"Post Something"

It's been on my list.   Just post SOMETHING!  Juggling our lives with a new label ("homeschooling") has taken some adjustment as we haven't yet found that place of equilibrium.  Don't get me wrong.  We LOVE it. It's totally worth it.  I can see us continuing beyond this year (though we still need to get through an entire year to see how Ellie does with it longer-term) however this time of year is just plain busy.  

This weekend Nathan came down with a bad cold virus, no doubt just wiped out from keeping up with it all (in the past three weekends I've attended a women's conference in Ohio, shot my last 2 weddings for the year, and hosted my mom and sister -- all wonderful things, just b-u-s-y).  Thankfully Nathan seems to be on the mend, just in time for our biggest annual event, this weekend's "African Goat Roast".  Each night we've had a team of students over working on constructing the cardboard box maze (which our kids think is the coolest thing ever -- Reni regularly asks if he can go and play in the "mock maze").  We're making daily trips to Sam's Club, Lowes, and/or Wal Mart for supplies (which, like the nerd I am, I've saved on my computer from previous years, so that helps a bit).  With kids, we just can't seem to do all the stores on the same day! 

Last night after cabinet meeting another team of students helped me chop 40 lbs of potatoes, peel & chop 6 giant bags of carrots, and a bag of onions for goat stew.  While we were doing that, at the request of a student, Nathan went and auditioned for a role in a campus film project.  (Don't we have the coolest job?  Ellie will think her Dad is IT to see him in a movie.  That is, if he gets the part.  His "sick" voice may make him sound too creepy for the role. We'll see. ;-))

Jesus is sustaining us and helping us.  Case in point:  On top of the important stuff getting done on schedule so far, on Sunday night as we were moving old pieces of cardboard down from the attic for the box maze, a student lost his footing and fell through the ceiling!  Thankfully, he wasn't hurt and thankfully the one square foot of space he fell through happened to be over the rounded corner of our fiber glass shower unit so he didn't break through any sheetrock requiring a repair!

No, life is not dull here!  I did a quick scan through my photos folders to see if I had any photos of the kids and found these from the last week and a half.  Below Ellie and Reni are with their new friend, Gracie.  Gracie's Mom and Dad were in our small group Bible study in the B.K. era ("before kids").  They now live in a creative access country so visits with them are few and far between!  We were grateful that they were coming down to Kentucky and could come and visit for a few hours Monday before last.  I feel I should also explain that we were having some issues with our apartment's climate control, hence Reni is enjoying his freedom as a boy to go shirtless.

 I really wonder what they're doing behind me that all the kids must be mimicking...

I'll try to be better about having the camera close by so I won't be short of blogging material!