"Love the Lord your God, walk in all His ways, obey His commands, hold fast to Him and serve Him with all your heart and soul." Joshua 22:5


Friday, April 20, 2012

John's birthday continued

Finally, after four days of postponing, we had birthday dessert!  (Four Layer Delight...  at his request!)

The birthday song.  (Hope we didn't torture his ears too bad!)



Happy Birthday, John!
We are BLESSED to have you and so glad to celebrate your 42 years!!

John's unusual 42nd birthday...

First, he (WILLINGLY) spent his "actual" birthday with me at a homeschool convention in Memphis...  looking over curriculum and helping me make choices for next school year.
John, I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!
So, the next day, he wanted to take the boys fishing in our pond for his birthday.  (Can you believe we've lived here almost a whole year without going fishin'?!!)  But, it rained.  So, we postponed until the next day.


















Turns out, fishing was SO much fun that no one wanted to stop to go eat (including John)... so we postponed taking John out to dinner for his birthday until the next night.

Everyone was SO stuffed after eating out for the birthday dinner the next night, that we postponed (again!) eating his birthday "cake" until the next night.  But we did finally give him his gifts...
(drumroll, please... it's tradition)
THE GIFT PARADE!



To be continued in the next post...



Monday, April 16, 2012

Easter 2012

Easter traditions...

Saturday we colored the eggs.  And decided to try an experiment...  can brown eggs color the same as white ones??  We have all these wonderful brown fresh farm eggs and so we didn't want to go buy white eggs.  So, we tried it.  And it worked!!  Definitely a little different shade of color...  more of a "heathered" look and a little army-ish.  The boys were very pleased!
Josiah would rather hide the plastic eggs than hunt them or color the real eggs so he was busy hiding eggs outside while Shepard and Will colored eggs with me.  This is the first year he hasn't colored eggs...  another change.  But, we love watching him mature into a man!  And the two younger boys had a blast coloring the eggs!
It is really awesome to have children at different ages and levels!  Having an older one now is so helpful and the younger ones still enjoy doing the activites.  Fun.




The hung begins...







Another tradition...  we have been putting the face stickers on our colored eggs for years.
So, we kept tradition!
Here are the boys with the finished eggs.

Easter morning!
More tradition...  the Easter baskets filled with little goodies.

Cute matching Easter outfits were not on the agenda this year. :)  The boys actually all picked out their own clothes for the day.  I thought they all looked so handsome.


The absolute highlight of Easter for us this year was celebrating a traditional Passover meal together!!  (We've never done that before.)
We studied it all week during school and learned a lot about the symbolism of it.  Wow!  All of a sudden the Bible account of Jesus' last week came to life for us!  Things that we had just been accustomed to reading over now made a lot of sense. 
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!!!!
This was truly a treasure moment!
(And it brought so much joy to me to see how much the children enjoyed doing it.)


 (There a lamb shank bone, parsely (bitter herbs), horseradish (bitter/ harsh), salt water (tears) and there is my homemade "haroset" (sweet joy) on the platter.  (We didn't have the traditional Jewish plates, etc, so we made do with what we had.)  Haroset...  my new favorite word since I learned the right way to say it!  I go around the house saying it over and over for fun.  The boys say I sound like a Russian!