ALY ALLEN | THE BLOG

did you all know i have a degree in history? i haven't exactly used it for anything, but i did earn it just the same. one of the major requirements for this degree were two huge research papers that spanned an entire semester each. for the first paper, we were required to choose a topic and then read as many secondary resources as we possibly could on the subject. secondary resources are basically books written by historians who have researched and learned about the topic, and then written a book about it. it's their synthesis and interpretation of their research.  the second paper required that we choose a topic and research all of the primary sources that we could find. we could throw in some secondary resources too, but the main objective was for us to actually practice being a historian ourselves. i wrote my paper on the development of the city of Coronado, see that fancy photo below? sounds fascinating, right? i basically lived in the Coronado library and his...

there's nothing quite like a rainy morning. we always open up the window and listen to the rain and lay in bed a little bit longer. the cool air and the smell. mmmmm the smell of rain. it just smells fresh and new and promising. plus it signals that fall is finally letting her guard down for us. i do love the rain, but sometimes it's a bummer when it rains on your pumpkin patch plans [say that ten times fast]. that's what happened yesterday. we'd planned for a few weeks to head up to the pumpkin patch with some friends, but the minute we woke up, it was rainy and the forecast said rain all day long. we'd been looking forward to it, but i was not excited about the prospects of wetness and muddiness with the kids, so we decided not to go. i was bummed, not because i needed to go to the pumpkin patch so badly, but because i crave quality family time. something other than sitting around the house, since that's what we do most of the week. i always feel ...

right this very second in my heart i want to just reach out and touch God. i feel like maybe i could if i tried really hard. i feel like i might explode from His goodness to me. i'm sitting in starbucks and my mom has had the kids all day, and will have them all night. and my husband is out of town. so i am literally alone and it is heaven on earth in every sense of that phrase. i love being alone. i love being refreshed. i love solitude. today i also got to sing at my "old" church . i'll just say it felt good. i felt alive for the first time in a loooong time. worshiping God. after nine months off, it was nice to know i could still sing. but it was even better to just worship. to remember that God is always worthy to be praised. it had been a dry nine months, meaning that i hadn't really "experienced" or "felt" God in [musical] worship for awhile. and though i know that many aspects of my life have been poured out in worship over those nine...

simply buy two prints, and in the message section at checkout,  let me know what you chose for your 3rd free print. it's that simple! enjoy! shop here

so i kinda touched on my college experience in this post. and i started thinking about how different that might seem to some people. not going away to school. not having that typical "college experience". not meeting my husband there, not living in dorms or going to football games or doing whatever you do when you're in college, because i guess i wouldn't really know. looking back, i don't regret this decision, but i'll admit at the time it was weird. i've always kept to myself,  been slow to meet new people, impossibly fearful of striking up conversation with strangers. so i just drove there, went to class, minded my own business, barely joined in class discussion, turned in my work, and that's about it. half-way through college, my husband and i got married. that was a very weird feeling. you're in this place where everyone is your age and they're all care-free and dating and breaking up and going about their day as a normal college stud...

sometimes i over-analyze things. actually, most of the time i over-analyze things. it can be anything, really. a trip to the grocery store, our monthly budget, a quick remark someone makes to me, a message i believe God wants me to share, how certain events will unfold and what the absolute best way would be to go about them, what people must think of me, and the list goes on. i think and i think and i think. i'm always inside my head. my husband will ask me what i'm thinking about, and honestly? one million things. it would take me a whole day to adequately answer him. in the car, i'm thinking. at home doing my daily mom duties, i'm thinking. always always processing. this is how i get myself into trouble with believing lies. there's a lot going on in my head so if i'm not super careful, lies slip in just as easily as anything else. always analyzing and processing and thinking... must be my  INFP   [introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving] personality...

1) if you have a Trader Joes, hurry over and buy this coffee today. it smells incredible, is sooo tasty, and it's organic. seriously, you can't beat that. coffee is one of the most important things to buy organic, actually, in case you care about that. something about beans being sourced from lots of different places in the same package, and there's no way to really know what kinds of practices are used with each different source. when you buy organic/fair trade, you know they're all from the same place and grown organically. fun fact. sidenote: i'm a sucker for packaging. and everything at trader joes is fun to look at. how cool would it be to design their labels? seriously who has that job, because i want to steal it. 2) made my fall wreath. loooove how it turned out. my friends  heather  and  laura  posted similar ones and i totally copied them. i added the chalkboard and bow and leaves to make it my own. i'm just finding it very unfortunate that...

one day on twitter, a bunch of us blog friends were lamenting how we feel like such great friends but we don't ever get to see each other in real life. what if there was a way we could meet up and spend a bunch of uninterrupted time together, just being friends? i was totally in, and we started exchanging emails... until about mid-way through the planning i realized that there was no possible way i could leave my family for an extended period of time during football season. i had to back out, and i was really bummed about it. sometimes being a grown-up isn't always fun. [i was so tempted to hashtag that, guys. it's amazing what social media has done to us. #beingagrownupisntalwaysfun] then this conference popped up called Influence . and it sounded so amazing, right up my alley, exactly the kind of thing i'd love to attend. not to mention, there would be plenty of friends going to this too. but it was the same october weekend as the little getaway i mentioned... f...