Please read this and pray and copy it on your blog too!

As many of you know, I love Samaritan's Purse!!! It's the organization that does the Operation Christmas Child Shoeboxes. I always post about it around Christmas time. In fact we already have a tub of stuff that we've been collecting for this upcoming year. I just love it when Christian tells me not to open his Happy Meal toy so that we can put it in the "poor box." (That's not the best name for the box...I tried to change it to the "blessing box" but Christian is pretty stuck on calling it the "poor box" because we give the things in it to the poor).

Anyway, yesterday (3) Samaritan's Purse staff were abducted by a group of armed men in Sudan. Two men and one woman, who is an American from California. Can you imagine? Please join me in praying for their safety and for their immediate release. My mind just keeps going back to this 36 year old, American woman, who is obviously just trying to minister to the poor and orphaned. We need to specifically pray for her protection.

This won't make the national news....although it should. So please spread the word. God has promised that he hears the prayers of His people. It's time for us to rise up in prayer!

You can read more about this HERE.

Wordless Wednesday

Our Year of Moving

I feel like I've been moving or moving someone for the past year. Seriously...we put our house on the market in March of 2009 and we immediately started packing you know, just to stage the house...but we quickly had an entire storage unit full of stuff.

---

Then my sister, Amy, moved away in June of 2009. So I spent time packing at her house.

-----

Then we sold our house in August of 2009 and moved into a rental in September.

----

Then we moved from our rental into our new house in December. As you can imagine, moving the week of Christmas was quite daunting. I don't even have one picture to document it. I barely have pictures of Christmas.

----

Then my parents moved from their home of 40 years in February Talk about daunting....

So Ryan assembled this grand crew to help!

That's my dad lifting up the powerlines so the truck could fit under them. I told you it was daunting :)

And loading a motorcycle with a dead battery was quite the task.

And then there were lots of projects like this one.

Whew...

-----

So my parents moved into our house in early March and guess what we've been doing now for the last two weeks.

-----

We're moving them again!

Tonight is their first night in their new home. I'm so excited for them. They're exhausted. It's been way more work then they anticipated. And there's a lot of work ahead of them, but it will get done! The entire upstairs of their house has a fresh coat of paint. They're ordering some new carpet and should be settled pretty soon.

------

I should probably mention that in the last two years all of my siblings (Amy & Tim) and all of Ryan's siblings (Robert and Angel) have moved. What a relief that Ryan's parents are staying put :) I'm thankful that Christian will have at least one familiar place to visit!

-----

And so I'm done with moving. I used to love "house shopping." I'm over it now. I just want to feel settled again. So I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks painting, organizing and trying to get settled for good. We're slowing moving all of my parent's things out and I'm enjoying the process of figuring out how I want to get everything set up. I still have boxes that have yet to be unpacked. I made some progress this weekend, eliminating 4 more huge boxes. So we're getting there.

A Surprise Visitor

Christian was thrilled to be able to surprise Emma, Abby and Nathan with a visit a week or so ago!
Emma was going to have her very first orchestra concert and Grandmom and PopPop were not going to miss it, so they took Christian along as a surprise!

I wasn't there, but I heard that Emma was fabulous and very grown up.

And oh how Christian loves Abby. He loved spending the night in the same room with both Abby and Nathan!

And these two were just the best buddies. When Christian got home he was so excited to tell me about everything they did together. Then he went into the bathroom and when he came back out tears were streaming down his face. He missed them. And he has continued to miss them and cry very real and very sad tears. I think I had forgotten what a huge part of our lives they were. Emma, Abby and Nate were much more like siblings than cousins to Christian and they might live a few hours away, but we've got to do a better job of seeing them. Summer is just around the corner and I hope to have lots and lots of cousin playdates!

So Proud!

This handsome duo had a preschool concert the other night. Christian and his buddy Carter were looking pretty sharp and they did such an awesome job!

Now let me give you a little background info here....I love music. It's always been a big part of my life. I love to sing, etc. So it was pretty disappointing to me that I ended up with a little boy who asked me to "be quiet" whenever I would sing. He didn't like for me to sing to him at bedtime. And he never let me teach him any cute songs when he was a baby. (Thankfully McKenna is the complete opposite. My word that girl can sing).

And then there was preschool and much to my delight this little musical boy showed up. He gets soooo into singing. He was stomping his foot to a song so loud one time during the Grandparent's Day presentation that his teacher had to speak to him in the middle of the program. ha! A little piece of me wanted to say "Excuse me...please let him stomp to his hearts delight." But it was drowning out all the singing :)

His spring concert was delightful. It lasted all of (2) songs, but I loved it! Loved the smile on his face.

I loved the spark in his eye and the stomp in his step. It was the best!

He was so handsome and listened so well to his teacher. Preschool this year has been wonderful for him. We are so thankful for his teachers and thankful for all the learning he's done.

And here's a little video of him singing. The quality isn't that great. I was zooming in so far that the camera had a hard time staying focused, but you get the idea.

Enjoy!

Attention all you Local Friends

As most of you know, my parents are moving into a new house.

My mom doesn't like the style of this ceiling fan, so it's up for grabs. It works great. It's kind-of an off-white color. It's rather fancy looking when it's hung from the ceiling. It would be good in a girls room, master bed room or a living room. They're giving it away for FREE! You just have to come get it. Leave a comment or email (judah322 at hotmail dot com) me if your interested.

And this is a working gas fireplace! The wood is an oak color. The surround looks like fake marble. I don't have the dimensions off hand but I can find out if you're interested. It's very deep. My guess would be that it's 3-4 feet deep. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the gas fireplace, my mom just doesn't like gas. Leave a comment or email me if you're interested. I'm going to list it on Craigslist in a day or too, so let me know ASAP if you want it. They are asking $400 or OBO. We could probably arrange to have this delivered if you didn't have a way to get it home.

Happy Birthday!!!

Happy Birthday Hannah and Elizabeth!! We love you and miss seeing you! Of course, Auntie Judy has your birthday present sitting right here on the dining room table. It's waiting to be wrapped. So you're just going to get to celebrate your birthday for an extra day, whenever our package arrives! We love you girls and are so proud of all the hard work you've done this year in Kindergarten!

Yard Sales oh how I love Thee!

I love yard sales! I mean I seriously do! My neighbors are having a yard sale today and I thought it would be a good way for me to actually meet them. So I headed over and those people were selling all their kids clothes for $0.50 each and some items still had tags on them and most of the stuff was GAP or Children's Place. Oh my word, I went a little crazy. But McKenna is now set with shirts for the summer and fall and I got the most adorable winter coat with matching snow pants from LL Bean for just $2.00! Abby is now going to have a pair of Heelies that are practically brand new for $2.00. Don't those things usually cost $40??? I don't mind buying stuff for Abby because it usually comes back to me in about a year :) And best of all, my kids are currently sitting peacefully in the playroom watching a new DVD. Ahhh, yes..nothing like a new movie to keep the peace.

--

So heads up to all you local people. Head over to my neighborhood if you need boy clothes (super cheap) for up to size 3T. Or girl clothes pretty much any size up to size 7-8. Sorry, but I wiped out most of the 3T girls shirts and some 4T winter shirts too. But there's still tons of pants left in those sizes b/c McKenna is still a size 24 months in pants.