Pumpkin Patch

About a week ago, following our annual tradition, we headed out to the pumpkin patch with our friends. We all look forward to the day at Oakes Farms each year. My two little pumpkins! Aren't they cute?! :)
Mackenzie holding a little pumpkin in her hands.

Josiah holding a little pumpkin in his hands.

Mackenzie "holding" Josiah, lol. They do have fun together!

Josiah driving the tractor with Mackenzie riding along behind it. (Okay, they were just pretending. Not really driving it!)

This thing is really neat. It is like a balloon trampoline. David, Bill, and all four kids enjoyed jumping on it!

Zoomed in on the four kids.

Josiah, Mackenzie, Lauren, Allison
(Petting zoo in background.)

All four kids peering in at the animals in the petting zoo area.

These big culverts were tons of fun! You climb in and roll them from one end of the yard to the other. :)

Mackenzie on the tractor bike.

Josiah loved the culvert slides!

Allison, Josiah, Mackenzie, Lauren

Zoomed in on Allison, Josiah, Mackenzie, and Lauren.

The four of us.

Josiah, Mackenzie, Lauren, and Allison.

The four of us.

We took a hayride out to the field and enjoyed the pumpkins. Josiah on a pumpkin.

Mackenzie on a pumpkin.

All four kids in the pumpkin patch.

Sweet Friendship. Fun times. Gorgeous day.

Kindergarten Craft, 2nd Grade Field Trip, Julia

Have I even taken time to mention in my blog that Mrs. Haluska asked me to be Room Mom for Josiah's class? Well, I said yes and tagged Allison, Lexi's Mom, to be Co-Room Mom with me! Nice to have a friend involved and to be able to share the responsibilities. I love being involved in the classroom. We had our first Craft Friday September 23rd. We will do those about once per month. Here's my little man. The kids were allowed to be out of dress code to celebrate Fall in farmer style clothes. Josiah wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans. The craft was nice and messy with paint to create hand print trees and thumb print leaves on the trees. We all enjoyed it.
One Sunday night we hosted our H2H small group Bible study at our house. One family has a new baby girl, Julia. She has an entire fan club, you see. Mackenzie was delighted to get to hold precious baby Julia.

SOOO super sweet. I love this picture! Julia doesn't seem to mind the attention, and the kids are learning so much from being around her. I am grateful that her parents are willing to share her with our whole H2H group! Thanks, Mike and Cindy, for sharing your blessing. :)

September 29th, Mackenzie's 2nd grade class took a field trip to Safety City. Sadly, I had to work that day. However, David was able to go and represent us and enjoy the day with Mackenzie. She loved having her Daddy there, too.

Safety City is a miniature city that teaches kids all kinds of safety skills, including rules of the road.

Mackenzie is on the bike to the right with a white shirt on in the above picture. Her class really enjoyed the trip.

That was 3 posts in 1! Getting caught up! More posts to come very soon. :)

David's Birthday

This tells you just how far behind I am with my blogging! Here's a couple of pictures from David's birthday. We had a fun celebration with family. I made him his favorite Fruit Pizza as a surprise on his birthday. I think he liked it!
David's parents bought him a Bruster's Ice Cream Cake. That was a nice treat. We all enjoyed the time together. I am so thankful for this man's birth!!! :)

Celebration!!!

What an amazing day! My "baby girl" has made the most important decision of her entire life. She gave her life to Christ over 6 months ago, and today she was baptized. What a blessing it was to be a part of this day for her. I loved hearing her plans as she thought aloud through the week, planning out this special day. She choose 3 songs, each of which has special lyrics, that she wanted played at certain times. David was able to put together a disk with the songs, and our friend, Mike, played them over the sound system at church for us. The first song was Come Now is the Time to Worship. Mackenzie wanted this played at the beginning, as it says, "now is the time to give your heart." The second song was Counting on God. She had the whole song played before the baptism, and she had the part about "the miracle of Christ in me, is the mystery that sets me free, I'm nothing like I used to be" played immediately after she came up out of the water. The last song she choose was Love the Lord Your God, by Lincoln Brewster. She says this is what it is all about. I LOVED hearing her pick these songs and the reason why she picked them. What insight. What a blessing. I do pray that she spends every day of her life serving the Lord with everything that she is and everything that she has and in everything that she does. We are so very proud of her. She choose a small group of around 40 people or so to be there for this celebration. We even had a pizza party afterwards!!! Even in the smallest child size baptismal robe, I had to roll her sleeves up for her hands to stick out! So precious.
She asked her daddy to baptize her. What an honor! He readily agreed and did a fantastic job.


Here is Mackenzie, ready to enter the water.

David met her at the stairs and escorted her to the middle of the baptistery. I then was using only the video camera and did not get a still pic during the baptism. My favorite part was when David picked her up in his strong arms so that she could see out over the edge before setting her down and immersing her.

My joy-filled child of the Lord. She was radiant! As soon as she was back in her dry clothing, she scurried back down to her friends and family. Thanks to Chris for leading the opening prayer and Leland for concluding in prayer circled around Mackenzie. We are all so blessed by our friends and family. We really appreciate everyone that came to celebrate with us today.

The pizza party afterwards!

Wonderful fellowship with wonderful people.

I really do love our friends and our family members, and I appreciate you all!

Mackenzie, Avery, and Arriona. Precious friendships.

Mackenzie, we are proud of you. We love you. We pray that you will make the choice each day of your life to serve the Lord in everything. We pray that He surrounds you with people to keep you close to Him forever. We are forever grateful for His gift to us. We are grateful for Jesus' life and His willingness to die on the cross for our sins. We are awed that He defeated death and lives forever and ever. We are humbled that He has taken our place and forgiven our sins. We will do our best to live our lives in loving service to Him.

A special thanks to my mom, David's parents, and his brother, Zac, for making a special trip to be with us to celebrate this special day.

It's Official. He can ride!

As David and I were inside the house getting last minute items gathered for our family outing to a farm area today, Josiah learned to ride a "two-wheeler." Mackenzie came running in screaming and we could hear Josiah outside screaming. We went running out thinking someone was hurt. Great news! No one was hurt at all. They were screaming with excitement. Josiah had done it. He taught himself how to ride a bike without training wheels. Our kids call bikes without training wheels, "two-wheelers." Josiah says he learned on our "practice bike," because it is the same one Mackenzie learned on...Elmo. Neither of them like Elmo, so he made sure to explain that it is just the practice bike. Today, David is taking the training wheels off his Cars Bike. It is official. He can ride.
I even got him to pose for a picture! :)

There he goes!

Way to go, Josiah! :)

7th Birthday Party

Today we celebrated Mackenzie's 7th birthday and Lauren's 6th birthday with a double party at the pool. What fun! The two girls who share a birthday, one year apart exactly, had been planning this double party for over a year now. I believe today was a success for everyone. The kids really seemed to have a great time swimming and playing together. Between the two girls, there were almost 30 kids at the party today! The best count I got was 29 or so. Amazing turn out, and so much fun!!! Thank you to all who attended and helped celebrate with us. Above is Avery, Mackenzie, and Abby, friends from school.
This is Mackenzie with Alyssa, another friend from school.

Mackenzie is on the right with Lauren sitting beside her. The two birthday girls! Sweet friendship. We enjoyed having our friends from our H2H group at church there to celebrate with them both, too. I never figured out a way to get all the kids in one picture, so I just picked a few of Mackenzie to upload for the blog.

Mackenzie loved the double party! Sweet birthday girls...Happy Birthday to you both!!! I am so glad we could share the day together with so many friends.

Mackenzie's Birthday

Somehow, among the chaos of this past week, my baby girl turned 7 years old! She is in the second grade. This was the first full week of school, and between early mornings and full days in school, we are exhausted! She has complained of not feeling well all week. Josiah has a cold with classic clear runny nose and sneezing. My case load at work has doubled, which is what I requested in order to have plenty of hours...however, one of the cases was "inherited" from another case manager who kinda went missing. Weird. She just stopped working. She did not really go missing, but she is not returning her calls or getting her responsibilities done. Therefore, her cases are being "off loaded" to other case managers. Problem is, there are MANY things left undone on all her cases that need immediate attention. I got one of those cases. Ha. No worries. I have an ultra supportive team of coworkers. I am truly and completely blessed with this team of people. I am getting plenty of hours and grateful for the job, too. That said, it was a crazy busy week....and it is not finished!

Tomorrow is Mackenzie's birthday party! Her birthday was Wednesday. She and Lauren, from church, are having a double party tomorrow. They have planned this party for about a year now, lol! I hope they have the party of their dreams tomorrow. It will be a pool party at a local gym. There will be lots of kids there, and the girls are very excited! I just can't believe how quickly her actual birthday came and kept on going...

We celebrated on Wednesday by taking sugar cookies with icing in between them and sprinkles, too, (like sandwich sugar cookies) to her classmates at school. After school, we celebrated with presents, ate at a Japanese restaurant so she could have mushroom soup (her request), and came home for cake and ice cream. It was a blessed day, and we are blessed to have her in our family.

On a side note...Josiah, as I tucked him into bed tonight, said, "Mom, the judge came into our class today and read Chester Raccoon to us." "The judge?" I asked. "Yeah, the judge. She came in and read to us and talked about not bullying." "Oh! You mean the principal?" I said. "Yeah." Josiah answered. That cracked me up! The judge. How cute is that?!

He also climbed onto the toilet, found the liquid Mucinex, took it to the sink, and attempted to draw his dose into the oral syringe. Sadly, he took an unknown amount. He showed me exactly where the dose came to in the syringe and told me he did that twice. Here's hoping that he is a good historian and is telling me accurately....if so, he got a "6 to 12 year old" dose. Should be fine. Sigh.

Did I mention that I witnessed a guy on a bike get hit by a car today? And the driver of the car zoomed off as fast as possible. The bike rider was fine. I rolled my window down and checked on him. Crazy world we live in, isn't it?!

Guess I was in the mood to type tonight. I mainly wanted to record a little about Mackenzie's birthday week. Kinda ended up rambling...He, he.

I will try to post about Mackenzie's actual party soon. She has enjoyed a wonderful birthday, and is eager to celebrate with her friends tomorrow. We love her and are very proud of her.