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: