PETA We Don't Need Ya

I was watching the news and everyone was making a big fuss about the PETA commercial that will not be running during the Superbowl and how racy it was. Here's what I don't understand, PETA is so worried about animals, but they don't care at all about peoples minds and contributing to the destruction of our society. This to me is just one of the many indicators of where we are in God's timeline.

On the Move Again...

Well we purchased another 4wheel drive, which seems pretty stupid for a family of Texans, but this family will soon be calling themselves Pennsylvanians. We found out Thursday Cory's boss really wants him up in Pittsburgh, so soon the Ruiz's will be North easterners. I am no stranger to moving, this will be my 25th move since Kindergarten and my 8th state to live in, but Texas is as far east as I ever thought I would live. It is so strange to me that my children will think of themselves as from the northeast. Overall however, we are excited.
PROS
The area is beautiful with numerous outdoor activities. Pretty much an outdoor lovers paradise. Upper Saint Clair or Peters, the 2 townships we are considering living in have absolutely amazing public school systems with 96% going on to college. Cory's office is actually located about 5 minutes from the area we are going to live in, so there will no longer be the battle of a commute. The neighborhood is actually outside of the city. Maybe, comparable to living in McKinney or even Anna. I know you are probably asking yourself now what about the winters, but I grew up in Montana and below 0 was a normal part of life. I am not excited to return to months of winter, but there is a ski resort 45 minutes away. I grew up on the mountain and think it will be fun for Caleb and Makaylee to have the opportunity to enjoy this activity. There are other things we are excited about but these are the main things that Dallas doesn't necessarily offer.
CONS
I guess the biggest thing is leaving our loved ones. We have built so many amazing relationships here and I can hardly even think about leaving these behind without tears coming to my eyes. There is rarely a day that goes by that Caleb doesn't ask for Hampton and Jackman or say he wants to go see Ellie, Anna and Mr Mike. He loves all his friends, as do I. We just had him enrolled in school were Aubren will soon be his classmate and Holly and LeeAnn are his teachers. Oh, it is so hard to say good-bye.
At times it has been hard living so far from family, but it is only a short 5 hour drive to Grandma and PaPa. Pittsburgh well, it is a bit further. I know this transition will pose its challenges to say the least. We will work it out though Gammaw don't worry.
Basically, we need to processes this with our Community group and barring no red flags I think the plan is to move at the end of May after birthdays are over, some of the precious new babies have arrived Reengage is over and my sweet friend Alyssa is married. I feel really good about what needs to be done. LeeAnn helped me see how amazing the Lord has been to pave the way to make this transition as doable as possible. Back in October we sold our house and have been living as simple as possible for the past months, so packing up will be easy. We thought we were moving up there back in July, which would have posed many challenges with a newborn, but now Makaylee is sleeping through the night and then some. We know more about our current market, so housing wise we know what we want to do. And finally and I think most importantly, Cory and I have learned so much about each other and our marriage from when Pittsburgh was originally put on the table. I think we thought then we could handle living up there to some degree in isolation at least until we found friends, but looking back we would not have had the last 8 months to process with people that love us some areas of our marriage that growth was necessary. I think we are on a great path. I am alittle scared because it really has been amazing doing life with people, but I see the tremendous value in this type of relationship. I know I will be diligent to pray for the Lord to provide this up in Pittsburgh. Besides, I have recently become a face book freak, so I can always commune through cyberspace.

Bowling for Toddlers

This was an experience to say the least. The kiddos had a lot of fun, but mommies hmmm well we all left exhausted, I think. For me there were a few factors that lead to me concluding that was fun, but I don't want to do it again anytime soon. Anyone who has ever had a two year old knows taking turns is not one of their strong suits and bowling with 8 little ones required this skill to be refined quickly. Caleb could not understand why he had to wait. He was actually amazingly serious about the whole experience. I think he is going to be a competitive little dude, which really surprises me because I am not sure where he gets that from. :)



We used bumpers and a rolly thing and his ability to whip that ball up and send it sailing down the line was quite impressive.

He watched pretty intently as the ball headed down to take out the pins and then hurried back to get the next ball and hit the remaining pins down. The boys cheered for one another and that was fun. Another factor that posed a challenge was a 9 pound ball that at any moment had the ability to crush fingers.

Jack did get a gash to his face but that was totally unrelated to the actual bowling. The final contributor was the music. I actually really enjoyed the songs, but the volume was turned about 10 notches to loud so I constantly felt like I was shouting instructions that were either ignored or not heard.

Caleb spent much of the event in timeout, so sad.

Sweet little Makaylee played on the floor and was her normal content self. In my attempts to try and distract them from having to wait I tried to encourage lots of cheering and at one point I think I told Caleb to give Hampton 5 which resulted in their usually tackle session with Caleb getting dominated.


What a joy to have such a fun mommy group to share these experiences with.

To Community or Not Community that is the Question?

I wanted to give a shout out to my community group and just say thank you guys for being faithful to build into and love each other. Eight years ago when I started going to Watermark (our church) I was in a pretty lonely spot. I had just broke up with my boyfriend of 5 years after moving to Dallas to be with him and everything I was involved in except Watermark was tied to him. I didn't really have any friends that weren't in his circle, so needless to say I was scared and all alone in this big city. Watermark had just started doing these groups called community groups. I was plugged into a pretty mixed group, there were 4 married couples and one other single who was 55 and male. It probably wasn't a great fit but I was desperate to have people in my life, so I was very content. About 4 months into it the group decided to break into 2 groups. It was encouraged by the church because they wanted to make room for more people to be in community and needed the leaders. I was devastated I remember thinking it felt like my group was going through a divorce. It was a split for all good reasons, but I loved everyone and I didn't want to have to say good-bye. It all worked out and eventually I recovered, but it was somewhat of a challenge. Probably a year later I decided to lead my own group of young women in my life stage. So I went through some great training provided by Watermark and then was assigned 11, 20 somethings. It was so amazing getting to know these Godly women in my life stage. Well, probably 5 months later Watermark decided no more community groups, we would now have Shepherds. Once again the heart behind this change was good and wise but it was really hard because we were encouraged to find our community where we were serving. I don't think any of the 11 of use were serving in the same area. I didn't really know exactly what to do, should I disband our group or should we just continue to meet and not follow the counsel of our leaders. It is easy to get spread thin in our church with many amazing ministry so I really was conflicted, but I decided to keep the group together and not worry about the fact we were not serving in the same area. Over the next 4 years some of the women came and went but 4 of us stayed faithful to live in authentic community. However, in this life stage a lot of changes occurred. 2 of us were married and I had my first baby. It was wonderful meeting with these awesome women, but Cory and I didn't have community together. We got involved in a foundation group for newly married people which was fun and our leaders were truly a gift from the Lord, I really don't know exactly where we would be without their mentoring, but we really didn't feel connected to the rest of the group in a deep way. We enjoyed the people but lived 45 minutes from most of them and trying to do life together just seemed extremely exhausting. We learned from this experience that we really wanted to be in close proximity to whoever we decided to do community with, so we contacted the ministry leaders and they told us there weren't any church attenders in our area looking for community. We explored the option of leaving our current church thinking maybe we needed to plug into a body of believes in our area. We prayed a lot and felt sure Watermark was where we needed to be, but there was still the challenge of finding people that knew us as one, not as individuals who were now married. The community pastor called and told us that there was a community group not to far from us that he had talked to about us joining. We were told the guys were good with it, but they needed to talk with the ladies. We know a few of the couples in the group and thought they would be fun to get to know on a deeper level, but about a week later we were told they really didn't think adding us was a great fit for the group. My insecurities were definitely exposed, but I really tried to believe it wasn't a personal thing and they were trying to do what was wise for their group. I'm not going to lie it stung a little. I remember telling Cory maybe we don't need community together maybe the way we are doing things is just fine. I had since joined a mommy group were I was building great relationships and felt like I had enough deep relationships anyway. Cory however, was needing men to challenge him and he was feeling very discouraged. I remember praying often Lord if you desire for us to live in community why is this always so hard. We desire to live this way so why can't we find a group. I really believe now that all the challenges I faced up to this point were God exposing patterns in my life that were destructive, and He was all along the way putting me in situations where I was able to grow but not so fast that I wasn't able to endure the challenges. I remember talking to our mommy group about possibly forming a couples group, but not everyone went to our church, some already had groups and the husbands were all very different, so this didn't seem like a great solution. We were meeting with one couple and going through some parenting curriculum and that was such an encouraging time, but Cory still felt like as a husband he wasn't being sharpened and he really felt like that was the most important role he played. I knew he was right but I was enjoying our current situation and I was quiet honestly tired of growing. The Lord however was faithful as always to show me how much I really needed to get out of what was comfortable. I really don't remember exactly how things transpired, but we started having a lot of trouble and it seemed heightened when we were around this particular couple. I was really having a hard time respecting Cory which is a whole other story so I won't go into detail because this is already running on and on, but all that to say almost every time we hung out with our friends we would get into a knock down drag out when we got home. Somewhere in the mist of this we decided to add more couples to our meeting time, but none of the other couples had children so that made talking about parenting very awkward and then one of the couples who was pregnant miscarried and it felt like we were throwing salt in a wound. The group meeting time became something I completely dreaded going to for many reasons. We didn't necessarily have commonalities with the group, the relationship we had with the couple we really enjoyed was very awkward now and I really didn't understand that and we never really discussed anything deep unless Cory and I were willing and then it felt like we were always talking about our problems which seemed to compound everything. I was extremely discouraged and really thought how is this supposed to be something that is good. We really were trying and the harder we tried the worse things seemed to get. Finally I couldn't do it anymore and we were going to say no more group. We were meeting that night to call it quits and one of the couples that never seemed to come showed up and told us they were going to get divorced. I was so thankful we were there and we had an opportunity to encourage them not to give up. They pursued some great ministries to help their situation and seem to be doing much better now. We continued meeting but my heart was really battling wanting to be involved. Then another couple informed us there was infidelity in the past and they had to struggle through that. It really helped me put my trouble with Cory in perspective and we were able to encourage that couple as well. During all this Cory and I were exploring moving to Colorado, so he was meeting with other men who were also contemplating heading to Colorado. He was being sharpened by this group and challenged to quit complaining about his marriage and surrender it to the Lord. I can honestly say in those few months my husband grow beyond anything I could have ever hoped for, so I really saw the importance of Cory being in relationships that challenged him. He was co leading a Summit group (the men's bstudy at our church) with a guy he was wired very similarly to and so they tossed around the idea of doing community together. We prayed about this decision for a few months and then decided to tell our group we were moving on. It was a very scary thing for me, because I am a people pleaser and hate to hurt anyone, but I knew for our marriage this was necessary. Not everyone in the group totally understood, but we tried hard to communicate we really appreciate them and that it wasn't a personal thing but that it was important if we were going to do community that we were in a group that really challenged us as well. We had our first meeting with our new group a few weeks later and discussed in great detail our expectations of the group. We all seemed to be on the same page and I was excited, but not getting my hopes up. Probably not the best way to enter into a situation, but my biggest struggle is rejection and so I do a very unhealthy thing of guarding so I don't get hurt. God is in the process of refining me in this area, but I am going kicking and screaming. I don't want to be this way, but it is a patterned developed over 32 years of many lost relationships and so currently this is my biggest struggle. Okay, back to my story. Anyway, like I said I was excited but guarded. Over the past 9 months there have been times that I have been encouraged and there have been probably equal times I have said gosh, life is hard in community and why am I doing this again. I can say though the current way our group shares all their hurts has helped me understand that our relationship with the Lord is not about having it all together. I know that intellectually but sometimes being performance driven I fall back into being a good christian instead of a surrendered Christ follower. The way we have worked through conflict when we don't like things has created such a safe environment for me. I love that if I've done something to offend someone I can trust they will come to me and we can talk it out. And Tuesday night I was so encouraged to see our little ones playing together and really building a family together. So thank you all so much for who you are and how you are sharpening me even when you are not aware of the impact you have in my life.
love jamie

First Day of School/Cowboy Day

Caleb absolutely loves being a cowboy so it was really fun that his first day at school/mdo was Cowboy Day. He seemed extremely excited to be going to school and didn't seem even a little phased to be saying bye. The awesome Thomas the train table was very inviting to my little man. The day was cut short with winter weather approaching. School was cancelled around 12:30. I wasn't able to get much accomplished in 3 hours, but I think it was a perfect way to start my time away from Caleb. I really did miss him and was ready to pick him up. It always warms my heart to see his huge smiling face and so much excitement to see his mommy. I did however really enjoyed my time as well. Makaylee and I went to Starbucks and enjoyed some pumpkin bread and time in Psalms 19.
I asked Caleb what he did at his first day of school and with an excited voice he replied, "make COW BOYs boots mommy." Holly also informed me that during story time when talking about rodeo Caleb made sure everyone knew the BULLRIDERS are at the rodeo. He loves bullriding. It is very interesting to me how our little ones develop there interests. There is rarely a day that goes by that Caleb doesn't ask to see cows or bulls. Whenever we drive past an open field he is convinced there are horses to be seen. It kind of makes me sad we live in the city, but I guess of all cities Dallas is probably one of the rare few where occasionally there is a horse in an open field.

Psalm 18

I've been kind of struggling lately. There is no reason for it specifically, but I just wanted to remind myself now of how faithful our Lord is in case I walk through another time of ungratefulness. I've always been so performance driven to the point it robs me of enjoyment in almost everything I do. I am so thankful that God doesn't want me to live this way and He is using my sweet children to reveal to me how destructive this way of living can be. I have two beautiful babies that are both sweet as can be, but so often I struggle with finding pleasure in this stage of life and I am seeing so much of this is rooted in wanting to be the best at being a mom. So much of life during the toddler stage is helping these little ones learn self control and I ask myself how can I teach them self control when so often I don't have it. Other times I battle feelings of guilt not wanting to sing the same song for the 15th time or read the same story again. The thoughts that go through my head are I can't wait until he is a little older and he enjoys more of what I like and then I feel guilty for wishing his life away because of my selfishness. Gosh, being a mom is hard at times and I often don't feel like I am equipped. Two weeks ago I think I hit an all time low in this mommy thing. I had the stomach bug that was so out of control painful I wound up in the hospital. I was dehydrated so they gave me an IV which really helped but just when I thought I was on the road to recovery it all started again. It was exhausting. Cory's job is pretty demanding and so it was really not easy for him to take time away, which added to my feeling guilty, taking him away from work and then mad that I was feeling guilty about this and then guilt again because I was mad at this wonderful man that works so hard to provide. All that to say I was sick, sleep deprived and emotionally spent. I couldn't really understand why all this was happening and I definitely was having a hard time seeing this as God not withholding His good. I lost it completely by Friday and just felt like such a failure as a wife and mom and then God being so loving sent us a sweet friend to visit. He reminded me of God's unfailing love and after about a 4 hour conversation with David and Cory I realized God loves me so much that he would let me fail to teach me I am not depending on Him. I have always really looked up to and aspired to be a person who can handle a lot and manage chaos. I struggle with people who seem lazy or weak, but I am so thankful to say that for the first time in 32 years I can see self reliance truly for what it is in the eyes of God. Even today reading in Psalms 18 I am reminded God saves the humble but brings low those whose eyes are haughty. So thank you Lord for loving me enough to allow me to walk through hard times so I can have a little clearer understanding of what truly following you looks like. I pray you keep my eyes fixed on you and not allow me to return to my natural bent to want to bring glory to myself in what I can accomplish.

Caleb's Dinosaur Roar

Caleb watched Jurassic Park III over Christmas at Grandma and PaPa's house and he liked it so much Grandma bought it for him. Well, I believe he has watched it about 10 times now and never seemed even a little scared. Saturday though all that changed. I walked into his room to him sobbing and pointing to the bathroom the dinosaur is guna get me. I said there is no dinosaur and he pointed again dinosaur mommy guna get me. I wanted to laugh, but I also felt so bad that I allowed him to be exposed to something that makes him scared. I got him out of bed and took him screaming into the bathroom. We turned on the light and I assured him there was no dinosaur. It took a little convincing but he finally relaxed. He seems fine now and we just shut the door to the bathroom at night. Of course, since this event he has asked to watch dinosaurs around 20 times. I haven't caved yet, but I am sure I will. Maybe I should just throw it out so I am not tempted.

Makaylee's Army Crawl

She finally got motivated to get a move on.

Update on Sweet Makaylee

Our precious little one is still her sweet little easy baby self. Last week she started clapping her hands. It is always so fun to have them start interacting with you. She loves when you sing to her and now she has started doing the hand jesters to one of the songs. I will try to get it on video and post soon. She seems to be such an easy going kid. She has no desire to crawl she would much rather you hold and hug her. She also has started panting like a dog when she gets excited. It definitely is great for a laugh. Finally, her love for food is truly amazing. She will eat anything you give her and then literally screams until you give her more. It makes for an interesting time out at restaurants.

Caleb's starting school

Today we went and toured Caleb's new school which he starts next Tuesday. It is called Jubilee Junction. He is very excited to be such a big boy going to school. His teacher is a great friend of ours LeeAnn Liggitt and his two best girl friends Anna and Ellie's mommy teaches the older two year olds in the room next door. It is crazy to think he is old enough to want to go to school. It will be good for both of us to have a little time each week to miss each other. His first day will be Cowboy day and he just happens to be an amazingly cute BULLRider. Stay tune for pictures next week.

Family