Bloody Wednesday

Nathan had a pretty rough day yesterday, our lead pastor is out of town and Nathan had to do a hospital visit for the first time ever and some one in the church died. Never fun to deal with. Anyway, we're sitting down at dinner today and I asked him how his day was, and he said productive, no, deaths, hospital visits, or anything like that. I said "what? No blood?" and then started relaying my day.....Kaleb crashed his bike a took several layers of skin off his knee in a couple places. Blood dripping down his leg, onto his sock everywhere. Damen was accidentally elbowed in the mouth...cue bleeding take two. Kaleb was accidentally kicked in the nose, bleeding take three. Monday was bloody when  Damen went mouth first into the pavement, don't get me wrong, but at least it was only one incident. Today was slightly more exciting with multiple events! The good thing about today was two of the events were Kaleb, he doesn't freak out about blood, he's pretty cool with it. It makes it much easier to deal with, get cleaned up and move on. I can tell we're finally getting to the fun stage with boys :-)

One of those days....

I didn't want to get up this morning knowing I'd have to deal with Connecticut house issues that came up at the end of last week. Well, I got several phones calls before even getting into the house issue and was on the phone with Nathan seeing if he'd call a plumber to see if they could resolve the contaminated water issue we had to fix (which the buyers didn't tell us about a month ago when they got the water test results back, but now can't get their mortgage because of) when I saw Damen go down on his bike. He went down hard, fortunately, I was out watching, so I knew what happened. When I got to him his mouth was full of blood....sound familiar? Instead of his tongue this time he managed to bite through his upper lip and knock a tooth loose. I knew he had gone through his lip, but that was about all I could determine at first, the tooth I didn't figure out until he had calmed down about 20 minutes later. He didn't have a huge hole through his lip, it's actually quite small, so I didn't have to worry about taking him anywhere to get stitched, which was good. But his upper lip is really large. I took a picture, I'll upload it soon along with the fun that he, Kaleb and Evie were having today after that digging a huge whole. The moral of the story is Damen will be fine, but I'm guessing we might get on a first name bases with the ER doctors here.

Nathan Preaching!

Nathan had the opportunity to preach yesterday for the first time ever! You can watch the entire service here. Or if you don't want to see the whole thing Nathan starts preaching just before 39 minutes in. It wasn't bad for a first time. :-)

What Pastor's Kids do for fun

Nathan is working today as he will be preaching his first sermon tomorrow. He forgot something this morning, so I took the kids over to the office to give it to him and let them run around the gym for a little bit since it's raining outside. They played for a little while and then went to the stage are of the gym where chairs are also setup with a music stand in front. The kids took turns "preaching" and they sang some songs as well. My kids preach for fun! I told Nathan if he drew a blank he could just have one the kids come up as they were prepared now :-)

VBS Take 2

The theme of the VBS at our church was Building on the Rock of God. Everything had to do with construction.

I was there :-) And this is the gym where the kids got to build with boxes. They absolutely loved it!

They had a huge sand pile and we brought our diggers and they were thoroughly enjoyed by all. Here Hannah is on one.

Here's Kaleb (in the blue) wrestling with a friend near another building activity.

Group picture in front of the cement mixer!

Damen laying bricks....

Kaleb mixing mortar.

During the week they built a brick wall, at the end of the week they got to destroy it. Finally Damen's kind of fun! I asked him if we should get a brick wall from him to knock down at our house and he wholeheartedly thought we should.

Hannah was a little more timid with it, but also got a chance to take down some bricks :-)

During the week they did a skit based on the wise man and the foolish man, here's a picture of the wise man's house......

And the foolish man's, which then collapsed.

Nathan took most of the pictures, as I was with a group the whole time, apparently he couldn't find Evie, so that is why there are no pictures of her, but she was there. 

lighthouse adventure

Last month the kids and I went with some people from church out to a lighthouse near by. After hiking around the park where the lighthouse was for a little bit and completely losing the kids....they were really far ahead of us and apparently the adults went off the path and the kids continued on it, so we had no idea where they were for about 15 minutes, but we found them and they had made it back to the car to try and find us, so that was good.....we went up in the lighthouse.

Here's the house part with the kids waiting outside.

Going up

At the top waiting to go outside!

Hannah absolutely loved it! She would have stayed out at the rail all day. As you can see Damen wasn't as comfortable, but Kaleb was okay with it. 

Evie stayed against the building the whole time, but did walk around the entire thing. 

Everybody else headed back down while Hannah and I stayed for a couple extra minutes. 

It was a beautiful view!

Then we headed down as well, Hannah did not like the going down part, it was kind of amusing after she was hanging off the railing that she was scared of going down the stairs. 

Here's the lighthouse we climbed!

Tree Climbing and exploring

One of the parks near us has some large trees that are growing at such an angle you can easily climb them. The kids really enjoyed climbing the trees and walking on the rocks along the water.

As you can see by the fact that five people are on the trees they're pretty big!

Here's Hannah up a little higher

Here you can see the trees in the background, the rocks and the water!

The boys had fun throwing rocks into the water

While Nathan, who you can barely see in this picture....was teaching the girls how to skip stones

Evie found this cool orange stone and brought it home and painted it like a lady bug :-) 

Soap Bottle Ball

The kids were out in our front yard playing a game that was a combination of soccer and football with a soap bottle refill container they had gotten out of the recycle bin. Who needs toys? I totally love the fact that my kids create games and toys out of things they find laying around.

Here's a short video I took of them playing from inside, Nathan and I joined them shortly after this. 

Transition and more ER drama

The last two plus weeks have been hard. We had VBS the week of July 18th. That was every night and involved being at church at 5:15 for dinner, which was great! And not leaving until 8:15 pm at the earliest, which was not so great. By Friday night when we were getting the boys ready for bed Kaleb broke down because he was sad VBS was over and he was missing everything Connecticut, his friends, toys, swing set etc. Since he was balling Damen decide to join in and it took a good long time to calm them both down. Transitions are hard. After VBS week Nathan was around Saturday and then Sunday night he had a meeting, Monday we had dinner at a couple's house from church, Tuesday and Wednesday Nathan had meetings. It was hard, by Wednesday night one child told me they didn't have to listen to me because Dad wasn't home. I was then laughed at when disciplining that child. I'm not sure what prompted the child to decide they didn't have to listen to me when Nathan wasn't here, but it was not cool. By the end of the week I was a wreck along with the kids. Nathan and I have reevaluated his schedule and hopefully have a solution that will work that will involve him being home every day for a couple hours even if he has a meeting. I went into this week with high hopes of things going better........and then yesterday Damen decided to chomp his tongue real good while attempting to do a pogo stick. It was deep and about an inch long cut. We went to the ER, but it was really crowed, so we went to the walk-in clinic, that closed at 3 pm, 10 minutes before we got there....we consulted Nathan's Mom, brought Damen home, but the tongue was still bleeding an hour plus after he did it, so I decided to try a pediatric office, took him there at four, was told the doctors were with their last patient of the day, so they couldn't get him in even though they didn't close until five....but then someone (I think a nurse) came out a took a look at it and said to take him to the ER because he'd need stitches and they didn't do them. So back to the ER I went....had a nurse take his vitals and asked if they'd stitch a tongue or not, she told me they had just done one last night...great....so I waited for four hours to be seen and then the doctor told me she doesn't do stitches on the tongue for kids that young because it just bugs them and they use the dissolving kind and the kids rub them off in less than 24 hours. Great, thanks, so I waited all that time for nothing...wonderful. On the way out Damen says "That was fun" I gave him a strange look and said "That is not my idea of fun." He did super well with the long wait and the over crowded waiting room was very impressed with how well he did for how young he was and the fact that he was hurt. Needless to say this week hasn't started out as well as I had hoped! That is the long update, on the past couple weeks, hopefully I will be getting up pictures and such of the fun we had as well!