Merry Christmas

so behind.

Keith and I feel like we have been running around every day of the week. I have at least a bagillion photos to post.

A few weeks ago we had our cousins Kyle and Meagan in town. We went an hung with them in May and they were able to come down and spend an extended weekend with us.

We love them and end up always just talking into the night.

We hit up athens on Friday to show them the campus and enjoy the fall air. We hung out on Saturday, went antiquing and enjoyed the Porterdale Yellow River Jam. We rocked out to an awesome bluegrass band called “ The Apostles of Blue Grass”. Then Sunday we went to church and then had a fun-filled night of game playing at the Sears’ house. Our weekend went way too quick and it was so sad to see them go.

I am famous…well kind of!

My cousins came into town last weekend to stay with keith and i.We had such a good time and lots more pictures and stories will come from that.  My cousin, Meagan is a Blogger. She helps all of us coupon to the fullest, as well as, open up about her life. She wrote an awesome post about a salad i made for them when they come over. I have to give props to Kosova and the best restaurant there California, as that is where i took this recipe. They do it a lot better than I can, but it is a little reminder of my favorite land when i am here in Georgia.

Check out the post: Quick and Easy Salad

Go Dawgs

Last minute on the day before UGA’s home opener my dad got some tickets from Pepsi. Keith, myself, Carson and his girlfriend Aubrey went together. Sadly when we got the CVS to pick up our tickets there were 6 tickets not 4 as we thought. Madison was not happy at all when she found this out. We ended up selling them for pretty cheap and had our parking paid for!

I miss going to all the games. One great perk of being a student!

4:8 challenge

Philippians 4:8 (Contemporary English Version)
8Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly, and proper. Don't ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.

I have been doing a challenge called the “4:8” challenge with my mom an a few others. Feel free to read more about it on my mom’s blog :    http://thehillsideoflife.blogspot.com/

It is crazy how when you start looking at your “thought life” you realize how negative you are really thinking and how you are not thinking on what is pure and holy is lovely.

Today was day 5. I had a hard day looking and focusing on things that are true and pure, right and holy, friendly and proper. It is crazy how little situations get you down everyday and cause such bitterness in your life. I have a lot more to learn on this subject.

mercy.

“I love the LORD, for he heard my voice; he heard my cry for mercy. Because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live.”- Psalm 116:1-2

Since we don’t have kids…

We blog about our cats!

 

Little Aslan is doing great! He is crazy and always running around like a mad kitty. He is fisty and like the pounce on our feet at night. He loves to play fight with Sadie and cuddle up on your chest. Since he was a lot youger when we adopted him from the Animal Shelter it has been crazy to see him grow so quickly. He is a little ball of fun. We love him, even though we want to kill him sometimes!

  

Sadie is doing great too. When Aslan 1st arrived, we were really worried this second cat thing was not going to work out. Sadie was an “ only child” and she had only child syndrome. she would just hiss and growl at little Aslan, but he just wanted to bite her tail!  Now they are BFF’s and Keith sends me pictures all the time of them cuddling with each other. They still love to fight, but they end up licking each other on the head after biting. haha!

Where have we been?

Guys… It has been too long!

Keith and I have been going going going over the past 3 weeks. We spent 2 weeks straight every night at church preparing for VBS and actually having the VBS.

I was thinking if we had 25-30 kids that would be a great turn out for our small church. Our first night we had 39 kids which blew my mind. The next night we had 59 kids then we had 70 kids by the end of the week. The lord is good and showed how awesome He is to everyone there. It was so awesome to see how God pulled it all together. There is no way this could have happened without him. Total the church spent $33.00 on VBS. Everything else was donated or creative skills were used to make everything super cheap and awesome! The kids raised $1300.00 for our missionary.

PureFUN! Donated the juice and food for snacks. A lady at our church, Maria, wrote the skits for each night… which were AWESOME! I used some songs from my past for all the music. i created the trading cards and v-buck money and Jerry let me print it out super cheap at work. I can’t believe $33.00 total was spent. It just shows what can happen when you listen to God’s calling in a situation and allow him to work in every area.

 

Besides that we’ve had some fun times with friends, saw inception with Leo DiCaprio, and a few other movies in home. Had a few girls from the youth group over. worked… slept… ate… you know the normal. I hope to update a lot more over the next week. Since we kind of have a little more time on our hands :-)

This weekend we have Mark Rice’s wedding and i can’t wait! :-)

Hero UP

This year our church is having our first ever VBS.  It is called “Hero Up-unleashing God’s power in your life.” We have a fun Super Hero theme, so that rocks! We are doing everything ourselves, so it has been lots of ideas flowing around and lots of work but it will be awesome to see how God uses the time.

We are making “trading cards” for the characters in the shows. Keith is playing the “smart” kid. Here is the trading card i made for Keith’s character:

4th

We had a great 4th. We had a wonderful service at church to start out the day and then Keith’s mom and Dennis came over for all the festivities Porterdale had to offer! We walked around the booths and had some yummy Pulled pork sandwiches. We just relaxed and enjoyed the beautiful weather. We rocked our USA Sunglasses and watched a great fireworks show. Porterdale is great! hehe!

    

a sneak preview of our newest family member

Aslan

Fathers Day

 

For one of my classes at school I was asked to write my Personal Testimony. So in Honor of Father’s Day I wanted to share it with all of you. Enjoy:

         

   I believe that one of the most important things in someone’s life is their personal testimony. Some people may say “well, I don’t think my testimony is very good and nobody can learn anything from it”, but I disagree completely. Everyone has a testimony, whether it be going through a hard life when we were younger or having a good life until something bad happened. The key part of the entire thing is how you came from those hard times and put God in your cockpit and how that changed your life for the better. A lot of us may think that nothing bad has happened to them, so it is hard to say things changed for the better. In my case though, God used something bad in my life to strengthen and mold me into who I am today.

My story starts when I was younger. I was born and raised in a Christian family with Christian values that all of us strive for and need on a daily basis. There were hard times growing up like with any other family, but the major difference was that we got through them because we kept God in the forefront and he got us through it.

I grew up in the church and that meant you could find me helping out with the puppet ministry, helping with VBS, playing in any of the sports the church had to offer, and pretty much anything else that a kid could do at the church. I loved God and He loved me, so I was on fire for him at a young age. Looking back on those days today it was in Gods plan for me to continue working with children, then fulfilling my calling with leading the youth as Youth Pastor. Seeing those days now just shows how he was shaping me to be the person I am today and the person I will continue to become. Some may think that this is where my story ends. I am working full time in the church with the youth, married and still on fire for God. But there is much more to my story than just a young child on fire for God. I was faced with one life event that had the potential to bring me in a complete one-eighty and turn me away for God for good.

When we are faced with our worst fears, it is God’s strength that gets us through those long days, not our own. Fear is the root of evil; evil can take and mold it into something that may not have ever been before. I try to tell this truth in some way to my youth every time I see them. I feel the calling God has on me to lead youth is for a many reasons, but one of the prime reasons is to relate to them in these teenage years where everything can change in a split second. I am a good candidate for this because that is exactly what happened to me. On February 26^th, 2001, I was 14 years old, it was a normal weekday for my freshman year of High school. I had a test in biology that I had studied all week for, my musical theatre class was practicing for the upcoming show, and my lunch was packed to the top with all good eats, it was a good day. Classes started at 7:30 a.m. and like any normal day my sister and I were running late. We kissed our parents as we left with our dad saying “You guys are going to be late, Again” in that loving, but stern tone. Normally my dad would have already been gone for work, but he didn’t have to get there as early to spend the morning with my mom, something you can do when you are one of the owners of the company. We arrived at school with minutes until the bell rang, as we were walking the stairs from the parking lot up to the building I began to think about things, my family, parents, and the biology test that I had first period. The one thing I focused on the most was my parents and how much they love us and shown us how we should be. I shrugged it off just as a thought I always had before I had to go to that long day of school.

Fast forward to third period I had gym glass. The speaker came on for me to come to the principals’ office. I was confused what it may have been about, of course all my classmates’ oooed and said that I was in trouble. After I changed back into my clothes and walked to the front office I wondered what it was all about. As I got closer I saw my sister sitting there waiting to go in. What did we do? Were we getting into trouble for being late and they were taking away her parking pass. That would be the end of the world and we would have to ride the bus we both said. We asked the secretary why we were there and she said she could not say. We waited and waited. Finally we see my aunt, uncle, a family friend and our mom coming up. We were puzzled. Our lives in the next few minuets would be forever changed. My uncle was the first to speak. He started to tell us that something had happened. Everything raced through my mind, what could it be? He then said that my dad had been in a fatal crash and that he had gone on to see God. To write those words today takes me back to that day and how nothing like that could have ever been foreseen in my fourteen year old mind.

As the days, weeks, months passed it became clearer that he was not coming home. I could say that this pushed me further to become the person I am today. That is not the case. In the months that passed I walked away from the friends I had had before the accident, walking away from helping the ministries at the church thinking by doing that I could change things and let my dad come back. As this happened I slipped further and further into the crowds, people and things my parents had told me about. I turned into a person that was more about himself and keeping himself “safe”. As I did this I began doing things i shouldn’t be doing and just not thinking about the choices I was making. I wondered why God had done this to me at this time in my life, when I was growing into the man I was made to be. God was still in my mind and beside me, but listening to him was the furthest thing from my mind. This went on through my sophomore and junior year of high school. On the inside I was struggling with all of these things and doing all of these things on the weekend, but during the week I was a normal kid getting good grades, doing sports and just appearing to be a funny happy student. I even was picked to be a foreign exchange student for a few semesters in Australia and New Zealand. My life was going as planned on the outside but on the inside it was total turmoil.

As junior year passed and summer was starting up I had this feeling that I was trying to be two different people and leading two totally different lives. I came home one day and just sat down on my bed and started crying asking God what I should do. I asked him for his strength and prayed to forgive everything I had done since the loss of my dad. I asked him to show me what I needed to do to become the child of God he made me to be. I asked why this had happened to me. As this happened I was filled with peace about everything. I knew what I had to do. I was to get rid of those friends that I had been getting into so much trouble with, I had to stop trying to be someone I was not, and I was told that it was my father’s time to go to be with God. That summer before senior year was hard. I had the temptation of those friends, the situations and everything that comes with evil trying to take your joy away. That senior year was a new start. I rekindled the friends I had let go so long ago. I got back into helping at the church. My family life was about the time I had with them and not taking it for granted.

My life was smooth, easy living. Then the roller coaster went down the track and life took over. I could have been sour and let that totally take over the choices for the rest of my life. Although I didn’t listen to God at the lowest part of my life, He still allowed me to go to him, broken, and put my life back together. That day on my bed, that is what I did. I went to him when I was at the lowest of the low and He has helped me to fulfill my calling and become the real person I was meant to be.

I do not think you have to have such a disastrous thing happen to see this in your life, but it does show God’s love is there for us even when we are not there for Him. I try and stress this every time I talk with my youth. Whether they are going through things at school, home, or just daily life we must keep God in the forefront and keep Him with us. This will help all of us out whether we have something big going on or something so small we think we can do it ourselves, keeping him with us in our hearts makes things run so much smoother.

From the Heart of Keith Davis

the bff’s meet once again

Projects of a Married Couple.

Keith and I are always doing weekend projects. The past few weeks Keith has been out of school, so he was on his Honey-Do-List. We had a few things that we wanted to get done around the house and at church. Our two main projects were 1. Tagging the Gravity Youth room at church and 2. creating “wall art” for the kitchen.

Keith and I spent all day last Saturday stenciling, outlining and spoungeing the walls to give the Gravity room a new look.

 

At the house we’ve been trying to find something to put on our HUGE wall in the kitchen. Keith and I have juggled around but nothing seemed to fit or work for us. (Keith says that i said NO to all the ideas….)

We went to Art on the River a few weeks ago and got our Inspiration for our wall. Once Keith has an idea, he goes for it gung-ho. He was at Home depot the next day trying to get it figured out.

Here are some pictures of our new wall

It didn’t stay blank for long…

i love the huge spoon and fork!  And yes.. that is a Bicycle Pedal. Ha!.. and “Sorry, We’re Open!”

Wife & the Wildlife

On  daily basis, Kaylee and I always look out the window to enjoy the river. We see if it is up or down for the day. Lately we have been noticing that spring is in the air. Animals moving, people swimming ( some sun bathing) and flowers blooming. recently, we had noticed two loving geese that would be by daily. They were always swimming, walking, drinking, and squawking together!

 

A few weeks ago we began to notice that they were not showing up anymore and we were getting sad, since Kaylee and I always call them “ our friends”. A few days later one started coming around alone and we wondered what had happened to our other “Friend”. A few days ago Kaylee had the window open and heard some squawking and went to the window. To her joy she noticed both geese were back and this time with a little baby goose! So i guess now we have a loving happy goose family at the lofts!

As well as these animals we also see a lot of “wildlife” on the river.

One sunday afternoon after church, one of my students from the youth group called and told us to look out the window. It was like a seen from Rescue 911, &  Willaim Shatner, was the host.

 

“A man in his late 20’s was trapped in the middle of the river on a huge bolder. his boat was unfortunatly at the shore. The crowds began to form on the bridge and every type of emergency vehicle sat upon the shore. How would he survive with the rushing water beating his face and body? How would the rescue workers get to him in time. Would he survive? BUM BUM BUM”

With our binoculars and extra zoomed camera  in hand we watched as the scene unfolded.

The time that it took to rescue him was about 45 min to an hour. This was way better than cable.  They threw the buoy out to him he grabbed on with all his might and they pulled him to shore. Safe & Sound.

This is just a normal day in the life of the Davis’.

We’ll keep you informed about all future WILDLIFE here at the lofts!

-Keith

publix savings.

I haven’t posted on Publix in a while, but i had a pretty good week last week, so i thought i’d post!

1 Romaine Lettuce

1.51lb of bananas

1 Yoplait Yogurt

2 Cascadian Farms Fruit

1 Cascadian Farms hashbrowns

18 ct egg

1 Cantaloupe

2 cucumbers

1-Land o Lakes Turkey

1-Baby Carrots

2 Edward Singles Dessert

2 Betty Crocker Cookie Mix

2 Knorr Noodle Sides

2 Kashi Heart Cereals

1 Publix bag

1 Rotini Pasta

3 Cascadian Farms (cereal, cereal bar & granola)

1 Pepperidge Farms Deli Flats

1-McCormick’s’ Herb and Garlic

3- Pepsi 2 liters

2- Scrubbing Bubbles shower things

2- Scrubbing Bubbles Refills

2- Campbell’s Soups

2- Mahatma long grain rice

Total Before Sales and Coupons: 109.02

Coupons & store savings: $78.77

Total Paid: 30.25

72% savings!

(Two Disclaimers, I lost two dollars of savings on the scrubbing bubbles when my publix said they now no longer take CVS coupons. Also, I lost another 2 dollars because for 4 weeks my Publix did not have the Scrubbing Bubbles in stock and 2 days after the Publix coupons I had expired they got them in… so lost a total of $4.00 in savings on those, but still saved about $20.00 on the deal so still got them!!!)

Proud of my little brother and sister

Carson and Madison have been doing Shot-put and Discus this year in track and field

Carson picked it up last year since he had to stay after school for maddie’s track and he just thought he’d try it out.

Last week Madison did her personal best in Discus 91.5 feet placing her 8th of 18 in the region competition. This is her FIRST YEAR!!!!  As a Sophomore she will letter on varsity! Gooo maddie!

Carson just beast’ed it up at his regional meet yesterday. Not only did he have personal best records in both events at his meet, he made two new school records and placed first in both his events. Moving him along to the state competition. He had an article about him in the Gwinnett Daily Post… go check it out!

http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/sports/headlines/92565444.html

Easter Time

This was Keith and I’s first married Easter. I think we have now hit every holiday as a married couple! We decided… kind of last min. That we wanted to dye eggs. We got a weird tie-dye kit for the eggs and got to work.

 

After our service at Journey Church, we hurried to Suwanee for Easter Lunch. Keith and I got our first easter picture taken as the Davis family.

Aunt DD7 was jealous and had to get in with us. She always does an awesome job getting everything set up and ready for our lunch. We love her!

  Below are a few more fun pictures from the day.