My Baby is 7!

On September 19th we celebrated Blake's 7th birthday. By request, I made him pancakes for breakfast and then we headed out to church. We had planned a Super Mario Brothers birthday party after church. There were six boys total and they seemed to have a good time. My mother and Eric's parents came over as well.

The boys tried to beat Bowser with fireballs.



They did a Yoshi Egg race.



Then it was time for opening presents and cake and ice cream, well this year it was cupcakes and ice cream.





And we ended the day with everyone getting a Mario t-shirt that I had made and a bag of candy. While we waited for parents to arrive, we had a fabulous game of baseball in the front yard. It was so much fun having all those boys!

The Ending of an Era

For seven years I was the person responsible for putting together bridal and baby showers at our church. I took over this ministry because I felt it was an important way for us to show love, especially to those who were fairly new in the church. You see it was twelve years ago that some women in the church showed this amazing love and support to me. I had only been attending CFC for about 6 months and hardly knew anyone. The fact that so many women would show up to my bridal shower to support me when they really didn't even know me was so foreign to me. Yet that is what they did. I knew at that moment that this was MY church, this was MY Christian family and I was loved. I have been blessed to be able to pass that love on to others for the past seven years. Over the past year I have felt like it was time to move on. I struggled with giving it up. Questions haunted me like, What if no one wants to take this over? I'm serving the Lord, so it HAS to be a good thing, right? People tell me I am good at it, so it must be a gift from God that I should be putting to use, right? I went back and forth on the subject, praying and praying that God would show me what to do. Finally he spoke to me through one of my devotionals and answered some of the questions that had been bugging me. If no one takes over????It's not my problem...it's God's and He is more than sufficent to handle it. Serving the Lord is a good thing???? Not if it takes over or hinders our relationship with Him. We can get too busy SERVING Him that we stop HEARING Him. And that was what was happening to me. The Lord was telling me that I had enough SERVING to do under my own roof at this season. Well what about my gift????? My gift is SERVING, and I do not need to be head of showers ministry to do that.

With that, I emailed my pastor and told him of my decision to resign. Less than a week later, my grandmother fell and broke her hip. Now I'm back to serving...right where I need to be. God's timing was perfect, just as it always is.

Parker's First Investment

I am very proud of Parker and the diligence he has shown over the past several years. He came to us when he was barely 6 and told us he wanted a four wheeler. "Well you'd better save your money", was our response. Little did we know that over the next several years, he would save every dollar he got toward this goal. He saved money from birthdays and other holidays. He would ask his grandparents if they had any jobs he could do to earn money. Everytime my father and his wife would send each child five bucks from Virginia for things like Halloween and Valentines Day, his siblings would beg to go to Walmart, while he would put it right into his bank. He finally found a 2005 Honda 90 that he fell in love with. Problem was, it was $800 and he only had $400. He kept on saving and then a blessing from God came for him. The owner said he would drop the price down to $600. He put a deposit on the quad and never once complained about not being able to bring it home yet. My husband and I talked and both agreed that he had worked hard and learned some very valuable lessons over the past several years, so we gave him the money needed to bring home the quad. He understands that he will have to pay us back and has already given me $50 toward what he owes. It was a fabulous deal as it came with a helmet that is worth over a hundred dollars alone. Well done Parker. We are proud of you and your accomplishment!

First Day of School

I typically start my kids after Labor day because- hey that's when I started as a kid. We love to hang on to summer as long as possible.

I tried something fun this year for the first day of school. I put all our subjects in a paper bag on slips of paper, along with some fun things like, go play a game of PIG, play a game of Swamp Sum, and go do a craft. The kids got to take turns pulling a subject out of the bag. And we proceeded to do school that way. We started our unit on Bach. Played sum swamp with the new number dice I bought (these go up to the number 12 instead of just 1-6), wrote in our journals, started our new curriculum for Science (Biology for the Christian Kid, and accomplished a math lesson. I also am doing a Homonymn a day with them this year and trying to encorporate that into their writing at least once during the week. They had so much fun with the first day of school they were disappointed that we were not doing the same thing on Wednesday.

It is now week three of school, and I can say that I absolutely LOVE our history curriculum, The Mystery of History. It is a biblical chronological study of history. They kids and I are learning so much of God's word and the world through it. I am still doing Switched on Schoolhouse for LA and Math. I have tweaked the schedule a bit to have the kids be able to do some independent work on Monday and Wednesday afternoons as I have extra kids on those days.

Nationals

My hubby got a unexpected but exciting phone call in August. It seems that one of our local softball teams was good enough to win the state tournament. They were going to Nationals, but unfortunately their short-stop was unable to go to Ohio with them.....so they asked Eric if he would be their short-stop. Eric was thrilled that they wanted HIM. So on September 1st, he packed a bag and headed to Ohio. Unfortunatley, the team was knocked out in the third game, but Eric was excited that he had the opportunity and that he played well. I guess there is a reason he always gets MVP in his league. He certainly is the most valuable to me...but I'm a little bias. :)