Here’s a picture of me and my husband as we were preparing to leave for the Gala the other night. My husband’s university was celebrating its Centenniel, and that’s why we were invited. We decided to go because this week is also our 12th Wedding Anniversary.

We were married in August 1994. Twelve years, five children, and eight moves later, here we are.

Oops … Looks like I better go sweep the driveway.

Since I haven’t been blogging here the past few days, I figured nobody was coming here. I hadn’t checked my webstats lately because I didn’t want to see the number “o.” But I checked this morning, and I discovered that people are coming here anyway. Weird. I’m absent, but people are still coming to visit.

Guess what my #1 most read post is this month? My review of 90 Minutes in Heaven. I still highly recommend this book. I checked the ECPA Christian Bestseller list and found out some good news. Are you ready? This book is a bestseller, ranked #21!

Psssst … I’ll just whisper this — I got my Dad a copy signed by Cecil Murphey, who wrote this book in the words of Don Piper. It will be a late Father’s Day present because I forgot to give it to him the last time I saw him.

I hope you’re all having a great summer. I’m swamped with kids everywhere. And I do mean everywhere.

What are you doing for Father’s Day today? It gives kids security in this crazy, mixed-up world when they see you loving their Dad. My husband and I went on a marriage retreat last weekend and were reminded once again that “Love is an Action.” Saying you love someone is nice — but showing it through your actions is even better. For me, that means staying off the computer and hanging out in the real world with my family.

Nobody says it better than FlyLady, who tells us, “Love means making sure there’s clean toilet paper on the roll and extra ones within reach. (ahem.) Love means making sure your family has clean underwear folded and put away in their drawers.”

I gotta get off the computer — bye! 🙂

Barbara over at Tidbits and Treasures tapped me for this “Ten Simple Pleasures” meme, which I think fits quite nicely into the theme for today’s Carnival of Beauty, “Rainy Days.” The hostess is Allison of The Autumn Rain.

Here are Ten Simple Pleasures for me, things that bring me joy and keep me going on those rainy days, when the skies are gray.

1. Our pets — five cats and a dog right now. I sat out in our backyard last night petting our white cat, Snowball, and thought to myself that life doesn’t get any better than this. Of course, he started purring, and it was even more fun because I let my one-year-old stroke his neck, teaching her how to be “gentle.”

2. Pure joy is when I get up early enough to drink a cup of coffee and read and/or write before anyone else in the house is up. (It didn’t happen this morning.) I love those quiet hours of darkness where I can dig in my roots and feel a sense of growth — it keeps me going all day. When I can read my Bible and meet with God, I’m as excited as Mary, the day she saw Jesus on the first Easter.

3. I’ve got three vases of wildflowers in our kitchen right now — brought inside by my kindergartener. She loves to hide the fresh-picked bouquet behind her back and say, “Mama, I’ve got a surprise for you.” I never get tired of her surprises — and now the wild dogwoods and pear blossoms look so pretty in our kitchen.

4. I love the moment when my husband walks in the door from work. He’s tall and handsome — and I realize I love him more every day. I’m not the type to be mushy in public — but this is one of my simple pleasures. I can’t believe how good God is to me!

5. The beach. Anything about the beach. The salty sea breezes, the feeling of sand under my bare feet, watching our children make sand castles and play in the waves. My stress unwinds completely when I can be near the sea. I feel God present there more than anywhere else — at the horizen of sky meeting the water — He’s there.

6. As I’m writing, it IS raining outside! My three-year-old is beside me playing with his Thomas the Tank Engines and saying, “Look, Mama. See the rain?” I love the quiet sounds of rain, especially when I’m in a barn with a tin roof, and I can smell hay at the same time (and be near horses).

7. My new pleasure of going to work out at Curves. It’s hard to believe I can relax while I exercise — but I’m having so much fun listening to upbeat music, talking with women about non-stressful things, and getting my chance to breathe (like on the airplane, when we’re told to give ourselves oxygen first before helping a child).

8. Encouraging words — it’s so refreshing to read or hear something nice, where someone took the time to reach out to me. When I’m feeling good about myself, it directly affects the six other people in our home, as well as everyone else I come in contact with.

9. Our Sunday School class. I’ll wait and post more about that on Friday for the Living Beyond Yourself group. We’ve been gone for four years, and we feel like we’re back home again. I love these people!

10. Being outside in the garden area with my family. We are really country bumpkins these days. Our baby playpen stays out on the porch — she is content to play out there for hours while everyone is doing yardwork. My husband is whipping the garden into shape and getting the kids to all do all kinds of chores. Soon, we’ll have cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, beans, and a host of other homegrown vegetables.

That’s it for today — I could keep going of course … but really, everything centers around my family right now. And I guess the neat thing is that I can blog about it — and maybe I should print this out and keep it somewhere for me to read when the sun is hiding behind a cloud.

I think I’m supposed to tap ten other people for this meme. I’d like to tap everyone in our LBY group — in the Blogroll. So, if you’re in the group and you’d like to share your ten simple pleasures, consider yourself tapped!

I’ve been noticing that my Travel category in this blog is a bit wimpy. I mostly focus here on books and parenting issues. But if you’re like me, blessed with little ones at home, you may have to do a lot of your adventure-seeking from your armchair (or should I say rocking chair? Or maybe I should even say laundry room, after seeing a picture of a mom tapping away on her laptop a la washing machine over at the recent contest on Mommy Net).

Did you know people all over the world are writing travel blogs? This technology did not EXIST when I did some international traveling in my late teens/early 20s. As I mentioned once, when I lived in Japan, I spent every evening writing letters, one by one, BY HAND telling my family and friends (and my special pen pal who later became my husband) all about my adventures living overseas.

But now the technology is here to be able to update everyone instantly — with words and pictures. This is also useful for anyone preparing for a trip somewhere. I mean — why read a guidebook that was written like two years ago when you can read about a traveler eating in a trendy bistro this morning?

The best site I’ve found so far is one called Travel Blog: Live Travel Journals. Have you heard of this site yet? I recently went to Rome — and before that, I climbed a mountain with a traveler somewhere along the coast of South America! The pictures are stunning. Of course, since the blogs are not edited, you never know what you might read. But for the most part, I’ve been interested to hear people’s fascinating stories.

You can choose any continent in the world, and hundreds of countries. The site owners pick different blogs to feature on the home page — I’m not sure if they’re updated daily or maybe weekly. Today’s front page features:

— On March 30th, a traveler named Keith took pictures and wrote about seeing humpback whales off the coast of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

— An explorer dubbed Honest Abe reports on sheep herding and eating curry on the island of Fiji.

— A traveler shared views of life on Penang, a large island off the northwestern coast of Malaysia.

— An April Fool’s Bike Ride through Pittsburgh (I suppose exotic to someone).

— A duo who call themselves “Cumberland Sausage” share pictures of a Holi Festival in Udaipur, India. You won’t believe their pictures. And they close their brief post with this: “No more blogs for a month I’m afraid, we’re off trekking in Nepal.” Ughhh!!

You gotta love it. I can travel the world for free via reading these people’s blogs — and you can too.

With two more months until summer, I’d love to hear back from you readers who don’t live in America. I know you’re out there! You may not realize it, but your home is very exotic to me. I know where a few of you live, but I’d love to learn more. Can you write me and tell me what it’s like? You don’t have to send a picture — I can probably find one on Google.

Do you live on an island? Anywhere near the ocean? I don’t. So in my opinion, you’re on vacation year-round. I want to know what the ocean sounds like for you. What color is the sand? Do you eat fish from the sea, and what kinds? Do you cook it at home or eat it at a restaurant?

You don’t need a blog to write — and you can email me, and I’ll use only your first name or initial. I just think it would be so interesting to use this blog technology to bring the world to my home — and yours.

If anyone else knows a good travel website, I’d love to hear about it.

(Sigh … bigtime sigh.)

Edit: (after much sighing) — If anyone reading this happens to live on an island and is in need of a family to herd your sheep for a while, we’d be happy to consider your offer. I think I’m kidding, but I might not be.

This week’s topic for the Carnival of Beauty is “Friendship,” hosted by Michele of Chasing Contentment. I’m having such a great time reflecting on these topics — I think about ideas while I’m going about my daily routines. It’s amazing what inspiration comes to my mind while I’m washing dishes, which is why my handy dandy notebook has wrinkled pages from soapsud-induced mad scribbling. (Does anyone else feel like you’ll die if you don’t write something down?)

So while I was thinking about friendship, sweet Blair at Scribblings by Blair tapped me for a Valentine meme about marriage. The question was, “What’s one thing you’ve learned about marriage that you could pass along to others?” I started writing about my parents — because most of what I know about marriage comes from observing them my whole life — but then I thought — Hey! This topic ties in great with friendship. So I saved my answer for this Carnival.

Being married to your best friend is one of the greatest gifts life has to offer. I thank God every day for this gift in my home now. But I also had this modeled for me growing up. My mom and dad are the best of friends. My mom brags about my dad all the time, and he brags about her. This is what I’ve observed makes a happy marriage.

Next month, my parents will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. They’ve spent four decades of life together. I love hearing them tell stories of how they met, dated, and spent their early years of marriage. My dad was in the Air Force, and I was born on an Air Force base in Kansas City, Missouri. We moved around a few times, so I was a toddler in Texas a while before we moved to Georgia. (Just wanted y’all Texas friends to know that.)

Over the years, my parents’ friendship has deepened and weathered the storms that life sends through. They took the calling seriously to raise three children and make sure we were in church every Sunday. No matter how busy we were, Mom always had us sit down together for supper, and I enjoyed watching my parents interact with each other — like friends — and talk and laugh about their day. The TV was never on while we ate — and everybody pitched into the conversation. (Even when I was a snooty-hooty teenager and dinner interrupted my busy agenda of phone calls and fashion planning.)

So, to answer Blair’s meme, marriage is all about friendship — first of all in having a friendship with God though Jesus Christ so you have the perfect role model for relationships — and second of all, it’s a lifelong friendship that grows and changes and is an adventure.

I’m still learning about this, which is why I love reading women’s blogs who describe their happy marriages. To double the blessings of my life, God gave me a husband whose parents also celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary last year. So, they should be the ones writing about marriage! I’m still the quiet observer, writing things down with my soapy dishpan hands.

How do you stay friends with someone for an entire lifetime? Here’s what I see. Marriage is a living thing, like a plant, that grows and needs constant attention. We were reading a book with our kids the other day about seeds, and it showed one of those giant Redwood trees in California. The last line of the book said something like, “Can you believe this tall tree used to be a seed?”

On our wedding day, we’re like a seed, planted into the ground. Then through years of growth toward the “Son,” we become like a tree. (Psalm 119:105 says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a LIGHT for my path.”). Our roots should be deep enough so we’ll weather various storms that pass through.

How do we cultivate that seed? From watching my parents, I’d say:

#1 Surround each other with love and grace, the same way God gives it to you.
#2 Work on your sense of humor — laugh about the crazy things life deals at you! Have a lot of inside jokes that only your family knows about.
#3 Keep finding creative ways to celebrate the happy events — and tell stories about them over and over.

I could write a ton more — but I know you’ve got more blogs to click into — so I’ll just say this: if you’re a parent, the best gift you can ever give your children is to cultivate the seed of marriage and show them what a lifelong friendship looks like. It’s more important than anything else. I can’t thank my parents enough for giving me four decades of love, laughter, and celebration worth writing about!

P.S. If you don’t have a friendship like this as a role model, you can learn so much from great books! The Bible is #1. But I highly recommend The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. And if you feel like a pioneer in this parenting gig, I just finished reading Mary DeMuth’s inspiring book, Building the Christian Family You Never Had — it’s a wonderful resource!