changed my life. and the promise of eternal life that I have been given.
2) my Matthew. He is also pretty special to me and has made me happier over the last year than I ever thought possible. I can’t believe it’s almost been a year since we got married. WOW! and our puppies: Ralph & Sophie. They always love me no matter what.
3) my Mom & Dad. They are pretty wonderful parents and I don’t know if I tell them that often enough (or ever really…?) But they did a great job and I’m so thankful for their influences in my life.
4) my Sister & Bubba. Although we haven’t always gotten along, I’ve really learned to appreciate them. Two of my favorite people.
5) my in-laws. Weird, right? I love all of my in-laws though. My 2 mothers-in-law, my 2 fathers-in-law, my 2 grandmothers-in-law, my 2 brothers-in-law and my 2 sisters-in-law. LOL! I just realized while typing that out that I’ve got 2 of everything (except no grandfathers-in-law; how sad on that part!)
6) my job. I know I complain about having to work quite a bit, but truly if I have to work, my job is the place to do it. It reminds me daily of how blessed I am to be healthy, and it has also given me some truly great friends. Not to mention the fact that I do in fact have a job, which today is always a blessing and something to be thankful for. I need to remember that more often I think….
7) my health and the health of my loved ones. I sometimes take this for granted to, oddly enough.
8) my future babies….all 5 of them (I know that if my dad reads this he’ll have a big smile on his face at that one–well, perhaps not the 5 but the baby thing in general!) LOL!
9) my breath that I just inhaled. It was a good one. Oh and that one too.
10) my friends. They say you’re blessed to have 1 person in your life that you can truly call a friend. (I don’t know who they are, but they miscalculated for me) I have been blessed with many people I call my friends. My sister, Leigh Ann, my cousins Alicia & Chele, my other Alicia , Leslie, Jamie, Meg, Melissa, Amber…..see my point? And the thing is, I know that if I ever needed any one of these girls, they would be here in a heartbeat. I don’t know how I’ve been so blessed, but I have. Not to mention my Matthew again…..
I could go on and on, but you get my point.
And that makes my heart so happy! I love love love Christmas time. It’s the best time of the year. That’s right, the absolute best.
We decorated our tree after Thanksgiving lunch; Matt instructed me that we could not put up the tree until after we had our Thanksgiving meal, so I decided we would have a lunch instead of dinner. hehe I certainly outsmarted him!
Swagbucks is awesome! I’ve only been a member for about 2 months, but I’ve already earned enough “Swagbucks” to pay for my brother’s Christmas gift! Matt & I have 23 people to buy gifts for: at $50 each (that’s the budget we’ve set up for each of them) that’s a total of $1150. So to save $50 of that money is awesome! I bought his gift for only $5.38 out of our pocket.
“What is Swagbucks?” you ask….it’s a search engine that pays you in e-bucks for the searches you do as well as doing daily polls and surveys. They have quite a few advertisements on their page and even have a “special offers” page where they promote different companies and services. They are able to pay you these e-bucks (that you can use towards prizes or, best-of-all, gift cards–Amazon gift cards are great!) because they earn money from the ads they have. It takes 450 swagbucks to earn one $5 Amazon gift card, so that’s not bad at all. Even if you only do searches, these can quickly add up.
For more information check them out at http://www.swagbucks.com/refer/saradawn12
