Happy Monday! I hope you had a good weekend. We had a great time encouraging couples at Harmony Bible Church in Danville, IA over the weekend! I learned over the weekend that about mid-last week the ability to leave comments on my blog shut down. (Sometimes...
Want to add some fun into your marriage? Add the element of surprise! But be careful, you need to first determine just how much your spouse likes surprises! Mark says… In our first year of marriage, I threw a surprise birthday party for Jill. That’s...
After a three week sabbatical, I’m back! It was a wonderful three weeks of speaking at the MOPS convention, moving Erica back to Texas, volunteering for a day in Joplin, and getting my boys started in school. It was a good break…but I did miss hanging...
We talk almost every Monday about intentionally making your marriage better. But what if you’re the only one in your marriage interested in making your marriage better? Today’s “Marriage Monday” is about how to keep discouragement at bay when...
Recently I was reading Thriving Family Magazine, one article title caught my eye: Become Your Spouse’s Publicist. In the book world, a publicist is one who advertises and promotes books. It got me thinking…Do I more often give my husband “bad...
Mark and I have been reading a book together called Your Spouse Isn’t The Person You Married: Keeping Your Love Strong Through Life’s Changes by Paul and Teri Reisser. Today’s Marriage Monday is focused on staying connected to your spouse during the...
Today is Mark’s birthday so today’s Marriage Monday will be a little different. I’m going to celebrate who Mark is! But not only that, I’m also going to invite you to a marriage seminar that Mark and I are doing in October. If you live in...
Someone once said, “Expectations are preconceived resentments.” We think, in marriage, that there’s a lot of truth to that statement. That’s why we think it’s important for couples to ditch the expectations and that’s what...
Last week Mark and I were talking with another couple about marriage challenges. She needed to return something to a store and she wanted to ask her husband to stop by the store on the way home from our house. She hesitated though, because her husband hates to shop....
Conflict in marriage is normal. We’re two human beings trying to forge a life together. We think differently, we process life differently, we see the world differently…is it any wonder that our differing ways sometimes conflict with each other? Conflict...
On the 25th of June, Mark and I will be celebrating 28 years of marriage. To celebrate, we spent last week in Florida together…just the two of us. We decided to take that trip exactly 7 days before we left. Crazy, huh? Spontaneity is an important part of...
Today’s Marriage Monday comes straight from our heart. It is a video clip from our ABC’s of a Healthy Marriage Seminar about the needs of a marriage. This clip focuses on the need for affection and sex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJisQWOG__g (Click...
Yesterday we had some drive time which turns into great talk time. We talked about how we’ve made so much progress in letting the small stuff go. In doing so, we’ve reduced our stress, made our marriage a safer relationship, and kept conflict at bay. We...
Today’s post is a guest post by Hearts at Home speaker Michele Cushatt. Michele is presenting a blended family workshop at our 2011 Hearts at Home conferences. It received rave reviews at the National Conference in March. You can find Michelle online at...
Sometimes we have the least patience with those we live with. We’re kinder to strangers than we are our spouse. Today’s Marriage Monday is about the power of kindness. Mark says… We become so comfortable with those closest to us, that we often...
