SURPRISE.

This is Debbie, sneaking in a guest post for the Mayer family blog while they are traveling.

Mostly it has to do with a lot of internet time and not a lot to do. I figured they would be surprised when they read this. Please, I am not so sure, but surprised, yes.

Hopefully soon, Jack will perfect the art of the picaken. What is that, you ask? It is a pie. Baked into a cake.

Yes. It sounds amazing, right? Plus, the possibilities are ENDLESS.

Clearly this blog had no direction, no foresight, no planning. Thus, it is going to end right about... now.

But, since I have a great view of children from around the world at this point, I would like to state that Hannah and Evie are still the cutest children in the world.

The house

We're on our way to Connecticut, visiting lots of family along the way. But I wanted to give everyone an update on our house hunting trip. We found a house! You can find pictures for it here.
We should be able to move in March 4th! And rent before closing on it. We're looking forward to actually having a place to go.

House Hunting

We're in Connecticut right now, leaving today. We've been here since Thursday. We're house hunting. Friday and Saturday we looked at 14 houses, plus reviewed several others that we weren't able to go to for one reason or another. That's a lot of houses in two days. Our minds were spinning! We found two we really liked, it's been hard but we finally decided which one to make an offer on, so this morning we're off to the realtor to make an offer! I'll post picture of the house once we have it. We're going to see how fast we can move it :-) After two days of craziness looking at houses we went to church with friends yesterday, yes, we already have friends in the area! They're the parents of some of my friends growing up, they home schooled their four girls in Rochester and we did lots of things with them. It was wonderful seeing them and being able to talk about the houses with them, visit at their house and take a walk through the woods! Besides Thursday, when we came in, it's been great weather, yesterday day was absolutely beautiful, sunny blue sky, warmer, not at all what it should be like in February in Connecticut :-) It looks like we may be heading up to finish up a mild winter and into Spring already, that'd be great! If not, the girls will love the snow. We head back to Houston this afternoon. The packers come on Wednesday, they load the truck on Thursday, we're leaving Friday early morning. CRAZY! We're going to take a week to come up the East Coast, visiting family along the way. It should be a great trip!

I'm not doing that

The other day Hannah and Evie were sitting on the couch, Hannah had a book in hand and was reading it to Evie. Not her normal reading of just making up words to the story, actual reading, following along with her finger and reading the words on the page. Of course when I mentioned something about this total denial was given. That girl is so funny! May she'll read to her sister on the moving trip Friday.

Red Velvet Cake

It was my friend Keelia's birthday today and she invited us over for dinner. Of course I had to bring the cake :-) She requested red velvet cake, I had never made that before. I found a great recipe and it was super yummy!

Happy Birthday Keelia!

Doesn't that look yummy?

Marry and bury

This past Sunday was a little different at Church. There was a licensing. A licensing is where someones call to vocational ministry is recognized and confirmed by the church congregation. Licensing also means that the person can marry and bury people :-) Nathan was licensed on Sunday. He became a licensed minister in the state of Texas (we're not quite sure how it completely works, if the licensing can be transferred to CT or not). Nobody can quite explain how all the licensing works, I'm not even sure if it's reported to the state or not. But anyway, it was cool to see this first step towards full time ministry!

Here's Nathan and our Pastor, Brett Dutton after the licensing is complete.

A visit with Lyn

We had Lyn (and Zac, and Kara and Karen) over on Saturday. They drove all the way from the Austin area (over three hours away) to see us before we left! We had so much fun. Kara was only able to stay for lunch, and then had to leave for work (she's going to college in Houston). But, before she left we made sure to show our crazy side. I made chocolate chip cookies for dessert for lunch and when I brought them out the girls said they wanted to decorate them. Kara chimed in that she hadn't decorated cookies, well, how can we have cookies and some who has never decorated them leave our house in that state? We can't. So I whipped up some frosting, let Kara pick from our HUGE assortment of decorations and let her (and my girls) go to town. :-) It was all great fun and craziness. I like craziness! Lyn came bearing gifts and spent a large amount of time reading to Hannah and Evie from the new books she brought. Nathan got out his legos which Zac enjoyed and we had a great visit. We're so thankful we could see Lyn and her family before we moved to Connecticut.

Lyn reading to the girls

Playing with foam. Everyone loves the foam! :-)

Cookie decorating. Zac, Karen, Kara, Lyn, Hannah and Evie.

In the kitchen with Mommy

Today while I was making a strawberry sauce to put on cheesecake I was bring to home group Evie came to watch. Although she didn't spend much time watching. Instead she pretty much emptied the bottom shelf of my cabinet and pretended to bake herself. This kept her entertain for more than 30 minutes. She'd take everything out, put it back in, take a few things out, pretend to pour them into something, or pretend to dump them and then grab something else. It was fun to watch :-)

Here you can see everything she had out. She also had the chocolate chips out (they're on the shelf in this picture) at one point. No bowl needed, just a great imagination!