Happy New Years (eve)

Hello everyone from snow-filled New York! Mark, Rachel and I are enjoying a few days with Stephanie and Travis in the Buffalo area in New York (state, not city). We've had a busy week, first traveling to Mark's family on Christmas Day and spending a few days with Grandma and Grandpa, Dan and Amy, Karen and Kyle. Then we headed to Kingsley, IA to spend the night at the Andrews. Eliya and Gabie have spent the past couple of days there with them and we will fly back tomorrow to meet up with them, the Andrews and Nana and Papa before heading back to Gettysburg on the 2nd. Mary was telling me a cute story about Gabie in church yesterday. She loves singing 'Away in a Manger' and apparently belted it out in the middle of the sermon :0). Other updates include: Eliya has decided that she loves dogs. Rachel is 'officially' crawling now (has been doing it for a few days, but is getting better each day). Mark had an interview with a church out here in Lockport (north of Buffalo). And Allison still cannot find a wii anywhere. We hope everyone has a happy and healthy New Year ~ I will add pictures of the past week when we get home.

New York

I hardly took any pictures while we were in New York. I think I was so busy taking it all in that I forgot to capture the moments. But I did get a couple cute ones of Rachel while we were there...

DQ

I have learned a great way to go through DQ drive-through with toddlers when traveling in the car. They love whipped cream, so I get them each a small dish of whipped cream ~ it's way less messy than ice cream and they love it and eat it up and they even will share with each other (a miracle in and of itself!)

Sleepy Day

We had a quiet day on Thurday, which was really nice as the girls decided mom and dad didn't need to sleep the night before, so we all took naps that afternoon. It was nice to just relax, and gave mom and dad a chance to get some reading done for our classes we're taking to get our master's degrees.

Christmas @ Grandma and Grandpa's House

Eliya made friends with Brassy (am I spelling that right?) before going sledding.




Uncle Dan took Eliya sledding while Rachel and Gabie took naps. She had so much fun playing on the same hill that mark played on as a kid.




Gabie loves to open presents, she was at a very fun age this year for Christmas presents.



Eliya loved her new Dora alarm clock / nightlight.



Rachel checking out her new jack-in-box with daddy



playing play-dough with aunt Karen

We had a family picture taken as a Christmas gift to Mark's parents. Afterwards we went back to grandma and grandpa's house to open presents, eat and spend time together as a family. It was wonderful, we're excited to get the pictures back, they turned out really good we thought.

Sisterly Love

Sisters....Sisters, there were never such devoted sisters

Christmas 2007

Merry CHRISTmas from our home to yours. We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas filled with family, friends, food and most important the reason we celebrate - Christ!

I'm not sure how much we will update over the next week and half, we will be doing a lot of traveling and I will update whenever possible.

Advent #23

For a few reasons (we're leaving Christmas Day morning for 9 days / we're trying to separate the whole present thing from what Christmas is really about - Jesus / we have tons of gifts under our tree /...take your pick) we decided to do some present opening a little early today. The girls really enjoyed this of course, but mom and dad actually enjoyed it qutie a bit too.

As for our devotion tonight we read about the angels and talked about what angels are. We opened the final candle was lit as we are on the fourth Sunday in Advent. The girls have really enjoyed the devotions, and we hope you have as well. Tomorrow night our 'devotion time' will actually be Christmas Eve services @ church which we are really looking forward to. Thanks for 'counting down' till Christmas with us this past month.

Our Little Michelangelo's

almost all the markers you will find at our house are these wonderful things called 'color wonder' that only write on certain paper. They are brillant! Unfortunately a regular marker got mixed in somehow and when they decided to draw on the hall wall, well it showed up on something other than special paper, to which they were thrilled.


They had quite a mural going before I caught them...


what gets messed up must get cleaned up, after all this isn't exactly the Sistine Chapel! At least it was a washable marker :0)

Advent #22

Tonight we talked about the star that lead to Jesus in Bethlehem and how wise men followed that star. Our activity was to play 'follow the leader' and the 'object lesson' was a star ornament. Say extra prayers for us tonight that we all get some sleep, it was a very long day with 3 sick little girls on our hands....and yet somehow they still seem to get into so much stuff that I felt like I was cleaning up messes and holding, soothing and medicining all day - whew! Let's hope everyone feels better tomorrow.

Advent #21

Tonight we talked about how God wants us to live out the fruits in our lives (review time!). We had a box of sun dried raisins, and we talked about just how the fruit needs the sun to make it good and sweet, we need the Son of God, Jesus to help us to be all the fruits of the spirit we've been talking about for the past few days.

I did not get any pictures today...but on a side note, a funny story to share. I have heard parents say before how their kids will ask Santa for something totally different than they asked for on any other list. We are experiencing that for the first time this year. We really hadn't gotten the girls much for Christmas because they have so much already and through our devotions we are trying to get the perspective back in the right place, but all of the sudden since her visit with Santa Eliya has been asking for "a princess computer with the 50 dollars with it" - what the heck is that?! So when I went to pick up some stuff @ the pharmacy today (extra prayers for Gabie as she's battling strep right now) I ran into Duckwalls (our local 'walmart') to see what they had that might count as some kind of princess computer with $50. Well, I think I know where she got the idea - there was a princess cash register/computer thing with fake money (I'm not sure if it's exactly $50, but close enough!). So I called home to see if Mark thought we should get her one new toy for Christmas. While we are talking Elie asks him who he is talking to and he says Santa, so of course she wants to talk to him (I'm sure just to make sure he got the right idea of what she wanted!). So here I am standing in the middle of the aisle on my cell phone trying to talk to my 3 year old in deep resounding "ho, ho, ho's" and "were you a good little girl this year?" voice. I don't know that I've ever been so embarressed, but she believed it! When I got home she was literally bouncing off the walls with excitement to tell me all about how Santa called and how she got to talk to him on the phone and that he said if she was a good girl and listened to her mommy and daddy and cleaned up her room she would get her princess computer with the $50 in it for Christmas (as red as my face may have been in that aisle, I made sure to get the important infomation in there - listening to mom and dad, cleaning up...) Now if we can just keep it hidden till Christmas :0)

Advent #20

We have two little girl's in our house who are terrified of Santa. When Mark was coming to preschool to Santa for our party this morning, he thought he'd visit the girl's as well ~ as you can see they weren't too thrilled with this idea. Rachel didn't seem to care, but it took Mark taking off the wig and hat before Gabie would go near him. Elie did seem to warm up to him a little once he talked to her and told her it was daddy.


Tonight we learned about the fruit of self-control. This was a great lesson tonight as Eliya was having some trouble with self-controling her mouth and it was getting her into some trouble. So we talked about how God helps us to practice self-control, that even when we want to say or do things we know aren't right, God gives us the strenth to practice self-control and not say or do them but think on Him instead. He also forgives us and 'erases' it even we don't remember to practice self-control.

Advent #19

Elie and Kirstie had a lot of fun playing outside in the snow today as it was a pretty nice day out (33 and no wind), so I let them bundle up for a treck in the backyard while the other two took a nap.

Tonight we talked about the reward of gentleness. We talked about what it means to be gentle (mainly because we focus so much on this with a little sister Rachel that they are always being told to be gentle with!). We also talked about how we have to gentle with breakables. We also talked about how God wants us to gentle with other people, and that means speaking kindly to them and doing nice things. We had a very fun activity tonight together as a family of going over to Beth and Justin's house after church and playing nintendo wii ~ Mark is still a little dizzy from him 'knock-out' in boxing! :0)

Advent #18

Faithfulness ~ tonight we talked about being faithful to God. We told the girls that faithfulness and trust are very much alike. Sometimes it's hard to believe that mommy and daddy know what's best, and we don't always like it when they say no, but we have to trust that they know what's best and are taking care of us. Faithfulness is believing and trusting in God that He knows what's best for us and is taking care of us, even when we don't always agree with the plans He has for us, if we follow Him it will be the best. We talked about being 'rich' in faith by believing in God. So to remind them of their 'riches' from God they each got a coin (gold dollar) to remind them of their 'riches' in Christ through their faithfulness in Him.

Advent #17

Our family activity tonight was a special Christmas dinner with the other circuit pastors in Onida. It is always fun to get together. When we got home we did our devotions on goodness. We talked about what it means to be good (at least what it means to a toddler :0) Then we talked about how we can show our goodness to others...they decided giving others presents was a good thing to do. Instead of opening a present themselves tonight they picked out a present they would want to give to baby Jesus, because He was so good to us. It was pretty precious when Elie brought out her angel toy to give to baby Jesus. She wanted to give Him an angel to take care of Him and than she wanted to tickle Him to make Him smile and laugh. Out of the mouths of babes...
(once I find the camera again I'll put the pictures from tonight on...it's location is temporarily eluding me)

Advent #16

The church's children's program was @ 4:00 today. This morning when they had their dress rehearsal while Nana was here Eliya stood up on the stage with her dress up by her face and didn't sing a word. She knows almost every song they were doing by heart and sings and dances all over the house when we play the practice cd for her. So this afternoon when we were getting ready to go to church I asked her if she would sing for mommy, to which she said, "no, mommy, I don't want to." I asked her why and she said because it was scary. I can accept that. I asked her if she would just stand up on stage, leave her dress down and smile for me. She shook her head. Then I got to thinking about one of her favorite cartoons..."would you do it for an elie-treat?" (scooby-snack). What treat mom? she asks. So I told her she could open a present when we got home. She said, "For a present I'll sing AND do the actions!" And she did. Oh dear, do I have a mini-lawyer on my hands? She's quite the negotiator! But she did sing and do actions and did awesome (she was a cow-girl angel). Right before the last song she just puckered out and our little angel was asleep in Patty's arms. Our advent devotion talked about the shepherds since out activity was the program, and the program was all about the shepherds @ Bethlehem. The girls were so excited to finally light the PINK candle (I know Claudia, I know :0) which is also known as the shepherds candle.

Advent #15

Tonight we talked about kindness. How Jesus was kind to us by coming to earth and how we can be kind to one another (sharing toys, helping each other, etc.) We also talked about being kind can be to help someone if they are hurting, and they opened up band-aids, which of course they wanted to put on each others legs. :0) Our activity was a fun project from Nana and Papa ~ a gingerbread house kit. We had a lot of fun putting it together, even though I think more candy went into their mouths than onto the house!

Advent #14

For those of you who follow this daily, you can probably guess that tonight we talked about....patience! We talked about how we have to wait patiently for a baby to come, and how we had to wait for Rachel, and how that was the way it was for the whole world waiting for baby Jesus to be born. We also talked about how hard it can be to be patient sometimes. We always want what we want right away. Like eating a tootsie roll pop - how many licks does it take? The world may never know because we are so impatient....so you can probably guess what they opened for their 'object lesson' tonight - and no they couldn't wait to get the center. (yes, they brushed their teeth extra long tonight!) Our activity was to play Santa tonight and we delivered presents to friends around town.