Sweet Treats with Sweet Friends

The sad reality is near...our sweet friends are getting ready to move back to WV in just a few short days. We've decided to drown our sorrows in ice cream! :) (Actually, Alli had some groupons she had to use up before leaving town and we were happy to help!) Lucky for us, when we showed up at TCBY, we found out that it was their 30th anniversary and so a small cup of their yogurt was only $1.30!! SCORE!

Callie and Carlie

Jacob, Keatley, Cooper, and Josiah

Caleb sat with Alli and I - and ate EVERY bite of his ice cream (i mean yogurt) and even some of Alli's cookie dough bits - and LOVED it! Go figure! :)

Still moving...

Still working on getting our "old" main building totally cleaned out and ready for the sale to be closed at the end of the month....which translates to working on Fridays (yes, supposed to be David's day off) and going in to help Daddy alot. Lucky for us, we have two little but very good helpers! :)

HER first haircut...

I shouldn't be that surprised, right? Every kid does it, or so I've heard. Thursday mornings are a little crazy around here. I should back up. Wednesday nights are a little crazy. It's a late night at church for us. REALLY late if it's a week that I'm singing on praise team. Then Thursday mornings I lead biblestudy from our home. It's worked out great for the last year - the kids always went to a Mother's Morning Out at a church down the street for me. But they cancelled it this year. So without any other options, Callie and Caleb stay home on Thursdays and I pray that they can stay out of trouble. They play upstairs for 45 minutes while I'm leading the discussion and going over our homework....then they are allowed to come downstairs and watch a movie/play in the playroom while we watch our DVD of Beth Moore. They have done well so far.

On this particular Thursday, I had a meeting with one of the ladies in biblestudy afterwards - she is our new Preschool Director at church and we were talking over a few things. The kids were running around and playing, and all of a sudden, Callie came downstairs and looked at me - and I knew. She had cut her hair.

This is the pile of hair I found upstairs.

She gave herself a mullet. Oh my. Totally cut bangs for herself and then cut the sides. Oh my.

She doesn't look very broken up about it, does she? :) Could have been a lot worse I suppose. I know a lot of little girls that have cut bangs WAY up at the hairline - at least these were still decent...but the mullet look was just rough. David about died when he got home and saw it. Poor thing. Good thing we're using our pictures from the beach for the Christmas cards this year!

And He does it again...

and just because HE loves to bless our socks off (and probably because sometimes it takes 2 or 3 times before we stop and LISTEN to HIM...

...THIS is what we saw when driving to football/cheerleading practice on Monday night!!

God's Promises

After I finished up kids' choir tonight, I was walking my class over to their Missions class and I heard the torrential downpour occurring outside. Happy to be safe inside and not outside in that rain, I dropped them all off and got back to my work. When we left later on that evening, the storm had passed, and I passed a parent who showed me these pictures he had just taken outside on his phone. How GOOD is our God?

My kids and I just stood there with our mouths hanging open looking at the sky. I LOVE when God overwhelms me.

Callie's Dolls...all of them....

A sweet lady from church asked me after choir one Sunday night - with Callie standing right there - if we would like to have her barbies....her girls were done with them....I thought Callie was going to stroke out she was so excited!! (Of course, because Callie was right there with me, there was no way I could hide them away and give her two now and save the rest for later, etc) THIS is what we came home with! Everywhere Callie goes, she has to take them ALL with her. They ALL go upstairs together, they ALL come down together, etc. It's pretty funny. She's constantly lining them ALL up on her bed, or ALL up on the couch like this. It cracks me up. I remember doing the same thing. I suppose it's just like Josiah and Jacob lining up their matchbox cars at this age, right? :)

TGIF!

It's Friday - and Daddy's home!! HOORAY!!!

Free Ice Cream Day at Carvel

The kids have decided that free ice cream cake is the BEST afternoon snack ever!! Can't say that I disagree! :)

Slightly embarrassed...but very tickled...when I noticed THIS happening next to me....

Callie and puzzles

Me to Callie: "Good job on that puzzle honey!"

Callie to me: "Yeah, I'm like a rock star!"

:) Guess she's not lacking in self-confidence....

The Playground

This is the VERY cool new indoor playground at our new church facility. Can you find my kids in these pictures? :)

It worked out great because we had to head up to church today to get some stage things squared away and the kids were HAPPY to go when they found out they could play on the playground while we were there! :)

Caleb the Samurai Warrior...

Caleb and the Bike

I can't tell you how many times I've told him he's not big enough for this bike...does it stop him? NO. He's going to be one of those kids that you hear about your friends having that can ride a two-wheeler by the time they are three (Courtney - like Joshua!!!) He can't really push the pedals, but he sure thinks he's hot stuff sitting up on top of it! :)

questions...

"Questions are good. They leave lots of space for God to fill in the blanks far beyond our imaginations."

- Beth Moore

The day after...

After a morning yesterday up on the mountaintop, this brought Caleb & I down pretty quick! :) He fell and hit his head right on the corner of our media cabinet. Poor guy - would you believe he didn't even cry? That kid is crazy tough.

I worked on making our "angels" for our Angel Tree. Our kids choir has adopted the kids from Hands and Feet Orphange in Haiti, where two of our our Northside members have moved and are serving as missionaries. Our kids have been SO excited about getting behind this service project and it is exciting to see!!

What a Morning!!!

This picture obviously does not capture it...but I was on stage the rest of the morning and couldn't very well be taking pictures from up there! :)

Wow. What an incredible morning. A giant testimony of God's faithfulness, His provision, His leading - what an amazing God we serve. Our church bought this land more than 10 years ago. Knowing that one day we would need to relocate to this property in order to have enough room for growth. God has moved so many mountains to make this possible, people have prayed and given sacrificially for years and years - and the time had finally come.

There was so much up in the air because of the construction delays and things were not completed - but that didn't matter. As I was driving to church EARLY that morning, I was singing through our songs for the morning - "Come Fill This Place", "This is Your House" - and I was overwhelmed to the point of tears...in the car! God had been so faithful and so good to us - and what a privilege that he brought David and I here to Northside to get to share in this day.

The morning went amazingly smooth considering the incredible amount of things that could have gone wrong! The stress and exhaustion from the week leading up to it was overwhelming. Earlier in the week I posted this on FB:

"LOTS of change this weekend. As a church, we move into our new property on Sunday. New building. New people. New rooms. New parking place. New drive time (hooray for some of us!!). New hallways. New paint. New AVL stuff. New procedures. New songs. But there are some things that have NOT changed - God and His people. OUR job remains the same - to come before Him on Sunday mornings as empty vessels that He can fill and use. Whether we are in a new building or one that is 150 years old - we have to be emptied out so He can fill us up with HIS Spirit."

So as I said it was an amazing morning. One filled with worship and praise and gratitude to our Lord. When we took the stage to open up our 9:15 service, the preservice 5:00 minute countdown was up on the screen...when it got to 10 seconds, everyone in the room began chanting "10, 9, 8..." - no kidding! And this is NOT the contemporary service! :) Cheers erupted when we got to zero and the service began - I saw so many tears of joy on the faces of these sweet people that have prayed and given and waited for this day for so many years. The attitude of worship was nothing short of overwhelming. The room was completely full - but our hearts were even fuller. Wow. The contemporary service was more of the same - packed room, people standing along the back walls (shhh...don't tell the fire marshall) and an anticipation and eagerness to celebrate what God has done! What a morning.

As the psalmist wrote, THIS is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it! Boy did we rejoice!

All Jacob Wants for Christmas...

...is his two front teeth!!! The other one came out!!

These toothless boys are really making a dent in our budget this month!! Good grief!

The Day Before...

I can't even begin to write down the stress and insanity that this week held. We have been anticipating the relocation of our church to our new property for months and months and the week was finally here. The best thing that I can relate it to is when you are moving and trying to get into your new house and set things up but also still trying to pack up your old house, get it emptied out and cleaned out - except multiply that by about 1000! And of course complicating things was the fact that our new building was not going to be totally ready because of some construction delays - so we were cleaning out the old building and putting it not in its permanent place because some areas weren't accessible yet in the new building. Crazy.

David was working these crazy, round the clock hours and every day he'd come home and I would ask him "is it really going to be ready for us?" and he'd say "I don't know" or "they keep telling us it is"! You talk about all hands on deck - the pastors all got a call one morning that the truck had just arrived with the chairs for the worship center and they all needed to get there asap....the truck didn't have a ramp and needed to unload the 900 chairs! It was a week!!

We had an extra rehearsal on Saturday morning with the choir and instruments first - to get our first run through in the new worship center, with the new AVL stuff. The excitement was palpable. This choir has been so dedicated and totally have caught David's vision of where he wants to go in leading the worship in the first blended service. What an incredible group of people they are and such a blessing to us! They have more than doubled their size from about 20 to almost 50 in the last few months and we are excited!!!

The worship that took place that morning was something special. Yes we were trying to figure out microphone and monitor stuff, but our hearts were worshipping at the throne of God. The music was specifically picked by David to capture the theme of dedicating our new building to the Lord. One of the songs we sang was called "This is Your House" by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. One of our favorites and was so perfect for this special day. You can see the lyric on the screen that David was singing in this picture - Let Your glory fill this sanctuary. It talks about "decorating our walls with grace and mercy", that "this is Your house - a holy house of prayer" and on and on. It's incredible - and to be together in that place as we prepared for our grand opening the next day - it was special.

While we were rehearsing - the chairs were being unwrapped and set up...by our senior pastor!! What an amazing leader he is!!!

After the choir finished, the praise team & band for the contemporary service had their run through (which took about 5 hours due to some technical difficulties....people were so kind and patient...bless them.....and it was such a blessing to look out in the worship center and see our choir that had decided to stay after their rehearsal was finished and working alongside of our senior pastor to get the chairs set up. What a special family this family of God is...

Josiah and the VERY loose tooth...

Josiah's other front tooth had been loose for quite some time. He was emphatic about wanting to pull it out HIMSELF though - which meant it was going to hang in there for quite some time...Finally, we were eating dinner one night and whatever he bit into, just about tooth his tooth out. He jumped up from the table and I knew that this was FINALLY it! :)

See it just hanging there? Gross!

Jacob was so excited to watch - Josiah was freaking out a little bit...but still totally wanting to try to do it himself. It was a very big deal to him (which was hilarious to me...)

He did it! Pulled it out himself! :)

Bowling!

We went bowling with our friends on Monday - unfortunately, by the time I started taking pictures, Caleb had already lost interest and was drawing...

Alli was still going strong though, and is a secret bowling club member I think. She was great!

The little kids had all jumped ship by this point and were drawing on the floor...while the big kids happily bowled for them. :) Thank heavens for Groupons - no money lost!

Labor Day Picnic!

The annual Northside Labor Day Picnic is always a fun family afternoon. The weather is FINALLY getting cooler, free sno-cones and bounce houses, and an outdoor movie - what more do you need! :)

Caleb was insistent about carrying his chair out all by himself when we arrived. Poor baby - "his" chair is actually one of Callie's old chairs that a neighbor gave us with Dora on it....I've got to get him a boy chair!! :)

I mean seriously - what's NOT to love about a sno-cone!

Our sweet neighbor Melodie arrived and sat in front of us with her family. She is playing keyboards for David in the contemporary service and piano for the choir in the blended service. To say she is tremendously talented and blessing to have on board with us would be an understatement!!!

Callie and Carlie - these girls are a HOOT together!!

We settled in with our popcorn to watch the outdoor movie - "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" - and loved it!

This how Caleb fell asleep on the way home. Happy as could be! :)

Movie Night

Our friend Noah came over and had a movie night with us - and Caleb wanted to be RIGHT in the middle of the action! He laid RIGHT on top of Jacob for a little while before David took him up to bed :)