Chicken Pot Pie Soup

I love a good collection of recipes, and I have long felt that ours has lacked in the soup department. Perhaps it's because I commuted for so many years, and there wasn't time to assemble a soup and let it simmer properly before it was time to eat. Perhaps I have just never pursued the soup world. I have no idea.

Regardless of the reason for my soup failures to this point, our recent implementation of Tuesdays at the Table meant I needed to find some new recipes for the rotation. And I found a recipe for chicken pot pie soup on Pinterest. How comfort-foodish did that sound? All the goodness of chicken pot pie without the embarrassment of revealing I am incapable of making a decent crust. {Whoopsie. Guess I just did that.}

I've made more tweaks since the first time I made it, and I have to say - it's pretty delicious. It also comes together fairly quickly, which makes it even better. Ryan has given it two thumbs up and declared it a keeper, so I decided to preserve it in the Shafferland recipe box. With soup season officially here, I wanted to pass it on to you in case you'd like something new to try!

Chicken Pot Pie Soup

* 1 Tablespoon coconut oil
* 1 medium onion, diced
* 1 Tablespoon garlic powder
* 1 cup diced mushrooms
* 1/3 cup wheat flour
* 3 cups low sodium chicken stock
* 2 cups low-fat milk
* 3 cups shredded cooked chicken
* 1 pound cubed frozen hash brown potatoes
* 1 bag frozen mixed vegetables
* 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
* 1 teaspoon seasoned salt

Melt coconut oil in a stock pot and cook onion in it for a couple of minutes until tender. Add garlic powder and mushrooms and cook for a couple more minutes. Add wheat flour and stir well until mushrooms and onions are coated. Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a boil. Lower heat and continue cooking until heated all the way through. Simmer on very low heat until ready to serve. Serve with biscuits to serve as a crust.

 A Few Tips:

* If you don't have coconut oil, you can use vegetable oil to saute the onions.


* I use fresh mushrooms because we almost always have some on hand. If you don't keep them on hand, you can easily substitute canned mushrooms. Or, if you don't like them, you can leave them out entirely.

* You can use fresh garlic instead of powder. The original recipe called for 4 cloves.

* I use wheat flour, because it's what we have. You could use whatever kind of flour you have.

* I cook my chicken in big batches and divide it up to use in all kinds of things. {Quesadillas, BBQ chicken, etc.} I just boil it and then put it in my stand mixer to shred it. I also add some seasoned salt to it when it's freshly shredded, just to help with the flavoring of whatever dish I'm making.

* The first time I made this, I bought a bag of potatoes and cubed them. It took forever and we didn't use them all and the excess went bad and made a big mess in our pantry. I started using frozen cubed hash brown potatoes instead, so I could put in only what we need and skip the mess of cubing the potatoes/having the rest go bad.

* The original recipe called for all manner of fresh veggies, but I truly hate all the prep work of dicing them. So I decided to use a bag of frozen mixed veggies instead, and it worked very well.

* Ryan adds more seasoned salt to his bowls of soup. Easily done for those who want a little more salt!

* I've served this with biscuits {from a can - let's not imagine I'm better than I am} and that worked really well. Ryan loves a pot pie crust, so he put the biscuit in the bottom of his bowl and put the soup over it. On the days when I didn't feel like I could spare the carbs, I could skip the biscuits entirely, and on the days I wanted one, I could eat it separately, because I hate wet bread. Win-win!

* The last time I made this soup, I didn't have biscuits on hand, so I used cornbread, and it worked really well, too!

* This reheats beautifully!

Go Tell Aunt Rosie

Don't you love it when you title a blog post and then realize YOU HAVE THE WRONG WORDS???

Welcome to my Wednesday.

Allow me to back up, if I may.

I feel it is an appropriate time to mention, especially after yesterday's post on my occasional housewife failures, that I am actually not the best housekeeper in our marriage. I am a good housekeeper. I keep the clutter picked up, I do the laundry, I empty the dishwasher, and I'm pretty sure the health department wouldn't kick up too much of a fuss if they visited. But if we're in the business of truth-telling here, I must confess that Ryan is a MUCH better housekeeper than I am. He is better at cleaning {probably because he is not so ever-loving FREAKED OUT by unidentified dirt}, and he is motivated to tackle these projects far more often than I am.

It's an area of life I've had to come to grips with since being married. My choices are to feel like a failure because I'm not as good at this as he is, or accept that I'm not as good at this as he is and let it be okay, because if he's not worried about it, I probably shouldn't be either.

Most of the time, I choose the second option.

So keeping that in mind, may we pause for just a moment to talk about our vacuum? When we got married, we owned many things in duplicate. This happens when you have two thirty-somethings who marry and combine their fully functioning households. Our general rule was to compare the things we owned in duplicate and keep the nicer option. And in the event that we hated both options, we put that item on our registry.

This worked very nicely, except in the case of the vacuum. I owned what I felt was a fairly nice vacuum. It was probably less than ten years old, it was sturdy, easy to manage, and I had mastered the delicate art of changing the bag when it got full. It wasn't a masterpiece of a vacuum. It wouldn't star in a commercial for being the coolest kid on the block, but it worked well.

Ryan actually owned two. And I'm pretty sure both were original prototypes of vacuum cleaners. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is one of those times. So I am going to skip all description and just show you.

You guys?

I HATED THEM BOTH. The blue one wasn't so bad if you had a specific project: a closet or a car to clean. But it wasn't practical {or lightweight} to cart around the house, so that left the maroon vacuum. That thing is as loud and unwieldy as you might imagine, and Ryan loved it. The vacuum hill was one he was willing to die on in the combination of households, so my ultra-modern, kinda-cool vacuum went to a new home, and old blue and old maroon moved in...in all their loud, croaky, 1970's leftover glory.

I probably don't need to really explain why I didn't vacuum with intense frequency, do I? For me, using these vacuums required a mental preparation, and I didn't get there nearly as often as I should have.

Sooooooooooooo...a couple of months ago, Ryan decided to pre-spend his Christmas money and get one of those little robotic vacuums that works all by itself.

I did not care at all because, well, OBVIOUSLY this was going to make my housewifery life much easier. And it was his Christmas money. If he wanted to buy a vacuum, more power to him. But I sort of wondered in the back corner of my mind just how pathetic it made us that we had to have a robot vacuum our house. Had I found a new all-time low as a housewife failure?

He named her, because we name all our stuff, and this is how she came to be known as Rosie. {Apparently that was the name of the housekeeper on the Jetsons. I never watched the Jetsons, so I don't have any idea.}

I mentioned Rosie in passing a couple of weeks ago on the blog and had some questions about her, so I thought I'd answer them for you.

Rosie is about the size of a large dinner plate, and she's probably about 2-3 inches tall. She's programmable, so every day at the assigned time {7:30 a.m. for us}, she sets out from her charger and begins looping about the house in random patterns, sucking up cat hair, litter, dust, Bekah-hair, and whatever other odd assortments of dirt have come in during the past 24 hours. She pokes around in every single room, regardless of the surface {she does work on carpet, tile, and hardwood}, and she finds hidden dirt and eats it.

Because she's little, she can get under pieces of furniture that a handheld vacuum would not be able to maneuver. {Bookcases, couch, etc.} If she runs into something, she just rotates and goes another direction. Her one vice is eating cords, and if she gets too choked up on one, she just stops working and dies. {I can't blame her there.} When I find her and untangle her, I just turn her back on, and she continues on her merry way.

Her goal every day is to make it back home to her charger with her belly full of dirt. Most days she does, but now and then, I find her conked out in the bedroom, too tired to make it home. {Can't blame her there either sometimes.}

Because we're weird this way, one of the highlights of our day is examining the dirt pouch and seeing what she found every day. Ryan usually empties it when he comes home for lunch, and Rosie sleeps in her charger all day so she can be ready for the next day.

Call us crazy, call us spoiled, but we really love our Rosie. I admit it is SO NICE to have floors that are not littered with cat hair every single day. It's nice to not carry cat hair on my socks everywhere I go. It's nice to know that people can come over whenever, and our floors at least look clean. And it's nice to have an electronic babysitter for Braeya every morning. {Braeya HATES Rosie, but she stalks her anyway.}

We kept the other two vacuums so we can actually hand-vacuum the house as needed {after a party, for example, or if there's a specific spill}, but I do NOT miss using loud, cranky maroon. Not one bit.

We call Rosie a good investment.

And back to my opening statement...

When I heard that her name was Rosie, it made me think of the scene in Little House on the Prairie when Laura, Mary and Carrie sang the song about going to tell Aunt Rosie that the old gray goose is dead. I sing it every time Ryan talks about Rosie. And when I went to get the clip so YOU could watch it too, I learned it's not Aunt Rosie at all. It's Aunt Rhodie!

Oops.

Well, from now on, in Shafferland, it's Aunt Rosie and the old dead gray goose.

{PS - Our Rosie is an iLife, if you want to read more specifics about it at your leisure.}

Embracing Imperfection

First of all, it's Spill the Beans Day!! :)

We realized, with much horror, that we never properly welcomed fall on the podcast, so we're talking all things fall-important {my disdain for raking leaves, Ryan's childhood on the farm, etc.} and then we chat about my planning day last week - aka the day Ryan's co-workers began to mock me for what I fear will be the entire coming year.

Click here to listen.

And now...to today.

Is anyone else addicted to TimeHop/On This Day apps for social media? On This Day is one of my most favorite things to look at while we eat breakfast every morning. It makes my memory-maker's heart so happy to see what I was up to on this very day over the past few years.

So yesterday, I was scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and I found my thoughts from three years ago: October 24th, 2013 at 9:08 p.m. I had written:

Thought in my mind at 11:00 this morning: "I need to leave work and be a stay at home wife today, because I know how to do THAT." Thought in my mind at 8:00 this evening after Ryan took over fixing the ENVELOPE PASTA SIDE DISH following my three failed attempts: "I just need to go to bed and let this day win." Here's to a better Friday.

I elected not to unearth the journal and find out what was causing me such consternation at work that day {I have a few thoughts, but if I'm right, I'd rather not relive them.} But I smiled and wanted to tell three-years-ago Bekah that if she could just hang on about another year and a half, she would get to leave work and be a stay at home wife, not just for one day, but for all the days. That dream she was too scared to dream was just about to come true. {You know...in a year and a half.}
 

I've told you, recently even, how much I enjoy this season of life, working from home, investing in our house and in our marriage in ways I could not as a working-outside-the-home wife. I'm not here to rehash that, because probably some of you hate hearing it when it's your secret dream too, but your time hasn't yet come.

I'm here to say that being a stay-at-home wife occasionally still carries the failures that October 24th, 2013 carried. There are days when I still wouldn't be able to make a pasta side dish without an adult helper. {We also no longer eat those...not so much on the clean-eating-approved list.}

There are days when Ryan comes home from work and I look around and wonder if I have anything to show for my hours of work within the walls of our house. Anything tangible that will prove to him {though he never asks for proof} that  my staying home every day is worth it to our family.

There are days when I mess up the laundry and pull something from the dryer that was clearly to be line dried only. There are days when I forget the one chore he asked me to do. There are days when he comes home for lunch and the mountain of dishes threatening to dissolve in a landslide when he left for work are still precariously perched on the counter. There are days when lunch is cold, because I overzealously got it ready too early. There are days when lunch refuses to cook faster, regardless of my coaxing, and he nearly gets full on Cheez-it appetizers while he waits.

There are days when I'm still in bedhead and jammies when he comes home for lunch, eyes wide and frenzied because I'm in the middle of the biggest writing roll and I haven't paused to do ANYTHING but pound words into a keyboard for the last however many hours. There are days the alarm goes off and I groan and say, "I forgot to get more strawberries for breakfast." {How can that be thought #1 at that hour and not on my brain ONCE the day before??}

Being a stay-at-home wife doesn't mean I'm great at it all the time. Sometimes I'm a failure and he has to help me clean up the mess I've made. Sometimes I still need to go back to bed and let the day win.

I say this not as a self-bashing session, but because I think there are too many picturesque blog and Instagram posts {my own included} that show tidy rooms and scrapbook-worthy moments, and out there somewhere is a reader who feels like a failure because she's living my October 24th, 2013, and she just wants to know that out there somewhere is an honest blogger who admits that sometimes the laundry is a fail and sometimes the strawberries are still at the store.

Ryan is gracious. He drives to the store in the wee hours to buy strawberries and doesn't complain about Cheez-it appetizers when lunch is behind. He even calls me cute when my lunchtime attire strongly resembles the jammies I had on when he left home. He doesn't question my productivity level when I can't produce anything to show for my day.

I appreciate that about him. And I appreciate the gift of staying home. But even in being a "professional" stay-at-home wife, I assure you I still have my days. Bring me an adult helper and another coffee, please. And let's start over again tomorrow.

Pheebs!!!!

I am sorry to report that we are still no closer to getting a dog of our own.

This may be one of the main reasons why:

Braeya is exceedingly curious about Phoebe...as long as Phoebe is blind to her. Have you ever tried to get a dog to be blind to a cat? Yeah, it doesn't work out so well.

But despite the resident fur-baby's distaste for dogs, leading us to NOT own one ourselves, we continue to enjoy visits with Miss Phoebe, who is just about the best dog on the planet, I'm totally convinced. She came to hang out with me a week ago today, and it was a joy to have her for a few hours.

My main agenda on Monday was to recover from a weekend of speaking, so I had nothing but time to play with this cutie.

I think she missed me:

So many kisses.

We took a walk...and she managed to wait until we were RELATIVELY close to a trash can before she pooped.

We went to visit Ryan at work:

And despite it being OCTOBER, we were able to go for a walk in SHORTS!!!

{Just like a kid - she veered right into the water trail and walked through it.}

I think she was so tuckered after her walks, that she pretty much just wanted to cuddle the rest of the night.

Okay by me!!!

What a sweet girl. She is definitely a blessing to us!! {Braeya has asked to be excluded from that last statement.}

The Shafferland Shuffle

UPDATE: The site I use for my collages is STILL not working, but I found one that works similarly, so I managed to create some collages for today's blog. We'll see if the other site ever starts to work again or if I just need to learn a new one!

* You should very intimately know our tale of last Sunday after the blog this week! I feel like all you did was read about our weekend! It was my last day to spend at the retreat where I spoke, and then we hurried from there to the centennial celebration of my old church! Definitely not our most restful Sunday in all of history, but definitely a beautiful Sunday that created wonderful memories! {And ten thousand husbandly points to Ryan for being such a great support to me that day and ALL weekend!}

* This week was our city school system's fall break, so I had no carpool duties, and I enjoyed every moment of may "fall break." The scenery got extra beautiful while we were gone, and as a bonus for Monday, it was warm, sunny, and Phoebe-filled! YAY! We got to keep her for a few hours that afternoon and evening, and we had a blast! {We, of course, being everyone but Braeya.}

* Does anyone else get as excited over a new set of pens as I do? Ryan gave me these and made my WEEK!!!! So pretty! I spent the day writing and working in my office, looking at pretty trees and meeting deadlines! And that night, while Ryan went to a class for work, I went to a party with one of my friends {direct sales} and played Bingo with Skittles. Not a bad game, my friend. Not a bad game.

* I took Wednesday as a planning day for 2017, so when Ryan left for work, I packed up my bags and went to the coffee shop to plan, dream, work, and pray. It went beautifully until the really loud woman came in and stayed for a long time, telling all manner of stories to her friend. I know so much more about her life than I ever meant to! After lunch, I went for a long walk and continued my planning at home - in the quietness. :)

* Thursday was a great day to stay home: too bad Ryan had to go to work. It was classic fall, with blowing leaves, much rain, and multiple excuses to have more coffee. We had to run some errands in the evening, but when we got home, we crashed on the couch and just rested. Much-needed!

* Because of Ryan's class on Tuesday night, we had to reschedule Tuesdays at the Table for Friday. We will not discuss what this did to my OCD. We had some friends over who helped us tremendously with the renovations on our house back when we first bought it, and it was fun to let them see the finished product! They brought their kids, and we had a blast making our own pizzas, drawing on the chalkboards in the garage, playing Barbies, and trying to lure Braeya out from under the bed! {That worked as well as you might imagine.}

* Yesterday, we spent most of the day at my parents' house, so Ryan could work on some projects for them. Any time he has an excuse to play with power tools, it's a good day! He crossed a lot off his list, and I got to hang out with Mom. {We made donuts with her new donut pan!!} Poor guy...when we got home, he sat right down and went to sleep!! And I sat and looked at the pretty flowers he bought me.

The Saturday Six

One.

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I do love a good party theme, and in my world, any party theme involving ice cream is a good party theme. So this triple scoop party was pretty amazing, in my opinion. Good job, Anne!

Two.

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I am not a political blogger, and I'm not starting now, but I think this post by Beth Moore is well worth a read. She speaks great truth here. God is sovereign, always has been, and will continue to be in November and beyond. I'm choosing to focus on that.

Three.

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I found this idea on Pinterest and the link I found was just for the picture, so I have no idea if there is supposed to be an accompanying post or not, but I LOVE this idea for setting a Thanksgiving table with brown paper for the "cloth" and drawing on the placemats and placecards. It makes my heart happy. {Would make my heart happier if I could actually script like this!} 

Four.

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And for those of you who are already working on Christmas gifts, and you need fun, inexpensive ideas for neighbors or co-workers, here's a whole list of play-on-words, usable gifts you can share!

Five.

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Have you had a bad day this week? READ THIS. Sometimes we just need a perspective shift. Thank you, KariAnne! 

Six.

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This week I absolutely devoured a novel, and if you like good suspense, you might want to devour it too! {For the record, by "devoured," I mean that I started it one night when Ryan wanted to go to bed early, but I wasn't tired, and I pretty much canceled life the next day to finish it.}

Irene Hannon's latest romantic suspense, Tangled Webs, is the third and final book in the Men of Valor series. I did not read the first book, but I caught the second one, Thin Ice, earlier this year. As I mentioned in my review then, I continue to be amazed at Irene's fiction-writing talent. She can crank out a thriller like the ones in this series, and she can just as masterfully deliver sweet small-town romance stories like the ones in her Hope Harbor series that I also just adore.

Tangled Webs focuses on the youngest of the McGregor brothers {each book in the series focuses on a different brother} - Finn. After six years as an Army Ranger, Finn is discharged following a horrible mission in the Middle East that nearly ends his life, and he decides to take a month off to spend in solitude in the woods to try to mentally regroup and figure out his next life moves.

Solitude comes to a literal screeching halt when he hears screaming in the middle of the night and meets his neighbor-in-the-middle-of-nowhere, the lovely young Dana Lewis, who is battling through nightmares of her own. She's come to the woods seeking solitude and fresh starts, too, but mysterious happenings on her late grandfather's property spook her and intrigue Finn.

Investigating the odd {and dangerous} happenings proves challenging for the two non-natives of the area, but all the time spent together also ignites more than healing in their hearts and minds. As they chase truth and answers, they also chase one another toward a renewed faith in the Lord and chance at trusting enough to love.

Suspense, ethical dilemmas, danger, faith, love...they're all tangled in the web of this book, which I found impossible to put down and surprising to the end!

* Revell provided a copy of this book to me at no charge. All opinions are my own, and I was not required to give a favorable review. *

Happy 100 Years, Chapel Pike!

I'm not sure I have ever shared this particular story on the blog {touched on it during the podcast recently, but that's it, I think}, so I will share it now!

I grew up attending church at a Quaker/Friends church in Marion, and I've told you about that before, including this trip down memory lane last summer. This is the church where I was dedicated to the Lord as a baby, where I learned memory verses and Sunday School songs, where I worked in the nursery, sang in the choir, played piano solos, and took my turn on the two tiniest handbells in the handbell choir. This was where I attended youth group and went to lock-ins and weekend retreats, where I did my first ever public speaking in church, and where my foundation as a Christian found its bottom layers.

I did not want to leave this church, ever in my life. I wanted to get married there and raise my own kids in the same hallways where I ran {only when adults weren't looking} as a kid myself. But when I was a fifth grader, the church went through a devastating split, and a few years later, before we'd even had a chance to recover, it split again. By the time I graduated from high school, the huge sanctuary held just a smattering of people who continued to be faithful to come. I loved each of them dearly, but the closest one to me in age was probably still twice my age.

By the time I completed my freshman year of college, I knew I had to find a new home. The church I loved with all my heart was not {in the foreseeable future, anyway} going to recover from its traumatic splits, and if I was going to be part of a church with people my own age, I was going to have to relocate. Leaving absolutely undid me. In fact, I did not tell one soul that I was leaving until after I was gone, because I knew they would all talk me out of it. So I drove out of the parking lot on that last Sunday, sobbing, knowing I would find a new church that would fit me, but grieving the only church home I'd ever known.

It was a big responsibility, I felt, to find a new home on my own. I was 19 and smart enough to know what I needed to look for in a church, but scared to death to look on my own. Walking into unfamiliar church foyers all by myself was daunting for a scaredy-cat like me. I knew I needed a home with solid Bible teaching, life in its pews, and potential friendships. And Marion could not be accused of having a shortage of churches, so I knew I should be able to find something. But where?

God had already walked ahead and begun to prepare the way. In the months leading up to that change for me, He had placed three new friends in my path who all shared a church home: Chapel Pike Wesleyan. Two of them were new co-workers of mine and one was a college friend. All three spoke so highly of their church and urged me to visit. They promised I would be warmly welcomed and offered me a seat with them if I didn't want to sit alone.

So in the summer of 1997, I went for the first time. And for the next eleven years, Chapel Pike was my church home. I grew so much there. I was {as promised} warmly welcomed, I made new friends, I learned valuable lessons, and my faith strengthened within those walls. And the only reason I left, eleven years later, was because God unmistakably put it on my heart that it was time to make a change. I fought against it and argued at length, because I didn't want to leave. I didn't want to change. I didn't want anything new. But He was clear, and again, I slipped out of the church without telling a soul I planned to leave - until the decision was behind me.

Last Sunday, Chapel Pike celebrated 100 years of ministry, and because the retreat I spoke at ended unusually early, and because Chapel Pike was on the path between the retreat and home, we were able to sneak in late and enjoy the second half of the celebration service and stay for the lunch that followed. Ryan never attended here, and this Sunday was just a gift he gave me in being able to go back to a place that meant so much to me, even though he had no ties to it.

We were an hour late {eek!} but the service was long, so we still got to enjoy an hour of music and preaching!

I borrowed this picture from Facebook, because it shows us paying rapt attention!!!

{For my own peace of mind, I must tell you that I do NOT wear jeans to church, ever, but this was the leftover retreat wardrobe, so I made an embarrassing exception for the day.}

We were in the overflow room, because the main sanctuary was absolutely packed. But I did sneak out once to take pictures from the back of the sanctuary.

This was {most of} one of the main worship teams during my time at the church. Only the drummer still attends here, but the group got back together for this day, and they sounded SO GOOD!!! Julie, Tony, Joe, and Jon...you were a blessing on Sunday! Thanks for singing for everyone!

And Josh was a youth group member when I started attending, but he is now a full-fledged minister and delivered a wonderful sermon for the morning!

And after church...it was time to meet up with friends I hadn't seen in too long!

Jaye came partway through my time at the church, when her husband came to be the youth pastor. Pastor Brian was the one who ended up baptizing me several years ago, actually. Jaye was in the Bible study I led and was such an encouragement to me!

Julie {of the worship team} is also the one who gave me the fabulous housewarming gift I talked about earlier this week. She has been a rock of friendship to me dating back to our student worker days at IWU. We were neighbors for a while, we went on a girls-getaway weekend once, and she drove an hour once upon a time just to give me a hug. Julie is a treasure of a friend. Find yourself a Julie, and keep her!

Savannah was birth #2 I attended back in the day. Clearly she is growing up to be a stunning young woman.

And then her brothers, Liam and James. {If you heard the podcast, Liam was the one who didn't recognize me with blonde hair.}

And one more: with Julie again, and our friend Sarah, who was not only a good friend and part of our Ladies Bible Study, but she also made the to-die-for cake and cupcakes for our wedding. Great. Now I want more of them. :)

I heard that about 300 people came for this celebration, and it definitely was good to see so many friends from days gone by!

100 years is a long time to do ministry, and I am grateful for the eleven years {out of the century} that the people of this church fed into my life!!

Congratulations, Chapel Pike!! Keep up the fantastic work! :)

Be Still...Wrapping Up

Thanks for taking time to read about the retreat from the weekend...hopefully you felt like you attended a little corner of it! :)

Normally, retreats end close to lunch time on Sunday, but these ladies had to hurry back to their church for the morning service, so our Sunday morning time together was QUICK! Ryan and I stayed up late Saturday night to get all our stuff packed up and get ready as much as we could {read: I did my hair before I went to bed so I didn't have to do it when I got up - HA!} so we didn't have to get up at 4 on Sunday!

Ryan was a sweetheart and loaded up our car while I finished prepping with my notes...and...possibly...took a few pictures of the beautiful pre-sunrise sky.

Then it was time for breakfast, and if you listened to the podcast, you heard the story of "the waffle." Oh, I'm still cracking up over that!

Also - if anyone is looking for Christmas ideas for Ryan, he'll take one of these, please:

We walked over for the final session, and I was freaking out about my voice. It was so early in the morning, and I was coughing and hoarse, and I wasn't sure I could pull off the last talk, even though it was a short one. But Ryan prayed with me and as soon as I got up to speak, I was fine. {Of course I wasn't as soon as I was DONE, but I made it through!!!!}

 OH!!!!! AND!!!!!!!

Ryan did the drawing for my gift basket, and Anna took this picture of us. YAY!!!

After this session ended, we helped the girls carry their sound equipment out to the bus so they could get back to their church.

It was a joy to serve this group. I thoroughly loved it. Erica, I promised you a shout-out, and here it is! Thank you for keeping me so in the loop for months leading up to the weekend, for answering my endless questions, and for becoming a new friend. You and ALL the ladies of the planning committee made my job so much easier, and I appreciate you all. I'm excited to hear what God does in you through the things He taught you this weekend!

Union Church - you are a joy!