See tabs above for two new pages on our current adoption journey.

Check this out when you have a sec:

is Becca from Stephenson Family! She wins a Nicki Olinde Photography custom photo card design and 25 cards! Congrats.  The winner was chosen using a random number generator.

I wish I had a had a recorder and a way to post a sound recording!! It’s moments like these that make me cherish this season of my life. I know how quickly it will slip away and our house will be quiet again. Since I can’t let you hear it, let me describe the sweet sounds that were wafting from Griffy’s bathroom earlier. Picture this…the water is running for his bath and he is already in there playing with various toys that aren’t supposed be bath toys… like hot wheels and legos, but, what the hey. Above the running water, his little voice is belting out “The Face of Love,” by Sanctus Real. He starts out singing it just like he hears it on K-Love… “The face of love, the face of love, you look more like love every day.” My heart smiles…he doesn’t know I’m listening. I whisper a prayer of thanks that he loves to sing praises, always has. And this boy, when he sings, he SINGS, lemme tell ya. Next thing I know, he is mixin’ it up, departing from the real song, he goes into this little rap flow…. “the face, i say the f-f-f-face of love, that is the face I love, yeah.” It’s all I can do to muffle my giggles as he suddenly switches to some Toby Mac, “I’m a brand new man in a foreign land, I’m a man who’s burning for you. The mistakes I made have been chased away to the bottom of ocean blue.” Life is beautiful! I love this path we’re on.

In addition to posting sneak previews from new sessions, I’m also going to post a few favorites from a past session every Friday. Gotta love a beautiful bride! Enjoy!

After exchanging phone numbers with the mom, I honestly did not expect her to call me. I was going to call her today and check on the baby, but my phone rang at 2:57 am this morning. It was her. They were just leaving the ER. Praise God, the baby just has a concussion. Please keep praying for this family. The mom shared some personal things with me about their life, and she is in a really tough season right now. I am praying that God will continue to give me opportunities to love on her and maybe bring her to New Beginnings.

The most disturbing thing just happened during one of Griffy and my late P-villeWalMart runs.  We were in the fabric section looking for stuff for my classroom, when we came upon a young mom with 3 kids…She was yelling at them and just seemed really agitated.  After we finished shopping, we ended up right behind the same family in the self-checkout line.  While the mom was scanning her stuff, the little boy, I would guess to be about a year old, kept standing up and turning around in the little seat part of the basket.  It was making me so nervous.  As Griff started to unload our basket, I turned to see the baby boy sitting up on the bar of the basket, like where you put your hands to push it… before I could move or say a word, the mom, who was standing at the foot of the basket, yanked the end of it and the baby went flying backwards and fell all the way to the floor, landing on his back/head.  The back of his head hit the floor so hard, y’all.  Griff and I were horrified…You know how it is when you see something like that…it’s like it’s in slow motion.  We rushed over to see about him, but the mom yanked him up and started yelling at the older brother for not watching him.  My heart was aching for all of the children.  I tried to calm her down and soothe the baby, and we helped her load her groceries so that she could take him to the ER to get checked out.  He had a huge knot on the back of his little head and there was some bleeding around his top teeth.  The older brother was sobbing because he thought it was his fault.  We exchanged phone numbers and promised to pray.  I am hoping to be able to touch base with them to check on little Brennan tomorrow.  In the meantime, please pray for him and just for this family in general.

We’ve been doin’ battle with the Sword at our house today! Griff has had quite an issue with his reactions EVERY time i ask him to do something. These responses include, but are not limited to, moaning, whining, arguing, negotiating, and lots of facial contortions that look something like this:

Chad and I have tried various discipline methods to break him of this. None of them has been successful. He has remained consistently stubborn and willful in this area. Today, we started the day with a talk about respect and submission, and I told him that every time he argued or complained today, he would have to write Phil. 2:14 five times.

“Do everything without arguing or complaining” Phil. 2:14

I’ll spare you all the gory details, but about midday, he accumulated 15 times of copying the verse.  So, seated at the table, he went to work with his pen to the paper.  After finishing about half of his work, the crocodile tears welled up, and he came and squeezed my neck and said, “Mom, I really want to stop arguing and complaining.” As I held him tight and reassured him, I talked to him about how God sees his heart and would give him the self-control he needed to do it! It was a sweet revelation for me to see God’s living Word penetrate his heart when nothing else had been able to get through to him.   I’ve always had the following scripture in the inside cover of my Bible, but today was a fresh confirmation of its Truth and power!

“For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” Hebrews 4:11-13

Now, don’t get me wrong, he still struggled through the rest of his scripture copying. He claimed to be suffering from “claustrophobia” from having to sit at the table so long!?! Then of course he was hungry and thirsty a bajillion times before he got done. But guess what…..when he finally did get up from that table, it was with a humbled and submissive spirit and a softened heart. God is cool!

 ~nicki o.

Attention!! Ok, this is the coolest… there is a giant give-away circus going on in the blog world over here. So here’s my contribution: 25 custom designed photo Christmas cards. The winner will email me the photo you’d like to use on your card and I will design a card (with your input, of course), have them printed, and mail them to you!! If you’d rather, you can do any type of greeting card instead of Christmas…baby announcements, party invites, Thanksgiving cards, etc. How do you win? Just leave me a comment this week, and I’ll draw a winner at random on Friday, July 27. If you’d like to see a few samples, you can poke around over at my photography site.

Now that we have a blog, I’m excited to be able to share “sneak-peek” previews with clients before their actual proofs are ready! So, Guerin’s, you are the debut family, and here are a few of your precious girls.

I loved working with this sweet family. Little Summer is having her first birthday party next weekend, and Ali is a very “growny” 2 1/2 . Aren’t they dolls?!

And these are the faces that always tell me when “it’s a wrap!”

Mom and her sister whom we call, “Aunt Sister:”

my one and only sista Tracy:

I love “girl time!”   The girls came downtown with me for my photo session of a family this afternoon at the Old State Capitol.  After that, we went to Circa to rummage and treasure hunt.  I had a few shots left on my memory card, so I decided to have an impromptu shoot of the sisters while we were there.   Aren’t they “brootiful,” as my girl Medea would say?!! Later, we did lots more fun girly stuff…I cut my sister’s bangs, we looked at these monogrammed flip-flops online, and decided that Aunt Sister should color her hair.  It was a great day!

On a serious note, I just want to thank God and praise Him that we are all redeemed.  We all came to faith in Christ as adults….Tracy & I in our 20’s and Mom & Aunt Sister in their 50’s!!  Our time together has always been fun, but it is even sweeter now that we are really SISTERS IN HIM!!

…it seems that we defied the odds:

• Nearly half (43%) of all Americans who accept Jesus Christ as their savior do so before reaching the age of 13 (2004)
• Two out of three born again Christians (64%) accept Jesus Christ as their savior before their 18th birthday. (2004)
• One out of eight born again people (13%) made their profession of faith while 18 to 21 years old. (2004)

We love our church for so many reasons, but today, my heart is bursting at the seams over all of my HPC brothers and sisters who are all over the world right now being the hands, feet, and heart of Jesus!  Our church’s stated purpose is to be a “healing place for a hurting world.”   What I love is that if you are a local….a broken family, a hurting addict, a lonely widow, you can walk through the physical doors at 19202 Highland Road or any of our other campuses and find a safe place to heal, a place to be loved and accepted and touched by Jesus. But, now I can see why God didn’t just give Pastor Dino the motto: “a healing place for a hurting city, or state, or even nation!” Praise God that he gives us eyes to see the hurt beyond our walls and our borders.  Blessed to be a blessing!  Check out the updates coming from our teams in Cambodia and Los Angeles at Dan Ohlerking’s blog.

After 7 years out of the classroom and homeschooling my one, I am overwhelmed with excitement and enthusiasm about the approaching school year. What does God have in store?! How will he use me in these 40 4th graders’ lives? How will He use them in mine? Will I make an eternal difference? That is my greatest hope. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in stuff that doesn’t really matter like what color bulletin board paper I’m going to put up or how I’ll organize my gradebook. Lord, help me to focus my vision on what You care about….on those souls that you are allowing me the privilege of shepherding for a few hours each day. Let me see them as you see them.

I am so thankful for a new school for our family to plant roots in. I wonder how Griffith will do with his transition to “real school 3rd grade?!” When Griffith was approaching kindergarten and Chad and I were praying about what to do about schooling, God gave us a great metaphor picture….I just love it when he does that…. I pictured the foundation of a home in which the cement was still wet. We felt like the cement was still wet on Griffy’s little life foundation….there was more work we wanted to do with him before we sent him to school for the majority of the day. It has been a wonderful, amazing experience…I am beyond grateful that God allowed us to do it. Homeschooling will always be a passion of our hearts. I will always cherish these years of learning to read in our PJ’s and laughing together trying to pronounce some ancient Egyptian phaoroh’s name. In a few weeks, I’ll probably be the only 3rd grade mom boo-hoo’ing as I send him down the hall with his lunchbox and his brand new tennis shoes. Maybe the kindergarten moms will take me in.

~nicki

p.s. Speaking of lunchboxes, did y’all know that vintage lunchboxes like the metal ones we had as kids with the matching thermoses are BIG TICKET items on ebay?!? The rare ones go for over $700! crazy. Remember the Dukes of Hazzard ones. I was always jealous of my friend’s Bionic Woman one.

I can’t sleep, as usual, so….. I decided to create a blog!?! I am moving up and out from the ranks of blog stalker reader! Hey, it’s better than watching infomercials and way better than buying the stuff on the infomercials, right?!

WARNING: The contents of this blog will be all over the map….just like us. God certainly does like to paint outside the lines, creating the big picture of this little family! We have learned to trust his master hand even when we can only see a few brush strokes at a time.

So, we are the new kids at blog school. Please don’t make fun of us. We still have to learn how to do our little blogrolly and all that jazz.

~nicki