All Hail the Mighty State!

Happy Texas Independence Day!!

On this day in 1836, the Convention adopted the Texas Declaration of Independence and asserted their status as The Republic Of Texas. Yeehaw for Texas! I wanted to make Texas-shaped cookies to celebrate the holiday, but I have, most unfortunately, begun a low-carb kick-start plan this week. Boo for low carbs. More on that in a second. However, I found a fun close-second option instead of cookies: Texas-shaped cheese! :) Laugh if you must, but cheese conveniently has no carbs, and what was I to do with a Texas cookie cutter that needed some love, today of all days!? So here's the result:


Now, about this low-carb kick-start thing. If you haven't ever stopped to think about it, let me first inform you that all comfort food is super-high in carbohydrates. Milk, bread, pasta, flour, anything with creamy goodness or warm fluffiness - all out of the picture right now (I think the reason people lose weight on low-carb diets is because there is nothing good left to eat, so you just don't eat as much! :)). The kick-start part of the plan means you take low carbs to an extreme and keep your intake at a minimum with the understanding that later on, you will add more carbs back into your diet. So I am trying to stay under 20 grams of carbs a day. To put this in perspective, a slice of bread has about 15 - 18 carbs in it. Yeah. So, as I am eating lettuce wraps (in lieu of sandwiches) and celery sticks without peanut butter and roast beef without gravy or potatoes or carrots, I am consoling myself with the fact that this is a one-week experiment. I read online in different places that the first week is the hardest, so maybe I will loosen the restrictions a tad and stick with it the second week. We'll see.

In other, probably more useful news, Grandmother started reading Desiring God, by John Piper and shared a phrase with me that she liked enough to underline it in a library book! (in pencil, of course :)). He said, "I learned how to dig for gold rather than rake for leaves when I take up the Scriptures." It took a little thinking over for me to fully appreciate it. But don't you love it!?

Also in the preface (which is where the previous sentence came from) is a beautiful quotation from a Matthew Henry book.

" 'The joy of the Lord will arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.' This is the great business of life--to "put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks."

Love it. I'm next in line to read it when she finishes :)