God also spoke very clearly to me that because of the way I knew Him when I was younger He was able to prune a lot of things out of my life years ago so I could be this big beautiful tree. Now I am a very strong beautiful example of the power and strength of God. (cue water works)
Friday, September 22, 2017
Fall Thoughts - Trees and Things
God also spoke very clearly to me that because of the way I knew Him when I was younger He was able to prune a lot of things out of my life years ago so I could be this big beautiful tree. Now I am a very strong beautiful example of the power and strength of God. (cue water works)
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Update!!!
September October November update
Wow! Time has zipped by. My apologies for dropping the ball. I guess buying a new house will do that to you, and loosing a loved one (My Grandpa on my Dad's side....my first true love besides my dad) sigh, and starting a new business. I jumped on the Direct Sales band wagon and now sell Jamberry which you can check out here! ---> mollzmani.jamberry.com <---
That's all I have to say about that....well that's not true. I love the product and love sharing what I love so now I sell it. If you have no idea what I'm talking about I'll happily explain it all to you! Just send me an email :)
Back to the whole reason I'm posting OUR HOUSE!!!! Picture an adorable brick house with a huge picture window and a single car garage two doors down from the middle school and a block and 1/2 from an elementary school. Other than after school traffic and school busses loving our street I love our new home. We bought our house from the original owner that had lived in the house for almost 50 years. Some things look original to the house! When we looked at the house for the first time it was literally like walking back in time. However, nothing was worn out. Except the plumbing but it's functional just not ideal. And that is a whole different topic. Since then we have done some updating. Marcelyn's room was the first major project that I headed up and did most of, Chris has done basically all the rest. Marcelyn now has a light blue room. It turned out a bit darker than I pictured it but it's a HUGE improvement to the mustard (or as I call it Winnie the Pooh) yellow. Who knew yellow would be so hard to cover up!!!??? Uuuhhhggg but I learned that the previous owner loved color. The room had been baby blue, olive green, and mustard yellow. Since then Chris has been winterizing our great outdoors and taming our forest. Most people have a wooden privacy fence. Well we do too it's just still alive and it's just extremely green. Some might call it evergreen. Our entire backyard is fenced with cedar trees. It's so tranquil and lovely back there....just don't be barefoot it's painful. I have mixed feelings about the trees but I do love them more since one of our youth group kids said we need to build a wardrobe in the alley, because our backyard is like Narnia and that would be the entrance. Gotta love creativity!
This weekend we tackle part one of the kitchen remodel. Preparing for the new range oven. We knew when we bought the house that a kitchen remodel was inevitable since there wasn't a dishwasher and everything in the room predates our parents' childhood and just to fit our refrigerator we had to take out a cabinet. We knew something would need to be fixed sooner or later (we were thinking and hoping later) but about a month ago the wall oven died. And since it was old enough to be true vintage and antique, parts weren't readily available.... wall ovens aren't cheap nor are they the same size as they were in 1958 so we decided to go with a normal range cooktop. Well there's a cooktop ontop of a super handy cabinet, which will be dismantled today....well finished the cabinet has basically been take apart already.
Thanks to my awesome handy man hubby. He truly is amazing. Step one is to get a functioning oven!! With a small cabinet next to it. I'm super excited. I think we may also paint the cabinets if we pick out a color.....but that will be a long weekend project. Like uhh maybe uhh Thanksgiving (to anyone reading this that would want to come help paint) weekend. We haven't decided on colors yet so it might be Christmas. I will be posting updates on Instagram and Facebook. I'm so excited. This is the first time I've ever gotten a brand new oven cooktop. My last one was an awesome score off of a local classified site. It was totally God because I needed something specific. This go around it was in the budget to go big. It's nothing bigger than normal it's just awesome and we got a pretty good deal on it.
Oh and the coolest part about our new house is with the money/equity from our old house we had a nice down payment plus leftovers for renovations so all of our remodeling and updating is payed for with CASH!!!
Well it's late and I'm on toddler duty all day (nothing out of the ordinary) plus keeping hubby safe and capturing what I can on camera.
I'll sign out with a sweet picture of the Marcemallow.
She has figured out she's now tall enough to climb up on our dinning room chairs. In this picture she's doing her favorite activity watching for bunnies. Buhh as she says or raaaw. Her vocabulary is impressive. My favorite is when she calls me mommy it sounds like wowwy but I have a name now instead of her wining at me. She's growing up!!!
Friday, August 26, 2016
August Update
First July 29th my Grandpa graduated into heaven. It's been expected and dreaded since Grandma passed away a few years ago, so it wasn't sudden or thankfully, too soon. We (all cousins and grandchildren) were able to say good bye and he died peacefully and quickly. I'm not ready to share in detail what happened, because it's still so raw and weird that he's actually gone.
Then August 1st we signed papers on our new house! Talk about an emotional roller coaster.... Backup a few weeks.... We were battling back and forth with realtors on our house trying to come to an agreement on a price and when we finally came to an agreement we were super excited. Days later I got the news that a former co-worker and a best friend of a close friend of mine had suddenly died of cancer. She was young and had only been diagnosed a few weeks before. It was a huge blow! That week was a roller coaster of emotions. That was hard going through that, but it was nothing compared to what would happen in the coming weeks. We finalized the sale on our old house, Chris went on a missiontrip to Mexico City with the youth group. I'll write more about that in another post all together (Maybe even have Chris write that post) and then we closed on our new house and moved. The original plan was to take all week to move room by room, but with the plans for Grandpa's funeral it didn't work out that way. Monday was the day. We got keys for our house at 9am and by 9:00pm we were 90% moved in. We thought we had gotten everything, but as days went by we realized we forgot some stuff. Thankfully we sold our house to a good friend. The funniest was I completely forgot two drawers in our island.
Now to tell you about our new house!!! I'm so head over heals about this house. We knew we had found a fantastic house, but it really has become one of the nicest houses I've been in....but I may be a little bias. I'll try and give you a word tour....I haven't had much time to take very many pictures but checking out the hash tag #lofstromhouse on instagram will give you a little peek into where we are.
Front door: the front porch is a cute stone platform with three steps up to a white door that's the perfect amount of class...not to fancy that it's pain to keep clean, but new and nice enough that it doesn't tell the age of the house. The first room you come into is a living room which is connected to the dinning room. Both rooms have amazingly HUGE picture windows. The best part is they have been replaced recently so they don't leak as much as the original windows would. The living room has oak hardwood floors. Mom and Dad got a us a nice swatch of carpet as an area rug for now. It was super hard covering up the beautiful floor, but Marcelyn wasn't handling the hard floors all to well. She was tripping over the floor because her feet or socks would catch because the wood was actually more grippy with shoes or bare feet...either that or toys that she was used to playing with rough and tough would move out from under her when she was climbing on them and her head would hit the floor....needless to say she was not liking the floors. I hope I never forget the day we laid the carpet down. She was so giddy and goofy! To say that she LOVED the carpet was a huge understatement. I'm not sure I had ever seen her that goofy before. It was hilarious. I think it also was the fact that her four favorite people were all centered on her and she had all of our attention.
Bedrooms: As you walk towards the dinning room there is a small hallway that leads to the bedrooms and one bathroom. The first bedroom is ours and has lovely RED wallpaper. It has an elegant design on it, but it's most DEFINITELY 1959 awesome! >_< lol next is bathroom number 1 and it's in need of help....but mostly just a facelift. All could be fixed with a little bit of cocking, tile adhesive and paint. The only part about the bathroom that blows our mind is the fact that there aren't any electrical plug-ins....NONE. Not in the hallway and none in the light in the bathroom....good thing I'm low maintenance >_* lol!!! I look forward to redoing that bathroom. The best part of that room by far is the tub! It makes me super nervous when bathing Marcelyn, but it's so deep and long. We aren't 100% sure, but we think it's a cast-iron with a porcelain overlay.....there's a fancy term for that, but I'm drawing a blank. Next is Marcelyn's room. It was the first room that we painted...it's much better now. Before it was a
Basement! YES! WE HAVE A BASEMENT!! But before going into the basement you must take a quick peek into our ATTACHED garage :) =D single car oversized garage complete with loft and work bench. Now downstairs. First door is the utility room/laundry room and extra storage access under the stairs. Then on the left is the 3rd bedroom with a huge closet. Next is a small living room with a kitchenette off to the side (it's currently Chris' office space) with a couple of walls the come in from the sides to separate the two spaces. The back down the hallway is bedroom number 4 and a nice bathroom with a shower. The basement had been fixed up quite a bit with new carpet and paint. We learned recently that the shower may not have been the best thought out....Chris found a window that had been covered up by the shower.
here are some pictures!!
Well the Marcemallow is up! I better get the rest of my day going! Thanks for reading. I look forward to sharing more of our adventures with you as we settle into our house more.
There's so much more to share, but I'll quit for now!
Blessings
The Lofstrom Family
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Weathering Storm Season

Chris said that we should have only lost 3-4 pieces. We are blessed considering what happened all around us. Our neighbors just to our south (G-6) lost a corner of their shingles and possibly more damage, but nothing visible from our front porch or yard. Our neighbor to the west had a tree limb (roughly 5"-8" in diameter) fall on his truck. Then down the street a big cotton wood tree lost a sizable amount of branches. The whole street was blocked off by them and now there is a rather large gaping hole through the canopy of the tree....so sad.
It has been a few years since we rode out a storm that intense from our house. I usually like to get out if we know the winds are going to be above 60mph. I've heard that we had 75mph or higher wind speeds this morning. It was an adventure for sure! The power was out for about 10-15 minutes and at one point it was raining so hard that I couldn't see the playground. For most of the storm it was raining so hard that I couldn't see the row of trees south of our neighborhood. The most humbling part of a powerful storm like this is watching huge trees get whipped around like grass....that's when you know it's one powerful storm. No hail though so that was nice. Just lots of wind. lots and lots and lots of wind. I think our garden will be okay too. Two of our tomato cages were blown over, but it didn't look like the plants were broken off anywhere. Just a little smooshed.
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
June update!
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
May update
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
April Update
This month has been full full full!!!
This past weekend we had the dedication for the church and open house. It's wonderful to say that our church building is FINALLY DONE!
I was in charge of making the slide show of all the construction pictures. It was so cool to see how we all came together as a body and captured the whole process rather well. I didn't ever get real good before pictures or fully complete pictures, but the process was still amazing and you could tell how bad things were before we started. Unfortunately the video is pretty long so I can't post it here, but I'll look into sharing it on youtube or facebook. That project is the main reason I'm so late in posting this month. I can't believe April is already more than 1/2 over! My birthday is almost a month away and I'll be 28 this year!
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| One of my favorite tulips from my garden. |
Spring is so pretty here this year.
We finally got some substantial rain this past weekend and wow did we need it.
| The view from the bridge |
It's amazing to see the impact of something as simple as a few inches of rain. This past weekend was an answer to prayer. It calmly rained for days and most of it soaked right in.
This picture on the left is pretty mind boggling to think that just 24 hours before us being there where we stood was under water. I'm not sure how much but my guess was about 2ft or so. There were definite lines of water movement where we were standing and trash bags and debris in the trees to the right of what's show in the picture. Plus you can tell the steps across the way are wet and packed with mud.
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| 15 monthday picture <3 td="">3> |
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| helping Daddy dig a hole for our new pampas grass. |
She absolutely loves being outside and can say several words. She understands most things that I tell her which is a lot of fun to watch. She surprises me every day with a new word yesterday there were about 3-4. Sadly I'm drawing a blank as to what they all were, but her favorites are "go" "stop it" and "phone" She says "please" and it sounds like jeesh or cheese which is absolutely adorable. If she does have to be inside she loves playing with her Minion ball that her Aunt Brandy gave her during our last visit to Tulsa. Today however her favorite activity was splashing in the water that we collected during all the rain this weekend.

If it was just a little bit warmer I would have let her play in it more, but I couldn't get past her freezing hands and runny nose. We went to the dr. Monday and I think we picked something up while we were there :(
Friday was her 15 month check up and they wanted to give her shots to her then. I knew that she normally runs a fever and is rather grumpy for a few days afterwards so I asked if we could wait until after our HUGE weekend....and boy am I glad I did. She still isn't back to herself. On top of 3 immunizations she also had to get her iron levels rechecked.....rough rough rough. I'm so thankful to have my wonderful husband. I'm also thankful to have a healthy baby girl. All went well and I'm glad to have it all over with. Below are picture I took earlier this month. It's hard to capture good pictures of the Marcemallow nowadays because she's SO BUSY! I love it though. More adventures are ahead for us. Marce and I signed up for my first HRC class. (hmmm how to explain HRC...Hays Rec Commission....) We go on Thursdays to the gym and play play play. The class is called Little Climbers and is for toddlers Marcelyn's age (9mon-18mon) range. I wasn't able to capture any pictures this last time because I was busy chasing Marcelyn from one end of the gym to the next, but I'll try and paint you a word picture. Imagine yourself in a full-size basketball court with stations of activities spread out. Two of the stations are soft shapes to climb on made out of the same matterials as gymnastic mats. Other stations include a ball pit, things with wheels (trikes, cars and push carts), small toys with wheels or that can be pulled by a string, and Marcelyn's favorite, beach balls the size of her. I'm not sure why she loved them so much but she played with those the most. I wasn't all that impressed at first thinking how is this going to entertain her for a whole hour, but it did and she PLAYED HARD.
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| #Selfie |
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| All dressed and ready for church. Purse and ALL! |
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| 2 seconds later I took it out myself |
| Mommy braided my hair AND put a bow in it! |
Well I probably better quit for now. I'm writing during nap time, and I've heard the Marcemallow make some noise a few times. Plus its getting late and we have Kids Club tonight!
Thanks for reading!!


























