Wedding

This past weekend Matthew & I went to Seattle yet again, where Matthew had the privilege of performing a wedding for the first time! It was for Brendon and Lynette Mix. Brendon and Matthew became friends while working together for several years at Alaska Airlines, before Brendon moved down to the Seattle area. After moving there, he asked Matthew what church he should go to, and when he went there, he ended up meeting Lynette, who just happened to be visiting the church that Sunday! When they got engaged, he asked Matthew to marry them because he was someone Brendon looked up to as a good Christian example, and because he played a big part in them meeting in the first place! Matthew said he would, but only if he could do their pre-marriage counseling. He wanted to be sure that they were right for each other, and they were going about it in the right way. He certainly doesn't want the first couple he married to end up divorcing. So, over the past 2 or 3 months, we met with them once a week on skype, and went through a book on preparing for marriage. We really enjoyed doing it, and are confident that they are in it for the long haul, and want what God wants for their marriage. Here is Matthew and the groom just before the wedding...both a little nervous!

It was a beautiful, happy wedding! Matthew did an excellent job, and gave a good short sermon during the ceremony. Some of the family said it was one of the best they've heard at a wedding.

This was having Brendon say the vows.

Official license signing The weather was warm and sunny. They had an outdoor reception on this grassy field. I just had to make Matthew pose in his suit and tie with our rental Mustang (they upgraded us for free) with Mt. Rainer poking up in the background. Probably not a scene we will see again! :)

Go Bumpkins!

Logan had his first soccer game today! His team is called the Bumpkins. (Logan is the one in blue shorts, in case you couldn't tell). They were cute. They basically ran in a pack chasing the ball, all around the field including behind the goals, and through the crowd of families watching the game. Brennen got upset because they all ran through the volcano he was making in the dirt! Logan kicked the ball a few times but mostly just followed the crowd around, and tried to get his friend on the opposite team to pass him the ball! He had fun once he got into it. They all did pretty well for only having one previous practice! They don't keep score or anything at this level so I have no idea who "won".

Sunny In Seattle

Last week, we finally gave up on seeing summer time sun and warmth here in Ketchikan, so our family and my parents came out from under the clouds to warm, sunny Seattle for a couple days. We just wanted to have a bit of nice family time before school starts. We all invaded "the Chrusty Hotel" (Christy's house) and had fun visiting the usual playgrounds and mall with the carousal. The next day we went to Alki beach. It's a nice area to visit, and the kids loved watching jets taking off overhead and ferries going by. They spent hours digging in the sand. I already put this picture on facebook, but I like this one of the boys.

Each one wanted to be buried in the sand!

Then were quite covered when they got up!

We ended our lovely day with a stop for ice cream at Baskin Robins, then headed off to the airport to come back to the clouds and rain. Meadow got her lovely golden locks cut while we were there. Her hair was always getting in a huge knot, so we decided it was time. Here's the before and after! She's lovely with the shorter hair too, and she likes it because she can brush it herself instead of mommy's painful brushing!

Finally Some Summer!

After a very wet, cold summer, we finally have some sunny days! On one day we went with my parents on a beautiful hike on Connell Lake trail. The kids are excellent hikers, and ran most of the way, even Ashlen, who also makes so much noise she scares away all the bears for miles around!
Meadow was calling herself a nature girl and posing for forest pictures along the way. She also said she's going to name her kids Shore and Berry Bush!

I love being deep in the forest! It's so beautiful.

Today was the Blueberry Festival! The kids liked this fish fling game. See the (rubber) fish almost going in the hole? Meadow also participated in a spelling bee. She did well sounding out the words which were hard for a 6 year old. She didn't quite win though.

Krista met up with us, and shared her blueberry popcorn!

4th of July

We had a lovely cold, very rainy, windy 4th of July! But that doesn't stop Kechikanians, as you can see the usual crowd came out to watch the parade. I'm just glad we have a parade, as many places don't, I guess. It was a rather strange one though, with the "tattoo float" which had half naked people creepily standing on the back of the truck showing off their tattoos...and accompanying rolls and flab...as you can imagine, it was quite a sight, along with the person dressed up in the sasquatch costume...??? Hmmm. The old lady driving her power chair with a roof over it and holding her little fluffy white dog on her lap was pretty dynamic.. and the senior class of 2012 who were dressed as cave men, had one brave (and shivering) lad wearing, um, nothing but a little flap in front and in the back, true cave man style, if you know what I mean..! Not smart on a windy day! Haha, (he did have skin colored sort of tights on, but still...really??)

There was plenty of yummy candy to pull out of the mud puddles!
Poor Ashlen didn't seem too impressed, but she didn't complain either.

Meadow and best friend Jenna, soaking wet and shivering at the end of the parade, but they had a great time! We had friends over for a barbecue, and the kids spent more time running around out in the rain, then Matthew set off a few firecrackers on the deck for Meadow to watch. (The boys were sound asleep and could not be woken up) It was a good day!

Tooth Out!

Last week Meadow lost a front tooth! Her 2 front teeth have been loose for a while, so she just pulled it out herself at school, during Bible time! Tooth losses for her have been easy. She loves to pull them out! This is her 3rd.

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.