Week in Review 5/9

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???

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! ;) 

Scrapbooking & More…

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!

Flood Photos

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

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.

Some Photos

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.

Wow, where to begin...

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!

Some Random Photos

Tucker


Tucker & Jared sleeping in the tent.


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


Adam playing for the church softball team.

Photos from Potato Creek

More Photos from Potato Creek

Sunday, November 05, 2006

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!