Links For Layla

If you have a blog where you have written about Layla or you raise money for Layla’s Family, please link it here.

Thank You!

For Layla

Isaiah 49:14-16
But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.” “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me.”

The day that Cadence was born was the happiest day of my life. Almost everyday my husband and I wonder aloud why she is so “bad” and where she gets this behavior from. When my days with her get so overwhelming that I feel like I’ve reached my limit, my husband grabs my hand and reminds me of Layla Grace and what I’ve told him about her.

Then came the following Tweet from Layla’s family:

I cannot explain the pain that ripped through my body. I know that I don’t know this family, but it is hard as a mother not to feel their pain, to imagine what they are going through and to realize that this could be my child.

I find comfort knowing that Layla is no longer living in pain. It was tearing me apart watching her Mom and Dad tweet about her not eating, not pooping, not waking up and then last night they mentioned Layla’s feet were getting cold.

All we can do is continue to pray for their family, especially their other two daughters: Jenna who is 9 and Claire who is 3. May they find strength in one another, in their family and friends and the extended family and friends they met online who all supported and loved Layla. May they continue to find peace in their faith and know that Layla is with the Lord now.

We can also help to continue to raise awareness of Neuroblastoma. Click here to see how.
If you can, you can donate to Layla’s family by visiting their site and clicking on the Paypal “Donate” button. (All donations go towards Layla’s medical expenses).
Donations to Layla’s medical expenses can also be made at any Wells Fargo bank. Ask a manager to make a deposit to the Layla Grace Marsh donation account.

How to connect with the Marsh family:

- Follow Mom & Dad on Twitter
- Join their Facebook fan page
- Visit Layla’s website

In her short life, Layla was able to touch so many. It’s because of you that I am raising money to help fund pediatric cancer research. It is because of you that I fight for a cure. It is because of you that I now know what my purpose on this Earth is.

God Bless you Layla. Dance with the angels sweetie, dance…

2 Corninthians 4:7-12, 16-18

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Tags: blessings, donate, Layla Grace, love, Sick Baby, tragedy

Cooking With Momma: Week of 3/7

This week’s dinner:

A1 Beef Stew/Rice
Baked Mac & Cheese/Chicken
Jerk Chicken/Rice & Peas
Lasagna
Chicken Sandwich/French Fries

Tags: menu

Canon EOS Digital Rebel T1i. Major #fail.

I know that the title is long, but I’d love for this to show up in Google searches.

I. Love. Photography.

I consider myself an amateur photographer.

I have two good friends that are photographers- and awesome at it! My IRL (in real life) friend Melissa and my online Mommy friend Kim. (If you live in Tampa Bay, FL or Memphis, TN and need a photographer one of these women is your girl!)

Sorry, I have to give my girls a plug in.

Anyway, my loving, awesome, encouraging, caring husband knew that I was considering starting (very slowly) a photography business. Nothing big, in-home at first. Point being, he went ALL OUT. Hear me again- all out. And bought me this disturbingly expensive and absolutely amazing dream camera.

In my opinion, this is a beginning photographer’s dream. And it takes beauuuuuuutiful pictures (that’s right, beautiful, with 7 u’s).

Right out of the box, I saw Error 01 telling me that there is a communication problem between the camera and the lens. RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX!!! (Apparently I’m not the only person this has happened to, see here). So I remove the lens and replace it and it begins to work again just fine.

But as someone who thoroughly enjoys photography, having an error message which deters you from taking pictures is annoying because you can miss “the shot.” That awesome shot that you only have a few seconds to take… like when we took our daughter to the beach a few weeks ago. I missed many-a awesome shots. Like baby girl holding her Daddy’s hand as they walked down to the water- AWESOME SHOT… but oh no, Error 01.

I called Canon “customer support” and was told to “clean my lens contacts with an eraser.”

That’s it. No other help offered. She sounded like I was bothering her. Aaand ya.

Almost $1,000 on a camera for that. So, it was an awesome gesture by my amazing husband, but after a long discussion I decided that we should return the camera. Since Canon doesn’t give a shit, why should I. My Kodak from 2006 has a few issues after extensive wear, tear and use, but it’s still kickin’.

The problem today is that everything is about money. What the hell happened to customer service? I love that after spending an absurd amount of money on a product Canon could give a shit about their customers. And also, in this Yahoo! question from one year ago, one woman said “it happens often.” Should a fuckin camera that costs an arm & a leg be giving Error messages on a regular basis?

I am disappointed in Canon’s customer service for not giving a crap and just wanted to put that out there.

This rant is over. Carry on.

Tags: #fail, photography, rant, things I don't understand

That’s How We Roll

So Hubby and I are at Tar-ghetto (as he so affectionately calls it) and we are picking up some finger paint & paper for the little one. We see an awesome bean bag chair and decided to buy that also because she is ALWAYS sitting on the dog’s bed and we want to see if she gets her own round, soft thing to sit on if she’ll stay OFF of the smelly dog bed.

Nuff said.

So, we get to check out and the cashier says “$15.57″ just as I am about to swipe my card, pay and head for the door, Hubby says:

“How much is it?” (I repeat the price to him)

“How?” (“I don’t know” I say)

“All that stuff?…” (I say nothing and I swipe my card)

The cashier hands us the receipt and we head for the door. I take a look at the receipt and notice it only has three items on it: fingerpaint, paper and a tee shirt. I look at Hubby and say- “She didn’t charge us for the beanbag… but I saw her scan it… what do I do?”

Let’s pause for a minute

In all honesty, if this was say… five years ago, I may have kept walking and said “oh well, her bad”

BUT

It’s 2010 and I’m a Mom with a conscious and so we walk back to the register, wait our turn in line and kindly tell the teeny-bopper that she didn’t charge us for the beanbag. She then shouts to the manager “My scanner hasn’t been working properly all. day.” to which the manager shouts back “move to register four!!” She thanked us over and over again for coming back and I basically said: “I don’t want to be a thief or anything. Plus if I took this beanbag Karma would totally bite me in the ass and something bad will happen to me down the line and it’ll be like see- remember that time you stole that beanbag?” (Cause yeah… that’s the kind of luck this family has)

I look at Hubby as we walk out of Target and say- “See honey? We are good people.” (To which he says “yup”) And I just say “that’s how this family rolls…”

Hopefully the Big Man Upstairs was saying “well done good & faithful servant…”

What would you have done?

“His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

~ Matthew 25:21

Tags: excursions, family, honesty, hubby humor, karma, wifey humor

Not-So Wordless Wednesday on Thursday

Tupperware, like forks, seems to disappear in this house.

You think I need to invest in some more Tupperware? LOL

Tags: food/feeding, wifey humor, Wordless Wednesday

Milk, Eggs, Bread… Puppy

What? That’s not your average grocery list?

We took a family trip to Wal-Mart to buy groceries, like we usually do on Sundays.

Right outside of Wal-Mart are two guys, each holding one of these:

Image taken from OLX.com

If you don’t know much about dog breeds, this, friends is a “blue nosed Pitbull” aka one of the cutest dogs EVER. Besides my bad ass dog, of course.

I asked the guy how much and without even blinking he said $600.

HA! Are you smoking crack bald guy standing outside of Wal-Mart trying to sell pitbulls which I’m sure is illegal but maybe it’s not in this crazy ass state of California. (yup, that’s one sentence)

I pet the dogs and whispered sweet nothings in their ears, then proceeded into Wal-Mart to buy my groceries… Six Hundred Dollars. Yeah right! We only paid $350 for our defective ass dog. Probably cause he was the only one left from the litter. Probably because as a pup he had every medical problem a puppy could have…. and he’s a little slow on the uptake. Maybe that’s why he was on sale.

Image taken from Brooklyn Blue Pitbulls

Look at that face, though. Don’t you just wanna kiss and cuddle it? So cute. So cute. I know that pitbulls have a reputation that precedes them, but like Cesar Milan says, it’s not the dog with the issue, it’s the owner. Kingston belongs to the same family as pitbulls and bulldogs are just sweetie pies.

I know I don’t want another dog. Maybe not until the one we have dies, not that I’m wishing him dead or anything. But they were just so cute!!!

Don’t those idiots know that people shop at Wal-Mart for the cheap prices? Who do they think is walking around with $600 cash in their wallet? I don’t even have 600 pennies in my wallet. Shit, I don’t think I have one penny. It’s all debit. I never have cash.

Oh but those little guys were so cute. I may be adding that to my list of possible dogs to own in the future along with rottweiler and doberman.

Tags: cali style, doggy talk, groceries

Street Pharmacist

What you want? Cause I got it…

Come on, we all know what a street pharmacist is. That’s the politically correct name for the local hustler, dope man, drug dealer- whatever you wanna call him.

That would be me… orrrrr at least that’s what I feel like.

I took my butt to the clinic two days ago and left with an arsenal of drugs. That only adds to the pot that I have growing at home. Apparently after being dormant for what? 7 years? My supposedly exercise-induced asthma wants to make a reappearance and as regular asthma- not exercise induced. I guess the Cali air is really getting to my lungs. We ain’t in Florida anymore Dorothy…

So now I have:

Paxil- for my crazies
Promethazine- for my upset tummies
Prilosec- for the daily heartburn
Albuterol- for the asthma

I’m on a Z-pack of antibiotics, just in case what I went into the clinic with was walking pneumonia, which I had one year ago and some hard core presecription cough medicine to help me sleep at night without waking up and coughing up a lung.

Yup. Whatever you need, I probably got it…

Image taken from Idea Champions

Tags: medication, random musings, sick parents

Technorati Claim Token- Please Ignore

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Hello Moto

That’s what my new phone says when I turn it on.

Well, it’s new to me.

I was actually told by a Middle Eastern man at the cell phone accessory kiosk in the mall that he used to carry cases for my cell phone, but “that phone is old” and “they don’t make cases for those anymore.”

Well you know what? Who ASKED YOU?!

I have retired my iPhone. For personal reasons, we are going separate ways.

My iPhone and I have a love/hate relationship… Mostly love, though. It did so many wonderful things for me, but honestly, I was probably cheating on my husband with it:

Laughing at tweets that I would get from my Twitter friends, playing words with friends late at night before bed, incessantly checking my email on long car rides, playing Tic Tac Touch or writing a new blog post on the Wordpress app.

I definitely loved my iPhone, from day one. But then there were the times when I would have a dropped call even though I had full bars. Or when I’d walk into Old Navy at the mall and lose all reception. Or when I drove to Nebraska with the family and my “best 3G coverage” dropped in and out the entire way. That was fun…/(end sarcasm)

Alas, everything in this world comes at a cost. AT&T charges $30 per month for the iPhone data plan. With our government discount, it’s a little bit less, the the difference is not significant. After chatting with their customer service reps, we found out we were paying almost $30 in taxes! Thirty. DOLLARS. I’m sorry, what is that? I don’t get it.

I got rid of my text messaging months ago thinking it would help, but nope. And so, I’ve decided to make the “ultimate sacrifice” (please, just- allow me to exaggerate the situation for a bit)  and get rid of my iPhone. This will save us an extra penny on our bill per month and hopefully it will drop the bill significantly.

And as parents, making sacrifices is something we do for our families, right? I watched both of my parents make sacrifices for us all of the time. And if I really think about it, the iPhone is a want, not a need. So… **sigh** I can live without it. Life goes on, right? And by the time I’m in a position to go all smart-phone-ish again, there will be a phone even better than the iPhone for me to get.

At least that’s the way I look at it.

We also cut back our minutes to 700 daytime minutes per month from 2100, so… if you didn’t get the memo- please don’t call me before 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time unless you have AT&T. You may call me on weekends freely, otherwise, please get in touch with me to acquire our home phone number. Yes, we got a home phone. And while you may think that it is expensive, I will tell you, in another post about the Jack with aaaaaall of the Magic.

So, I bid you adieu iPhone. It was great while it lasted. We had our good times and our bad times, but boy, were you fun.

I’ll be packing you up ever-so gently along with your 3 colorful protective cases and shipping you off to your new owner in North Carolina. I know her personally and well, she’s a great person, so I know she’ll take care of you.

Goodbye iPhone.

Hello Moto.

Image taken from Caytech.net

Tags: reflection, saving money, selfless acts, things I don't understand