Fancy Meeting You Here

Whoops, I forgot to blog for most of June. But hey, here I am again! Back in action! And Blogger added a bunch of new templates and backgrounds so I switched that, yet again. I really liked the look of the other one but it was a little busy for my tastes and also I couldn't access the dashboard very easily which means jibber jabber to you but it was bugging me. So, hello new yellow swirlies!

I do want to take a poll as to whether you find it difficult to read with the transparent background. So please let me know and if so I will try something else!

This past weekend we went to Tucson, so we could be incredibly hot. Just kidding, we went for a wedding. The being hot part was just a little bonus. It hit 105 every day we were there, including the day we went to the wedding. Did I mention it was outside?

Jokes aside, the wedding was for our very good friend Rob. Rob is someone Ben and I have been friends with since high school. Actually, Ben and Rob went to the same preschool, though they don't remember each other from that far back. He is one of Ben's original guitar buddies and just an all-around wonderful guy. Some of my best, funniest memories involve Rob. He was a groomsman at Ben's & my wedding, and we also performed "our" song at my reception - that would be the Elephant Love Medley from Moulin Rouge - which is somewhere captured on video but maybe it is best that the moment live on only in our hearts.

We also love Rob's family. We spent many a night in high school and on trips home in college hanging out in the Nation Family basement with his brothers and being doted on by his momma. If I am ever the mother of three boys, I can only pray they all turn out as impressively as Louise's did.

We got to make the trip with another couple from high school, Cara and Cody, who are still our dear friends. It was fun to take a mini-vacation together and live it up at a gorgeous desert resort. There were several amazing pools where we spent most of our days. Ben and Cody went down the water slide approximately 500 times. We all got a little sunburned. It was awesome.


Rob married a lovely woman named Laura who were were excited to finally meet this weekend. The wedding was wonderful, everyone looked beautiful, and by the time the ceremony got into gear the sun was setting and the heat was mercifully dissipating. Their ceremony was really God-honoring and brought to the front and center Rob & Laura's faith and love for Jesus. All in all a totally great weekend and I am so excited for my old friend Rob and my new friend Laura and the beginning of their shared life.

Both Hands

Our friends Tim & Carrie are working on the process of adopting from Russia. This past weekend we were able to be part of a pretty cool fundraiser they did. Ben made this amazing video to help them get the word out about what we did, and it is so great! Get out the Kleenex, it is a tearjerker!



You can find out more about Tim and Carrie and their adoption at their blog, http://twetenadoption.blogspot.com. Please pray for them as they continue to work to bring their children home soon!

Birthday Week!

Ben's an 8-2-82, I'm an 8-8-83. That means the first week of August is Birthday Week in our house!

I love nearly sharing a birthday with my husband, but it was a change coming from a family where everybody's birthdays are spaced throughout the year. Ashley is in January, Mom's in March, I'm in August, Dad is in November. Since we've been married, Ben and I always have a big co-birthday celebration because we know we'll have to wait a whole year before we get to celebrate again! It was actually one of the reasons we decided to get married in March instead of waiting til summer, so we would have something else to celebrate the other 359 days of the year.

I thought it would be fun to take a look back on our birthday celebrations from the past couple years...

2006 we celebrated even more things at once with a combination birthday-birthday-housewarming party. The house was as clean like it will never be clean again, since we'd just moved in about a month before. Ben got to fire up his brand new grill. There were hotdogs and brats and it was as hot as August in Nashville can be.

2007 was the year of the FIESTA! We had a rockin' good party featuring the first appearance of the Wii. There was a donkey pinata named Paco. I made fajitas to feed 50. BYOB. Good times all around.

2008 we spent birthday week in Estes Park Colorado, and I had the most magical of all birth-dates ever in the history of birthdays... 08-08-08! It was so fun we just kept chanting it! The discovery of the brookie. White water kayaking. I met Bethany Dillon. Friends and family and all the good stuff.

WILL 2009 top them all? Well, let's just put it this way. There's going to be this:


And lots of it. So bring on the festivities, it's birthday week 2009!

Introducing... Baby Carrot Designs

Many of you know that, in addition to frequenting the pool and making lunch dates, I've also been busy this past month working on getting my official scrapbooking business in gear. I'm happy to finally announce the launch of Baby Carrot Designs!

I've officially opened my own Etsy store online, which is an exciting step! For those of you who aren't familiar, Etsy is a delightful online community of handmade arts and goods. It's also extremely, intensely addictive. The bounty of beautiful, creative, quirky stuff is overwhelming! You can see my store at http://amybethjames.etsy.com/.

I've also converted one of my old blogs into a site dedicated to my scrapbooking and Baby Carrot crafts. You can see this at http://babycarrotdesigns.blogspot.com/, and I also added it to the sidebar.

I owe a big thanks to the many friends (most of my small loyal readership here) who helped me brainstorm and gave me encouragement and challenges when I needed them most. Please please don't stop helping me! If something sucks, I'm counting on you to tell me about it. I take it from you all so much better than from Ben. (Sample conversation starting with Ben: "I just think maybe you might want to change..." Me: "You don't like what I maaaaaaaade!" Sobs.)

Besides the baby books on sale at Etsy, the other part of Baby Carrot Designs will be custom scrapbooks of any size and shape, so if you or someone you know has a project in mind, I'm game! Just let me know!

Thanks for the Memories!

Well, as many of you know, I became one of that elite society this week: the unemployed. GMA, like so many companies in the music industry, had to make the difficult decision to make cutbacks, and thus me and three of my wonderful co-workers had to be let go.

So that's the bad news.

The good news is this: I'm really, truly, 100% okay with it. I just know everything will work out fine, and I am so excited to have the chance to do something different! I don't know what that is yet - and I'll entertain all ideas - but it's going to be awesome. I'm just sure of it.

I have loved working at GMA. My coworkers over the years have been some of the most wonderful people I've ever met, and I'm SO blessed to call them my friends! I just wanted to end by posting some pics of all our fun times. I love you all!

A Tree Story: It's Planting Time

Last week after a loooong wait our trees finally arrived! We had our friends Jon and Heather come over to help with the process of getting the trees unwrapped and into the holes, then filling the holes and finishing the planting. It was an arduous process!

First step was getting the trees out of their packaging. Our big willow oak was container grown, meaning it needed some special attention. We dubbed Heather the "Root Liberator." It was her job to gently coax the roots, which had been growing around each other as they got to the edge of the container, out and to separate them so they could spread into the ground.

Ben helped:


I helped:


Scruffy supervised:

Time out for one more cute puppy picture:

Meanwhile Jon got to work on the cherry tree. The cherry tree had been "balled and burlapped" which means it was growing in the ground for a short time and then cut out and packaged up until we bought it. It was much easier to maneuver than the oak tree!


After the oak was successfully liberated, Jon and Ben manhandled it into it's waiting hole. It was very heavy.


Then we staked it so it would stay straight while we buried the roots and would grow nice and tall for its first year in the ground!

Cherry tree got the same treatment.

There she is! So happy in her new home!


It was a long and mildly difficult and expensive process, but so worth it! I can't wait to see these trees grow and branch out for as long as we live in our house, and to know that they'll be there for decades to come for the whole neighborhood to enjoy. If you have a yard and the space to do it, I would challenge YOU to plant a tree - what better time than Earth Day, which is coming up next Wednesday!

How I Spent My Long Sick Weekend

For the past four and a half days, I have been sick. This is pretty rare for me so it has really sucked. And to make matters worse, until yesterday afternoon, Ben was still gone in Japan so I was all alone. Just me and Scruffy in my Den of Germs (aka my house). My time sneezing, coughing, and running a fever can be summarized with the following four actions:

Watching Lost. I had decided I wanted to start rewatching the older seasons of Lost. And you know what works great for that? Days of uninterrupted time in which you want to do nothing more physically taxing than sitting on your couch within arm's length of a Kleenex box. I watched Season 2. And Season 3. And I'm starting Season 4 right now. What a way to spend four days. And as an added bonus, it's helping me remember some important connections for this season. SOMETHING TO NEVER FORGET: Benjamin Linus is a lying liar who lies.


Eating Baja Burrito. I don't know why, but the only thing that sounded good to me for the first part of being sick was Baja Burrito. It isn't even my favorite burrito place, but I NEEDED it. I went there three times, and each time I saved half my burrito and ate it for a later meal. You do the math.
Taking my temperature. I have always had this fascination with taking my temperature, but I hardly EVER run a fever. So imagine my twisted delight when on Thursday night I busted out the little digital thermometer and it read me at a toasty 102. Woo!
Sleeping. I didn't ever get a full night's sleep, mind you, too much coughing for that. But nevertheless, I spent at least 78% of the past four days either asleep on the couch, asleep in my bed, or at the very least snuggled beneath a large fluffy blanket. Nothing wrong with that.

I'd like to give some sick props to Jon & Heather, who answered the call when I was about to go insane from being in my house too long. They took me out to dinner and didn't mind when I asked to go to Target so I could get a new trash can. They didn't even laugh at me too much when I was walking around the store in a sort of craze/daze, fanning myself and wondering why it was so freaking hot. (Hint: it was the fever.)

Finally, I have to add a small note about Ben. He came home on Saturday afternoon to a fussy wife who couldn't even give him a proper welcome home kiss for fear of spreading the sickness around, but he has been nothing short of wonderful. It's so very nice to have someone to look after you when you're sick and tired and tired of being sick. He got me medicine, and rubbed my back, and tucked the covers in at the bottom of the bed where I'd kicked them out in a fevered fit. He loves me very much, and I am so happy he's home.