Family Photo Shoot

I'm doing my best to only pick a few out of the over 300 pictures that were taken at our family photo shoot! I'm happy with the way they turned out...now I have to figure out which ones to print and put out! We are going to redo the ones of the boys together as the lighting is a bit off on those. And I had no idea it was so hard to get everyone in the family to look in the same direction at the same time! Some of the pictures of Kaden aren't his best faces...but I just love all of his little expressions! :) And actually Caleb was not real thrilled with the whole thing...he was happiest when we let him throw leaves on his head but we couldn't even get a real good pictures of that! At least we got one good shot of everybody and that's what counts!

Famine Weekend

Thanks for all your prayers over the weekend! We had an awesome famine and the kids did amazing! I think I actually complained more then they did! :) (But in my defense, part of my headache was caused by splitting open my eyelid on a car door...yeah...I was a little disoriented, but Praise the Lord it only bled a little and no ER visit required!) 

  We all got together at 6:30 on Friday and headed out to build our cardboard shelters for the night. Matt did a great job putting our shelter together, and it was kind of romantic to sleep in a shelter he had built for us...ok maybe not since we were surrounded by 11 other people!:) The girls built a shelter on one side of the yard and the boys on the other and Matt and I had our hut in the middle! Although, I don't think that did much good since the girl's spray painted the boys boxed in the middle of the night (middle being relative since we didn't even get into bed until 2 a.m.) and the boys played gunfire over a stereo to scare the girls...yeah we slept through all of it! Anyways, after building our shelters we headed down to the church for worship, devotions, games, and sardines. Sardines is reverse hide and go seek in a church that is completely blacked out! Creepy but so much fun. At around 1 a.m. we left to dump what was left of our 29,000 chains on one of our church members lawns! So fun and they that it was hilarious the next morning. After that it was time for bed...well refer to above story not really bed but the motions of going to bed. 

  We were up by 7:30 (not near enough sleep!) and had one of the guys from our church come with a squirt gun and water balloons to get the kids...this was to simulate war lords coming to attack them! :) We got everything cleaned up and headed to the local foster home shelter to play with the kiddos and help organize some of their rooms. I didn't put any pictures up of the shelter because of legal issues with the kids. After the shelter, we headed back down to church and played more games, got ready for Sunday, worship, and basically tried to stay busy until 6:30 when it was time to eat! It seemed kinds of wrong to break a 30 hour fast where we're focusing on being hungry to help the kids who are starving by having this huge meal (thanks to all the mommy's and church members who brought in food!) but it was yummy and we appreciated it. We were able to raise over $5,500 and we're still waiting for more money to come in! Praise the Lord who can do great things! That's pretty impressive considering there was only 14 of us raising the money! More exciting is that the World Vision has a grant from the government that will match every dollar we raise with $4! So really we raised over $25,000! Very cool.

  The pictures are just random ones I picked out since you wouldn't have to see all 60 something! I love the one of Kaden's face peeking through the cardboard! :) The boys were troopers. They had a babysitter all Saturday but spent a lot of time with us. Thanks again for all your support. Stay tuned my next blog should have family pictures on it! :)

  

27 Hours to go...

Hello all! We are 3 hours into the 30 Hour Famine! Yippee, and I'm not even hungry yet! :) However, I hate that when you know you can't have something thats when you start craving that something! I guess that's the point of fasting...when the craving or desire hits, it's supposed to drive us to our knees in prayer and our hearts toward God. Awesome how that works. Matt and I are super excited for tonight/tomorrow and we'll let you all know how it goes...and we'll have pictures as long as I remember to bring the camera. :) Thanks for all your prayer support this weekend! Jesus loves you!

  

29,000 Chains

Wow, what a weekend! I can't believe it's Monday night already...it still feels like it should be Friday! Although we did do a few family things this weekend (family pictures-so fun and can't wait to show those-, the goodbye party for our friends, and a half-marathon- with a time of 2:03:26-a great run and I'm so grateful the Lord let me do it!) most of this weekend was spent preparing for and running our 30 HR fundraiser. 

  On Saturday, a few of the kids came over and we connected all the chains together that were stuffed into like 30 huge trash bags in our garage. We have been making paper chains for months and on Saturday we hit our goal of 29,000 paper links! These 29,000 links stretch over 7,000 feet (that's way over a mile) and took up the entire front of Walmart! The 29,000 links represent the 29,000 children under 5 that die every day from malnutrition. We wanted to make a representation of each one of those little lives in order to bring awareness to the community and to raise some funds. So after hours of stapling on Saturday (really hard to do outside, on a windy day with paper!) and getting completely  sun burnt we were done and stuffed them all into the back of Matt's truck. 

  Sunday morning, we drove the chains down to the church and made a presentation during the service. The kids did an awesome job singing the Prayer of the Children after carrying in all 29,000 chains into the church. After church, we had to carry all 29,000 chains back out of the church and into Matt's truck and to Walmart. We sat outside Walmart from 3-6 selling the paper chains and taking donations. It was really really really HOT, maybe in the 90's, but so worth every minute. The kids raised over $1,300 in donations! Praise the Lord! We are so excited. God is so good. We do have A LOT of paper chains left over but we have plans for those. 

  The kids even got their picture in the local paper...unfortunately the reporter put the wrong church and the wrong phone number in the article after putting the right church name at the top! Oh well... the Del Rio News Herald is not always known for it's literary accuracy! 

  All in all, it was a good but very busy weekend. We are just so so proud of our teens and are excited to see what God is going to do this weekend as we actually do the 30 Hour Famine! Pray for Matt and I this week when you think of us as we get all the final preparation done. Speaking of getting things done...it's time for me to head to bed or I'll be getting nothing done tomorrow. Hope you have a blessed week!

Just to say...

Just to say hello to everyone. Not much going on here and when something cute does happen I usually don't have the camera! :) I totally planned to take the camera to gymnastics yesterday but got there and realized it was still safe at home in the closet. Good place for it. So that will have to happen another time. 

  This weekend will be busy but in fun ways. We're getting family pictures done tomorrow at 9:30! I'm really excited and just hoping we can get everyone dressed and out the door by then. :) Especially since I'm hoping to run a half marathon tomorrow...just for the fun of it! :) Then we have a goodbye party tomorrow afternoon, complete with friends and bouncy castle so that should be a lot of fun. Sunday we have to be at both services as the teens are presenting the 29,000 paper chain links we have made to represent the 29,000 children that die every day from hunger. We're planning on selling them at Walmart to help raise money for the 30 Hour Famine. So that's the weekend in a nut shell. Hope you all have a good weekend too. Talk to you on Monday!

  Jesus loves you. 

Cupcake

Well it is the end of Monday and to celebrate we let the boys have cupcakes! :) Actually, these are left over cupcakes from a birthday party we attended on Saturday but any excuse is food for eating chocolate. Caleb completely destroyed his cupcake at the birthday party, so we decided to let him eat his outside, naked...well almost naked. He actually didn't get much messier then this since he ended up dropping most of the cupcake on the ground, but I'm still glad we did this outside! Kaden didn't get a picture because the camera ran out of batteries, and he was clean which we explained to him was a good thing. 

  Not much else to report. Praise the Lord we had another successful donation babysitting night on Friday. The 30 HR famine is in less then two weeks and I've still got lots of preparation to do so that is the goal for this week. Sunday we had a good family day. And today we had a play date on base which was so much fun...except for the moment that Kaden flattened his brother with one of those kid drivable cars. You know the ones that run on batteries, the little jeeps that they can drive around. Well, Kaden threw it into reverse and didn't look to see that his brother was standing behind him. I look up and the entire car is on top of Caleb's body and Kaden's revving the engine. Praise the Lord no one was injured! Caleb is one tough kid. He just got up, cried a few tears, and kept going. :) 

  Well, I hope your week is off to a good start. Jesus loves you

Shopping...in Del Rio

I just wanted to vent my latest shopping experience here in the metropolis of Del Rio. Kaden is in desperate need of a summer wardrobe. We have some t-shirts, but no shorts or pj's or swim trunks, etc. So I finally resolved myself to taking two boys to go shopping for clothes. First we went to Ross and found what looked to be good deals. Dragged the boys into the dressing room and tried all the clothes on Kaden...not one of them fit. Not a big deal, a waste of time, yes, but at least we know now what doesn't fit and that we shouldn't have started at Ross. So we head to JC Penny...Keep in mind that these are about the only clothes places in town, and everything is way expensive. I'm just not ready to spend $25 on a pair of shorts that are going to be played in. And the pajamas there were $27.99 for one pair! One! There's no way I'm paying almost $30 for something that they are going to sleep in! Usually we get good deals at JC Penny but not yesterday. So by this time it's lunch and nap time so we head home. As soon as the boys wake up from their nap we head back out. This time we go to Fallas, don't worry you've never heard of it, I think it's a Mexican chain. They're clothes are really cheap and some of them are good quality, it's kind of hit or miss. So we go and I find about 8 pairs of shorts and some shirts to try on Kaden. We walk around the entire store to find the dressing room...can't find it so we go to the front. They tell me they don't have dressing rooms and they're return policy is for store credit only. There is no way that I"m buying all these clothes without trying them on Kaden. So we walk all the way to the back of the store. Try to find a discrete spot and Kaden strips down to try on clothes. I'm just glad that he's 4 and has no social sense of embarrassment. He had no problem standing there in his underwear while people walked by! Caleb on the other hand thought this would be a great time to go running around so I'm trying to dress one child and yelling after the other to come back. Then Caleb has a horrible dirty diaper. So what else to do but change him on the floor cause there's no way I can take him home without changing him, I have no idea where the bathroom is or if they have one. I felt so ghetto. I'm realizing now that I should probably get into online shopping...and I may have to go to Walmart to look for pajamas but at least we can say shopping in Del Rio is an experience.  

Hawaiian night

Wednesday night was Hawaiian night at AWANA. Kaden was very excited to dress up for the occasion...and I was too until I realized that the only Hawaiian shirt that half way fit him was blue and the swim trunks he owned were bright orange with lizards...needless to say he didn't match at all, but that's not important when you're 4. He did get to wear daddy's cool Hawaiian necklace which he was very proud of. Matt did point out that I didn't have to dress him so that he clashed so badly, especially since I had just bought swim trunks that were blue....but he couldn't wear those cause they might get dirty! :) And for those of you who know me from years past...I didn't really ever match as a child either! :) Caleb on the other hand looks very cool, and it was so cute when he saw Kaden getting his swim suit on, he pleaded with me to get his on so that he could be just like big brother! They are so fun...even when they do clash!

Sprinkler

Matt made it back from San Antonio, where he took the GRE, this evening and it was warm enough to water the lawn and the boys at the same time! Caleb was not a big fan of the sprinkler as you can see by the expression on his face as he is running away from the water.He was, however, a big fan of not having a diaper on and kept trying to take off his bathing suit! (those pictures didn't make it on the blog) Kaden, on the other hand, had a great time playing in the water with daddy, and was quite upset when it was time to come in...so maybe we'll be doing this again tomorrow. I am personally thrilled that it is warm enough to be playing in the sprinkler! I love the South! 

What do you do on Friday nights?

We build pyramids with our teens at 10:45 at night! Sorry the pictures are blurry we didn't have the right mode on the camera...but you get the idea. And yes, I am on the bottom in one of the photos! Fun times!

Transformers

Caleb may like Dora and Bob the Builder, but it's no match for Kaden's love for Transformers. We play Transformers all the time, and actually Kaden is really, really good at transforming the toys from car to robot. Very impressive for a four year old! So these pictures started out by us just being silly this morning and putting on some cracker boxes we emptied out, but soon Kaden was in full transformer mode. Here he is pretending to be Rachet ( I'm not sure who Caleb's is supposed to be, he just wanted to look like brother). I love his transformer robot face where he is posing, and the one where he is laying down on the ground is not Kaden  playing dead, but Kaden in "truck mode". :) One of my favorite things about Kaden is his awesome imagination. Yesterday he was a pirate Chiuaua (ok i know that's not spelled right but the little Hispanic dogs)  going on an Easter egg hunt! :) At least we're not often bored! 

Happy Birthday Mom

Mom's birthday was last Thursday and we were so blessed to be able to share it with her. Caleb and Kaden had so much fun helping Grandma open presents and blow out candles. Caleb's favorite song is Happy Birthday so he's very excited when he gets the chance to sing it. We just had a quiet family birthday with a nice dinner, presents, and cake. I think my mom looks so beautiful in these pictures. I love you, Mom!

P.S. for any of you who have ever been in my parent's home the flower picture that my mom is holding is to help replace the huge Moroccan Black men pictures! Yes, my poor mother has had these pictures (my dad bought them when he was stationed in Morocco in the navy) up forever or at least the last 29 years that my parents have been married. It's definitily time for new pictures!

Bob the Builder

Caleb absolutely loves Bob the Builder and likes to run around singing the theme song but it sounds more like, "Da-da-dada" (Can we fix it!) I just thought he looked so cute dressed up in 

Kaden's Bob the builder hat and tools.