April Birthdays bring May...um.. I don't know

April in our family is a busy birthday month, with 4 of us having birthdays! Mine (Caren) is first on the 7th. It was a great day, even though I'm in shock at how old I am! I just like to think of myself as 28. I plan on being 28 for the rest of my life! The day started with going out to coffee and then an art show (that I had tried to enter but didn't finish the painting in time) with a friend, who didn't even know it was my birthday! Then Matthew took me out to lunch at Ocean View, then we went on a wonderful hike up Perseverance trail! Here's a picture at "the rock".

Next comes Matthew and Ashlen's birthdays on the 10th. We had a little celebration at my parents house after church. Meadow played Happy Birthday on the harmonica. Then we had another party at our house that evening after community group. Ashlen is 2! Can you tell? :)

And finally Logan had his 5th birthday on the 20th! He had 2 friends over for a space party after school. One of the games we played was "shoot the asteroid" with his suction cup Nerf gun. We also played "pin the astronaut on the Space Station", but mostly the boys just wanted to play with Logan's new Lego's.

Here's Logan and his best buddy Kegan and his Space shuttle cake with planets around it.

10th Anniversary!

On March 31, we celebrated our 10th anniversary with a quick trip to Seattle! We stayed in a fancy hotel in downtown, and went to dinner at The Melting Pot, which is a fondue restaurant. (We went to the one in Bellevue, since we heard it's better than Seattle).

This cake was there in our room when we arrived! Unfortunately we didn't eat it right away and when I did eat some, about 8 hours later, it gave me food poisoning and I threw up! ~how romantic! This shows part of the beautiful room. The fancy part was this big tub that fills from the ceiling! See the water coming down? Here's a lovely picture of raw meat. We started with a cheese fondue with bread and veg, then a broth for the main course, which was a variety of meats, then had yummy dark and white chocolate fondue for dessert! It was all very yummy! They gave us complimentary sparkling cider since it was our anniversary!

Yummm! This chocolate one was called the Yin and Yang. We had a really nice time, minus the sick part! It's been a great 10 years! Now on to an even better next 10! (Kind of a scary thought, realizing that we will be in our mid 40's, and kids will all be teenagers! Well, Ashlen will be 12, but still, yikes!)

Community Groups

For those of you who have moved away from here, I'll update you on a change we have made in our church. For quite a while, our Sunday evening service has not been very well attended, averaging about 20 people. Our pastor noticed that the once a month Sunday FOLD groups were getting about that many people in each one, and thought it would be a better use of time and would reach more people if we just made every Sunday evening a FOLD night. It was a hard decision to stop the evening service, but the church elders agreed to try it for a while. We started doing this in January, and all groups are watching a DVD series called The Truth Project, which is put together by Focus on the Family, and teaches on having a Biblical worldview. There are 12 different sessions, covering topics like what is truth? Who is man? Who is God, science, history, sociology, etc. (that's as far as we've gone, so I don't remember the rest). They are well done and a lot of information is covered in each one. Afterward we have a time of discussion. Our group has really enjoyed it, and there are people from Matthew's work who are watching it.
Our pastor also wanted to change the name of our groups from F.O.L.D. (Fellowship Of Local Disciples, which is where the church breaks into smaller groups and meets in homes) to something that would be a little more recognisable to new people joining our church. He said for a long time he didn't know what FOLD meant, until someone explained it. So they came up with Community Groups as the new name, since many churches in other places use the name community group or small group for their Sunday night home meetings.
I think it's been an ok change, especially for families with young children to be involved. I think what people miss is the testimony time. It can happen in the groups, but then you don't get to hear from other people in the church, only those in your group.

Clean Sweep!

Well, this post is not in chronological order, but I had to put it in. Have you ever seen the TV show "Clean Sweep"? It's where organizers go in to someone's home and help them clean and sort an out of control room. Well, this weekend I was clean swept!! (By friends, not the TV show, in case you were wondering!) There is a large extra room downstairs that we haven't been ready to use yet, so over the 4 years that we've lived in this house, stuff has been accumulating, and I had become so overwhelmed by it, that I couldn't even go in there! Realizing that it's more fun to clean someone else's house, some wonderful friends came up with a great idea. We would all go to each others houses to help with whatever big cleaning project was needing to get done! We are needing an extra bedroom now, so we started with my house, while my mom watched all our kids!

And here is the dreary mess! This room has become known as "the messy room"...as you can see! Here's the mighty Laura, lifting bags of stuff while carrying her baby! And Kristi and Robin, who helped immensely by sorting the whole room and deciding what to get rid of, which is very hard for me! One of them commented that this was the biggest pile of randomness they had ever seen.I don't yet have a good "after" picture, because I'm still sorting a few things, but I gave away a van load, and took a whole truck load to the dump!

Kristi got so into cleaning, that once we came to a stopping point with the room, she stayed and cleaned out my pantry! As you can see, I am a major stasher...The closet was overrun by plastic bags. I had no idea there were so many in there! She filled a giant garbage bag with them! Fortunately there's a place to recycle here.

Finished! It's so refreshing to open it now! Kristi went on to clean off the top of my fridge, and a messy cabinet full of old magazines. She's going to inspect my pantry every time she comes over to make sure I'm not hoarding plastic bags again! I'm going to start using the re-usable shopping bags now.I now have a better idea of what things I need to make a place for, and what things I just don't need to keep. Hopefully these pile-ups won't happen again!

catch-up time!

Hello blog readers who have probably almost given up on my blog! For some reason I just didn't feel up to updating for a while, but now I will start! I'll do a few posts a day to catch you up on our existence since the last post 4 months ago!

Meadow's 6th Birthday

December 10th was Meadow's 6th birthday! It's rather shocking to think I already have a 6 year old...that happened awfully fast! Her birthday fell on a Friday, which means there is always a Singing Christmas Tree concert that weekend, so we had a family party at Grandma & Grandpa Cooke's house, then went over to the church for the performance. The next day she had a girl party, and went to the Rec. Center to play, then McDonalds for lunch. The girls all had a good time together. It was funny though, at different times during their conversations, I overheard each of them state, "I know everything"! It must be great to be a wise 6 year old!

Genesis, Aurora, Meadow, & Jenna Candle in an ice cream cone

This is the cake I made for the family party. She requested a seahorse!

Decorating for Christmas

The kids are showing off their stockings:

Meadow...with Sluggy the slug peeking out Logan

Brennen...with mom and dad's stockings on his feet Ashlen putting hers on

Then my octopus of children "helped" with decorating the tree. I call them my octopus because there were 8 eager arms reaching and grabbing and throwing things in all directions! It was all rather crazy for a while, but we got the job done, and only broke about 5 glass balls. Trying to settle everyone down, I had them do nice calming waterpaints while I finished cleaning up. A few minutes later I found Meadow putting on "make up" and of course all the others copying her. Then just as I was about to have them all clean up, daddy came home and let them paint his bald head!

And Back to Seattle Again!

In November, Matthew and the worship team for our church went to Seattle for the annual worship conference at Overlake. On the last day, I came down with the kids, left them with Christy, and joined them for the final concert! It was Gungor (pictured singing Beautiful Things) and then New World Son. Gungor is one of our new favorite bands. It was a wonderful concert, and fun to hang out with everyone in a different place.They all enjoyed the conference, but for this year Matthew has decided it would be better for the group to go and serve, so in the fall we are planning a trip to Mexico to purchase and set up a sound system for Katie and William's church in San Marcos, and also to do concert outreach events.

This is the amazing, crazy drummer for New World Son. Matthew showed him a video on his phone of Brennen drumming, then got his autograph. He said Brennen sounded pretty good, and wrote, "to Brennen, keep on drumming" and drew a little picture of a drum. That may be worth something when Brennen is a famous drummer someday. :)
Krista was very excited to have all the New World Son guys sign the back of her phone.

Meanwhile, the kids all had a wonderful time with Auntie Christy! We stayed a few extra days in Seattle for a vacation. We let the kids each choose a toy while we were shopping, and they all wanted snakes! So each night they slept snuggled with their snakes, of all things! Another fun activity was visiting Woodland Park Zoo. Here, Meadow and Logan are trying to cheer up the tapir by talking to it and petting it (there was glass in front of course) because they thought it was crying. As we were leaving the zoo, we let the kids pick a small toy from the gift shop, and guess what they all picked...snakes! It was the trip of snakes I guess.

We sure love our trips to Seattle! It will be sad if we ever loose our flight benefits.

Lovely Fall Storms

The month of October has been quite stormy, with high winds causing power outages about every other day! We celebrated 10/10/10 with a particularly bad storm, with sustained winds of around 80 mph. and gusts over 100 mph.! Anywhere else I think that would be considered a hurricane, but here it's just a fall storm, sightly windier than usual. Well, it caused lots of damage! Here are some bad pictures taken on the move:

A telephone pole that broke in half

One of the wire holding things that broke off a pole

and a landslide. Trees and wires were down everywhere, and a huge fish processing boat tore away from it's dock and ran aground. Our power was out for 21 hours. That wasn't bad considering they were saying it could be 2 or 3 days! We were warm and cozy and able to cook on our woodstove, so it was kind of fun! Our friends came over to get warm, and stayed the night, and we played a game of Catan by candlelight. The kids were quite used to the power being out by now, so they didn't really care.

Sunny Seattle

Matthew had a bit of time between building jobs, so we decided to come out from under the clouds, and go to Seattle for a few days of fun in the SUN! Of course, just as we were getting ready to board our jet, the power went off again in during another storm! And yes, it was a rather scary, bumpy ride!

We visited auntie Christy and my long lost parents who are also visiting there. Our first day we went up the Space Needle, which is something Logan has wanted to do for a while. I think the kids were a little dissapointed that it didn't actually go to space.

Beautiful Meadow! (I was having fun with a special effects photo app on my iphone, as you can see.)

City view from the top.

More....

Next we rode the monorail into downtown and back.

Pretty picture of Ashlen running next to the Space Needle. She's such a happy girl!

This is a labyrinth painted on the ground just below the Space Needle. The kids all did it and loved running the path. I need one for my yard! When they're getting too wild I can say, "Go run the labyrinth 3 times!" It's surprising how long it actually is. That's the "Experience Music Project" (EMP) in the background.

Barefoot Boy of course had to take his shoes off on the sidewalk in downtown Seattle, near a man who was screaming unintelligible things about whiskey bottles!

From City to Farm

The next day we visited a farm with a pumpkin patch and a corn maze! It was beautiful, and our first time seeing either of those. The maze was fun. They gave us a map, and we had to find numbered posts with a hole punch attached to punch the numbers on our map to show that we found all of them. We didn't think it would be all that hard, so we started out letting Ashlen lead the way, which she did with great noise and excitement, only to realize later that we hadn't seen any # posts, and had no idea where we were! But I figured it out and saved the day. I'm a hero.

In the background are the entrances to the 2 mazes. We did the castle one, not the vampire, in case you were concerned!

Ashlen was on overload, saying, "Ball! Ball!" everywhere, and trying to pick up the biggest ones! She was so cute.

This was at the Auburn Supermall. I thought it was cute. Logan and grandpa had lunch together.
We came home the next day to slightly nicer weather. It was a fun trip! Yay for flight benefits!

Birthday Boys

October 2, Brennen turned 3, and Grandpa John turned...59! They had a yellowcopter applesauce cake. Here's a slightly better pic of the cake. It was slowly falling apart (and ending up with mysterious chunks out of it!) It didn't turn out as good as I had hoped, but it was the best I could do while feeling sick. Brennen loved it though, and it was yummy!

Because I've been sick, we just had a family party, (with Krista too!). We had spaghetti for dinner, then opened presents. Brennen was so excited about each new thing! (grandpa too!)