Sam

I love this boy...A LOT!  And I have been loving playing some sort of game with him nearly every evening.  We play cards or a board game or quirkle or Blokus.  Daniel often tries to take our pieces, but when we play cards he has his own decks and hits his cards on the table.  He may sometimes throw them away and laugh too.  Daniel may have even thrown my sweatshirt away without us noticing... :)  I  discovered this the other night when I looked for all of the cards he had thrown away while Sam  and I played Cribbage.   When I opened the trash can, I saw my sweatshirt  and then instantly realized that this is why he had laughed so hysterically earlier that evening in the kitchen.  Sam and I laughed together.  And we continued playing Cribbage and Daniel continued throwing cards away.  Every time one entered the trash can he would laugh hysterically.  Every time.  Sweet memories, sweet times.

Praying Friends

"Rich is the person who has a praying friend." -Janice Hughes

We read this today in our bible study time at school.  Our Bible Portfolio theme this year is Prayer...so they are actually Prayer Portfolios.  This quote made us all stop, think of one specific friend and then pray for them as a group.  Each of the kids chose a different friend, and I was so touched listening to their sincere, heartfelt, individualized prayers for their friends.  Among many things, Drew prayed that his friend would love the Lord with all his heart and mind and soul.  Sam prayed that his friend would find peace and comfort as he misses his sister.  Lizzy prayed that her friend would know Jesus.  Abby prayed that her friend would be a great big sister to her new baby.  It was precious.  Just precious.  When we were all done, I looked up and said, "There is no reason we cannot do this together more often, like every day pray together for our friends."

I am so thankful.  Rich we have been with praying friends.  And God is a faithful God who I know answers according to His perfect will.   And he gave us Jesus, whom he says will never leave us or forsake us....Jesus whom the writer of Hebrews says, "Therefore He is able also to save forever those who draw hear to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them." Hebrews 7:25

And I believe that the reason Daniel is here today, is because God has given us so many praying friends.

How rich we are indeed!

"I will lift my eyes to the mountains, where does my help come from?  My help comes from the Lord, who made the heaven and the earth." Psalm 121:1-2

SILLY Girl!

Abby is genuinely funny.  She makes us all laugh...and lately I have been noticing it coming out in her clothing styles.  :)  Love you so much sweet girl!

Lizzy's Puppet Show

Lizzy has been loving putting together puppet shows lately.  And I must say, she is very creative and quite good at it!  :)  Over the weekend, she wrote and created another one.  She made a set, she wrote a short script, she made a place for the audience to sit and she enlisted the help of her baby sister to "introduce" the puppet show (which ended up being one of my favorite parts).

 Here she is with her set up (she just used what was available...if I had known what she was doing, I would have flipped our chart paper so she could have a blank background)...

And here was most of her audience (of course Daniel and I were there too...)

And a scene from the play...

it was a "Princess Tragedy" of sorts...but of course ended with a "Happily Ever After".  She had ALL of us laughing.  Sam was nearly crying he was laughing so hard as that poor princess really had a hard day.  I guess you had to be there to know exactly what I mean.

Great job Lizzy, you are so creative!  :)

I Love Books!

Daniel loves books, but he has two favorites right now...  "Trucks"...

 He especially loves when you get to this page and "Spin, Spin!"  I adore how he waits with eager anticipation for this page to come.  Then he gets his pointer finger ready and looks at me with a sweet sparkle in his eyes...and belly laughs as I say "Spin, Spin!"  So sweet.

 His other favorite book is "Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear?"   His favorites are the leopard and the walrus...

All of the big kids take turns reading to him.  This particular day it was Lizzy.  And I do my fair share too.  :-)

Baking Bananas

Today we used up our bunch of over ripe bananas.  I will be the first to admit that baking is not my favorite thing in the world.  I LOVE to cook.  Baking...well...not so much.  My husband is sweet though, as he says "For not liking it and not doing it very often, you are pretty successful when you do.  Maybe you should (ahem...cough) make (cough) some of those (cough) chocolate chip cookies next time."  :-)  I can take a hint, so maybe I will just have to do that for him.

But today we made banana bread.  And my girls were oh. so. HAPPY.  They LOVE to bake.  In fact, when their dad is home they beg him to bake cakes and muffins and whatever else because he usually says yes.  So today I made their day.  We had enough bananas for Lizzy and Abby to do their own batch.  And they looked super cute in the aprons Grandma Marge made for them...

I think our efforts were successful, as within 5 minutes of taking the "Big Loaf" out of the oven it was gone.  The kids just love the stuff...

 Good thing we still have four "mini-loaves" for the next couple of days...

Game Time

Friday nights are still family pizza and game (or movie) nights at our house.  Tonight was no exception and we played "Headbands" after having our pizza together.  If you have never played this game, everyone gets a headband and puts a picture card (without looking at it) in their head band.  On your turn, you then ask questions to help guess what might be on your headband... 

 It was a lot of fun...we laughed a lot...but we laughed especially hard when Lizzy drew the card "I am a Chicken".  For whatever reason my kids find chicken stories, chicken talk, chicken jokes, chicken pictures, chicken names and chicken anything extremely funny, so they all about fell of their chairs laughing when Lizzy was a chicken.  And she was happy to act the part for a picture for me...

I love Friday nights!  And apparently today was actually "Chicken's Day", my kids even put it on our calendar at school.  Nothing official, just a day they created for "Clucker the Chicken".

So funny!    

My Dad's Birthday

Today is my dad's 63rd birthday.  These are a few of the pictures we took on his last visit...

Happy, happy birthday dad!  I hope you have a great day and fantastic year to follow!  We love and miss you very much!  :-)

They have come a LONG way baby!

As I was going through our blog, deleting things and making changes to the web address and such, I came across this unpublished post from fall 2008.  So, since I did not publish a post yesterday, this will be for yesterday.  :-)

FROM 2008:Well, for those of you who know my oldest son, you might remember that for quite some time he was VERY afraid of the water. He would scream and go crazy when we would try and encourage him to get in the water. The fall of 2006, just after we returned from Turkey, a little friend of his talked him into taking the plunge. She got him to jump off the side of the pool and swim with him...this was a HUGE step. Since this time he has gradually gotten more comfortable with the water. Swimming lessons with his buddies in Mayville helped and last summer lessons at UND did too. Now that we have a pool here where we live, all of our kids have a chance to swim much more regularly. The boys just finished up a session of swimming lessons. Here is a little video of each of them. Drew is attempting to dive into 7 ft...a HUGE step for him!

In the months that followed this, both boys ended in a program called swimming kids where they swam for an hour 3 times each week.  My Drew who was so afraid of the water, became a most excellent swimmer, even mastering the butterfly.  Now they just like to play in the water.  I am hoping the girls get as comfortable as the boys now are.  :-)  It is fun to look back at these videos/pictures.  I guess that is why I keep blogging.

North Dakota Winter

This is a picture from our last full winter in North Dakota...

I do not miss the cold weather, but I sure do miss many wonderful people. And I just love this picture of Lizzy.

Lots of Love

This picture cam across the screen tonight.  Daniel was 10 months old, easy to tell because his eyes were not yet fixed.  I am sure I might have already posted this 2 years ago,  but I wanted to again because there are just so many things I love about this picture.

So. many. things.

Ready for Church

The girls had a sleepover with a sweet friend last night.  This morning they came down all ready for church with bibles in hand...

They are just precious.  So thankful for sweet friends.

Daniel Faces

Wrestling With Daddy

Daniel loves to wrestle with his daddy.  And I LOVE listening to it.  It is so funny to me just how different he sounds playing with me versus playing with his daddy...

I think they may have always enjoyed playing this way...these are from 2 years ago!  :-)

Love it.  Just love it.  Love them.