Gotta Get Back in the Groove!

I've become SUCH a bad blogger. For the past week and a half a whole lot of my free time / blog time has been consumed with BOOKS. Not reading them; selling them on eBay! God opened a fantastic door for us and soooooo blessed us... but more about that later. I am so, so, so far behind on all of the happenings around here that I've forgotten most of them entirely! So I'll rely on the pictures I've taken... and that's been almost as sporadic as my blogging. ;-)

Let's see, the first thing we have is Josiah doing school...

He was wearing is spy gear night goggles under there. It's the guy way of doing school, I guess.
We had our Youth Convention down in Hatch again this year and it was wonderful. The theme was The Potter's Vessel, to match the General VLB theme for the year and all of the messages were very good. I especially enjoyed hearing our new ministers, the "kids," preach. They had so many good thoughts--good things to share. I only ended up with a couple of pictures this time, for some reason. Nathan and Caleb being baptized...

Unfortunately, after all this time (!) I can't remember a whole lot of other details about the Convention. Except the food, of course. We were in Hatch, so it was fantastical and we were sick and miserable by the last day from eating way, way too much.

The Convention ended late on Saturday night, so a whole bunch of us stayed at the motel again that night. The next morning we all went to Denny's for breakfast together before going our separate ways. Afterward, we drove home with the Hays hot on our tail. :-) We had some Family Camp business to attend to that warranted them coming to stay a couple of nights with us on their way home. So, of course, Brother Dustin got busy playing soda jerk...

I really think he's gotten more use out of the soda fountain than we have. Ha! It's GREAT.

We had a really great Sunday evening service that night, then we all went to McDonalds with the Clarkson clan and had a fun--however chaotic--visit while the kids ran wild in the play place.

I don't know how it happened, but we never got to play games with the Hays that night; we just talked about Camp stuff. What's that all about?!

The next day we got up and headed two and a half hours over to take a look at the campground we'll be using for Camp this year. Brother Dustin wanted to take a real good look at the facilities and see what all was available up there so he'll know how to best plan and prepare. We spent about an hour there, then drove back home. We split up into a girl van and a guy van for the trip home and I so enjoyed being able to visit with Sister Jamey. Wish we could have more times like that!

I had cooked a pork roast before we left for Convention so we'd have something to eat on one of the days when there would be no time to cook. So we had barbeque sandwiches for a fast, easy dinner. Bathed the children, put them to bed, finished up on our Camp stuff, then got down to the real business at hand: GAMES. I honestly can't remember a whole lot about the night, but I'm certain we had a great time. :-)

Ah, yes... I almost forgot, but for the pictures. :-) One of the HAYS KIDS (ha!) did a dastardly deed while at our house. YESSSSSSS!!! I think that means I'm two points ahead. Not that anybody is counting, of course. ;-) James has been planning on getting the pond all set up, cleaned out, and filled up here for a few weeks. He's been concerned that the liner might have gotten torn or punctured during the winter and has given the kids express directions to stay away from the pond and--whatever they do--DON'T throw rocks into it because it would further increase the chances of the liner being destroyed. Yeah, you guessed it. That sweet little girl did her best to fill that little pond up with rocks! Ha! Of course, since it wasn't one of our own children who knew better, James wasn't the least bit upset. Brother Dustin was thoroughly appalled, however, which is what it's all about. :-) He marched Aleah down to the pond so she could confess to James and apologize. Here she is explaining how she "accidentally" dropped a few rocks into the pond... HA! Of course, her Dad didn't go for that and made her adjust her approach.

When she really got into confessing mode she just fell apart. She was sobbing so hard she could hardly speak! Poor thing!!!
And of course, our children were not happy at all with now unfair it is to see their Dad's reaction to some other kid being sooooooo different than if one of them had thrown rocks in the pond. Ha!
The Hays didn't have to head home early the next morning, so we decided to go to the children's museum with them. I took a plethora of pictures, so here they are...

Everybody was pretty fascinated with how the water shot in such cool little streams at the fountain.

Ah, yes. Some time ago Sam saw this policeman hat at Wal-Mart and just fell in love with it. Unfortunately it cost $4 and he only had $1. But a week or two later his brother came into some money. After paying his tithes, he slipped $4 to his Dad and asked him to pick the hat up to surprise Sam with. What a guy! Sam LOVES it and wore it non-stop for the first week. I love his bendy-down ears when he wears it! HA!
Playing with water currents
Uuuuuhhh... I think this was another something about water currents...
Enjoying the trains
At this station you're supposed to cut little paper cups into different shapes to learn about how the different designs affect how the airflow will carry it. (The large cylinder blows air straight up.) Some of them will hover in the same spot indefinitely. So cool.
It's Sam's favorite spot in the whole museum. :-)
And here are the guys playing with more air currents, making the balls hover in the air or blow back and forth.
Joe found a spot to be cute. Though I'm sure that wasn't what he had in mind.
Learning about the construction of an arch...
Lifting it into place, oh-so-carefully...
And... success!
The "Electrician Extraordinaire" doing what he does best ~ahem~... playing with electricity.
I'm surprised there weren't three or four unnecessary holes in the table when he left. And the lights in the building weren't even flickering disco style when somebody would flip a switch. ;-)

Ha! This was great. Both guys are staring into a mirror, but according to how you adjust the lighting on each side you can see your own face MIXED with the features of the other guy's face. How cool is that?! Or scary...
Jamey couldn't help but laugh seeing her own face mixed with James'. Ha!
Speaking of that scary face...
I never did go see what this was all about, but Katie and Isaac sat and talked to each other for a long, long time.
Brother Dustin rode the highwire bike and was scared to death. He was shaking and fidgety and almost threw up twice. It took a good hour for him to calm down. Okay, so all of that is a lie--he didn't act the least bit bothered by it. But what kind of a story is THAT?! Boring...
One of the highlights of the museum is always the construction site out on the roof. Here is Katie by the house she built, sitting the chair she built.
Several worked together to built a nice little house for Aleah. She looks pleased.
Sam built this one for himself. Gotta love the pose. Ha!
Okay, that's all of the pictures I have for a while...

It was that weekend when we started working on the eBay stuff. A really special lady around here :-) felt led to get rid of all of her Christian fiction books. She mentioned donating them to the library, but I told her we'd be happy to help her out if she wanted to try to sell them instead and use the money to help people go to Camp. She prayed about it and felt like we should do that, then donate whatever didn't sell. So we went to her house to pick up the books one day. I don't know what we were thinking (we'd seen her bookshelves before!), but we somehow expected to go pick up a few stacks of books and that would be that. When we got to her house, she had ELEVEN BOXES of books all packed up! Ha! WOW!!! We worked off and on for three days at taking and editing pictures and writing up descriptions and getting everything listed on eBay.

Easter Sunday was nice. We had good services and three visitors, then enjoyed having Sister Galaviz come spend the afternoon with us and share our Easter dinner--which was way too much food. It was sooooooooo nice to have her--we don't see her nearly as often as we'd like to outside of church. She's such a fun, crazy old lady. (I had to say that because she reads my blog sometimes...) And I think she told me she's 78 years old this year... ;-)

I struggled to get a good picture of Katie (she has serious issues with being able to open her eyes if the sun is shining!), but I LOVE the dress Mom made for her this year! I'm usually not so crazy about the Daisy Kingdom thing, but I think this is just soooooooooo adorable.

The week after Easter was spent doing the regular things (at least according to the pictures that I took... or didn't take!) and in watching the eBay auctions and praying and praying and praying for God to bless and multiply them. And that he did! The last one ended on Friday night and the final tally was a whopping $923.03!!!!! Can you believe that?!?!? The eBay fees have gotten a little outrageous, but after they (and PayPal) take out their part it's still over $700 profit. Amazing! I have just been sooooo blessed through all of this. Not because of the MONEY, but because of how good God is; because of how He led this lady to donate these books at this time for this cause, and how He blessed abundantly because of her obedience. (Since that time things have happened with her job that are a GREAT blessing to her--things she's been praying for for a long time.) And I've been so blessed to see how God blessed and multiplied the amount raised through our fervent prayers for His favor. He is sooooooooo good and we are sooooooooooo blessed.

That's one of the real reasons (or excuses) I have for not blogging much. We have been sorting, separating, and preparing packages of books to be mailed. James has handled all of the invoices and payments and helped me with getting things ready to ship. He did the dirty work; I did the fun stuff. :-) I like filling orders and I like wrapping things in brown paper and making them look nice and neat. In the end, I think we've mailed nearly 50 packages in the past few days. Two more to go and we're all done.

The kids taped strips of construction paper onto their cheeks for "war paint" one day and headed out to play cowboys and indians one day. Yes, this is posed. (As if there was any doubt! Ha!)

Here is the pile of packages from the first night the auctions ended. Some people actually pay IMMEDIATELY upon the auction ended. And anybody who knows James knows that their orders were filled and taken care of IMMEDIATELY! He's a great eBayer.
Our pastor and his family were ministering at a Convention in Mexico this weekend, so James was in charge of the service here yesterday morning. Before I forget, Brother Chris called during the service Saturday night because he just couldn't wait to tell us all about it and how God had blessed and directed and how the people had responded. I can't wait to get the whole story on the rest of the Convention!

Due to circumstances beyond our control ;-) we were unable to have church at our building on Sunday, so we arranged to meet in a member's home and just join our morning and evening service into one. Josh David had shown up in time for dinner (elk stew--YUM!) on Saturday night, we stayed up visiting and playing I Buy until about 1:00am, I think, then he went with us to church Sunday morning before heading to Texas. We had good Sunday School, good worship, then James preached a mini-sermon and introduced the theme for our upcoming Regional Convention: The Sound of Abundance of Rain. The Lord really blessed. Then we went straight into my ABM service. I felt good about what I had prepared (the seven "gifts" listed in Romans 12: prophecy, serving, teaching, exhorting, giving, ruling, and mercy), but I really wondered if anybody was WITH me through it! I was shocked when several people told me afterward how much they enjoyed it. Who knew?! I have biblical examples for each gift, then posted pictures of some modern day people in the Church who demonstrate the different attributes. THAT was my favorite part--seeing how God has created different people with different personalities, temperaments and callings in order to meet the different needs in The Church of God. Oh, how we need each other!

After service we went to Jack in the Box with Josh before he left, then our family decided to just dink around town a bit before heading home. I'm not sure what all we did, but I know we were at Sam's Club and a few other places, most notably Krispy Kreme. (I had FOUR doughnuts today, two for breakfast and two after lunch--that's sooooooo bad!) We also stopped by Albertson's to pick up a few buckets of Blue Bell--it was on sale again. :-) Moo-llennium Crunch is way, way, way too good. I'm holding back and not letting myself have any tonight after those four doughnuts earlier. Ha!

The only other real excitement (that I can think of at the moment) is that James bought and installed a screen door today. I love it! It's just a plain, simple, wooden door that's mostly "open" and it was a lot trickier than it should have been to install (isn't that always the way it is?!), but I LOVE it. It's just soooooo nice to be able to leave the door open and hear the wind outside and feel the nice, fresh air. I seldom step foot outside, so if I'm going to get fresh air it has to come to me. Ha! Anyway, I LOVE IT.

Way, way, way too long of a post, but that's because it's been way, way, way too long since I've blogged. I'll try to do better. We'll see!