Halloween

I've had such a great time checking out all of the blogs and facebook pages to see everyone's kiddos! We had a wonderful time last night! Surprisingly not as many houses were giving out candy this year and we figure it is a combination of the recession and the Razorback football game. More likely the Razorback football game! That just meant we had to walk farther which was no big deal since it was good exercise and a nice night. We loved having Larry's parents here and the kids had a blast. No one really knew what either of my kids were. People guessed that Evan was a pirate or a knight and one person knew who Prince Caspian was once Evan told them. People kept asking Clayton why he wasn't wearing a costume so he'd have to explain it, but once we got home and he was giving out candy there were kids who came to the door that knew exactly what he was trying to accomplish! One funny story.....Evan got his costume for his birthday back in July. He has been very careful with it, especially the sword. It is not the most sturdy thing in the world so he has treated it with great care, and even hidden it when kids come over to keep it from being broken. Last night about 1/2 an hour before the sun went down he was playing outside with it and broke it! We couldn't believe it. Luckily with dad and Pa-Pa around there isn't much that can't be fixed so we performed emergency surgery and the sword is now stronger than ever!
6 bags of huge bags from Sam's and we used it all!

Prince Caspian

Bakugan Brawler - notice the Bakugan on his shoulder and the ones clipped to his pants

Acting out the part!

Doing sugrery on the sword

Evan's loot

Clayton's loot

Pumpkin Time

Last night was pumpkin carving time in our house! Everyone at our house has a job. The boys decide on the pumpkin design and help with various tasks, I dig out the guts in the pumpkin (a job I rather enjoy :), and Larry does the carving. This year the boys each got a small pumpkin along with our large one and got to design and carve their own pumpkin...with a safety knife, of course!
Sonic the Hedgehog!


Clayton's creaton

Evan's creation

This year Larry's parents are coming in town for Halloween and we are going to stay in our neighborhood. We've done something different every year that we have been here, and this is the first time we will be staying home. Our neighborhood is awesome to trick or treat in. It is literally flooded with kids. In fact I've seen multiple 15 passenger vans from other neighborhoods unload in ours. There are some lower income neighborhoods not to far from us, and we live in a very large neighborhood, so I guess we are the trick or treat spot, which I think is great! It's like the old days when the streets were filled with kids, unlike many neighborhoods now where maybe 10 kids are out. Evan is going to be Prince Caspian and Clayton, who is quickly growing out of the desire to dress up, is going to be a Bakugan brawler. If you don't know what that is you aren't alone but I don't have to buy anything for his "costume", which is really just his regular clothes, so I am thrilled. I'll post pictures after Halloween.

This blew my mind....

I recently found the blog of an organization called The ABBA Fund which helps provide financial solutions for adoption. Here is some staggering information that I found there:

My best guess is that 40-50 million orphans worldwide are adoptable or would be best cared for through adoption. Ideally that means adoption locally/indigenously first and then adoption internationally.

As for Christians, according to Mission Frontiers, globally there are:

Christian Believers — 800 million who have been born again into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Other Christians — 1.37 billion who consider themselves Christians because they come from a Christian culture.

Culturally near non-Christians — 1.8 billion are not yet Christians but live in a people where a viable, indigenous church movement has been established.

Therefore, if roughly 6% of the born again Christians in the world adopted we could care for all the adoptable orphans in the world (I have heard 7% used and that might be true as well).

Not 80%, not 60%, not 30%, but 6%. Ponder that, it will probably blow your mind as well.

Relax

Homeschooling is a wonderful sanctification tool! Each year I learn something new about myself and God refines me through the process of educating my children. This year's lesson is RELAX! I started the year in mid August with a goal of being done by the end of May. We LOVE summer and LOVE the chance to set our books aside for 2 1/2 months to have fun. We are often fried by the end of the year and desperately need this break. I sat down in August with my calendar and figured in holidays, vacations, FamilyLife staff meetings (which are no school days), added in a few for illness and other unexpected absences and I was ready to go! Pretty early on I realized that I was going to be in trouble. Various things were popping up that I didn't plan in my yearly schedule. We are not talking about a day at the park, but things like field trip opportunities, or things where I was needed by someone and couldn't school that day. I started to freak out and then came up with this brilliant idea....we can school on Saturday to make up for the day we missed! I did that once and realized it was a big mistake. As you can imagine, my children were less than cooperative. Then the final straw came when Clayton and Larry got sick for an entire week! I fretted over what I would do....I know, cut my 2 week Christmas vacation to 1, or get rid of spring break! Then after everyone was well again we started school and had an absolutely wonderful week. The break had been good for everyone and my children were engaged and ready to start again. That's when God said to me "RELAX! Why are you so hung up on being done by the end of May? Enjoy the process!" At that moment I completely changed my outlook. If I would calm down a bit and take breaks as needed during the year maybe I won't feel the intense need to be done by the end of May. I've decided that the end of May is my cutoff for full weeks of school. After that we will do maybe 1 or 2 days a week or a small amount each day until we can wrap it up. I'm also not getting hung up on finishing EVERYTHING! Some good friends recently told me that most public school teacher's don't finish every book by the end of the year. After May we will focus on those subjects that are most important or that the boys need extra work in and let anything else go. I'm already feeling better about this school year and I'm thankful for the constant refining from the Lord!

On another homeschooling note, we are doing some extra fun school lately. On November 13 we are going to a children's symphony created for school groups. We signed up as a homeschool group and got a fantastic packet of information that included a CD of the pieces being played, along with information about the composer and the inspiration for each piece. We had a great time studying each piece of music and listening for the sounds of storms, etc in them! The boys are very excited for their first symphony. I've also decided to do a small unit on the Reformation in preparation for October 31st, Reformation Day! I found a great website for kids at www.reformationkidz.com where they have information about reformers such as John Calvin, Martin Luther, etc., along with activities about each of them. I also found some videos on Netflix about some of them and hope to get some books at the library. We've found this to be great fun and hope that it will help in my new goal to RELAX!

Pictionary laughs.....

Last night we decided to play pictionary. We don't own the game so we just got a list of words, some paper and pencils, and split into teams to play. Clayton and I were on a team and Larry and Evan were on a team. The rules were that you had 1 minute to draw your word, if your teammate did not answer in the minute the other team had a chance to guess and earn your point. So I was drawing Spongebob and Clayton was guessing. Now I'll admit that I'm not the best artist in the world, and my kids don't watch Spongebob but they certinaly know who he is. So I'm drawing what I consider to be a decent Spongebob....square with kind of bumpy edges, big eyes, a mouth, "holes" drawn on him, feet, arms....and Clayton is yelling things like "a cracker!". What cracker do you know with eyes and feet? So Larry and I are laughing because at this point Larry has figured it out. At the same time Evan is jumping up and down yelling "I know, I know!" He is counting down the seconds until Clayton's time is up and when the timer ends he is SOOOOOO excited to yell the answer out and he says "CINNAMON TOAST CRUNCH!!!!!!!" Larry and I were rolling on the floor laughing. My guy looked just like the cinnamon toast crunch men from the commercials! Later Clayton told me that I draw a better cinnamon toast crunch than Spongebob! I don't have a scanner to show you the picture of my Spongebob but here is an idea of what my guy looked like:

Val's Wedding

Last weekend, after 8 years with Philip, my sister in law, Valerie, got married! It was a beautiful ceremony and a fun reception! She was supposed to get married at sunset but with a cloudy night and a delay in the wedding she ended up getting married in the dark. Oh well, she didn't care, she was just thrilled to be married! After a very busy weekend we drove home with a sick Clayton and by the time we got home we also had a sick Larry. They both still have fevers and coughs. Clayton went to the doctor yesterday and it is just a virus. Larry is going today. This is by far the worst part of this time of year!

Here are some pictures from the wedding:

I Don't NEED a House

The message below was sent to me through FamilyLife in December of '08. I've kept it tucked away in my inbox because I was so blown away by the truths in it. It is written by Ney Bailey. Ney has been on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ for more than 46 years! She has written an incredible book called Faith is Not a Feeling , another piece of her writing that had a profound impact on me. Today I found myself searching through the stuff in my inbox to see if any of it needed to go. When I came across this I thought it would be wonderful to share with you and appropriate for the times that we live in now. Enjoy :)

I’ll never forget the time I invited Elisabeth Elliot to come speak to our women who were ministering in Eastern Europe when the Iron Curtain was still up and the countries were closed. The conference was in September, and 75 of us were meeting near Vienna in a classroom with tiered seating and desks. I was seated by Elisabeth during a break when an obviously anxious young woman came and stood in front of her. With a voice full of angst and stress she began to explain her situation to Elisabeth:

Woman: “My husband and I moved here from the states with our two children in January, and we have looked and looked and looked for a house to live in and after all these months we have been unable to find anything! We have been forced to live with first one family for a few months….and now we have been with yet another family for several months. School is about to start again, and we still haven’t found a house!”
Elisabeth (calmly): “You must not need a house”
That was the last response the young woman expected Elisabeth to have after her elaborate explanation of desperately needing a house and not finding one. I, too, was initially a bit taken aback by Elisabeth’s words.
Woman (astonished, mouth open, quizzically): “I must not need a house?”
Elisabeth (authoritatively): “You must not need a house… ‘MY God shall supply ALL YOUR NEEDS according to His riches in Christ Jesus’ (emphasis Elisabeth’s). If you needed a house, you would have a house.”
Woman (stunned): “I don’t have a house because I don’t need a house?” “I don’t have a house because I don’t need a house…I don’t have a house because I don’t need a
house…” (I was seeing her change before my very eyes as she repeated these unbelievable words…convincing herself and coming to the truth of Elisabeth’s words as she repeated them over and over.) “Wait till I tell my husband we don’t have a house because we don’t NEED a house! I’m going to go phone him right now!”

She had come to Elisabeth full of anxiety and puzzlement. She walked away in awe of the truth of what she had heard and received into her heart.

When I saw the woman again a couple years later I asked her about that incident. She said not long after the encounter with Elisabeth they found a wonderful house. But she realized in retrospect that God had used the time of not having a house and living in the homes of others to acclimate her and her family to a new culture. Those families had become some of their dearest friends and are to this day. God had known what they needed the most.

Chuck Swindoll writes: “God’s plans are beyond our understanding and too deep to explain. Perhaps God doesn’t explain Himself because knowing and understanding His way may not help us all that much. Stop and ask yourself: Does knowing why really help? Is the pain removed by knowing the cause? Ours is a world filled with devastating catastrophes.”

This includes terrorism, political turmoil and the recent financial ‘earthquakes’ affecting us all.

Chuck continues: “What bothers us is that He doesn’t act as we think He ought to act. He doesn’t do what our earthly dads would have done in similar circumstances. While I’m at it, where was He when His own Son was crucified? To the surprise of many, He was there all the time working out His divine plan for our salvation. As the process was running its course, Jesus’ own disciples didn’t get it—they were the most disillusioned people on the planet. Do you remember what they were thinking? They were wondering how in the world they could have believed in a hoax. From their perspective, their Master’s death didn’t make any sense."

Near the end of the book of Job, after all of the losses and calamities that devastated Job’s life, “do you know what Job finally sees? Job sees God, and that is enough. He doesn’t see answers. He is to the place where he doesn’t need answers. He has gotten a glimpse of the Almighty, and that is sufficient.” 1

Job trusts God with his life—all that He is and all that he has and doesn’t have.

As the difficult year of 2008 comes to an end, may we be like my friend who began to trust God without the house she thought she needed and may we be like Job who trusted God with His losses. May we not be ungrateful for what we don’t have…but may we have His grace to be thankful for what we do have.

And may we remember that God’s love for us “is in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen."2

1. Chuck Swindoll, Great Days with the Great Lives, p. 279, W Publishing Group,©2005.
2. J.B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English, Geoffrey Bles Publisher, p 361, ©1959.