Sabbatical Send-Off

This weekend was a busy, but fun one! Our pastor is going on his sabbatical leave for 4 months and we had a great way of celebrating his send-off.



First, we had the Chicago Staff Band, which is a great Salvation Army band out of (you guessed it!) Chicago. We had the honor of having them come last year as well and it was so moving to hear them play. I was brought to tears several times last year and this year was no different. Music seems to bring me closer to God than most other times. It's a way of worshipping that speaks to me. I think King David had something going there when he sang and danced for God! Last night's rendition of "God Bless America" was beautiful and emotional and truly uplifting.

Because the band was spending the night and playing the next morning they needed people to help house them. We were fortunate and blessed to have Mr. Jeremy (L) and Mr. Brian (R) stay with us last night. They took up the kids' rooms and the kids slept in their sleeping bags in ours. The kids LOVED having them stay and asked them all kinds of questions and told them all about Yetis and lots of other silly things. They didn't want to see them go this morning. When I was a kid, we had lots of visitors. Visiting pastors and missionaries, friends of my parents, family - so many stayed with us over the years because of dad's ministry and it was always fun for us kids to meet new people. I was excited that my kids would get to experience the same thing.

After we dropped the guys back at the church we quickly ran out for breakfast and got back in time to enjoy the service with them again. Again, the music was amazing and just such a great way to worship and prepare for John's departure.

After the service we headed down to the fellowship hall to have a lunch together for the Sabbatical Send-off. The cake says it all!

As everyone was getting lunch ready downstairs, the fellowship team had made up sack lunches for the band and asked the kids to deliver them. You'll see Livie and Pete in the background there. Livie made a note for Mr. Jeremy with sad faces and tears to tell him she would miss him. It was really cute. :-)

Roy and Cathy, our fantastical food creators (is that a unique enough term for them?), made up the meal today. Roy even made up a kids' buffet complete with chicken nuggest and dinosaur-shaped pb&j sandwiches. I helped serve.

My friend Donna and I got a quick picture from our other friend Debbie to commerate the day. Donna and her husband James made all our sabbatical videos leading up to today. I would love to find a way to upload today's version, because it was HILARIOUS! It was done in a silent movie style and cracked us all up! They are such talented people!

Several people got up and spoke with blessings for John and John too talked and shared his thanks and his excitement about his leave. He's going to be doing a lot this summer while he's away, thanks to a special endowment grant we were approved for. I'm very excited for him!

We gave our hugs and promised to pray for a wonderful time of renewal and relaxation for him and his family. This is our pastor, John and his wife Debbie with his mom and sister. What a great way to celebrate something so important. And, to do it with people we've come to care so deeply about has made it that much more special. It was a great, fun-filled, powerful weekend!

Floors - Day 2000

You'll notice the title of this blog is "Floors - Day 2000" and I put that because, though it's only been actually about 16 days since we started this project, it certainly feels like an eternity!! But, the end is in sight. Here are some updated pictures from last week.




On Tuesday we began in the kitchen. By Wednesday night we had gotten this much done. It was starting to come along. However, since we had no room for the kitchen table while we were working that was in the middle of our living room all week. We worked on it a little every night and made the final push yesterday to get it done. We had guests coming last night, which you'll see in my later post, and we didn't want them walking into a house that had a dining table in front of the tv and a partial floor to walk on. We got it all nearly done, just a bit by the pantry and inside the pantry - and, of course, all the trim. I'll post pictures of the final product once we're completely done.

Today we decided to leave our mark on the house as the first owners of it. Madie and I love to watch "If Walls Could Talk" which shows old houses and the history left behind by previous owners. We decided to have each of us decorate our own little square on the lino in the pantry, so that the next owner(s) might some day find it if they ever take up the planks we put in it. Pete wanted to put "Why did you pull up our wood flooring?! Don't you know how much work it was to put in?!". But we thought it best not to accost any future owners of our home. ;-)


Pete is working as we speak, trying to lay the final planks in the pantry, so we can be just one step closer to having a finished floor, but I'm feeling so much happier to know that at the very least my house is 99% back in order. No more table in the living room or refrigerator pulled out in front of the pantry. We actually even ate at our table last night with our visitors and it was GREAT! Can't wait to share the final project of our first major inside home-improvement project. Yay!

Day 8 - The Foyer is DONE!

FINALLY! After 8 long, hard days we finished the foyer. Hooray!



And, I've gotta say, it looks terrific! Of course, now I want to paint the foyer, but we'll get to that later. :-)

This picture shows where we ended our foyer work. I haven't been much help these past few days, because it was basically all trim work. So, Pete's been working very hard to get all those pieces cut - especially the ones he had to backcut around all 4 of the doors in this area. Ugh!

Now that the foyer is done, it's time for the kitchen. Sigh. Hopefully this will be the easier of the two spaces, but I have a feeling we'll be in for more surprises and set-backs. At least Tater is excited!

Floor Redo - Day 3

On Day 3 we finished up the rest of the foyer/hallway/basement area. Got the closet finished and the last couple of boards. It's been so tedious, because of all the measuring and sawing and cutting that it doesn't look like we've made much progress in 3 days of work, but we really have!



We've practically been ignoring the kids since we got home from IN, because of the work we've been doing, so I decided to make up something kind of special for them after dinner, so they could have something really fun to do instead of just hanging around all day again. I made them this giant blanket fort! It basically took up the entire living room and they absolutely loved it! Heck, even Tater, who also has been neglected, got into it and had fun. Olive checked it out briefly, but was too annoyed by the crazy kids crawling all around in there to stay for long. It seemed to make up for the lack of attention since Friday. :-)

Here are the updated pictures. The closet door is back on and all the boards are in place. We even picked up the mess a little. Pete laid the trim piece by our bedroom door, but still has the trim to do all around the walls and stuff. That's another full day or a few evenings of work for him before we even start the kitchen. Figure we'll try and start that next weekend. We have guests coming to stay with us from the Salvation Army Band in a couple weeks. I'm just hoping we have it done (or really close to having it done) by then.

I think it's looking really good though, don't you?! Tater is interested in it, but it's very slippery for him. He doesn't like to run through it yet. Pete thinks that's a good thing. :-)

I made Pete give me a thumbs up to show that he's happy at all that he's accomplished. I sensed a little sarcasm in there too. I'm sure he had another finger on his hand he wanted to show me instead. ;-) But, seriously, he's done such a great job! He's had to manually saw through the basement door frame and our bedroom door frame, not to mention the closet frame. All just to get those boards to fit. He's so handy and talented at this kind of thing. Way to go, Honey!!!

Floor Redo - Day 2

I love home improvement projects just as much as the next guy, but MAN are these floors sucking! Granted we started on the hardest section, but it seems to be taking forever! We made some progress from yesterday. We got all the wood finished by the basement stairs/garage door area. That was no small feat either.



You probably can't tell from the picture, but it is a narrow space, so one plank of wood was just a little too small to fit there, so we had to cut all the pieces and the door jam was in the way, so Pete had to manually saw off a half inch of it to make room for the flooring. Long story short, finishing the foyer and the basement area, which equally about 7 rows of boards each took all stinkin' day! Ugh. Pete's exhausted. I'm tired. But, it's looking really good and for that, I'm thrilled!

We still have to finish the last part in front of the front door and then the coat closet and the last beam in front of that and our bedroom before we can start doing the trim work, but I'm hoping to get most of that knocked out tomorrow. Pete's doing all the cutting so I'm not a huge help to him right now, unfortunately. You see from the picture above that there is still that ugly lino. That's because despite the past 2 days of working and at least another one ahead, we still have the entire kitchen/dining left to do!!!!! AHHHHH!!! At least there I might be able to help more, since we'll have much longer stretches of board without having to measure and cut them all. So, there you have it. Day two in the floor redo. More tomorrow on our last day of Spring Break. Onward we push!

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, everyone! We had a very busy day and I'm just now getting a chance to post about it. Of course, it started off with the kids finding their baskets full from the Easter Bunny. They were thrilled with everything they got and spent the afternoon watching the movie "Tin Tin", one of their favorites.



Gotta say, the Easter Bunny really knows how to spoil those kids rotten, doesn't he? ;-) Now that Noah's diabetic, he seems to stay away from giving them lots of candy and now just gets them a couple presents instead.

When I was a kid, my dad always bought me, my mom, and my sister a corsage to wear. My mom always made sure we had a new outfit, usually one she made us, and I would sometimes even get to wear a hat and her shawl. It was wonderful! I have such great Easter Sunday memories and some of those traditions I'm trying to pass on to my kids. The new outfits is one of them. I can't make them myself, but I always try to pick out something really cute for them to wear to make that day seem a little more special. :-)

A couple years ago our church decided to start having an Easter Breakfast and it's always fabulous! Today was no exception. They went out of their way to make lots of delicious food and the kids enjoyed being with their friends this morning while they ate.

The kids were all in both the bell choir and the children's choir. They LOVE the bell choir and work really hard to know their stuff. See how happy they are?!

They really concentrate when it's time to perform.

Apparentely, while I was in the bathroom, Livie took a picture of herself during the service. Pete said he saw a flash and looked over to see Livie taking pictures. She loves that camera!

After a great service, the kids all went downstairs and got ready for the Easter Egg Hunt. They made their own bags this year during Sunday School, so they were ready to go!

Noah, every year, looks for the one golden egg. He doesn't collect any other eggs, though there are TONS of them! He just wants that one special egg. Sadly, he once again didn't find it. At least he had fun looking.

Madie was on the hunt for any she could find. She found several and had quite a lot of goodies when she was finished.

Livie walked away with the most. She filled her bag almost to the top!

Livie's friend Christina found one of the 2 golden eggs! She was so excited!

He searched high and low for that egg!

Madie was going through her eggs to see what goodies she had. :-)

We ask the kids to dump out their candy in their bags and give back the eggs, so we can reuse them each year. It's fun for them to all gather around the big egg bin and see what they had. Livie shouted out, "I got MONEY!" in her biggest Yeti voice. It was hilarious!

Of course, we had to take the Easter Family Photo. That is one of the requirements of our Easter morning. I rarely get a family picture and thankfully we have friends who we trade off cameras with and all get family photos of each other. I think this year we had another good one!

Another beautiful Easter morning with my three amazing, wonderful kids. I am so blessed. I leave this post with an entry I posted on Facebook yesterday. Today was so busy that I honestly had little time to find time to center on the meaning of the day, but yesterday I did and I took that opportunity to reflect on why Easter morning is so significant. As fun as it is to have the Easter Bunny visit or participate in Easter Egg Hunts, the day is about sacrifice and resurrection. This is what I posted:

"Watched a show last night on the Shroud of Turin. They tried to replicate what Jesus would look like from the image on the cloth. The man behind the computer image got emotional when talked about what Jesus would've looked like after the crucifixion. He was so battered and beaten. He looked like he had been in a horrific car accident. Then you remember, it was worse than that. Much worse. And, each time he was hit with that whip or had the nails driven into his flesh, he was thinking of us. He wanted to be that one sacrifice, so that we wouldn't have to be the ones battered and beaten. So I'm trying, as I work with Pete on the wood floors, to center myself on what tomorrow is all about. That despite the pain and suffering, he went through it all and fulfilled his Father's promise, so that I may believe in him and have eternal life."

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into the living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 1 Pet 1:3