The Bloom Blogger

1.  Our church pairs up engaged couples with married couples to act as mentors.  This past weekend our bible study threw an appreciation dinner party for all of our marriage mentors.  They are so much more than mentors to us, they really are friends.  Towards the end of the night the guys and the girls split up to chat.  The girls sat on the screened porch with a few candles so we could see each other.  Five women who have been married anywhere from 8 to 40 years and five women who are all right around the one year mark.  What a beautiful picture.  We talked about personal things, we talked about challenges, we laughed... a lot, and we received words of wisdom that we all needed to hear.

2.  Back to school shopping!!  One of my co-workers is organizing a school supply drive for an area elementary school with a high rate of under-privileged children.  Matt and I took the list of needed supplies and filled one backpack for a boy and one backpack for a girl.  Who doesn't love a new box of crayons and colored pencils and picking out notebooks with the best looking covers?  The backpacks are loaded and sitting by the front door ready to be delivered.  Hopefully this means one girl and one boy that will not have to worry about standing out for not having the basic school supplies that the other kids have.  Hopefully they can walk in with their backpacks and just focus on learning and making friends, with one less thing standing in their way.

3.  Amazing prayer time at bible study Wednesday night.  It seems like each of the girls has something really major going on right now and it felt really good to delve into to prayer together.  There's something really powerful about calling upon the name of the Lord with a group of women you know and love.  

4.  Bacon wrapped shrimp with basil, bbq sauce, and goat cheese.  Sooooo goooood.

5.  Sampson loves my stuffed animals.  It doesn't work to buy him his own stuffed animal; he wants mine.  He has a tendency to drag them out of the bedroom when no one is looking.  He gets them in the middle of the living room floor, starts kneading them, and meows.  He never does it while we're around though.  We never actually see him grab the stuffed animal and drag it.  One night this week Matt woke up at 4am to Sampson meowing.  He had kibo (my hippo, kiboko, "hippo" in swahili) out in the living room.  He had stolen it from the bed while we slept!  I woke to find that I had Matt's gray t-shirt under my arm instead of my gray hippo, haha!