My Life...

2011-01-18T10:51:00.000-05:00

Left or Right Brained?

2010-08-13T07:45:00.002-04:00

Found this very interesting!

Click here to take this test for yourself:
Left or Right Brained?

Thank you for taking the Creativity Test. The results show your brain dominance as being:

Left Brain Right Brain
50% 51%

You are more right-brained than left-brained. The right side of your brain controls the left side of your body. In addition to being known as right-brained, you are also known as a creative thinker who uses feeling and intuition to gather information. You retain this information through the use of images and patterns. You are able to visualize the "whole" picture first, and then work backwards to put the pieces together to create the "whole" picture. Your thought process can appear quite illogical and meandering. The problem-solving techniques that you use involve free association, which is often very innovative and creative. The routes taken to arrive at your conclusions are completely opposite to what a left-brained person would be accustomed. You probably find it easy to express yourself using art, dance, or music. Some occupations usually held by a right-brained person are forest ranger, athlete, beautician, actor/actress, craftsman, and artist.

Your complete evaluation follows below:
Your left brain/right brain percentage was calculated by combining the individual scores of each half's sub-categories. They are as follows:

Your Left Brain Percentages

54% Reality-based (Your most dominant characteristic)
44% Sequential
27% Verbal
25% Symbolic
11% Linear
9% Logical (Your least dominant characteristic)

Your Right Brain Percentages

37% Concrete (Your most dominant characteristic)
30% Holistic
28% Random
25% Nonverbal
24% Intuitive
24% Fantasy-oriented (Your least dominant characteristic)

What Do These Percentages Mean?
Low percentages are common in the Brain Type Test and are not indicative of intelligence. Instead, medium to high scores (30 - 50%) are desireable, as they show an ability to utilize a processing method without an abnormal reliance on it. Special focus should be paid to highly dominant (50% or above) or highly recessive (0 - 30%) methods, as they tend to limit your approach when learning, memorizing, or solving problems.

If you have Highly Dominant characteristics, your normal thinking patterns will naturally utilize these methods. Conscious effort is required to recognize the benefits of other techniques. Using multiple forms of information processing is the best way to fully understand complex issues and become a balanced thinker.

If you have Highly Recessive characteristics, your normal thinking patterns naturally ignore these methods. You may only consider these under-utilized techniques when "all else fails," or possibly not at all. It is important to recognize the benefits of all of your brain's capabilities in order to become a balanced thinker.

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Left Brain Categories

Reality-based Processing
Reality-based processing is used by the left hemisphere as a method for processing information with a basis on reality. This processing tool focuses on rules and regulations. An example of this would be how a left-brained person would completely understand the repercussions of turning in a late assignment or failing a test. A left-brained person also usually easily adjusts to changes in their environment.

Your Reality-based Analysis

You process information with a firm basis on reality, but because of this, may lack creativity. You are able to easily create or adapt to rules and regulations. For example, you understand the repercussion of your actions. You easily adjust to change in the environment and probably do not become emotionally involved in many tasks.

Sequential Processing
Sequential processing is a method used by the left hemisphere for processing information. The information that is received is processed in order from first to last. Information is processed in a systematic, logical manner. Through sequential processing, you can interpret and produce symbolic information such as language, mathematics, abstraction, and reasoning. This process is used to store memory in a language format. Activities that require sequential processing include spelling, making a "to-do" list, and many aspects of organization.

Your Sequential Analysis

You show moderate ability to organize information sequentially. You are capable of processing information you receive in a systematic, logical order from first to last. However, at times you will process information you receive quite randomly, or may give it only a semblance of order. You are probably an average mathematician and speller, and may or may not enjoy tasks such as making "to-do" lists.

Verbal Processing
Verbal processing is a method used by the left hemisphere to process our thoughts and ideas with words. For example, through verbal processing, a left-brained person giving directions may say, "From this point continue east for two miles and turn north onto Bellevue Road. Continue north on Bellevue Road for seven miles and turn west on Main Street". With verbal processing, exact, logical directions are given in a very sequential manner compared to a right-brained person who, in giving the same directions, would use more visual landmarks.

Your Verbal Analysis

You have a moderate verbal ability. Using this method you process your thoughts and ideas with words. You tend to combine technical details with illustrations, depending on whatever strikes you. For instance, if giving directions, you might say, "Continue two miles east on Court Street and take a left at the McDonalds," combining the exact details of street names and mileage with prominent landmarks.

Symbolic Processing
Symbolic processing is a method associated with the left hemisphere that is used for processing the information of pictures and symbols. The majority of functions associated with academics involve symbols such as letters, words, and mathematical notations. This process is what aids you to excel in tasks such as linguistics, mathematics, and memorizing vocabulary words and mathematical formulas.

Your Symbolic Analysis

You have the ability to process the information of symbols at times, but you may need to first view the real object before you can understand what you are trying to process. For example, in solving math problems it occasionally helps you to "draw out" the problem, which allows you to better understand it through visualization. At other times you do not need visualization to aid you in forming your answers.

Linear Processing
Linear processing is a method by the left hemisphere to process information. In this process, the left brain takes pieces of information, lines them up, and proceeds to arrange them into an order from which it may draw a conclusion. The information is processed from parts to a whole in a straight, forward, and logical progression.

Your Linear Analysis

You tend to have difficulty in processing data in a linear manner. When processing information you tend see the whole picture first and work your way backwards, filling in the pieces as you go. The information you process is not done in a straight, progressive manner, but may take different paths as you start with an assumption and take different paths to discover the threads that lead you to that assumption. Seeing the big picture at the beginning of the process is a necessity for you if you are to understand additional information. When given a task, instead of naturally following directions in a linear fashion, you tend to feel the need to know "why" you are doing something or else you may have difficulty with it.

Logical Processing
Logical processing is a method that is used by the left hemisphere to take information piece by piece and put it all together to form a logical answer. When information is received through reading or listening, the left hemisphere will look for different bits of information that will allow it to produce a logical conclusion. This aspect of the left hemisphere is what aids you in solving math problems and science experiments.

Your Logical Analysis

Logical processing is not one of your strengths, so you may tend to rely on a "gut" feeling to help you make your decisions from the information you have received. For example, you will often choose an answer on a test because it "feels" right, and you may be correct. This is due to the fact of your tendency to look for the whole picture but not the details that create it. You can often start with the answer and work your way back to allow yourself to see the process and parts that create the whole. You may find math problems and science experiments difficult because of this.

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Right Brain Categories

Concrete Processing
Concrete processing is a method associated with the right hemisphere that is used for processing things that can be seen or touched. It processes much of the information you receive from real objects. For example, a right-brained person is not just satisfied that a mathematical formula may work, but will want to know why it works. A strongly concrete person often finds it easier to solve a mathematical problem by "drawing it out" because it allows them to visualize it. The more a concrete person can visualize something the easier it is for them to understand it.

Your Concrete Analysis

At times, you feel the need to see a real object in order to understand it. At other times, you are able to understand a problem on a symbolic level. For example, you may find that in solving math problems, it occasionally helps you to "draw out" the problem in order to understand and solve it.

Holistic Processing
Holistic processing is a method used by the right hemisphere to process information. The information is processed from whole to parts. A right-brained person, through holistic processing, is able to see the big picture first, but not the details that accompany it. A strongly holistic person may often find that prior to listening to a lecture given by an instructor, they must first read the chapter so that they better understand what the lecture is about. This function is also what provides to you your visual spatial skills. It also aids in tasks such as dancing and gymnastics. Through holistic processing, memory is stored in auditory, visual, and spatial modalities.

Your Holistic Analysis

You show some ability to process data holistically, starting with the whole and working backwards to find the parts, which inform the whole, to form your conclusion. When you process information in a linear manner you are able to start with the parts and work up to form the whole. It is important to be comfortable with both methods, as both are equally necessary in the learning process.

Random Processing
Random processing is a method used by the right hemisphere for processing information. The information that is received is processed without priority. A right-brained person will usually jump from one task to another due to the random processing by their dominant right hemisphere. Random processing is, of course, the opposite of sequential processing therefore making it difficult for right-brained individuals to choose to learn in sequence. In order to overcome this, a right-brained person may want to attempt to learn sequence by using colors since the right hemisphere is sensitive to color. For example, you may want to associate the first step with green, the second step with blue, and the last step with red. Consistently using the same sequence will allow you to see that this strategy can be applied to many tasks involving sequence.

Your Random Analysis

You have some ability to process data randomly. You are at times able to make "leaps of logic" and discover unique things by thinking "outside of the box." However, you may tend to ignore your random processing thoughts unless you are desperate for a solution. It is important you recognize this skill as not grasping at straws, but a viable way to discover new ways of approaching a problem.

Nonverbal Processing
Nonverbal processing is a method used by the right hemisphere to process our thoughts with illustrations. Reliance on this method is why it is occasionally difficult for right-brained people to "find the right words" in certain situations. A right-brained person cannot just read or hear information and process it, but first must make a mental video to better understand the information they have received. For example, through nonverbal processing, a person giving directions may say, "Continue going straight until you see a big, red-brick courthouse. At the courthouse turn right, and go down that street for a couple of miles until you se a gray stone church which will be on your right. Straight across from the church is the road to the left you need to take." With nonverbal processing, the directions that are given are extremely visual compared to the exact, sequential directions that would be given by a left-brained person.

Your Nonverbal Analysis

When processing your thoughts and ideas, you use tend to use both illustrations and words. When giving directions, you probably use both visual illustrations such as, "keep going until you see a McDonalds on your right; then turn left at the Home Depot", and technical terms such as, "travel for two miles and turn east onto First Street."

Intuitive Processing
Intuitive processing is a method that is used by the right hemisphere to process information based on if it "feels" right or not. For example, a right-brained person may choose an answer on a test because they had a "gut" feeling and often they will be correct. Another example of this is how a right-brained person will know the correct answer to a math problem but will not understand the procedure of how they arrived at the correct answer. A right-brained person will usually have to start with the answer and work their way backwards in order to be able to see and understand the parts and process that create the whole.

Your Intuitive Analysis

When processing information, at times you are able to go with your "gut" instincts. At other times you may doubt your instincts, or prefer to put information together piece by piece to form your conclusion. You should be careful not to ignore your intuition, but at the same time do not solely rely on it.

Fantasy-oriented Processing
Fantasy-oriented processing is used by the right hemisphere as a method for processing information with creativity. It focuses much less on rules and regulations than the processing method of a left-brained person. Due to the fantasy-oriented processing mechanism of a right-brained person, they do not adjust well to change. Instead of adapting to the change in the environment, a right-brained person attempts to change it back to the way they liked it. But fantasy-oriented processing also provides the advantage of creativity to right-brained individuals, and since emotion is integral of the right side of the brain, anything a fantasy-oriented person becomes involved in emotionally will aid their ability to learn.

Your Fantasy-oriented Analysis

You have the ability to use both creativity and reality to process the information you receive. This is a unique gift that allows you to both focus on rules and regulations but to also act with creativity. You are able to adjusting to change, even though you might not like it, and you can become emotionally involved in your work if it interests you.

Busy, Busy, Busy!!

2010-08-07T21:08:00.002-04:00

As summer comes every year, I always think that THIS summer I will have more time to do things....take picnics, relax, just enjoy the summer, but every summer it is just busy, busy, busy and it seems like there is no laid back summer time.

So a recap...

June 14-25th- Jared had drama camp each morning and then at the end of the 2 weeks, they performed, "Horror High: The Musical".

June 23rd- We had a VERY BAD storm in the evening. Jared had gone with Sarah to Dairy Queen because it looked like it would be a while before the storm got to our area, but it moved in fast and by the time they could get back home it got really bad. Just as they turned into our addition, a large part of a tree came down across DeCamp taking the power lines with it. God obviously was watching out for them because of they had been just a few minutes sooner the tree may have fallen on Sarah’s car! She had to park her car in a drive way on the other side of the tree and then they had to run home in the rain. Mark went out to pick them up, but they were nearly home by the time he got to them. By this time it was raining and storming so badly we decided we needed to go to the basement…and of course thanks to that tree, we had no electricity! Sarah stayed until the worst of the storm passed and then we drove her back down to the tree so she could get to her car. Our power ended up being out until nearly 10:00 Thursday night and what a pain it was! You can no idea how much you use electricity until you no longer have it. I felt like I was Amish and I didn’t like it very much! I thought I would just go into work early Thursday so at least I could use the electricity there, but power was out in the church neighborhood too! A tree had also fallen there and taken out power for several homes! So….Jared went off to drama camp and Mark and Adam went t work and since I couldn’t do anything at home I went and spend some time at Panera and took my laptop. I guess there were several 1000s in Elkhart County without power!

June 27th- Jared I were on worship team, and since there was no power we practiced without mics and lights! ;) At least it was a sunny evening and there was quite a bit of light coming in through the windows.

June 28th- Well, here it is Friday and still no power at the office and we were wondering if it would come back on before Sunday. What would it be like to have church without a bulletin or maybe even church without power at all??? However, the power came back on around noon on Friday. So I worked late on Friday and came back in for a while on Saturday to get things finished up with the bulletin! What a week!

June 28th- Jared & I went to Pottawatomi Zoo.

June 30th- Jared had gone sailing with Larry & Judy Miller and in the evening they invited Mark, Adam & I to come and join them. Judy came up and brought dinner for us. Jared had gone sailing with Larry a few times before, but this was the first time the rest of us had been sailing and it was a lot of fun!

July 1st- July 11th - Friday morning….left for Word of Life Camp- Schroon Lake, NY! I have an album of photos for each day uploaded to Facebook about our adventures at camp. We had a great day trip this year to Lake Placid where they Olympics were held in 1980 and 1934. We got to go to the Olympic Center where all of the ice skating took place and it was SO, SO neat to be there where those awesome skaters had skated. This is also where the Miracle on Ice took place the US Hockey team defeated Russia. Another fun thing was the pile of SNOW they had outside of the Olympic Center! This was one of the hottest weeks on record in the Adirondacks, but there was still snow there as they make a pile to bring in every day! I even got a great photo of Jared and Lori having a snowball fight!
The boys did excellent in Teens’ Involved and all but 2 placed on the top 5….which is awesome!
On the way home from camp we stopped on Niagara Falls!

July 12th-16th- Vacation Bible School at MMBC…where I was the photographer and Mark did games with Shawn. Jared was part of the nightly drama team.

July 17th- Jared & Adam went to Cedar Point with RUSH and Mark and I went to Don & Michele’s 25th Wedding vow renewal ceremony. Afterwards we went out to dinner with Shawn and veronica to Papa Vino’s in South Bend.

July 19th- Hosted a Lia Sophia Jewelry party.

July 23rd- 31st- Elkhart County 4-H Fair. Jared took 2 herbs and received a blue on his Oregano and an Honor on his Tarragon. We went to the fair Friday night as a family, but it was an extremely HOT HOT night so we didn’t stay long.
Tuesday- Mark, Jared and I went to see Huey Lewis & the News. It was a great concert! Mark and I had seen them back in ’85 and Huey still sounded great!
Wednesday- after another bad storm came through Elkhart County, Jared and I decided to go back to the fair again…just the two of us.
Thursday- Mark and I went back to the fair and ended up spending some time with Glenn & Mary as well as Shawn & Veronica later in the evening.

July 25th- Jared & I were on worship team again.
Mark had a youth group reunion at Harrison Center. It was really nice to see John & Karen and lot of others back from Harrison Center Church

July 26th- Aric came over last night and spent the night and then spent the day with us. Later in the afternoon Braden come over too. It seemed funny to have them both here for that time because we used to babysit each of them regularly, but neither one had been here for a long time.

July 29th – Ethan Quiram is home to stay for a few weeks, with Grandma and Grandpa Miller and so today Jared and some of the other MMBC kids all went sailing with Larry again.

August 1st-6th- Jared left for Checkpoint Bible Camp in Buffalo, IN to be a councilor.

August 1st- We had our first WOL meeting of the year to plan our kick off party. Shawn and Veronica are joining us this year as WOL leaders and I know it is going to be a great year! The big news at MMBC is that we are making a switch this year and are taking on the WOL Olympian & Gopher Buddies program instead of AWANA! It think it is going to be a very positive change for our church in general!
That evening Adam took me out to eat at CiCi’s…Mark didn’t want to go so it was just Adam and I which was kind of nice!

August 6th- Jared got back late in the afternoon and then we went down to Kim’s for a cookout. Tracy came up with Ashlyn, Trey and Lynnea for a long weekend so it was nice to be able to see them and the family for an evening.

August 7th- Jared went with RUSH for a lake day at Perry’s

And that brings us up to date!! Wheww!!

Catching up a bit more….

2010-06-22T10:48:00.003-04:00

Life has been kinda quiet around here since Nicole has gone back to Korea, but we are easily falling back into a regular routine, which is a as busy as usual. Jared has been going to Drama camp all last week and this week to prepare for a production this weekend. It is a brand new play that Mary worked with the writer on to make it work for drama camp. It is called Horror High School: The Musical. We have tickets for Friday night and I think Mark and I are going to help usher on Saturday.

June 18^th- We had an interesting evening on Friday night....before going to see Jill & Mary in “Thoroughly Modern Millie”, we were going to have dinner with the Springers at Subway in Bristol, but even before they could finish making our sandwiches it was announced by the manager that they were going to be closing immediately due to a "tornado" moving that way. They told us that we had to leave due to insurance reasons. {They did finish making our sandwiches which we paid for!} By this time it was POURING down rain and so we all had to run across the street and ended up SOAKING wet and eating dinner in the corner of the lobby at the Opera House! So much for Subway caring for their customers...you would have thought that they would have allowed us to stay instead of sending us out in the midst of what they said was a tornado. {And there never were any tornadoes...just BAD storms!}. Anyway... "Millie" was great....Jill & Mary both did a great job, as did everyone else, and I really enjoyed it even though I felt a bit soggy through most of it! ;)

June 19^th- Saturday night was our end of year party for WOL. We did a digital scavenger hunt and send the kids and the parent off with a long list of things they had to take photos of and then we ate pizza and tallied up the points for each team when they returned. I think everyone, including the parents, had a lot of fun!

June 20^th- Sunday was Father’s Day and after church we went down and spend the day at Mark and Linda’s. It was a very nice afternoon and we spend a lot of the time sitting out on their front porch. That morning in church our new pastoral intern, Christopher and Heather Kocher were with us. They will be her for a year starting in August, and this was a nice day to meet them and Christopher gave the sermon. They have the cutest little boy named Aiden! Since the weather was so nice, Jared and I slept in the tent….I don’t think we slept in the tent at all last summer so it was kind of nice to be able to do it again. I had thought we would keep it up and sleep in again on Monday night, but storms were heading our way so the tent had to come down Monday morning.

June 21^st- I took Joanna out to lunch at Panera. We had a nice time just sitting and talking with each other!

Now backing up a bit….

Saturday, June 12^th- We went to Rachel’s wedding….she married Tim Brandli. It was a beautiful wedding and Rachel looks so pretty in her wedding dress. The reception was outside in the parking lot next to the Laborde’s and it was a hot and humid afternoon, but thankfully there was a breeze to that helped a lot. That evening we left the reception a bit early and went to Goshen to see Morgan and Brock in a Glee Club concert.

Sunday, June 13^th, we spend the afternoon with the Jordans and went up to Grand Rapids and spend the day at Frederick Meijer Gardens. What a beautiful place! They had so many wonderful flowers and some interesting sculptures as well. http://meijergardens.org/index.php

Everyone took a ton of photos that day! Here is a link to my Facebook album with all of the photos that I took.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=182991&id=618024210&l=cc15a0b9e1

Monday, June 14^th, Lori, Jill and I went to Hacienda for dinner and then afterwards went to the movies to see “Letters from Juliet”. I really enjoyed the movie. It is definitely a chick-flick and it made me cry at the end! ;)

Busy Weeks

2010-06-14T12:02:00.004-04:00

The last few weeks have been so busy that I haven't had time to blog....even just to do my week in review, so will catch up here with the highlights!

Friday, May 28^th- Nicole cooked a Korean meal for us! It was sirloin marinated in a Korean marinade, with some different kind of mushrooms. I made Jasmine rice to go with it and we even bought some fortune cookies for dessert. {Even though Nicole says they don't eat fortune cookies in Korea.} The meal was very good!

Saturday, May 29th- Mom and Dad came up and we went to Martin's Pet and Garden so Adam could help them pick out some plants for their pond of their deck. We then went to Chelsey Bayes open house and the onto to a double header church softball game. It was very hot and mom and I found nice shade on the side of the dug out instead of sitting right out in the sun! {Photos take by Veronica!}

Sunday, May 30th- Memorial Day Sunday: We went to Potato Creek as always. I can't even remember how long we have been going our annual picnic at Potato Creek, but I am pretty sure we were even doing it before Mark and I were married, but maybe not every year until after the boys were born. The weather was very warm, but there was enough of a breeze and we had low humidity so that helped a lot!

Monday May 31st- Memorial Day: One week from today, Nicole will be heading back to Korea...we have a busy wee ahead of us! Today we went to the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo. We ended up getting caught in the middle of a heavy rain storm while back in the tiger area and Adam & I got separated from Mark, Jared & Nicole. Adam and I also found out that trying to hide under a thatched room to keep dry doesn't work very well...the rain does get through! But...thankfully we were able to keep moving to around to find dry spots so our cameras didn't get wet. Thankfully, it didn't rain long and we were able to meet up with the rest of the family and enjoy the rest of the day at the zoo. After leaving the zoo we went to the mall for a while and then ate dinner at Chipotle.

Thursday, June 3^rd- Nicole's Graduation Ceremony from Concord High School.
When I got home from work this afternoon before heading off to Nicole's graduation, I went to the basement and noticed that our bunny, Twix, was not looking right and went right away to get Adam. We were pretty sure that he was very sick and probably dying! L I called Veronica since she has had rabbits for a long time and she said to make him comfortable by adding a towel to his cage and see if he would eat anything. He wouldn't eat, breathing was very shallow and he felt so cold. He barely was even moving. We went off to Nicole's graduation, (the boys stayed home), and Adam kept an eye on Twix while we were gone and he wasn't doing any better. I went down and spent some time petting him and trying to making him feel better, but just before I went to bed that evening, Twix died. Adam already had a box ready for him and a hole dug under the pine trees and so went out right then and buried him. We had Twix for at least years and he was getting old for a bunny, but it was still sad for Adam & I. Jared and Mark really didn't care much about him though. I will miss our sweet, little bunny!

Friday, June 4^th- Jared went out to dinner with Sarah and the rest of us went to dinner at CiCis and then went shopping for all of the food and other things that we needed for Nicole's open house which was the next day.

Saturday, June 5^th- Nicole's Open House!
It rained in the morning and continued to rain for most of the open house, but at least we knew ahead of time so we could just plan to have it inside instead of having to rush and pull things inside in the middle of the rain like we did with Adam's! J It ended up a very nice day; lots of people from church came as well as some of Nicole's friends from school. As tradition stands….both Nicole and Yve got thrown into the pool near the end of the open house. That tradition got started back with Marica and it has to go on, so Mark took on Yve and Shawn pushed in Nicole. Yve put up a bit more a fight, but Nicole was resigned to the fact and didn't really give Shawn too much trouble, though they both made a point to give everyone nice wet hugs afterwards!

Sunday, June 6^th- Nicole's last day with us and last Sunday at church!
Nicole spend most of the day packing and getting thing around and later that evening the Springers came over for dinner. Lori was out of town for Nicole's open house, so we invited them to come over for Sunday dinner so she, along with the rest of the family, could say goodbye to her. One of Nicole's favorite meals while here in the USA was spaghetti, so we had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner that evening.

Monday, June 7^th- Today is the day….Nicole heads back to Korea!
Nicole's flight left today shortly after 9AM and it was hard to see her go! She wrote each of us a very sweet letter which she gave to use right before she left. It seems very strange for her not be here with us any longer. L That evening I kept expecting her to come out of her room and plop down on the couch and pet Tucker! She left lots of thing behind and so her room doesn't even look like she is gone. She and her Dad are coming back in August to visit New York City and Washington DC and will come here for a day to visit with us before heading to Cincinatti where she will go to school at a private school for the next year.

Week in Review: 5/17

2010-05-24T14:49:00.001-04:00

Monday, May 17th: Jared and I went to Shipshewana for the afternoon. The main reason that we went was to find something for Mark for his birthday. Last year we bought him a ball made out of barbed wire to put in the flower beds. It sounds really strange, but it is actually a unique decoration and he really liked it. We had also bought another barbed wire thing to hang on the fence. We went back to the same store in hopes we could find something similar. We didn't find anything new made from the barbed wire, but we did find a neat trellis that was rusted and had a similar style. We also went to the cheese place and a couple of other places.

Tuesday, May 18th: C.E. Meeting

Wednesday, May 19th: After work, Jared and I went to Kohl's since we had a 30% off coupon and I found a new pair of Capris, which I really love! Tongiht was our last night of WOL for the year. It is hard to believe that this WOL has come and gone already! We still have a end of year party that we are planning for June, but all of the regular club nights are done now.

Thursday, May 20th: Worship team practice

Friday, May 21st: Today we had a pretty bad storm....thankfully not much wind, but it poured down rain so hard I could barely see to drive home. Mark even drove through quite a bit of hail on the way home. It cleared up for a while and we did a bit of work in the yard and then another storm came through later on.

Saturday, May 22nd: Mark, Jared, Tucker, and I participated in a walk for Ribbon of Hope at Island Park in the morning. Several people from McCoy went too including the Jordans. Veronica, Tucker and I walked together and we were some of the last ones done. They had a nice path marked out for us to walk....around the island and down the river walk and back around the YMCA. After we were done with the walk Shawn paid for our lunch at McDs. The weather wasn't very nice in the morning, in fact, it misted through much of our walking time. Thankfully, later in the day the weather turned very nice, which was perfect since that evening Jared went to the Northridge prom with Sarah Griffin. I went to drop him off and of course we took several photos.

Sunday, May 23rd: Worship Team at church then in the afternoon, we opened up the pool. It is going to be a while before it is warm enough to swim, but today was our first hot day, (high 80s) and it is supposed to be that warm all week so it may warm up sooner than we think! That evening, Jared & Nicole had their end of year RUSH party at the Hanson's.

Week in Review 5/9

2010-05-19T12:43:00.002-04:00

May 9th- Mothers Day- Spent the day at Mom & Dad's house. Grandma, Kim and Kassie were also there and Mom and I went with Kim to see her new apartment since she and Joe have split up. :(

May 10th- Went to the dentist to have my very first root canal. YUCK!!! Honestly, it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be, but it was terribly uncomfortable keeping my mouth open that long.
Tucker had an appointment with Amanda that afternoon, but since Adam is done with school and had Monday's off he took Tucker to get his hair cut.

May 11th- Took that van to Naquins for an oil change and to have them fix the driver's side window since for some reason on Sunday it stopped going down!

May 12th- Birthday!- Since we had WOL, we didn't do anything to celebrate our birthdays on Wednesday. It was so nice to see how many birthday wishes that I received on Facebook! I have no idea how many, but it was A LOT!!

May 14th- Mom's birthday: We called her and all sang Happy Birthday to her! For dinner we all went to Ryan's for our belated birthday dinner.

May 15th- Worked in the yard some...planting flowers and cleaning up flower beds. In the afternoon we walked over to the fire station since they were having an open house and then Jared had a church softball game in the evening. {They lost!}

May 16th- Mark and Linda came up for dinner and we all went to Lintons in the afternoon. Jared and Nicole had the RUSH senior banquet that evening and the Jordan's came to pick them up and then came back and joined us for dinner that evening. We had hamburgers, Griller and sausages on the grill!
Here are a couple of photos that Veronica took of Tucker that evening:

And a couple of pics of our flowers that she also took:

Blogging Again???

2010-05-18T14:09:00.008-04:00

Wow, what a long time it has been since I last wrote on my blog...I am truly a blogging failure! LOL! Something told me today to go and look at my blog even though I hadn't been here in such a long, long time. I really do enjoy reading all of my past posts and really don't care if anyone else ever reads what I wrote. Nothing in my life is that interesting that someone would want to read my blog on a regular basis anyway. So I am going to try something different. I am going to see how it works for me to use my blog in a different way. As more of a calendar of events. Just something I can look back on and say..."Oh Yeah, I remember when we did that!" If I feel like writing more details about the even, then great...if not, I am going to at least try to leave a list of things that we have done in the past week. Better than nothing, right??

Since it has been so, so long since I last posted I thought that I would post a photo from Facebook that shows a quick overview of what went on in my life during 2009.

I would say this about sums it up for 2009!
1. We are currently hosting an exchange daughter through Cetusa from South Korea...GaRam (Nicole) Song, but she will be leaving on June 7th.
2. A photo with Jill when we went to Chicago for the day for the Cetusa Chicago trip. Nov. 2009
3. Mark and I chaperoned a goup of 90+ foreign exchange students for a week in Florida in April 2009. Here we are pictured with the other chaperones.
4. Tigger & I at Animal Kingdom!! (Also had my photo taken with Pooh and Eeyore.)
5. WOL Kick Off party, August 2009.
6. Another photo from Florida....Hollywood Studios!
7. My Tucker!
8. Jill's adoration of Adam. LOL! The photo was taken after Jill & Jared's performance in Footloose in August 2009.
9. Teens' Involved at WOL Camp, Schroon Lake, NY, July 2009.
10. Jared's performance for Sound Express at Greencroft Goshen, Dec. 2009.
11. Mark at Epcot in front of the awesome "flower towers".
12. Walters family reunion, August 2009.
13. WOL Superbowl!
14. Jared's (and the other MMBC kids), performance of Brother's Grimm.
15. The first trip to Chicago of 2009, in July with Mom, Kim, Kassie and Linn who was back for a visit. This was at Cheesecake Factory!!
16. Elkhart Well Fields shortly after Nicole arrived.

More Later........who knows how much later! ;)

Catching up as Always…

2008-07-18T13:48:00.003-04:00

Well, it looks like it has been a really long time once again since I updated my blog. I guess I will never, ever truly get into the habit of keeping it up to date. {{Sigh!!}} Even when I updated it the last couple of times I didn't go back and say anything about what we had been doing and I missed such an important thing…our vacation to Topsail Island in May 2008. I was so thrilled to be back at the beach once again. After taking a year away from the beach in 2007 when we went to the Smoky Mountains, it was so nice to be back at the beach. Instead of trying to type all what we did here, which would take me forever, I will just leave the links to the photo albums that I have uploaded to Facebook and if you want you can look at them. (You don't need a Facebook account to see these photo albums, but if you don't have a Facebook, get one…more on that in a second…) I didn't get the last few photos uploaded, but the best are here:

Topsail Vacation Days 1 & 2
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28163&l=411df&id=618024210

Topsail Vacation Days 3 & 4
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28504&l=48ce4&id=618024210

Topsail Vacation Days 4 & 5
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=29207&l=39ce6&id=618024210

Speaking of Facebook, have you checked it out? I am having a lot of fun there. I am not sure if you don't have a Facebook account if you will be able to see much, if any, of my profile page because I have most things set up for "Friends Only", but you can check it out anyway. http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=618024210#/profile.php?id=618024210
I actually opened up a Facebook account quite some time ago, but then really didn't get it and didn't take the time to do anything with it. I opened my account to keep up with what Nathalie was doing, but even then very seldom went there. Well, on Memorial Day at Potato Creek, Kim and Kassie kept talking about Facebook and how I need to get back there and do something with my account. Nearly all of their past exchange students are on Facebook too and it makes a great way to keep in touch with them. So, after that I went and tackled Facebook and figured out how it all works. I even invited Marica to join and both Adam and Jared now have an account as well. There are a lot of silly and not-so-good things on Facebook, but I you decide to join, just make sure you have your privacy settings set so not everyone can see your Facebook and be careful what applications that you add. If you do join, I hope that you will let me know so we can be Facebook friends!

After vacation of course, was Adam's graduation and open house, which I actually did write about on my blog, but here are some photos from that event as well:

Adam's Graduation
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28435&l=a24e2&id=618024210

Adam's Graduation Open House
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=29165&l=4bb48&id=618024210

On June 11^-13^th I went and stayed with Grandma Eunice for a while. She had been in the hospital for hernia surgery which was supposed to be quite simple, but she had some complications and ended up having to stay for a week. When she got out she had to be on oxygen and lots of different medications, and they didn't want her to stay alone the first couple of nights. It was very nice to stay with her for a few days because I haven't done that in a very, very long time, but I wish it would have been under better circumstances. She is doing better now, but it is still in low spirits because she just doesn't feel back to normal. Being on oxygen really got her down, but I am hoping she will be off of it soon. (Maybe she is now, it has been a couple of weeks since I talked to her.)

June 16^th, Tucker had a moment of "fame" by making Grown Up Doggie of the Day on the site called Daily Puppy: http://www.dailypuppy.com/dogs/Tucker-the-Bichon-Frise_2008-06-16
Then one other day he had another moment of fame…a few months back Purina was having this call for photos to be sent in which would appear on Times Square for a special promotion. I received an e-mail from Purina a few days ago that said on June 19^th Tucker's photo appeared in Times Square! Here is a link, just type in "Tucker" and "Elkhart" in the search boxes at the top of the page and you will see him.
http://www.longliveyourdog.com/dogpark/TimesSquare.aspx

On June 20^th, Adam had his IUSB orientation. Mark and I went with him and they had separate sessions for parents and students. He got signed up for his classes that day as well. He had a bit of trouble with getting classes that worked for his schedule, but we finally got that all worked out. He wants to continue working as much as possible and with gas prices, he wants to take as many classes as he can at the Elkhart campus.
So his first semester as a college student looks like this, which equals 14 credit hours. The nice thing is he already has 9 credit hours from the classes that he took at Bethel during his senior year in high school.

INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTING- Mon. evening at Elkhart
ENG-A 190 - ART, AESTHETICS, & CREATIVITY- Tues. & Thurs. at IUSB
INTRO TO BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 1- Tues. & Thurs. at IUSB, with a 4 hour lab on Thurs.
ANTH-E 105 - CULTURE & SOCIETY- (Anthropolgy)- Wed. evening at Elkhart

Later in June we had VBS at church where Mark was in charge of Games, Jared helped with the preschool class as well as being "Captain Taylor" in a daily skit. I was in charge of taking photos and making a Powerpoint presentation for the final night. Adam wasn't able to help each night, but since the theme was Amazon Expedition, they wanted some "wild animals" displayed on the final night so he brought in some creepy crawlies from Martin's Pet & Garden for the final night when we had Parents' Night.

The day after VBS was complete; we left for New York and a week of WOL Camp. We left Friday morning June 27^th and returned July 6^th. We went to Niagara Falls the first day and stayed overnight in a church in Batavia, NY, Friday night. Saturday morning we got up for our final 6 hours of traveling to Schroon Lake, NY. We took the church van and had it filled to capacity, with 11 teens, including Jared, and 4 leaders…Mark & I, as well as Scott & Lori Hembree. When we arrived at camp, it was not great weather, cloudy and we knew it was going to rain. By the time we got the kids across the lake to the island it was coming down pretty good, so we quickly got back on the boat to get back the mainland and then it really broke loose and the rain was coming down so hard and the wind was blowing so much that the rain was coming across sideways! The waves in the lake were pretty big and the boat driver honked most of the way across because he couldn't see! We got so WET, we could have probably swam back and not gotten much wetter. When you get off of the boat you have to go up a hill to the parking lot and the water was running down the hill so fast it was like a river. What a mess, but something we will never forget!! Sunday afternoon, Mark, Scott & Lori and I took a day for being tourists and went to Fort Ticonderoga and a battle reenactment. It was a very interesting thing to see. Monday and Tuesday were Teen's Involved Days and Thursday was the Teen's Involved awards ceremony. Monday night we played carpet golf in the WOL Inn, where we tied for 1^st place but because Mark got a hole in 1 on one hole, we won! Hooray! On Wednesday we went over to the island to spend some time with the kids and all of us leaders did the high ropes course with the girls. Wow, okay, that was fun, but very scary and I can't say it is something I would do again. I loved the zipline, even though I screamed half way down. LOL! Friday was the 4^th of July and we went over the Island briefly and then came back for the celebration. We went to the parade, the Schroon Lake concert, which is hosted my WOL, and then the fireworks. They set them off right near the lake and there are literally 100s of boats that come in to watch, what a pretty, pretty site. We headed for home Saturday morning and spend the night Saturday night in a hotel in Ohio and arrived back to the church Sunday at about 11:30.

Here are some photo albums from camp:

Niagara Falls
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=31933&l=ea067&id=618024210

WOL Island, Inn & 4^th of July
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=32128&l=ea1a7&id=618024210

WOL Island High Ropes Course (Yes, there are even photos of me!)
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=32278&l=5940e&id=618024210

WOL Teens' Involved
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=32812&l=02f24&id=618024210

Our speakers for the week were Jimmy DeYoung, which we also heard last year, but you can never get tired of Jimmy, and Ray Pritchard. Jimmy spoke on Revelation and Ray spoke on love from 1 Corinthians 13.

Jimmy DeYoung: Prophesy Today
http://jimmydeyoung.gospelcom.net/pp/

Ray Pritchard's Site and his Facebook
http://www.keepbelieving.com/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=766840206

Since camp, the boys crammed in their 4-H projects and we got those turned in earlier this week and now that finally brings me to today! Wheww!! The 4-H fair starts today, but we aren't going until tomorrow. Jill & Anna are in a production of High School Musical and tonight Jared and I are going to see them. Tomorrow evening Pat Benetar is going to be at the fair, (free concert!) and Mark is going to watch her while the boys and I enjoy time at the fair.

Not much today...

2008-06-02T22:48:00.001-04:00

Today was our last day of homeschool bowling for the summer. Jared's team won first place and they each got a nice trophy. I will probably take Jared back on Monday's to bowl with Glenn, who has been teaching Joel L. to bowl. Glenn has been bowling for many many years and is very talented. He has been giving Jared some great tips and I think spending more time with him could greatly improve his game.

I should have been doing more things to get ready for Adam's Open House today, but somehow hardly anything got done. It is always hard when we are gone most of the afternoon for bowling, but really that is no excuse. I guess I know what I will be doing tomorrow!

Tonight Jared and I picked Jill up from work because the rest of her family had other things that they had to be doing. After we picked her up I took them to Steak-N-Shake and bought each of us a milk shake and it was very good!

Adam has graduated!!

2008-06-01T14:58:00.003-04:00

Adam had a very nice graduation ceremony yesterday. There were 10 homeschoolers that graduated, 3 boys and 7 girls. Today at church was Senior Sunday and the youth group ran the service. They showed the Senior power point and recognized each Senior. It has been a very emotional weekend for me and I have barely held it together. I knew yesterday at the ceremony at today at church if I started crying I probably wouldn't be able to stop and so far I have done fairly well at not letting more than a tear or two escape.

Besides Adam's graduation, we had 4 open houses that we attended. Our neighbor Courtney, who lives across the street, Cara Aksel, Logan Springer, and Luke Anspach. Cara & Logan, (of course) both graduated with Adam and I am Cara's prayer partner for RUSH. It was a long, but very fun day.

Today we will be working more out in the yard and around the house to get ready for Adam's open house next Sunday. I hope who ever might be reading this will be able to attend! :)

Just Stuff…

2008-03-05T21:49:00.001-05:00

Teens' Involved went really well and all of our entries but one will be going onto Regionals which are in Crawfordsville, IN, on April 12^th. It was an exhausting day, but I am so proud of all of our Word of Life kids. They really put their heart in their performances and did such a great job for the Lord. That night we ordered Pizza Hut for dinner because there was so way after that long day that I wanted to cook dinner. Jared still was running a pretty high fever so he ended up staying home. I know how badly he wanted to go, but it was a good thing he stayed home cause he said he slept most of the day.

Sunday he still stayed home from church in the morning, but by the time we got home he wasn't running a fever and was feeling much better. I let him play with Brandon in the afternoon and then he went to RUSH that evening, but it turned out that by the time he got home from RUSH that he was running a fever again! I was part of worship team on Sunday and it was quite a hard one for me. We actually sang 2 songs for call to worship and then sang 3 more for worship team time. They were really great songs, but two were brand new so that made it a lot more challenging for me.

Monday even though Jared was still running a low grade fever we decided to take him to get his hair cut because it needed it SO bad. I don't think his hair has ever been as long as it was this time. Afterwards we went to homeschool bowling and then ran some errands. By the time we got home, he was pretty tired and still running a low grade fever! When we got home, I was surprised to find Mark curled up on the couch with a blanket…guess who is sick now?? Yes, Jared passed it onto Mark and he has been home from work for the past 2 days and I am not real sure that he will be going in on Thursday either. It is the same thing Jared had…just a fever which I assume is all viral.

Tuesday we had a bit of an accident. When Braden's grandpa dropped him off, when he backed out of the driveway, he hit Adam's car!! Thankfully it was only the mirror and actually the mirror itself is okay, but the case is nearly cracked in half and is dangling. We dropped his car off at Jerry's place tonight on the way to church and he is supposed to get it fixed tomorrow. Adam is not thrilled about driving our van to work, but at least he has a way to get there and I don't need take him.

Last night the boys had a 4-H meeting and I had to go and sign their sign up sheets so afterwards I went and ran some errands. It was really snowing and the roads were icy underneath and we saw a van turn sideways in the road in front of us. That was kinds scary, but nothing else happened, thank goodness.

Mark still wasn't feeling well this evening so he stayed home from Word of Life and since he had the lesson and Scott wasn't prepared to teach we did Quiz Blitz for the evening and the kids had a lot of fun with it.

I guess that is all for now…time for me to get my pjs on, pop some popcorn and go curl up on the couch with my book and my puppy!

Scrapbooking & More…

2008-02-29T23:57:00.005-05:00

We had a great time on our Potato Creek Scrapbook weekend. I completed 14 layouts, 13 of Adam's baby photos and one layout of Tucker. I had hoped to get more done since we stayed an extra day, but it was still pretty good for me. While we scrapped we watched some movies in the evening so I had a hard time staying focused on my layouts, plus you know…I had to take time to talk! (We watched "50 First Dates", "Amazing Grace", and "Mr. Bean's Holiday"…it was pretty silly!) I am all ready looking forward to our next year's retreat. We have all ready decided to do all day Sunday again next year. It was so nice having that whole extra day. It just make the weekend much more relaxed. We started and ended our weekend by eating out so that was an added bonus. We ate lunch on Friday at Panera in Elkhart and then on the way home on Monday, we went to Pages in Time in Granger and then to Applebees for lunch. I didn't get home Monday until just after 4:30 and left again shortly after 6:00 when Anna picked me up for the first night of our new Beth Moore Bible Study. There was also a WOL team meeting that night, but since it was the first night of Bible study and I didn't want to miss so Mark went to the meeting by himself.
Following is a photo of my scrapbooking friends, but Donna is missing from the photo as she had to leave on Sunday evening and we forgot to have our photo taken until Monday morning. Sandy, Bettie, Anna, Ester and Me.

While we were away, the water came back up in the basement, since it rained quite a bit over the weekend. It had just started to dry up after the flood from the last week and then got wet again. As usual, there wasn't much water, but since it stayed wet for nearly 3 weeks this time, we had two toadstools grow in one corner and some mold on other places. GROSS!! Things are back to normal by now, but we need to get some bleach and spray on some of those spots and get it cleaned up.

2/28-2/29 Jared has been running a fever for the last couple of days. I am not real sure what is wrong as today, his fever was up around 103 most of the day, yet he said he felt better today than he did yesterday even though yesterday the fever was only around 100. Tomorrow is WOL Area TI and Jared really wants to go with us but if he is running a fever like that he should probably stay home. I guess we will just see how things are in the morning. Mark has to leave early to head over to First Baptist in Goshen as Dave Eger has asked him to be Quiz Master for the Quiz Blitz competition which is first thing in the morning.

TI ought to be interesting…the Hembress are out of town, so Mark and I are on our own this time around. I was very stressed out on Sunday trying to figure out what to do to get all of these entries ready to perform for our congregation on Sunday night, but it all came together very well. We had practice all day Sunday, after church, but the Hembrees weren't able to be there until around 4:30. Then they went out of town this week leaving on Wednesday morning. So, it has been quite a bit of learning for Mark and I trying to pull things together. The teens are doing SO well on their performances, and so as long as I have all of the paperwork together correctly, I think we are all ready for tomorrow morning.

I know there is probably lots more that I should be writing about the last couple of weeks, but it is nearing midnight and I need to think about going to sleep so I can get up for TI in the morning!

I Have Been Tagged!

2008-02-21T20:57:00.003-05:00

Okay, this is the first time I have ever been tagged...probably because not many people have the link to this boring blog. LOL! I was tagged by my friend Jessica and quoting from her blog here are the rules: "The point of this fun game is to answer the questions, then tag 4 of your friends and post their names on your blog. Might want to leave them a message telling them they've been tagged. Oh, and I make a new rule: absolutely no retagging."

Where Were You 10 Years Ago?

10 Years ago…hmmm… Feb. 1998, if I remember right that was our first winter in this house and the boys would have been 8 and nearly 5. (My goodness it is hard to remember that long ago….) I think that would have been the first year that I was homeschooling both of the boys…Jared in Kindergarten and Adam in 3rd, we skipped around some back then which is why he never really knew what grade he was in! I also was selling Pampered Chef at that time.

5 Things On My To-Do List:

Only 5? That is funny!!!

1. Get everything ready for Word of Life Teens' Involved, which is next weekend, March 1st. We need to get paper work around and get copies made among other things.

2. Start getting things around for the Word of Life sleepover which is in a 3 weeks. Yes, Word of Life keeps me busy!

3. Try to figure out how to keep Jared on task and motivated to get his school done before 5:00 PM every day. This is an ongoing thing for me and would appear on my To Do list each and every day!

4. We just started the brand new Beth Moore Bible study at church on Monday, "Stepping Up: A Journey through the Psalm of Assents", so I want to be able to keep on top of my homework. I can all ready tell it is going to be an awesome study, and I don't want to get behind.

5. Work on more layouts for Adam's graduation open house…specifically baby and toddler photos, actually any photos before about 1999, which means I only have about 10 years of photos to go through between now and June! YIKES!! Okay, I don't have any aspirations of scrapping all of them, but I do want to go through them and pick out the highlights of those times.

3 Bad Habits:

{Gulp…once again…only 3? Okay, maybe there are only 3 that I want to tell about!}

1. Jessica, this one ought to make you feel better… I get up between most days between 7:00 and 7:30, but with the exception of Tuesday when I need to get in the shower and ready to go before 7:15 since Emma's dad drops her off, other days I am lucky to be in the shower by noon! (I can't really believe I am admitting this here!} We start school and once I get started on it I don't want to stop to get myself around so don't end up getting out of my pjs until later. I guess that is one advantage of being a homeschool mom, but it just sounds as if I am lazy!

2. Not posting on my blog more often. I tell myself ALL OF THE TIME that I will post at least once a week, but it never seems to happen.

3. I am a packrat, but I get it naturally, from my dad and from my grandpa before him. I am an organized messy, and I hate getting rid of things cause you just never know when you might need them. {blush}

Places I Have Lived:

1. Kewanna, IN: little tiny town where I live for my first year, so I don't remember it at all.

2. Rochester, IN,- from the time I was 1 until the summer before my 8th grade year.

3. Argos, IN: bigger than Kewanna, but not much! This is where I went to high school and graduated from and lived until Mark and I got married in 1985.

4. Warsaw, IN: From the time we got married until 1988.

5. Elkhart, IN: Fall 1998 to present. (2nd house though.)

As you can see I am true Hoosier at heart since I have lived her all of my life, always moving a little farther north with each town where I have lived. Hopefully the next move will be south…..way south…where there won't be snow!

Things Most People Don't Know About Me:

I don't know how many people know these things, but I guess they are worth mentioning.

1. I inhaled a carpet tack when I was just a toddler and had to be rushed to the hospital, but no damage was done.

2. My dad was Chief-of-Police in Argos, which is why we moved there, and so I had to be a good girl. :)

3. I got married less than a year after I graduated from high school and didn't have our first baby until 4 years later.

4. We have hosted 2 incredible exchange students, who I both count as daughters…Marica from Serbia, (2000-2001), and Nathalie from Germany, (2001-2002, and has come back to visit twice, Aug. 2003, (or was it 2004 the first time?), and Aug. 2006.)

Here Are The Lucky People I Tag:

1. Gena

2. Heather

3. Sharmin

Now, remember, no tag backs, girls!

Here we go again!

2008-02-06T22:40:00.001-05:00

Well, once again we have water in the basement. Just a month ago, we went through this! UGH! The Elkhart River is currently at 10.4 feet, (flood stage is a 7 ft), and it has officially made the #5 spot for all time high historical water levels, effectively bumping our Jan. #10 spot, record of 10.07, off of the charts. This is just crazy! We had some snow, but not nearly as much in Jan. and then a couple of days of rain and, up came the water again. At the moment, the water is just starting to creep through the cracks in the basement floor, but the water is just as high or higher in our neighborhood as it was the last time and it came up a whole lot faster…just over the course of today. We just got the basement back in order from the last flood and today we had to get everything up off of the floor once again.

Here is the chart of Historical crests for the Elkhart River from the Nat'l Weather Service site. You can see our Jan. measurement at #10, but as soon as they update this list it will be gone and our record from today will be at #5.

Historical Crests
(1) 11.94 ft on 03/14/1982
(2) 11.87 ft on 02/24/1985
(3) 11.03 ft on 12/30/1990
(4) 10.46 ft on 03/17/1982
(5) 10.33 ft on 07/10/1951
(5) 10.33 ft on 03/05/1979
(7) 10.27 ft on 10/11/1954
(8) 10.20 ft on 06/09/1993
(9) 10.15 ft on 04/04/1950
(10) 10.07 ft on 01/09/2008

The weather in general has been pretty crazy. Twice last week, schools closed due to snow and ice, (Wednesday and Friday) and then Tuesday of this week, they postponed 2 hours due to dense fog. Tonight most of the area churches cancelled their evening services, but since we didn't have church last Wed. we decided to go ahead and have it this week. Halfway through the day today it started to snow and it got pretty bad, but it started to taper off and the roads didn't end up being as bad as what we originally thought. (so tonight our flooded neighborhood is covered with snow!!)

On a good note…we booked our vacation! Hooray…we are going back to the beach! Officially to Topsail Island, which is about 30 minutes north of Wilmington, NC. We are going the first week of May and I can't wait to go. (Now would be really good!) We aren't 100% sure what we will doing along with it, maybe DC, Gettysburg, or who knows, but we have time to figure that out before we leave. I am just very excited that we are going back to the ocean. The home which we have rented is right on the water once again and has its own walkway right to the beach. It is also pet friendly so we will be taking Tucker to the ocean with us! Here is a link to the home which we are renting:
Our Rental House

Here are a few more things that have been going on in the last few weeks, (since I got behind on my postings once again!)

Jan. 19^th- we had Parent/Teen game night for WOL. We played life-sized Trouble and were able to play our new WOL Quiz Blitz too.
Jan. 25-26, Mark and I, along with Pastor and Nancy went to Kokomo for the WOL Leaders Training Seminar. (Scott and Lori weren't able to attend.)
Jan. 27^th, Grandma Eunice's birthday and we met everyone for dinner at Logan's Roadhouse in Mishawaka and then everyone came back to our house afterwards for dessert and just spending time together.
Jan. 28- I started to come down with a scratchy throat and ended up by Thursday with a fever of 102 and sick on the couch all day. I am still not completely over it, (have a cough and a runny nose), but am feeling better than I was last week.
Jan. 30^th, even though the roads weren't great today and I was not feeling the best with my cold, Jared and I took Tucker to get his hair cut and Jared and I ate lunch at Burger King. Before we went back to pick Tucker up we went and got Jared a new pair of jeans at Kohl's.
Feb. 2^nd, we had FIF dinner at Jim and Willa Floras, also with the Wieses, and we had a very nice evening. It was the first time I had been out of the house for a few days since I hadn't been feeling well.
Feb. 3^rd- Superbowl Sunday. The guys went over to the Jordan's, the ladies went to Chevalier's, and the teens had a Superbowl party at church. Tucker came with me and got to have a play date with Lucy and Peanut, even though he wasn't too thrilled with Peanut, but he and Lucy got along great! (Lucy is the Chevalier's new Bichon which they got after Chloe died.)
Feb. 4^th- homeschool bowling started up again and Monday evening I went to Hacienda with Julie for dinner. We had a nice evening, but the fog was so dense on the way home, it was quite a challenge seeing the road!

A Nicer Week

2008-01-18T12:42:00.001-05:00

What a much nicer week this week than last…very uneventful, which makes for a nice change! We still have water in the basement, but there are dry spots and really the only standing water is in the shop and the back corners of the playroom. Most of the rest is still damp, but we are making progress. I have only done a couple of loads of laundry in the past week and a half, out of necessity, but I really need to get down there and do more. It is just not pleasant to be down there with everything being damp.

We babysat for Emma twice this week, once on Tuesday as normal and she is here again today. (She is napping right now.) We also had Braden both of those days and today we went and picked him up from preschool since his grandma and grandpa are going out of town.

Adam has had a very busy week this week. He is now taking two classes at Bethel, Written Communication II which is Monday evening and Psychology which is Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Logan is taking the writing class too, but he is on his own in the other class. I guess it is good for him so he can get more used to going there on his own next year. Yes, I am pretty sure he is going to go to Bethel next year. He has been accepted and even has been offered a scholarship from Bethel, which he has a chance to increase if he attends a scholarship day at Bethel. We haven't actually turned in the acceptance letter and paid the fee yet, but that is definitely the way we are leaning. Adam also had a Nat's Honor Society meeting this week as well as a busy week with work. This week was the deadline for the 4-H scholarships, so that was kinda crazy trying to get those finished and turned in….then we forgot to sign them and he had to drop of new signature papers the next day.

Yesterday we had Joel L. here for a couple of hours while Julie had a dentist appt. and lunch date with Jay, and then last night I had worship team practice. Tonight after Braden gets picked up, we are going to meet the Hembrees for dinner at Rulli's to go over plans for tomorrow night and have our monthly meeting. Tomorrow evening we have WOL Parent's Game night. We will have a short parent meeting and then play games. Lori is making a giant Trouble game where the kids and parents will be the "markers". We are also going to play the brand new WOL Quiz Blitz…parents against kids. It ought to be a lot of fun.

Tomorrow morning we were supposed to go to church and do follow up for the Jesus Film Project. http://www.jesusfilm.org/ It is a great movie that was distributed in part by our church around our church neighborhood and tomorrow we were going to go out and ask if people had watched it and get feedback. Unfortunately, it is supposed to be well below 0 wind chill tomorrow and we are also under a lake effect snow advisory. Right now the sun is shining, but it is very cold! (Wind chill currently is 17, but is supposed to drop throughout the day.)

One month from this weekend, is our annual scrapbook retreat at Potato Creek and I am all ready very excited about it. Same ladies as always are going, but this year since the weekend we are going falls over President's Day, we are staying through Sunday night as well. I need to get busy and start pulling together page kits because as long as it takes me, I will need the whole month to get it done. I think what I may do is start working on some of Adam's baby photos and younger years' photos, so I will have some of them done for when his graduation open house comes around.

Flood!!!

2008-01-11T13:02:00.001-05:00

(The following posts span a few days, and were things that I posted to Praisebooking, so the tenses and formats may not be quite right for my blog, but I want to get this up and don't have time to fix everything to have it in the right perspective, so I hope it makes sense!)

Thursday 1/3, we woke up to freezing weather, -2 and by mid morning is had warmed up to a whopping 8 degrees! The nice thing was, the sun was shining and with all the snow that we had it made for a bright and beautiful day.

After all of the snow and cold that we had in the last week, Sunday it got up to 51 degrees and the snow turned to mush! The Sr. High youth group were supposed to go to MI to go tubing, (Echo Valley), but they were closed because of the warm temps so they had to cancel.

By Tuesday it got up into the low 60s, we had severe thunderstorms Monday evening as well as a tornado watch. (And a week ago we were under nearly 2 foot of snow!) Now that all of that snow has melted, the Elkhart River, which is behind the homes across the street, is nearing flood stage. Our neighborhood is known for water, sometimes up into the streets, but more often in people's basements. Our sump pump has been running extra times today so I know the water is starting to come in, but when the basement gets really wet it simply seeps up through the floor so there is nothing that the pump can do to stop that. One good thing is that our home is higher up than most of the other homes in our neighborhood so we usually have some warning since the neighbors start pumping water out of their basements before we get wet.

Well, we got the water, much to my disappointment. The boys and I spend quite a bit of time Tues. morning/afternoon picking everything up off of the floor in the basement, and trust me that was no small task. UGH!! There was a small river flowing from Mark's shop through the laundry room into the sump pump, which was dragging saw dust with it. How pretty! The water is just flowing in and I have no idea how bad it might get, but even this is too much for me. Normally, when this happens we only get an inch or just a couple, so hopefully this time won't be any worse than before. We have been very lucky and this is the first time we have had any water in the basement for a couple of years.

(Thursday morning…..) Wow, what a night we had last night! Adam drives to Awana since he comes from work, so goes home a bit earlier than us. Just as we were leaving church, Lori, my best friend who lives across from the church comes out and says that Adam has been trying to call me on my cell phone and to call him right away. Uh oh...has our pump given out while we were away? Do we have 3 feet of water in our basement? We continue on our way home and my cell phone won't work. ARG! I can see that Adam is still trying to call and now Lori is trying to call too, but I can't get anything else on my phone. How frustrating and what a tense ride home, not knowing what was going on. Thankfully, we are only about 10 minutes from church. We finally get home and Adam says the Red Cross has called and the police and/or firemen are going to be around our neighborhood in about 45 minutes to evacuate everyone and then they will turn off our electricity!! What?? Why in the world would they do that? Don't they know that those of us that aren't completely flooded out need the electricity to keep our pumps running so we won't be totally flooded out?? How crazy is this? So I went into panic mode...moderate panic mode, I guess you could say. Mark and the boys started bringing up stuff from the basement, especially his woodworking equipment since he has a lot of money wrapped up in that. So far those things had just been up on tables, but if they are going to turn off our electricity, who knows how much water we might get. Meanwhile, I see the firemen pull up in front of our house and I go out to see what is going on. They don't really know much about the evacuation or the electricity; they say they are just there to rescue those in the back of our neighborhood who truly are stranded. All of the neighbors started coming out of their homes, everyone trying to figure out what was going on and what we were going to do. In the midst of all of this, Lori called to see what was going on and assured me that if we did have to be evacuated that we had a place to stay, as our church has two empty parsonages right now and she had talked to Pastor and he said that was no problem at all. At least that was one less worry. After that our evening turned into a waiting game. We watched 3-4 fire/rescue vehicles come into our neighborhood, including the rescue boat. The neighbors all congregated in another neighbor's yard and one sweet friend, (Leah), even went into make coffee for all of us!! It ended up that we didn't have to evacuate or have our electricity turned off, thank the Lord! They were only going to turn the electricity off in those homes where they had rescued the people that they knew were all ready flooded out and the electricity could cause a problem. About 10:30 everyone decided to go home and pray that our pumps all ran through the night and nothing else happened. Mark decided to take part of the day off from work today since he still had some personal days to take and is at Lowes right now to buy a new pump…just in case. Ours has held up so far, but it has run constantly for at least 36 hours and we are worried that it is going to die. Several other neighbors have had this problem and have gotten more water in their basements.

Flood Photos

2008-01-11T12:42:00.000-05:00

Here are some photos of the flood. You can click on each photo to make them bigger.

Our wet basement. You can see all of our junk piled up to keep it dry.

The river across the street. Obviously the trees, picnic bench and lightpost, (in the 2nd photo), are not supposed to be in the water. Normally, they have 4-5 more feet of land after the light post before the river starts! This is Jared and Braden, (the little boy which we babysit.)

Our neighbor's car in his driveway. (This is just 3 houses down from us!)

This is a photo from the Holmes backyard shooting down the street...you sure can't see the street though since it is covered with water. That bush is about 5 feet tall.

Boat ride anyone?

The view down the street in front of the home where the boat is. See the mail box?

This is the end of our driveway by the later afternoon, Wednesday. Notice the car parked in the road...that is the car from one of the homes around the block, and the car in our driveway belongs to the Holmes, 2 doors down.

Our Wednesday night adventure.

The neighbors were all trying to figure out what was going on and what we were going to do.

The photo is a little blurry, but here you see Mark enjoy the coffee that Leah, (in the green jacket), made for all of us. This is in front of Mindy's home, who you can also see in the photo.

Happy New Year 2008

2008-01-02T18:00:00.001-05:00

Wow, 2007 is gone all ready. The years just keep flying by faster and faster. Everyone always said that when I was young too, but I never believed it. I remember when the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas felt like it would never end. I even kept a countdown on my calendar, counting down those endless days until Christmas.

Now, 2008 is here and everyone is talking about New Year's Resolutions. Do I make any or just forget about it. It seems like it is very rare for a New Year's Resolution to actually take hold and get carried throughout the year. I could make the traditional resolutions to lose weight, exercise more, eat healthier, etc., but who am I kidding. I am not even going there. Even though I may not keep them, I am going to make some anyway, and here on my blog I am going to put them into writing. Okay, I know…that sounds really bad to all ready be saying that I won't keep them, but hey, I know myself and actually living by them and keeping them for a whole year just probably won't happen, but even if I can improve and do a bit better on those things that I am making my resolutions is better than nothing at all. So, with that said, here it goes:

My 2008 New Year's Resolutions

* To be happier every day and not take out bad things that happens on those around me.

* Work on having more of a quiet and gentle spirit. (This will be a tough one for me.)

* To go along with the one above… Be careful what comes out of my mouth. I really need to just learn to keep my mouth shut most of the time. Not everything that pops into my head needs to be said out loud.

* Be faithful in my quiet time. I have done great this WOL year doing my quiet time every day, but I want to make this something that I do all of the time and not just for WOL.

(edited 1/4 as i thought of a few more I wanted to add)

* Post to my blog more often. I did really well at the beginning of 2007, but then things started to fall apart during the summer. My goal is to post at least 4 times a month, but more than that would be even better.

* Keep the house cleaner, (which will make Mark happier!) I have been following the FlyLady plan for several years, but never very well. This year I want to try to do better by following her Daily Missions and my own personal Flight Plan.

http://www.flylady.net/pages/FlightPlan_Missions.asp

In the Scrapbook area:

* Scrapbook 90 Layouts. (Less than last year, but I really want to make my goal and I know trying for much more than this is definitely going to set myself up to fail.)

* Finish my ABC Scripture album.

* Continue working on my journaling.

* Continue working on showing more of my faith in my layouts.

We had a nice New Years Eve; we spent it at the Jordan's house, with the Springer, Chevaliers and the Burns. Springers didn't get there until late because they had a family thing with some of Brads relatives. Burns had to leave early because Tiffany wasn't feeling well. The Jordan's got the kids a Wii for Christmas and instead of spending the evening playing board games like we normally do we took turns playing the Wii. It was a lot of fun. We bowled and I played baseball with Veronica. I actually won in bowling…something I never would do in a real game, but in baseball Veronica won by the mercy rule…no, I wasn't doing very well. HA!

The days leading up to New Years Eve, weren't too great. I started coming down with a cold on Christmas Night and I have been fighting it all week. I am on the back side of it now, but it still isn't quite gone. We had Jean's funeral last Thursday and that same morning my hard drive crashed on my new laptop. Oh, was I mad!!! I spent an hour on the phone with Dell tech support and they determined that it needed to my replaced. They said that I wouldn't have the new drive until today, but unbelievably it came the next day. I am back up and running on my laptop now, but am still waiting to see if any of the data can be recovered from my old drive. Mark Kerk is looking at it and is going to try to get as much of the data off of it as he can. One of these days I am going to learn to keep everything backed up so I don't lose things. Thankfully, right before Christmas I backed up all of my photos, so I didn't lose any of those this time, but there are other files I really hope to get back.

Back to New Year's Eve….they were calling for snow, but not a lot. Adam came right from work so we had two cars there. About 7:00 it started snowing and did not let up all night. By the time we left at around 1AM, it had snowed between 6-8 inches and Adam didn't want to drive home so I drove the van and mark drive Adam's car. I really didn't want to drive, but I followed Mark and it was okay. It snowed like crazy all night and most of the day New Years Day and by now we have close to 2 feet of snow!!!

Here are a couple of photos that were taken on New Year's morning.

New Year's Day we took down the big Christmas tree even though I wanted to leave it up for a few more days. Oh well, at least all of my snowmen are still up and that helps it from being so dreary. We watched the Rose Bowl parade in the morning and in the evening I watched the HGTV Dream Home show. It is an incredible home that they built in the Florida Keys. You can enter a drawing to win the home, wouldn't that be awesome??? http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/dream_home_2008/text/0,,HGTV_30596_65296,00.html

Tonight Jared is spending the night with Turner Hanson and so it is a little on the quiet side around here right now. We are having chili for dinner and I think it is almost ready so I guess I better go and get the rest of the things ready for the meal.

Jean went home for Christmas

2007-12-26T22:59:00.001-05:00

December 24, 2007, 7:10 AM, Jean went to be the Lord and her husband Myron who passed away in Feb. 2003. Her obituary can be viewed here. http://obit.stemmlawsonpeterson.com/obitdisplay.html?id=488408

This has been such a long path for all of her family and having her go home on Christmas Eve will always make the holidays bittersweet. Today was Jean's viewing and tomorrow morning is the funeral. I finished writing my part for Jean's funeral and sent it to Jay and Julie this evening. I had it mostly written last week, but had to do some tweaking and I just hope it is okay and that it will honor Jean.

We had a very nice Christmas all the way around, but I think I am paying for the business and the late nights now because I am definitely getting a cold. After all of the snow and bad weather we have had for all of the December weekends, we ended up with a green and not white Christmas. On Saturday it warmed up and rained and melted nearly all of the snow. We got a few flurries on Sunday, but that was about it and it hasn't snowed since then.

It is hard to believe that Christmas is over for another year. The time from Thanksgiving to Christmas just flew by. It always seems to go quickly, but this year, more than normal. I didn't even do any Christmas baking. I only made some fudge, (which turned out really sticky), and a pumpkin dessert to take to mom's on Sunday. Mark and Jared made most of the Christmas Eve goodies on Monday while Adam worked at Martin's and I spent the day doing the rest of the wrapping. Every year I say that I am going to have all of the wrapping done before Christmas Eve, but that rarely happens. The Christmas Eve service was very nice this year. Jared even had a part. Rachel Laborde sang a song while some of the Jr. High and Sr. High kids came down the aisle with candles. Later, that same group did a choral reading and Jared had some lines then as well.

I am going to make this short tonight so I can get to bed! Night, Night!

It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas…

2007-12-18T19:53:00.001-05:00

It has been another week of bad weather for us. It has been kind of strange because mostly the bad weather hits over the weekend and then hangs on for another day or so. School did delay 2 hours last Tuesday, but unlike the teachers at Concord schools, the Elkhart teachers, which is where Emma's mom works, still have to go in at the same time even when school is delayed. How crazy is that?? So I still had Emma at regular time, but had Braden early that day since his preschool was closed.

Last Thursday night we went to an awesome program with Mom, Dad, & Grandma at a church in Plymouth. It is called the Festival of Lights and they have the whole sanctuary covered with lights...from the ceilings to the walls and everywhere else. Then they have them "dancing" along with the music. This is the 2nd time we have gone to this program and we really enjoyed it. A really cool thing...my very best friend from high school, Marica Clark, (now Branch), who was the maid of honor in our wedding now attends that church, (her husband is one of the assistant pastors there), and I got to see her. This is the first time I have seen her in a whole lotta years and it was so nice to get in touch with her again.

Friday night once again both of the boys worked concession stand for the basketball game and this time Mark and I went to our Sunday school Christmas party. We met at church, had a nice meal and then did a white elephant gift exchange. It is fun, but sometimes the presents end up being more dumb than fun. I ended up with a day-by-day calendar of 365 Paper airplanes and Mark ended up with a box of chocolate covered cherries with two reindeer headband things.

Saturday morning I had an ABF Breakfast at Esther's home. I was supposed to make muffins Friday afternoon, but didn't get to them before we left for the party so ended up baking them at about 11PM Friday night. That is definitely the latest I have ever baked anything. Our brunch was very nice, but I woke up to a lot of snow so wasn't sure how the roads were going to be, but they were okay. After the brunch, I ran over to Walmart to pick up some photos and do some stocking stuffer shopping. I didn't have much shopping time as we had to be a church Saturday afternoon at 2PM for a leader's meeting and TI skit tryouts/practice. Saturday night we had the WOL Christmas party which was a progressive dinner. However, as the day progressed the weather kept getting worse and worse. Pastor Ray went with us and drove the church van and I was sure glad that I wasn't driving! We went to 4 homes for part of our meal…the Shira's for appetizers, the Zentsen's for salad, the Arko's for the main dish and Pastor and Nancy's for dessert, games and a gift exchange. Our food at every stop was excellent and at the Arko's we even got their son, Titus to play Christmas carols on the piano for us. By the time our party was over, there was quite a bit of snow on the ground and it was still coming down. Pastor said he wouldn't cancel church though unless it got much worse…….

Well…it did….get much worse! ;) We woke up Sunday morning and at first glance it didn't look like that much worse, but it was and when Mark checked the WFRN web site, sure enough McCoy had cancelled all services for Sunday. Honestly, I was quite shocked, but I do think it was a good idea. By mid morning almost all of the area churches had cancelled and Mayor Miller even declared the city a state of emergency. I am not sure how much snow we ended up with but it was close to 10 inches, I am sure. It ended up being a lazy Sunday. I made a fire in the fireplace and sat in the front room most of the day working on some Christmas projects, reading or doing things on my computer. By early evening almost all of the area schools had postponed 2 hours as we were supposed to get a lot of drifting over night. I don't think it drifted as bad as they thought, but it was still best to not have those buses out so early.

Monday morning we did a shortened day of school and when Adam left to go to work, Jared and I left to go to South Bend shopping. Thankfully, by this time the roads were pretty much cleared. We went to Erskine Commons which is where Scottsdale Mall used to be. We got bunches of shopping done and can say that I only have a few more last minute things to get done. I had put a rolled rump roast in the crock pot so that was ready for us when we got home and after dinner, Adam, Jared and I got almost all of the gifts wrapped that weren't for our immediate family.

Tonight Mark and Adam are finishing up shopping for me and Jared I got all of Mark's things wrapped while they were gone. They still aren't home yet, in fact, so it is pretty peaceful here. HA! Jared is off doing something with his IPod and Tucker is curled up in a pile of blankets on the couch in front of me.

Jean has taken another turn again. I got an e-mail from Julie today that said that they had to put Jean on oxygen and that they could only get it up to 80% or so. The hospice nurse really feels that this time she is truly nearing the end and thinks it may be only a couple of days. Jay called me tonight to say that she is still hanging on, but there was no improvement over the day. Not that any time is a good time for something like this, but so close to Christmas has to make it harder on Julie and her sisters.

Hopefully, I will get here to post again before Christmas, but we have another full weekend of course, so we will see how things go. Here is a quick rundown of our schedule.

Saturday: Shopping with Lori and then doing the annual Springer/Martin Christmas that evening.

Sunday: Church and then going down to my mom & dad's to celebrate Christmas with them.

Monday, Christmas Eve: Adam has to work until 4:00, so we will most likely stay home, prepare all of the goodies for the evening, go to the Christmas Eve service and then come home to do our gifts.

Tuesday, Christmas Day: going down to Mark & Linda's for the day.

Ice & Snow!

2007-12-11T00:51:00.001-05:00

Jean is still hanging on. I really thought last week may have been the last for her, but it sounds like she has reached another plateau and is holding her own again. I know this is so hard on all of the family, but it all is in God's hands.

This last week has been pretty eventful weather wise. As I was typing my last blog post it had just started to snow, which ended up accumulating to nearly 5 inches overnight. All of the schools were delayed 2 hours and I think some ended up closing all together. Of course the boys tried to talk me into delaying our school, but that wasn't going to happen. HA! Then over Saturday night it got really icy again, just like I did a week ago. Many churches ended up cancelling services, especially Sunday evening. Of course, McCoy didn't close though. There have been several times where we have had to cancel Awana and WOL on Wednesday night, but only once can I remember them cancelling Sunday church and that was well more than 10 years ago when we still lived in the other house. This morning schools were delayed 2 hours and I won't be too surprised if the same thing happens again tomorrow as we are supposed to have more ice over night tonight. The ice storm is moving over IL right now and should be here in a few hours. I babysit for Emma in the morning, but since her Mom is a school teacher I may not have her as early as normal. I guess we will see what the morning brings.

Anyway…backing up a few days. Friday night both of the boys worked again. After dropping Jared off to work, I took Braden and Tucker into Martin's to see Adam and Sherry, the lady Adam works with. Before Adam got his license, I used to go in at least once a week, sometimes more and Sherry always gave Tucker a treat. Braden loves to go there to look at the animals and to hold one of the rats! After Linda came to pick him up, Mark and I went out for some Christmas shopping and to dinner. We started out at the Farmer's Market: http://www.americancountryside.us/market/ , then went to Sam's, to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings and then to Meijer for a few groceries.

Saturday, Jared and I went to South Bend for the day to do some Christmas shopping. I don't usually go to South Bend on Saturday this close to Christmas and it was really busy! I was happy though because I got quite a bit of shopping done. Still seems like I have quite a bit more to go through.

Sunday after church, we went, (slid is a better word….) to the Elco Theater downtown Elkhart to watch Jillian in "The Wizard of Oz". She had the part of one of the beauticians and an Ozian. The play was really good. In the evening the boys had their RUSH Christmas party and we went back to church to hear Jay Shaffer and his group, "Quartet plus One" sing and then we had a business meeting.

Tonight I had a very nice evening…I went out to dinner with Julie Lininger. She and I had been attending Bible study together and the last Bible study (Jesus, the One and Only), we went out to dinner before the last session. However, last Monday she had to go out to town, so tonight since Bible study is over with we went out to eat to make up for last week. We went to our favorite local Mexican restaurant, Hacienda...they have the best food! We sat and talked for nearly 2 hours after we got done eating..it was very nice.

By the way, Nathalie…if you read this…remember the man that sang Happy Birthday to you when we went there??? He was there tonight singing as well. He looked very different this time though…he got his hair cut short, (remember he had that long braid?), and he wasn't dressed in the sombrero this time either. It brought back some fun memories hearing him sing tonight.

Here I am again

2007-12-04T21:24:00.001-05:00

We are still working on our Christmas decorations, but at least most of them are up and all of the lights work! For some reason I am having a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit this year. It just does not seem like it should be December all ready. I hardly have any Christmas shopping done and not a single thing wrapped. I don't really know what my problem is, but I wish I could just get into that "cozy-homey" Christmas feeling because that allows me to enjoy the holiday so much more. Not that I am not looking forward to Christmas, but it just doesn't "fee" right this year, not that what I am saying makes a whole lot of sense, but that is how I am feeling right now.

Jared ended up placing 3^rd in bowling with a high score of 153, not too bad! He actually bowled over 160 one day, but it wasn't a league day so didn't count for a trophy…to bad! It is going to seem kind of empty next Monday since both bowling and Bible study ended yesterday. Bowling will start again in Feb. and Bible study will probably be starting about that same time too. Beth Moore has out a new study now on Psalm, and even though it is only a 7 week study compared to 10 week's which is her normal, it sounds like that is probably what we will be doing next.

Mark's Christmas party was very nice, but Saturday night we got a lot of bad weather. It kept going from snow to ice to rain, and you all know how bad that makes the driving conditions. We went ahead and went to the Christmas party and just took it slow. I was okay with that, but I was so nervous about Adam. First off, he had to drive home from work, and secondly, that evening they were having his Christmas party at one of the boss's home, where he had never been before. This is the first time he had really driven in the ice and going at night to a place where he wasn't familiar, well, I am sure you can understand why I was a little worried. I just kept praying for God to keep him safe. We are sitting at our party when I realize I have missed a call, so I ran out to listen to the message and I can't tell you how proud I am of Adam. I called home to talk to him and he decided since the roads were so bad, he wasn't even going to the party. {Praise God!} I felt bad that he had to miss his very first work related Christmas party, but I feel like he made a very mature decision to stay home. He actually started out, but only went a few blocks when he turned around and came back. The weather had gotten worse just in the hour from the time he got home to the time he left for the party. Thankfully, by the time we left to come home, even though the left side of our van was a sheet of ice, the majority of the roads weren't too bad and we made it home safe.

Julie Lininger called me today to say that things are real bad with her mom, Jean Springer. At the first call, it didn't sound like she was going to make it through the day, but it turned out that her body is simply shutting down and they feel like she may have a couple more day or as long as a couple of weeks. Jean has been ill for some time, years actually, and this has been so hard for all of them. Jean means so much to me as she is the one who first asked me to teach Sunday school for her when she and Myron went to Florida in the winter. I didn't think I was "cut out" to teach Sunday school, but she encouraged me and taught me so much. She saw something in me that I could not see, (and maybe never would have seen.) For a few years I just taught one quarter while she was away, and the rest of the time I was her assistant, helping out with crowd control and watching her teach. A few years ago, when Jean first started getting sick, she stepped down completely from teaching and I took over full time. She was an incredible Sunday school teacher and I hope that have been able to reflect some of that in my teaching. Julie asked me a couple of months ago if when Jean passed away if I would be willing to say something at her funeral. It definitely won't be an easy thing for me to do, but I want to be able to share with others what a positive Christian influence she was in my life. If it wasn't for Jean, I am sure I wouldn't be where I am today. Teaching Sunday school is a part of who I am, and even though there are weeks where I am sure I haven't done a very good job preparing, I just pray that I am being a positive influence on the little ones that I am teaching and helping them grow and learn more about Jesus each week.

December Already!

2007-12-01T12:08:00.001-05:00

Today we are finally getting the Christmas decorations put up. The last days have been so busy there just hasn't been time. We are getting the trees put up and hopefully the lights on and then tomorrow we will do the ornaments when we can all be here to do them. Adam is working today as usual. Already we have run into light problems just as it seems we have every year. We plugged in the 3 strings of lights, which were brand new last year for the snowman tree, and NONE of them work!! How annoying is that?? We don't have the big tree up yet, so who knows about those lights.

This weekend starts our busy December weekends. The boys work most every Friday in the concession stand for the Central & Memorial games. Last night Mark and I went to church to help get it decorated for Christmas, (then we all ate Vesuvios Pizza afterwards), and the boys worked. Tonight is Mark's Christmas party for Regal and it is at the Tippecanoe Place in South Bend. YUM! Adam has a Christmas party for Martin's at one of the owner's homes and Jared will stay home with Tucker. Next weekend is the RUSH Christmas party and the weekend after that is our adult Sunday school Christmas party and the next day the WOL Christmas party.

Tomorrow after church we have a carry in dinner for the people that have gone through the NETS training, so this afternoon I am making a dessert and a salad. I think I am going to make Beth Moore's Texas Sheet cake recipe, which is linked at the bottom left of my blog, and pasta salad. I also need to work on my Breaking Free Bible study this afternoon and if I have time, put my next quarter's Sunday school lessons into the weekly folders. If I don't have time for that today I will work in it tomorrow. Tomorrow starts the new quarter, but I don't actually have to teach since they will be spending the whole Sunday school hour going over songs for the Christmas program which will be in a couple of weeks.

Catching up once again

2007-11-29T17:45:00.001-05:00

Almost a month has since the last time I wrote in my blog, but I am not giving up on it! I will just keep plodding away. Mostly things have been pretty typical around here in the last weeks. There have been a few "extra" things that I want to write about though.

I have been doing a lot of research online about where we might go on vacation this year. The thought was that since this is Adam's senior year that we would let him have the majority of the decision so it could kind of be his senior trip. We just keep going back and forth. His original thought was going to Washington DC, which would be a great trip, but nothing any of us really want to do for a whole week. Then going west, to see Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park was considered. Next, and the best in my opinion, we thought about a Caribbean cruise! They really aren't nearly as expensive as I originally thought, but ultimately, Mark said that it still was going to be too much money. Cruises are cheapest in Jan. and money is always kinda tight after Christmas. I haven't given up the thought of a cruise, but it just won't be this year. Now, it looks like maybe we have settled on going to the beach again….Adam's suggestion…not mine, believe it or not. However, the *tentative* plans are to go to Washington DC for a couple of days and then for a week to rent a house at the beach. We are looking at some houses at Topsail Island which is about 30 minutes north of Wilmington, NC. This area will be perfect because the college that Adam ultimately hopes to attend is in Wilmington, (University of North Carolina- Wilmington), and while we are there, we hope to arrange a campus visit.

Thanksgiving is past and now Christmas is rushing quickly toward us. Wow, the time sure does fly! We had such a nice Thanksgiving. All of my side of the family came to our house, and Mark cooked our turkeys in the deep fryer. So yummy! In fact, tonight for dinner we have are having turkey noodle soup with some of the leftovers. He cooked extra turkeys for us to put in the freezer so we will be sure to have some good turkey related meals in the next weeks.

The day after Thanksgiving was the WOL Superbowl. It is such a fun night, but very tiring!

Of course the day after Thanksgiving is also shopping day too and I every year I go with Lori. This year though she called me Friday morning and said she was sick, so she wasn't able to go! L Jared decided he wanted to go with me, so we went and picked up Jill and the three of us shopped for a few hours until it was time to get to church for the Superbowl. Adam decided not to go this year since he enjoys his job and Martin's so much. Plus then he was able to stay home with Tucker. We left church about 2:30 Friday afternoon and went to Indy to a Pacers game. They played the Dallas Mavericks and it was a good game. The Pacers won by just a few points. After the game was the big WOL rally still at the Conseco Fieldhouse and then onto a new sports complex called, "Sports of All Sorts". The place is huge and has all kinda of places for different sports. Not really my kind of place, but the kids had fun there. Then around 2:30AM, we left to head to the bowling alley, where we bowled until 5:30. Wheww! I bowled terrible the first game…only an 80 something, but my 2^nd game was better with a 114, (which still isn't great, but hey it was about 3AM by that time!). We arrived back at church around 9AM Saturday morning. You can imagine we all slept a lot Saturday afternoon. We did take time to run into Martin's to see Adam though. He went to work Saturday morning before we got home and as soon as he got off there, he had to go work concession stand for a Central basketball game.

Our first session of homeschool bowling is almost over…only the party next week. Jared is very happy because it appears that his team is going to come in 2^nd. He has really improved over last year.

Oh, I almost forget... on Nov. 13^th, we got some sad news. Our friends the Chevalier's who go to our church and I used to babysit for Aric; their Bichon, Chloe, got hit and killed! We got Tucker because we fell in love with Chloe and we "babysat" for her several times when the Chevaliers were on vacation or away. It was very sad, of course for all of their family, and it really made me sad too. We always said that Chloe was Tucker's "girlfriend". We would even say to Tucker, "Where is Chloe??" and he would run to the door and look for her. Rosie, (the wife), was really torn up over it and I don't blame her a bit. I know I would be in BAD shape if something happened to Tucker. They had all ready considered getting another Bichon as a playmate for Chloe, and so they are going to go ahead with it and get her. Her name is Lucy and they are picking her up tomorrow. She sure won't replace Chloe, but I do think it will help all of them to have another dog in the house.

Life, one day at a time

2007-11-04T21:04:00.001-05:00

Last Wednesday was Halloween, but as usual, for WOL, we went Track-n-Treating instead. The kids go around the neighborhood of the church and pass out bags of candy which include a tract as well as some info about our church. It was different having this on the same night as regular WOL club and it definitely rushed the rest of the night, but the kids always have fun.

Thursday I met mom in Nappanee so we could go shopping. We went to Borkholder's Dutch Village. They have a large building which includes all kinds of little booths with crafty type things to antiques. There is another building that has a restaurant where we ate lunch. We both had smoked chicken salad sandwiches and peanut butter pie for desert. YUM! It was a nice day with mom. It has been forever since just the two of us have done something together. A couple of weeks ago, a tornado came through Nappanee, but thankfully it was on the other side of town from Burkholders and Amish Acres. I really only hit on one corner, but did a lot of damage to some of the RV companies in the industrial park. Also Dairy Queen and Taco Bell got pretty hard hit as well.

The last few days I have been doing some research on where we might go on vacation next year. We told Adam that he can choose where he wants to go and that will be part of his graduation gift. We have been exploring some different ideas. Washington DC, going west to Mt. Rushmore & Yellowstone, or maybe even on a cruise!! A cruise would definitely be my top choice. I didn't even really think it would be a possibility, but after doing some looking online, they aren't nearly as expensive as I would have guessed. I found one site that even includes the airfare in with the cruise prices. But they are more like last minute cruises so nothing is available for the time when we can go yet. If we are able to go I am thinking late Jan. or maybe in March. Those are the time when the rates are lowest, (Feb. is low too, but we have a lot going on in Feb, so it would be harder to plan around. Who knows where we will really end up going, but when I talked to Adam about it he voted for a cruise. Now if we can just talk Mark into it. He is saying he would rather go west, but we will see!

It looks like this week is going to be a more relaxed week than last week, mostly just the normal weekly things so far…homeschool bowling, Bible Study, babysitting, WOL, etc.

Some Photos

2007-10-25T00:19:00.000-04:00

Jared and Mark getting ready to take the Gators to Plymouth for the Blueberry Festival. Aug. 24th, 2006.

Mom, Grandma Eunice, & Aunt Kathy getting ready to watch the Blueberry Parade.

Adam and his new car! Sept. 13, 2007.

Adam is 18 now!!!

2007-10-24T22:31:00.000-04:00

Well, Looks like I have done it again, but even worse this time. It has been over a month since I last wrote on my blog. I don't know how to get back into the habit of it, it seems. Days go by and think, "I really need to write on my blog", but then it never happens. I guess once a month is better than not at all, but still that is just not how I want this to be. I am trying, really I am, but just not making much progress. {{SIGH}}

Here is a quick rundown of things that have been going on in our lives in the last month.

1. I started babysitting for a little girl, Emma, once a week. Her Dad works with Brad and so he recommended me to them. (Her Grandma watches her the rest of the week.) So now I have Emma & Braden on Tuesday and Braden on Friday.

2. Aunt Mary passed away On Friday, Sept. 21st. (Grandma Eunice's sister.) She hadn't been well since just before Labor Day, but of course it is never easy when someone dies. Grandma was pretty sad, but she is doing very well now.

3. On Sept. 21 & 22, we went to Mark's 25th high school reunion. His friend Jerry Meadows who now lives in PA came home with us on Friday and spent the night. Friday as a tailgate party at Vally High school and Saturday was a more formal dinner at the fairgrounds in Warsaw.

4.Sept. 28-30th was the Ladies Retreat and always I had an awesome time. The weather was perfect and I even went canoing with Esther on Friday afternoon. We did Beth Moore's Living Well for the retreat theme, it was excellent. On Saturday afternoon the massage school came in and I had 15 minutes on my arms and 15 minutes on my back. Oh, it felt wonderful!

5. I have started another Beth Moore Bible Study, "Breaking Free". Our church has offered it a couple of times before, but I wasn't able to attend, so am really enjoying it now. It will go until the first week in Dec.

6. We have started another season of homeschool bowling, but this time around Adam is unable to bowl because of his work at Martin's Pet & Garden. He really likes his job, so is okay with missing bowling for it. Jared is doing very well and is improving his average considerably over last year.

7. On October 16th, Adam turned 18 years old!! We went to Red Lobster for dinner to celebrate. YUM!

8. On October 18th, Adam got his driver's license!! He is very happy to be driving on his own now and it has been very nice for me not having to take him to work all of the time. He even drove Jared to RUSH Sunday night.

9. On Oct. 21, we had a bunch of family up for a dinner for Adam's birthday. It has been a while since we have had that many people here, but we had a nice time.

So, I guess that is about it...just typical life for us, I guess. I am still scrapping when I have the time, which hasn't been much lately. It is really taking a lot more involvement on my part for Jared's school this year, so I just haven't gotten the time to scrap as much as I would like. Tucker is getting more spoiled every day. HA! He sleeps with Mark and I nearly every night and I can hardly believe that Mark ever allowed it, but I think he enjoys Tucker as much as I do.

Oh, the post below, which seems kind of random for my blog....it was something that I read during Word of Life a few weeks ago for our prayer and share time. It is one of my favorite stories. I was in a huge hurry that night and so I just posted it quick to my blog without any explanation of why it was there. So just in case you wondered...now you know. :D

Table for Two

2007-09-26T17:03:00.000-04:00

Table for Two
by Kirsten Burgess

He sits by himself at a table for two. The Waiter returns to his side and asks, "Would you like to go ahead and order, sir?" The man has, after all been waiting since seven o'clock --- almost half and hour. "No, thank you," the man smiles. "I'll wait for her a while longer." "How about some more coffee?" "Certainly, sir." The man sits, his clear blue eyes gazing straight through the flowered centerpiece. He fingers his napkin, allowing the sounds of light chatter, tinkling silverware, and mellow music to fill his mind. He is dressed in a sport coat and tie. His dark brown hair is neatly combed, but one stray lock insists on dropping to his forehead. The scent of his cologne adds to his clean-cut image. He is dressed up enough to make a companion feel important, respected, loved. Yet, he is not so formal as to make one uncomfortable. It seems that he has taken every precaution to make others feel as ease with him. Still, he sits alone. The waiter returns to fill the man's coffee cup. "Is there anything else I can get you, sir?" "No, thank you." The waiter remains standing at the table. Something tugs at his curiosity. "I don't mean to pry but..." his voice trails off. This line of conversation could jeopardize his tip. "Go ahead," the man encourages. He is strong, yet sensitive, inviting conversation. "Why do you bother waiting for her?" the waiter finally blurts out. This man has been at the restaurant other evenings, always patiently alone. He says very quietly, "Because she needs me." "Are you sure?" "Yes." "Well, sir, no offense, but assuming that she needs you, she sure isn't acting much like it. She's stood you up three times just this week." The man winces, and looks down at the table. "Yes, I know." "Then why do you still come here and wait?" "Cassie said that she would be here." "She's said that before," the waiter protests. " I wouldn't put up with it. Why do you?" Now the man looks up, smiles at the the waiter, and simply says, "Because I love her." The waiter walks away, wondering how one could love a girl who stands him up three times a week. The man must be crazy, he decides. Across the room, he turns to look at the man again. The man slowly pours cream into his coffee. He twirls his spoon between his fingers a few times before stirring sweetener into his cup. After staring for a moment into the liquid, the man brings the cup to his mouth and sips, silently watching those around him. He doesn't look crazy, the waiter admits. Maybe the girl has qualities that I don't know about. Or maybe the man's love is stronger than most. The waiter shakes himself out of his musing to take an order from a party of five. The man watches the waiter, and wonders if he's ever been stood up. The man has, many times. But he still can't get used to it. Each time, it hurts. He's looked forward to this evening all day. He has many things, exciting things, to tell Cassie. But, more importantly, he wants to hear Cassie's voice. He wants her to tell him all about her day, her triumphs, her defeats...anything, really. He has tried so many times to show Cassie how much he loves her. He'd just like to know that she cares for him, too. He sips sporadically at the coffee, & loses himself in thought, knowing that Cassie is late, but still hoping she'll arrive. The clock says 9:30, then the waiter returns to the man's table, "Is there anything I can get you?" The still empty chair stabs at the man. "No, I think that will be all for tonight. May I have the check please?" "Yes, sir." When the waiter leaves, the man picks up the check. He pulls out his wallet and sighs. He has enough money to have given Cassie a feast. But he takes out only enough to pay for the five cups of coffee and the tip. Why do you do this, Cassie? His mind cries as he gets up from the table. "Good-bye." The waiter says, as the man walks towards the door. "Good-night. Thank-you for your service." "You're welcome, sir." The waiter says softly, for he sees the hurt in the man's eyes that his smile can't hide. The man passes a laughing, young couple on his way out, and his eyes glisten as he thinks of the good times he and Cassie could have had. He stops at the front and makes reservations for tomorrow. Maybe Cassie will be able to make it, he thinks. "Seven o'clock tomorrow for a party of two?" The hostess confirms. "That's right," the man replies. "Do you think she'll come?", Asks the hostess. She doesn't mean to be rude, but she has watched the man many times alone at his table for two. "Someday, yes. And I will be waiting for her." The man buttons his overcoat and walks out of the restaurant, alone. His shoulders are hunched, but through the windows, the hostess can only guess whether they are hunched against the wind or the man's hurt. As the man turns towards home, Cassie turns into bed. She is tired after an evening out with her friends. As she reaches towards her nightstand to set the alarm, she sees the note that she had scribbled to herself last night. "7:00 - Spend some time in prayer," it says. Darn, she thinks. She forgot again. She feels a twinge of guilt but quickly pushes it away. She needed that time with her friends. Now she needs her sleep. She can pray tomorrow night. Jesus will forgive her. And she's sure he doesn't mind.

Where does the time go?

2007-09-17T22:37:00.000-04:00

I have no idea how so much time goes by between the times when I am writing here in my blog. I think I will do better "the next time", and before I know it, 2 weeks or more have passed and I haven't written again. Not sure it really matters that much, since there is not much of anyone reading it anyway, (Nathalie and Marica are you out there?), but I do want to at least hit on the highlights just for memory sakes and for the 2 of you when ever you may have time to pop in and see what is going on in our lives.

The biggest news in our lives right now is last Thursday, Sept. 13th, Adam bought his first car!! (I haven't downloaded the photo from the camera yet, but will upload them as soon as I do.) We went out to dinner at Cici's Pizza and afterwards stopped by the mall since they were having a big parking lot used car sale just to look for cars. We didn't really plan on finding one since it appeared that most were way more expensive that what Adam could afford. We talked to one of the salesmen and told him what we were looking for and he found one that Adam really liked and that is what we ended up buying. It still was more than we had originally planned, but we payed for part of it and Adam will pay us back for some too. He bought a metallic turquoise Pontiac Grand Am. It is a really nice car...perfect for a first car for Adam. The only problem is, he still doesn't have his license! He isn't too far from being able to get it, I think just a bit more time behind the wheel and some parallel parking practice and he can go and take the test. He did drive his car to work on Friday and then Jared and I took it to the mall. It drove really nice. It feels so funny to drive a car after driving a van all of these years. I feel like I am sitting on the road.

Lori and I had our last scrapbook show of he year the weekend after Labor Day. It was he Midwest Scrapbook show in Indy and we hosted the crop on Friday night as well. as usual, it was a lot of work, but it turned out to be a good show for us and I made enough money to pay off my laptop, which was perfect! I never would have been able to save up enough to buy this computer if it hadn't of been for these scrapbook shows, so all of the work was worth it, I guess.

We had our first night of Word of Life last Wednesday and it went really well. So far we have 10 teens, 7 girls and 3 boys, but I expect that there will be more as the year goes on. Sunday was the RUSH kick off party and it seems strange to have both boys in RUSH this year. Jared, being a freshman, got initiated with the other freshmen and came home with make up all over his face and weird colored hair with glitter in it. HA! They also played weird Olympics and I guess the games were pretty crazy.

We now have one week of school under our belts and I guess it is going fairly well. There are things that aren't getting done as I would like, but I guess I should have expected that. I have Jared on a more structured schedule this year, which I think will help, but some how he still manages to not get everything done. I guess I am going to have to be more careful in checking to make sure he has done what he said he has done. Last Monday morning both of the boys went to see Josh McDowell at First Baptist church. He came to speak for one of his Bold Truth Seminars. Josh McDowell There was also a parent seminar in the evening and I went with Esther Flora. I was a really a great seminar. I am very glad that I went.

Tonight we started a new Bible Study at church, Beth Moore's Breaking Free.
http://www.lifewaystores.com/lwstore/product.asp?isbn=0767391128
I just love her studies and I all ready know that this will be a great one.

Updated my Slide

2007-08-31T09:09:00.001-04:00

I updated my Slide this morning to include all of the layouts that I created for the scrap game as well as some older ones that some how never made it there. Nathalie, make sure you check out the one of Mark and Wonder Woman that was taken when we went to 6 Flags last summer. I have had that layout done for quite a while, but never had it ready for upload.

I am the mom of a college student

2007-08-31T08:27:00.001-04:00

Wow, can you believe it... Adam started his first college class yesterday at Bethel College. He is just taking one course this semester....Spanish...and will get high school as well as college credit for it. He said it looks like it will be a good class and he likes his teacher so far. He and Logan are taking it together and Logan will be driving them.

We have a busy weekend coming up. Saturday Brad, my nephew, is getting married to Mallory and after the wedding we are having family photos taken. Sunday right after church we leave for Plymouth and the Blueberry Festival. Can't await for that! Our plans are the same as always....go to the festival on Sunday, picnic and fireworks on Sunday night, spend he night with Mom and Dad Sunday night and then to go the parade Monday morning. Dad is on the Blueberry board this year, so I am guessing we don't be able to spend much time with him. Last Thursday, the 23rd, we drove to Plymouth for the Gator Parade, just like last year. (Remember Nathalie...you got put in the sheriffs car!!) The weather Thursday night was very nasty, even some tornado warnings near Laporte, but even though the clouds looks very threatening, we didn't even get a drop of rain.

Saturday was our kick off party for Word of Life which was a Hawaiian Luau. We had planned on having the party up at Perry's, where they have a trailer up at a campground on a lake in Michigan. Because of the storms earlier in the week, they were without electricity, which means no toilets, plus there were a lot of trees and branches down. So we decided to have it at church instead. They came to our house for a bit to swim and then back to the church. We also had our parents meeting right before the party.

The "So You Think You Can Scrap" game at The Scrapbook Site is over now and of course I didn't win anything. I didn't expect to win, and it was just good to get some different kind of layouts done that I normally wouldn't have done. It was fun, but I am glad to be back to scrapping what ever and however I want.

We had Braden 4 days this week, so that was pretty good money which will help pay off this laptop. I am getting real close to having it paid for and since Lori and I have a show next weekend in Indy, I am sure I will make enough then to have it done. I have still been busy the last few weeks getting our school year planned. I am not sure I have ever spent quite this much time planning school, but it will be so nice having all of the plans ready and in the Homeschool Tracker. I just want to make sure that the next time I need a transcript report that all I have to do is click a button.

A day to myself

2007-08-18T09:04:00.000-04:00

Mark and the boys are off this weekend to the men's retreat at Quaker Haven which means I have the weekend to myself. Such a totally rare occurrence!! With homeschooling I hardly ever get any time alone like this and I am sure if it was a regular occurrence that I wouldn't like it as much, but I have to say that I have been looking forward to this! Last night after they guys left, I took Tucker for a walk and then I went over to Bettie's with a few other ladies to scrap. I didn't get much accomplished, but it was fun any way. I got home around midnight, read for a little bit and then fell asleep with tucker at my feet. Today, I think I am just doing to stay home and do what ever I want. I am thinking about maybe taking myself out to eat at Panera, but I may just stay home. I will probably spend most of the day on the computer, reading, watching a movie and just simply enjoying the fact that no one will be demanding anything of me today except for Tucker. HA!

This past week was pretty quiet, which is always nice. Linda started back to school full time so we had Braden 3 full days this week and will have him 3 full days next week as well. He will start going to 5 day preschool after Labor Day and then I will still have him 3 days I think, but not until after preschool is over, which is just before lunch. I think his grandpa will drop him off here. I continued to work on lesson plans for our upcoming school year, and I think that it will be a long process to get everything done and caught up.

Jared and I watched 3 movies together this week, Cars, Hildago, and Jump In, which is a Disney movie. Both Cars and Hildago we watched at night and I fell asleep for just a bit during Cars and Jared slept through half of Hildago. Good things we had seen each of those movies more than once.

this week's challenge in the "So you think you can Scrap" game was "Ordinary Objects"
Take pictures of 3 (or more) ordinary objects that you rely on to help you get through your day or make your day complete.

One more week and the game will done. It will be interesting to see how it all comes out. We have no idea how we have been doing as all of the voting has been done in secret and they haven't been telling us any of the results. I am just happy that I have got this far and have created some layout that I never would have taken the time to do. Honestly, this week's layout is one that I really didn't want to do, it just isn't my type of layout all the way around, but I do like how it turned out. One thing about this layout is, I had to take a photo in order to have something to scrap on this topic and I actually printed it out from my new printer. That was pretty cool! I can't see printing photos out at home on a regular basis, but for something like this it was perfect so I didn't have to try to make a special trip to Walmart to pick up one photo.

Falling Behind

2007-08-10T23:47:00.000-04:00

I had been so good about writing in my blog, but lately I just can't seem to get back into the swing of it. The last two weeks have been extremely hot, this week was the worst. Both week it has been in the high 80s or 90s most every day, but last week the humidity wasn't bad, but this week it has been very sticky and I just don't tolerate that very well. A couple of days I was pretty miserable. In the evenings I swam to cool down, but it just seems like during the day there wasn't much time for it for one reason or another. There really hasn't been much going on, in fact, I would say that this week has been rather quiet all week which really has been nice. Adam got home from Team Timothy a week ago tonight and so I have been taking him to work again, but that is about all. Actually, on Monday, Mark had to come home from work to take Adam to work because over the weekend, the an got a leak in the gas line and we had to take it in to be fixed and so I didn't have a way to take Adam to work. We have started to look for a car for Adam this week, and haven't really found much yet, but hopefully soon and then he will be more motivated to get his license.

I have really been enjoying my new laptop. I have been making a habit of sitting outside on the patio in the morning during my online time and it is so nice. We have an open field behind our yard and there is a woods on the edge of it. Because of that, our backyard can become quite a bird sanctuary and I just love sitting out here and watching them. They are always more active in the morning and it is a nice way to start my day.

One thing I have been doing the last couple of weeks is starting to pull things together for our next school year. We actually aren't stating school until after Labor Day, but I know if I don't start getting it planned now, it won't get done.

On Wednesday,which is Adam's day off, we were busy getting his application and other documents ready to apply to a local college. He is applying to Bethel College in South Bend for what they call the REACH program which will allow him to take a few college course his senior year in high school and get dual-credit for them. You have to apply just like if you were planing on going there full time, plus write an essay.
We got the application and essay sent off Thursday, but I still need to get his transcript printed off and get it in the mail. It has been quite a production getting it put together. I have an awesome computer program that I used to keep track of all of the boys school work and if everything is put in, than to get a transcript all you have to do is run the report. Unfortunately, I didn't start using the program until part way into his sophomore year, so I had o go back and add a bunch of stuff from before that. At least for Jared I will have it before we start high school in a few weeks and will make sure that I have kept better records.
The program that we use in called Homeschool Tracker

Earlier this week my old printer died and I just can't be without a printer so when we took Adam to work we went looking for one and when I picked him up later, I went and bought one that I had looked at. (Had to get it approved by Mark before I could spend the money!) I really like the one that I got..it is an all in one printer/copier/scanner. Thankfully, I found it for a good deal. I have used it a few time all ready and it works really well and I love how much easier it is to scan in my layouts.

As I mentioned in my last post, about the game I am playing at The Scrapbook Site, the Week 5 Challenge was to use music on a layout and I chose to use the Word of Life song along with some photos from our are TI Competition last March.

This week's challenge was called:
Power of 3
* 3 pictures
* 3 buttons
* 3 different ribbons
* 3 different patterned papers
* 3 word title
* 3 extra embellishments of your choosing
* Journaling

It has been a while....

2007-07-30T22:15:00.001-04:00

I don't know where the time has gone and how it has been so long since the last time I wrote on my blog. I guess things have just been kinda busy since we have gotten back from New York, but not that busy. I just haven't made my blog my priority for one reason or another. I never even really finished posting everything that I wanted to say about Word of Life camp, but in a nutshell, it was just awesome. On the way home from New York, we stopped for a few hours a Niagara Falls and wow, what a beautiful place it is there. You just have to see it in person to get the full effect.

Last week, July 20th-July 28th was the Elkhart County fair and that kept us busy for a few days and then just this past weekend, Lori and I had another scrapbook show in Grand Rapids, MI. (On Friday night we went to see "No Reservations" with Katherine Zeta Jones" and it was a great movie!) On the 22nd, we took Adam and Logan to Camp Michawana for 2 weeks at Team Timothy, and they won't be home until Friday. Seems strange here without him for this time, but it has been nice not having to run him back and forth to work all of the time. That boy really needs to get his driver's license!

The boys did well on their 4-H projects, but they didn't get most of the ones they signed up for completed this year. Between vacation, baseball and Word of Life camp things just didn't get done. Hopefully, next year will be better.
Jared took Scrapbooking and got a blue.
Adam took Weather, (a poster about wind) and received a blue/Reserve Champion.
He also took 3 potted herb plants and he got 1 blue, 1 blue/honor and blue/honor/reserve champion.

I don't think I mentioned it, but the day we got back from New York, my laptop arrived so I have had it now for a few weeks and am just loving it. Right now I am sitting on he couch with it in my lap and Tucker curled up beside me, and earlier I was sitting out on the patio with it. It is just so much nicer to be able to sit anywhere I want and still be online.

I am playing a scrapbook game at The Scrapbook Site called, "So You Think You Can Scrap" and each week there is a new challenge which we have a week to complete. I missed he first week since we were still in New York, but they built into i that you can skip a week. The challenges have been just that...challenging...but so far I have managed to get them done and uploaded on time. Until the game ends we aren't supposed to upload them to any other site but The Scrapbook Site gallery and our blogs, so I am going to go ahead and add them to this post, but won't add them to my Slide until later on.

The first challenge was to use an Elsie Flannigan Sketch, at least 3 photos and 2 different patterned paper by two different manufacturers. Elsie's style is definitely not my style, but I made it work. My layout is based on Sketch #7.
Elsie's Sketches

Week 3 was a Lucky 7 challenge, the title had to be something along the lines of 7 Things I am Lucky o have and also had o include, 7 photos, 7 buttons, and 7 journaling strips. This was hard for me since I don't think I could possibly use 7 photos on one layout, so I had to make it 2 pages and had to run to Walmart to get photos printed just to complete this challenge.

The Week 4 challenge was even more of a challenge for me because it focused on journaling which I am definitely not good at. We also were supposed to create a layout about a childhood memory and how it relates to you now. It had to have at least one photo, bu not necessarily a photo taken during your childhood. I was very perplexed about how I was going to do this one, but when I really started to think about it, I know I had to journal about all of my summers that were spent with Grandma and Pa-pa. The photo was going to be hard to come up with though.
I finally remembered that I had a photo of Adam when he was little with Grandma and Pa-pa on one of our Wisconsin vacations. I was a great photo for this layout and when the journaling was all said and done it was two pages long...so another 2 page layout for me.

This weeks challenge is to use music lyrics on a layout, which is once again something a bit out of my comfort zone since I have never done that before, but I think I have a pretty good idea rolling around in my head so we will see how it all comes together.

Wow, where to begin...

2007-07-13T21:48:00.000-04:00

We had such a great time in New York at Word of life. I can hardly believe that just a week ago today that Scott, Lori, Mark and I were headed for a day of site seeing to Vermont and Fort Ticonderoga. I really don't even know where to begin in writing about what we did while we were there. Word of Life has an incredible ministry and being able to go to the heart of it and seeing it up close and personal really impacted me. One of the highlights of the week for me what Thursday night when we went to the Island to spend some time with the kids and then stayed for their campfire meeting.

We didn't really want the kids to know that we were there, so we snuck into the campfire area from the side and sat down on the hill at the edge of the woods. Joe Jordan spoke that night and had a powerful message. Then he put forth a challenge/invitation to all of the kids. If they were ready for the first time to commit their lives to Christ or to rededicate their lives to him, they were to come forward and throw a stick on the all ready huge fire. Nearly every teen there came forward, only God knows if they all were sincere, but the site of all of those teens in a circle around that campfire really touched me. After everyone was gathered, they had everyone that wasn't all ready standing to stand and all were to sing. I couldn't even stand as I was so overcome by emotion at that point I just sat there on that hillside taking it all in and was moved to tears. Seriously, it was all that I could do not to sob out loud.

The whole are around Schroon Lake is beautiful. The lake is surrounded by trees and mountains. Monday afternoon we decided to take a hike up Mt. Severance, which is just outside of Schroon Lake. The hike was a bit more than we anticipated, but the view from the top was well worth it. We had a beautiful view the Island where the kids were staying, as well as much of the lake.

That is all I have time for now, I will write more about our trip later!

We are off to WOL Camp!

2007-06-29T06:29:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post this morning....it is 6:30 AM and in about 1 hour we will be leaving to head to church to meet the teens so we can leave for New York and Word Of Life Camp. We hope to be on the road by 9AM sharp, but have a few things to do before we leave. We stay in a church overnight tonight in NY and then will arrive at camp Sunday afternoon. We leave camp next Saturday, the 7th, and will stop at Niagara Falls, then staying overnight in a church in Ohio, just past the PA border. We will arrive home Sunday afternoon on the 8th.

Adam and Tucker are staying with the Springers while we are away. It is so nice to know that we have such good friends that will do things like that for us!

No More Little League

2007-06-27T21:31:00.000-04:00

Last night was Jared's last Little League game...forever! He has no plans on playing next year and he was supposed have one more game on Thursday, but it got canceled. Part of me is relieved and the other part of me is sad. Obviously, he is growing up and this is just one more thing that he is "done" with. Some times Little League can be so frustrating, but on the other hand I enjoy watching him play and interacting with the other families there. It sounds like this may very well be Jill's last year for playing as well, but Austin has quite a few more years so I guess we will just have to go to more of his games next year.

This morning the boys had a dentist appt. and afterwards we dropped Adam off for work. We then went out to lunch with Lori and the kids to Arby's. I feel like Lori and I have barely talked since Mega Meet...we have had bits of time here and there, and that one Friday when we went to Pages in Time and they stayed for dinner, but all and all we haven't had nearly as much time together as normal. It was nice today because after lunch we came back here so the kids could swim and we just sat and talked.

After dinner this evening I took Jared to get his hair cut...it was getting so long because I told him he couldn't get a hair cut until he got his room cleaned up. HA! Since last Friday he finally got it cleaned up, today he got his hair cut and he looks SO much better!

Yesterday Jared and I went to Pages in Time and spent the day there working on pages for his scrapbooking 4-H project. I helped him pick out paper and a few embellishments and he made pretty good progress on it. He still have some things to finish up at home and a couple of more that he just got paper for and so after camp we are going to have to hit it hard and get it finished up.

I completed two more scrapbook layouts the other day and both are now loaded into My Slide. The layout "Ripleys 2" was done for a scraplift challenge at The Scrapbook Site and so it also inspired my design for the first page of this layout too. For the month of July I am going to play a scrapbook game/contest at TSS called, "So you think you can scrap?". I have no aspirations of winning, but I have a feeling that it will pull me out of my scrapbooking comfort zone a bit which can never hurt. Maybe I will even learn something new!

Quiet Day Today....

2007-06-25T15:14:00.000-04:00

...which is very nice! I took Adam to work at noon and then came back home to wait for Braden to arrive. Linda is going on vacation tomorrow, so brought Braden here for a while this afternoon so she can get some errands ran as well as get packed.

We leave Friday for New York, so what I should be doing instead of sitting here is doing more laundry! I have all ready done two loads today, but have plenty more to do.

Saturday morning Jared and I dropped Adam off at work and then went to help clean up the church after VBS. Some of the guys made breakfast for us before hand and it was very good...pancakes and sausage! In the afternoon Jared went to see Pirates (again), with some of the kids from church and Mark and Linda came up for a while. They are getting ready to do some landscaping and wanted to go to some of the nice nurseries that we have here in Elkhart. Before they went home we went and picked Adam up at work, so they could see where he is working.

In the evening we had practice for Teen's Involved at church. We left Adam at home and Mark and I stopped at Blimpies for subs and took them to church with us to eat before practice. The practice went really well, but we plan on having them go through all of the entries one more time before they compete again. We are staying Saturday night in a church, (instead of staying in a hotel!), on the way to NY, so they will practice again there.

Yesterday after church RUSH was supposed to go to the dunes for the day, but the day ended up being cooler than was expected and only a few had planned on going so his trip got canceled. It ended up just being a stay at home afternoon for us, but we enjoyed it. Actually, Adam ended up going to the movies with Travis and Aaron and Lori H. picked them up. They went to see Fantastic Four II, and we stayed home and watched Ghost Rider on DVD. Mark and Jared really liked it, but it just wasn't my type of movie...it was okay, but sure not the best movie I have ever seen.

Back to Normal?

2007-06-22T22:57:00.000-04:00

Well, our life can go back to normal...what ever that is!! VBS ended tonight and Chloe went home about an hour ago...not that she was much trouble, but it is nice to get back to just Tucker. I think he is totally worn out and right now he is curled up on a pillow in my lap sleeping!

Jared spent all day today cleaning his room, under protest...but he got in trouble last night and Mark said he had to have it cleaned up by the time he got home from work. Amazingly enough, he actually got it clean! It was an unbelievable pit...no kidding, but now it is clean and even swept. AMAZING!

The weather has been so nice lately...not too hot and not much humidity. It wasn't even bad when I cleaned the pool this afternoon. However, last weekend with all of the ball games that we had, my shoulders got burned and just being out in the sun this afternoon made them start to peel. Ugh, now they itch!

Before we left for VBS today I started a new layout and earlier I finished up the one I was working on...photos from Six Flags, last summer! I am going to add them to my slide show as soon as I am done here. The ladies from Praisebooking have been talking about Stickles, which kind of like glitter glue, but much easier to use. I realized that I had some that Bettie had bought me a couple of years ago, but hardly ever use them and so they told me I needed to get them out and use them NOW...so I did...I Stickled on both sides of my Six Flags layout....though I am not sure it shows up real well on the scan.

Adam's SAT Scores are in!

2007-06-21T09:40:00.000-04:00

I am pleased...Adam did very well on his SATs! There is room for improvement of course, (especially in the area of the essay), but his scores were good on the other parts.

06/2007	SAT Reasoning Test
	Critical Reading	640	87%
	Math	650	86%
	Writing	520	58%
	Multiple Choice	55 (score range: 20-80)
	Essay	6 (score range: 2-12)

So, he is bound determined that he isn't going to take the SAT again, but I told him that will be up to his Dad and me. We will see! I think after camp is over, that he and I will sit down and start working on filling out some scholarship information and see how that goes. I know the better scores he gets on his SAT, the better scholarships may be.

VBS has been going well this week, we have had more kids come each night. The weather has been perfect for having the games and snacks outside. We have taken Braden with us to VBS two night, (Monday and Wednesday), and he really seemed to enjoy it.

Yesterday morning I took our van over to Jerry Perry's shop to have it looked at since it hasn't been running right for nearly two months. Lori had to leave to go to Virginia to do a show with Kim this weekend, (the owner of Kellers), so she asked me to take her to the airport, but said we could just take her van and that I could keep it until our van is done. Good thing cause Jerry wanted to keep it over night and I had to take Adam to work today. Actually, Adam had to work yesterday too, (which is normally his day off, but one of the guys that work there badly cut his thumb the other night so is taking a couple of days off.), so we dropped him off on the way to South Bend. Lori took the bus from South Bend to Midway Airport in Chicago and then flew to Virginia.

This morning when we took Adam to work, we brought in both Chloe and Tucker so Sherry, who Adam works with could see both dogs. I don't think I mentioned that we have had Chloe, (Chevalier's Bichon) since last Friday. They are on vacation and so we are taking care of Chloe for a week. After we dropped Adam off at work, Jared and I got lunch at McDs and took the dogs to the park. We got cups of water for them and it was funny to watch them drinking water from the McDs cups. We took them on a walk around Island Park and I think we wore them both out.

I am getting a laptop!!

2007-06-19T09:42:00.000-04:00

I am so excited! Yesterday I ordered a brand new laptop! Mark was able to contact the IT guy at his sister company and he was able to get me a great quote from Dell. So in a few days I will have a brand new Dell Notebook computer! This will be the first brand new computer that we have had since the very first computer, our Gateway, that we bought years ago. All of the computers since then have been put together by Mark Kerk. I am really hoping that it will arrive before we leave for WOL camp on June 29th. I don't even care if we don't have internet there, but it will be nice to be able to back up my photos and do some writing about our time there and then when we get back home I can just copy and paste it into my blog! I got my order acknowledgment yesterday, but am still waiting on my confirmation which will tell me when the ship date will be.
{Update} I am such a dork! I have 3-5 days shipping on my account and I took that to mean that my computer would be shipped within 3-5 days of my ordering it. The only thing that means is that *when the computer is ready* then it will be shipped with in 3-5 days. I just got my confirmation and it won't even be ready to ship until around the middle of July! Bummer! So, now I wait and learn to be patient! So much for having it for the trip to New York!

Last night Vacation Bible School started and I think I like having it in the evening. It is kind of hard with all of the kids that are involved in Little League, but I like the fact that we don't have to get up early to be there. And...the even nicer thing is that each evening they are providing a simple meal for all of the workers. That means that I don't have to make dinner all week! We are all helping with VBS too, so that is nice. Mark is doing games, I am the photographer, (and decorator, but that part is done.), Jared is helping with crafts and Adam is helping with the 5th & 6th grade class.

Sunday was Father's Day and after church we went down and spend the day with Mark and Linda. Adam wasn't able to go though as he had to work concessions stand for he Express, so Anna came to pick him up. Mark & Linda just got some new furniture for the house, two entertainment centers and some twin beds for the spare bedrooms, and they are so nice. All Amish made! I am going to try to talk Mark into ordering a new bed for us from the same guy, but it may take a while to convince him that we need one. We got Mark and new ShopVac for Father's Day since his old one broke a few years ago and he keeps borrowing one from the Holmes.

Saturday was busy with ball games. Jared had a ball game in Edwardsburg and Adam had a double header in the afternoon. So, I took Jared to Edwardsburg, (twice because we had to go back and get his cleats since he left them at home! ARG!) and Mark picked Adam up from work and took him to the games. Jared and I met them there after we got back from Michigan. Jared's team lost....the game was probably one of the worst they played all season, but the McCoy team lost the first one and won the second game by quite a bit. After the games, we went with the Jordan's to church to finish up the VBS decorations and ordered pizza for dinner.

Some Random Photos

2007-06-19T07:43:00.000-04:00

Tucker

Tucker & Jared sleeping in the tent.

Jared playing baseball for the Titans, (his tournament team).

Adam playing for the church softball team.

Catching Up!

2007-06-14T08:28:00.000-04:00

I have gotten a little behind posting here and told myself since I switched things over I would stay on top of things, so it is time to catch up a bit.

This week I have been busy with getting the decorations ready for Bible School. Sunday after church, Veronica & I stayed with the kids do to some more drawing and we also met at the church Tuesday afternoon. We have made good progress and don't have to go back until Saturday after the church softball game. We need Mark and Shawn to help us with a few things.

Jared was supposed to have a in park baseball tournament this week against the other two Concord teams, but the other teams are having trouble getting the boys around to play. I guess they have some injuries and some on vacation so the whole tournament was canceled. It is nice to not have games this week, but I was all ready signed up to work in the concession stand on Monday night so still had to be there for that. I really would rather work in the concession stand when Jared isn't playing anyway because then I am not missing his game. Jared ended up going with me and watching Austin's game and running around with Jill. Afterwards we went to Wendy's and Jared bought each of us a Frosty and fries! We drove over to Oxbow Park to eat it. After we got back home we set up the tent again. This week it is supposed to be nice all week so Jared has been sleeping in there each night and I have slept out there a couple of times too. It is not the most comfortable, but not all that bad since we piled on lots of blankets. :) Tucker has been sleeping out there too and this morning when I woke up I couldn't find him. I finally noticed that there was some tail hair sticking out from under Jared's blankets and Tucker was curled up under there with him!

I had my yearly check up on Tuesday morning...fun..fun...and was supposed to have a CE meeting at church that night, but I decided after spending all day at church working on VBS stuff that I was just going to skip it this month. I kinda felt guilty, but I really just needed to be home for a while.

Last night we finally got the pool completely filled up! It took 2 days of running the water to fill it up, but now it is done. It looks so nice with the new paint job. The water, of course, is freezing right now and it is going to take a while for it to warm up even enough for Mark and the boys to swim.

I started a new scrapbook layout yesterday with some more photos that I had developed quite a while ago. They are photos from last summer when we went to Six Flags!! I scrapped some of those photos shortly after our trip, but for some reason just put these aside and did nothing with them. I have been trying to get through some of the photos I have laying around and have been making pretty good progress. Winkflash, my favorite online photo developing place is having a good sale right now, .06 cents for 4x6 prints so I just ordered a bunch of new photos, the most I have ever ordered at one time. I ordered over 170 photos and even with the shipping it still came to just under $20.00! That is a great price! Some of the photos are for Jared to do for his 4-H project, but most of them are for me and so I will have PLENTY to scrap once they arrive.

Ali Edwards Newsletter

2007-06-13T07:43:00.000-04:00

I know that I need to update my own life on my blog, but this morning I am trying to catch up on some e-mail and just keep coming across some really great things that I have found online that I want to add here. I just read Ali Edwards newest newsletter and she has a list called: top twenty tips for creating & design. It is such a great list to refer to when scrapping and there are so many of them that I really need to take to heart. You can read the list and the rest of her current newsletters here: Ali Edwards Newsletter
I can especially relate to #1, 8, & 12! Check it out!

Awesome Online Movie

2007-06-13T07:21:00.000-04:00

My friend, Lisa, from Praisebooking sent me the link to this movie. She said in the e-mail to make sure you have a tissue near by and she was right.

Enjoy...it is very sweet!

Make a Difference

Saturday, June 9, 2007

2007-06-09T11:09:00.000-04:00

Thursday we spend a good part of the day at church with Veronica and the kids. We are in charge of decorating for VBS which will start in a couple of weeks. We are doing Rescue Zone and all of the decorations are things like fire trucks and police cars. We have to trace the designs on large sheets of paper and then the kids are helping us color them in. In the evening Jared had a baseball game and it was much warmer than it was on Monday, in fact, just as we predicted it was hot! It cooled down later so it wasn't too bad. They played Edwardsburg #3 and they won! It was an exciting game because it came right down to the end and they won by one point.

Friday Adam worked again and then Bradon came over later in the morning. School is done for his mom, but she still needs a few days to get in and clean up her classroom. I am pretty sure I will be babysitting for him off and on through out the summer too, probably just some half days. That is fine with me cause I can always use the money. Last night we had a nice evening. We went out to eat at Applebees with Jay and Julie Lininger. Julie did so much for us to help out with TI in WOL that we wanted to do something nice for her. Jeremy and Joel came over here to have pizza with Adam and Jared and hang out for the evening. Our meal was very nice. I had shrimp and sirloin and it was really good! When we were done with our meal, they came back here for a while and we sat outside and enjoyed the evening.

This morning, once again, Adam had to work so I took him at 8AM and then had to stop by the Little League to pick up fundraiser things. In a little bit we are leaving to go out of town for a wedding. Scott & Lori Hembree's son, (we work with them in WOL), Kyle, is getting married today. The wedding is in Berne, IN, which is south of Ft. Wayne and so it will take about 2-1/2 hours to get there. We will be gone pretty much all day. John Anderson, who works with Adam is going to bring him home after work this evening so we don't have to worry about that.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

2007-06-06T22:25:00.000-04:00

This morning we went to Amy Ford's home, (one of the homeschool moms that I have met through homeschool bowling), to help them clean up the roadside. They have adopted a mile stretch of road and clean up the litter twice a year. It is a good community service for the kids. She fed us monkey bread, (like little cinnamon rolls baked in a pan), for breakfast and made chicken salad for lunch. The kids were going to swim too, but it was a little cool for swimming today even though it was clear and sunny.

We came home mid afternoon and the boys got school done and then Mark came home and
cooked t-bone steaks on the grill for dinner. I made a simple lettuce
salad to go with them. After dinner Jared went off to play and ride his
bike, Adam and Mark went across to the river and fish and I took Tucker
for a walk. I also found some time to scrapbook and started a layout
with a couple of photos of Adam and Brooke from their birthday last
year. The photos aren't really that great so it has been hard for me to
be inspired to scrap them. I came up with some inspiration tonight
though and have it nearly done. I used foam stamps and paint to do the
title so am leaving it to dry overnight and then I hope to finish it up
tomorrow.
I uploaded a new layout last night that I finished a few days ago and
it is also in my slide show here on my blog. It was completed for a
sketch challenge forPraisebooking and were also some older photos that I took of Tucker last August while Nathalie was here.

Jared and I went out a bit ago and set up the tent in the
back yard. It isn't supposed to get too cool tonight and get much
warmer tomorrow so we figured it would be a good time for a camp out.
Jared and I are just about to go out there for the evening...he is
popping some popcorn for us to take out there right now.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

2007-06-05T20:20:00.000-04:00

Adam had to be to work today at 9AM so I was off and running early today. I took Tucker with me when we went to drop Adam off. He just loves to ride and gets so excited when we ask if he wants to go bye-bye. When I got home, I helped Jared with some math work and then we sat down and watched an episode of "I Love Lucy".

Jared is growing so fast lately that he has all ready outgrown the Vans tennis shoes that he bought the last time, so this afternoon we went to Kohls to buy him new shoes. He was pretty excited to find a really cool pair of Nikes for under $25.00. They are red and white and he is pretty proud of them as they are his first pair of Nikes that haven't been hand me downs from Adam. I found a cute pair of pajamas that were way on clearance too. :) After that we ran over to the mall and went to Hobby Lobby, Bath & Body Works and JC Penneys. I bought a few things at HL and some body wash at BBW since they are having a great sale right now. Neither one of us bought anything at Penney's but we enjoyed looking. We went and picked Adam up from work after that and ran to the bank and the grocery store.

I had dinner at Panera with the ladies from my ABF group this evening and ate my favorite Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad. YUM! I made the guys mac-n-cheese with hot dogs per Jared's request. The ladies were all still there talking when I left, but I had to get home because Mark and I had a phone interview with Dick Beihl this evening. He is the man that is helping our church through the process of choosing an assistant pastor. He is calling several couples in the church to get opinions in certain areas.

The boys have a 4-H meeting tonight so Mark took them there while I was at Panera and Logan will be bring them home any time now. We really need to get them going on their 4-H projects! We say every year that we will get started early and every year they are struggling at the last to get everything finished up. I have a feeling this year will be no exception.

Brrr!!

2007-06-04T22:40:00.000-04:00

Jared had a baseball game this evening and it was cold! You wouldn't think that since it is June that it would be so cold, but it is. (currently it is 55F.) I had worn capris and a short sleeved shirt today, but earlier had put on a sweatshirt and by the end of the ball game I had another light jacket on as well as had my legs and feet wrapped in two blankets. It wouldn't have been so bad if the wind hadn't been blowing! I put up the large golf umbrella and leaned it back and that did help block a lot of the wind. The good thing about the night is Jared's team won! Hooray! They played Big League Barbers and beat them 16-5.

Today was our last day of homeschool bowling so it was a pizza party and unlimited bowling. Jared bowled with Jeremy and they played 4 games. Adam ended up having to work this afternoon, so he missed it.

I guess Adam passed his "trial" period at work because this week he went from working 3 day a week (and only 4 hours on 2 of those days), to working 5 days this week with longer hours. He has off only Wednesday this week. That is good for him, but makes a lot of running for me. He is really liking his job at Martin's Pet & Garden and everyone says he is a good worker. I am glad he is enjoying it...it is so important to have a job that you like.

Yesterday after church we finally went to see Pirates of the Caribbean- At World's End. It was good, but a bit on the confusing side. I am looking forward to it coming out on DVD so I can watch it again and hopefully that will clear up some of the confusion.

After the movie we came home for a bit and then went back out to go to John Anderson's graduation open house. While we were there, Don & Michele showed up. It was so nice to see them. Since they left McCoy, we rarely see them any more which is really sad to me. We invited them to come over for a while after they were done with the open house and they came and spend nearly 2 hours talking. It was nice to get together with them again. We realized that we hadn't seen them since the Superbowl which would have been early Feb. We really need to take the time to get together with them more often considering how close we were to them a year ago at this time. I really hate how we have drifted apart like this.

Where did May go?

2007-06-02T12:09:00.000-04:00

I can hardly believe that a month ago we were in TN on vacation. It seems like just a few days ago. We left in April and now it is all ready June. I think someone stole May!

Yesterday was a fun day. We had Bradon again and we took him and Tucker and had a picnic at OxBow park with some other homeschoolers. It was a beautiful day, weather wise. When we got to the park, I let Adam drive...one of the days he is actually going to get out on the road and get some real hours behind the wheel. The bigger kids played football and I took Bradon and Joel L. to the playground for a while. When we headed back I took Tucker off of his leash for a while and he bounded across the field. It is so funny to watch him run in the grass because he really doesn't run, he kind of leaps, jumps and flies. I called him back to me and he was going so fast, that he ran right into my legs. HA!

The Springers have been in Florida this week and even though they got home last night they didn't come over yesterday.

In the evening we had a Word of Life party at the Anderson's home. Mark and Marla graciously volunteered to host and end of year party at their home. The kids played games, including catching water balloons in beach towels, ate lots of food including S'Mores, sat and talk and just had a nice time. During the sharing time, it got kind of emotional, as this is a very close group of kids and a lot of them will be moving up to RUSH next year. One thing that I really think is neat with this group is that they are ALL friends, girls and guys, they hang out and just have fun together. I think much of that was/is fostered by Jill & Jared. Since they have been together since birth, it is natural for them to be together and bring all of the others kids along, no matter whether they are girls or guys.

We found out last night that we have a new baby in the church, the Bargerhuffs had their baby... a girl..whom they named Esther Rose.

Today is another busy day. Adam is taking his SAT test right now and Logan came and picked him up since they signed up to take it at the same time. Jared had a game in Edwardsburg, but this game was moved up from next week and no one told the Edwardsburg team so they didn't show up. So, that was kind of a wasted trip, but Jared and I did stop at McDs on the way home from some yogurt and hash browns. Mark was home from work by the time we got home. This afternoon we are going to Sharon Kerk's Open House and then will pick Adam up from work and go to his softball game. (He is supposed to go to work right after he gets done with his SAT. )

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

2007-05-31T12:58:00.000-04:00

Kind of a busy day for me...started out with getting my hair cut and running a few errands, (put gas in the van & run to the grocery store for milk). Also we are babysitting for Bradon today when normally we just have him on Friday. Adam works this afternoon so will run him to work and go to the post office. Mark needs some 2 cent stamps and I was going to buy them at the grocery store this morning, but they were out. I would like to avoid the PO if I can since the line are always so long, so may just try to stop at the Martin's uptown instead. Tonight I have worship team practice and will pick Adam up from work right before I go there. Mark Kerk has been teaching Adam how to run the sound system at church and since he will be with me at worship team tonight he is going to run the sound for us. Mark will come and help him set things up and then Adam will be on his own.

For Mother's Day and my Birthday, Mark and the boys bought me Season 1 & 2 of "I Love Lucy" on DVD. I just love that show and so have been watching one or two episodes most afternoons. It is a nice fun break in the middle of the day. I am going to go and watch it in just a bit while I eat my lunch.

Adam is doing another practice essay for the SAT right now, much to his disappointment, because he would much rather be on the computer playing a game. Oh well!

Photos from Potato Creek

2007-05-31T09:25:00.000-04:00

More Photos from Potato Creek

2007-05-31T09:19:00.000-04:00

Wednesday, May 30th

2007-05-30T10:23:00.000-04:00

Today we are going to run some errands, if Jared will get on the ball and get his school work done. He has been saving money for an Ipod and now that he has enough it is burning a hole in his pocket. LOL! So, he really wants to go out today and buy it, but I told him that it all depends on him and how soon he can get done with school. I also would like to run to Hobby Lobby and look at stamps that are on sale, but that can wait if need be.

We need to be back no later than mid afternoon as Jeremy Lininger is coming over this afternoon for a while. He is working on training to become a paramedic and this weekend he has his practicals, which is a test to finish part of it up. But, before he can do that he needs to practice assessments on a few people and has asked to practice on us. I said that was fine as long as he wasn't going to poke us with a needle or anything. He assured me no one would get hurt. Wheww!

Tonight Jared has a baseball game and Mark has a meeting at church, but he may have to skip it so he can work on the pool. (Adam too!) It is nice having a in-ground pool of our own, but I will tell you it is a lot of work, especially when it needs to be painted. That is one hard job! I really do not like painting at all, but painting a pool and getting prepped is awful! I helped paint the walls last night and I had about all I could take. The roller was really heavy and paint is really sticky and doesn't go very far when being rolled. Plus to make things more difficult, our pool has a *small* ledge all the way around the deep end that we had to try to balance on and not slide down into the deep part while still painting the walls. I am sore this morning in places I didn't no existed. (in my shoulders and back mostly.) So, needless to say, I am glad that Jared has a game tonight so I won't have to help with the pool! The paint has to sit for nearly 2 weeks to be sure it is completely dry before we can fill the pool up again, so we really do need to get it done because at this point for me at least, by the time the water is warm enough for swimming it will be nearly July! Okay, there was my whine for the day!

I am liking this....

2007-05-29T10:58:00.000-04:00

The more I play around with blogger the more I like it! I have found out a way to make a slide show of all of my scrapbook layouts, (you can see the slide show on the left), and figured out how to link to photo albums that I have in Winkflash, (you can see a link to the whole album of photos that I took on our vacation!). This really has so many more options than 360 did, and that is very nice!

Today is a stay at home day all day long and I can hardly believe that. It has been quite a long time since we have had a day like this. Seems like even if we have a day at home, there is always something in the evening. It is going to be a nice day today, nearly 90 degrees, but hopefully not too humid.

Adam and I have been doing some college exploration online and I made him take a SAT essay practice test this afternoon since he is taking the SAT on Saturday. He is not looking forward to it, but I keep stressing to him how important it is for him to do really well! At this point, I think he will be taking some dual credit courses next year at Bethel College, (or maybe IUSB, but it looks like Bethel is cheaper), and then for his first year of college he will probably go to one of the local colleges as well. Then for his sophomore year he will go off to some place that will be more in the area in which he wants to do his major. His latest interest is Marine Biology and we found that the University of North Carolina has a great Marine Biology/Science program and it is located in Wilmington, NC, which is where we stayed all night last year the night before we went to our rental home on Holden Beach. Wilmington is also the home of the Battleship USS North Carolina that we visited. Who knows if he will really end up going there, but we sent for info. The bad thing is that it is pretty far from home, but the good thing is, it will give us a good reason to have to go back to the beach!

Memorial Day, 2007

2007-05-29T00:54:00.000-04:00

Yesterday as is our yearly family tradition, we went to Potato Creek. We left church right after the service, (couldn't miss that since I was on worship team!), came home to change and pick up Tucker and then were off to the park. The weather was not good when we left as it had been raining most of the morning and didn't stop until mid-afternoon. I got a funny photo of Joe, Mark and Dad cooking our hot dogs while holding umbrellas in the pouring down rain. I will be sure to post it here once I download it from my camera. Later in the afternoon, it finally stopped raining and we were able to move the chairs outside instead of sitting inside of our shelter. We walked to the nature center for a while and mostly we sat around talking and eating! Kassie brought her boyfriend, Brody, with her and they took a couple of walks with Jared. Adam just hung around with us mostly. Kim brought Keely, (sp??), her Lhasa, but she didn't really want to have much to do with Tucker. He really wanted to play like he plays with Chloe, but Keely was being a bit of a snob and just ignored him most of the time. She is obsessed with her ball and everytime someone would throw it, she would tear off after it and Tucker would tear off after her. She didn't think to much about that. We all got a kick out of watching it though.

Today, Monday, we spent most of the day working on the pool. UGH! We had to drain it to get ready to paint it, but before the painting it has to be scraped and sanded. Honestly, I haven't helped with too much of it up to this point as most of the time I busy with other things, but I did help with a lot of the sanding today. It is hot and dirty work and definitely not fun. I think we are pretty much done with that part now. It still needs to be power washed and then it will be ready for painting. Later in the afternoon, we went over to Labordes house for a cookout. They are in our FIF group this time around with the VanDaeles. They weren't able to make it though, but we went to Labordes anyway. Nancy's parents where there as well as Ken & Mary Lou Stewart. Rachel had been away with some friends, but she got back just about the time we were finished with dinner. The weather today was just perfect, and we sat outside all evening and had a nice time.

A couple of nights ago, the boys and I started watching the movie, "The Patriot", but since it was so long, we only watched half of it and we finally finished watching the end of it tonight. We borrowed 5 movies from the library this week and I don't think we are going to get through all of them! I watched Mona Lisa smiles Friday night and it wasn't quite what I expected, but it was pretty good, I guess.

Switching to Blogger for now....

2007-05-29T00:42:00.000-04:00

Well, I have been messing around with Blogger quite a bit today and think I am going to try to start using this instead of Yahoo 360. There are just things about 360 that are annoying to me and even though Blogger still isn't exactly what I would like to find in a blog, I think I like it better. I do like the photo albums in 360, but I don't always find them easy to work with, so we will try this for a while and see how it goes. For some reason both Yahoo Photos that is associated with 360 and Picasa Web Albums that is associated with Blogger, are very slow to load....very slow, and that is something that bothers me, but I think maybe the other advantages of Blogger will make it worth waiting for Picasa Albums to load since I won't be using photos every time I post to my blog.

2007-05-28T12:25:00.000-04:00

2007-05-28T09:51:00.001-04:00

Just testing this out to see if I want to move my blog here!
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Chicago Layouts

2007-05-27T01:51:00.000-04:00

Pevious Blogs....

2007-05-26T02:16:00.000-04:00

I was going to start switching over my old blogs from 360 to here at Blogger, but I think that it is going to take too much time to do all of that. So, to make it easier, all of the old blog posts can still be found at: Yahoo 360

Sunday, November 05, 2006

2006-11-05T13:01:00.000-05:00

Today was an awesome church service for us. Jared got baptized today!

The morning started out not so great because I was on worship team again this week which means being to church early. Right before we had to leave, Jared tells me that he needs another copy of his testimony. That wouldn't normally be a problem, but you know how it goes....everything went wrong. First, it is on the other computer which isn't hooked up to a printer, so I have to burn it to a CD and bring it over to this computer. For some reason I couldn't get it to go into the CD....finally after about 4 tries, I got it to work. Then I bring it over to this computer and the ink it almost gone so even when I printed it only part of it could be read. Switched the printer setting to "better" and then thankfully it came out okay. By the time we left home, I all ready should have been at church for practice! Thankfully, we are less than 10 minutes from church, so we got there and I flew in and apologized. They were waiting for me even though thought they would have started with out me. Julie told me that really we weren't supposed to start until 8:45 so I was really only about 2 minutes late!

Anyway...the rest of the morning went much better from there. This month is Pastor's appreciation month and we had a wonderful presentation of appreciation and love to our pastor and his family, including a touching power point. After that worship team, a short sermon about baptism, and then the baptism service itself. Jared was one of 5 that got baptised today. Luke, Jillian, Angelica, Katie were the others who were baptised today. It was very nice!

Thursday, November 02, 2006

2006-11-02T12:44:00.000-05:00

Babysitting for Aric again today and we have homeschool gym class. Today at gym is kinda bittersweet...this will be our last day for a while. The sign up for the next session is today and we have decided not to sign up again. I know this doesn't sound like a big deal, but for 7 years I was the Kind. gym teacher and so was there for every gym session. This year I decided to step down from teaching and since this is the session that runs up to Christmas time we have decided since we don't have to be there we are skipping this time. I know it is the right thing to do, but on the other hand, it is something we have done for so long that it feels kinda strange to me. I have had a lot of transitions in my life this year, and so this is just one more. It has all been for good, but just so much is changing at once. I stepped down from another design team that I had been a part of for nearly 2 years, after being an Awana leader for 16 years we moved up to Jr. High Word of Life, and after teaching gym for all of those year, stepping down from that too. Oh yeah...and after babysitting for Aric for 1-1/2 years that ended when he went to Kind. (that is why it is nice to have him back for a few days! ) All of those things took place within about a month of each other, so it has just been a bit different, but on the other hand freeing for me.

I think we are having leftover chili for dinner tonight and then after dinner Mark has a deacon's meeting and I have worship team practice again. (this will be the 4th night this week I have been at church!)

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

2006-11-01T12:31:00.000-05:00

Last night we had WOL Track-N-Treat and tonight as usual was regular WOL club night. I had the ice breaker tonight and had the kids break into teams and one had to throw marshmallows into the other ones mouth. The team that got the most caught, chewed and swallowed on 5 minutes won! Our winners where Jared and Morgan Jordan....Jared was the marshmallow eater and he ate 16 marshmallows!

Tucker got a haircut today and I told them to make it shorter than last time, and boy is it! I hardly recognize him since it is so short now, but he still is cute and I know it will grow back.

We babysat for Aric today...he was so excited to come and stay with us. After babysitting for him for at least 1-1/2 years, this August he went to Kind., so we haven't had him for a while. This week is parent/teacher conferences, so no Kind. for the rest of week, so he will be with us. I did this layout of Aric a while back and it is so typically Aric. This photo was taken at Awana last spring for Think Summer night.

Dinner tonight: Chili
Dinner Tuesday: Crockpot Potato Sausage Casserole

Monday, October 30, 2006

2006-10-30T12:03:00.000-05:00

Woke up in the middle of the night with a headache and it didn't go away until late morning. Got up and then ended up going back to bed for a while in hopes that my headache went away. Thankfully, when I woke up for the 2nd time, I was feeling much better.

I did something really cool with my Crop-A-Dile today!! I was looking through a scrapbook catalog and saw these really neat ribbon boxes. They came with dowel rods to put spools of ribbon on and then there were holes on the sides to stick the ribbon through. I started thinking....I store my ribbon in those cardboard photo storage boxes, some pretty ones that I picked up for real cheap at Micheals quite a while ago. I think I paid maybe 1.00 or 1.25 for them. The boxes in the catalog were 4.95 each. Well, I knew Mark had dowel rods down in the basement so I sent Adam down to cut some for me to fit the inside dimensions of my boxes. I the took my Crop-A-Dile and punched holes all along the edge of my box, lining them up with each roll of ribbon. It was SO easy!! I used the farthest depth that the Crop-A-Dile punches and so the ribbon comes out just under the edge of the lid, which hold the ribbon in place. I am pretty proud of myself for figuring that out and now I have two awesome ribbon storage boxes and that were much cheaper than I could have bought them for!

Went to my Beth Moore Daniel Bible study today and it was another great session, but my, did it make me think. This past week of homework and the next are going to be quite challenging. Speaking of which...I haven't done my daily WOL quiet time yet today, so I guess I had better wrap it up here and get to it!

Dinner Tonight: Tuna Noodle Casserole

Sunday, October 29, 2006

2006-10-29T11:38:00.000-05:00

Busy day today. We had to be at church early because Jared had to practice singing with the other teens and I had worship team. We had our yearly missions dinner right after church and just about the time we turned onto St. Clair, I realized that my dessert was still at home. ARG! So, after worship team practice, I went back home to get it. I missed Jared's first song, but got back in time to hear half of the 2nd one. Adam stayed home sick today so he missed the mission dinner. He felt kinda sick to his stomach and was running a low grade fever. There was a short program after the dinner and by the time we got home, he was feeling better.

We had a Word of Life meeting this afternoon and the Hembrees and Sherry came over to our house, so Adam, Travis and Jared hung out for a while.

Since the time changed yesterday it was dark today around 6PM, UGH! It was a beautiful sunny day so it really should have stayed light longer, but I guess even if we hadn't of changed time it still would have been dark at 6PM because that would have been the time we would have been on all along. It is just going to take a bit of time getting used to it getting dark earlier now. I liked it better when it was staying light later!

Dinner Tonight: Popcorn

Saturday, October 28, 2006

2006-10-28T12:27:00.000-04:00

Saturday, October 28, 2006
I am so frustrated today. Trying to get my 360 page set up is taking me forever and well, it just hasn't been a good day. What I really want to do is just go and take a nap, but at this time by the time I get to sleep it will be time to wake up and make dinner. ARG! Oh well, what I really need to be doing is my Beth Moore Daniel Bible study. It is getting more tough as time goes on, but I know it will be worth it.

Adam's waterbed fell apart again, and so we went and looked at new beds today. Didn't buy anything, because the more we thought about and talked to the guy at the waterbed store, I think it can be fixed. Sounds like Mark will need to buy larger brackets and longer screws to hold it together. So, until that happens, Adam doesn't have a bed, which doesn't make him very happy. I guess we have to get it drained first and then we will see what happens from there.

It is SO windy today, we are even under a wind advisory. At least the sun is out and the temp is 46 right now, so that isn't bad for nearly the end of October. Our time will change tonight so we will get an extra hour of sleep, but since we have to be to church about 30 minutes early, it won't make that much difference. {sigh}

Dinner Today: Salad