American Gothic

We went to my parents-in-law for lunch today. They just got back from a wonderful but very short vacation. Here's one of their memorable vacation pics; you can tell from their faces what a great time they had :)

More birthday fun!

We celebrated Joel's 5th birthday, which was double the fun because it was a welcome break from painting :) He is now enjoying keeping his sisters in submission with his foam dart gun and water guns, and enjoys his little $1 jack-knife so much that he snuck it into church this morning and we caught him licking it!?!

Now I see that Marie made "armor" to protect herself from the dart gun with winter coats wrapped all over and under her clothes. She's definitely ingenious; a few weeks ago I told her she was going to get a spanking and a few minutes later when I was ready to spank her, I discovered about 10 pairs of underwear layered on each other for padding. Wow, it was hard to keep a straight face when I made her take those off!

Joel was more than a little bit hyper

Trying out a 3-D movie
Peek-a-boo!
Holly loves her new car; plus it has bonus spots to stash her pacifiers and "treasures".

Are all little kids stashers/packrats? All of ours sure are.

Spray-painting the house was a fast but nasty job.

Steve helped out for a day with the cabinet installation and they also moved in some heavy stuff. Thanks so much Steve!

Visiting the grave of Steve's sister Leah

Family bike trip

We enjoyed the beautiful weather with another bike trip. Steve says it was about 10 miles and the kids did great, especially Joel with his tiny bike. The kids were elated when we stopped for a break at a creek. Next time we'll come prepared and bring bathing suits... we had to take off Holly's diaper and clothes so she could wear them on the way home :) Most of the time we biked a trail that used to be a railroad, with beautiful views of the Cascade foothills (can't really see them in the photos). Too bad we're moving away from the trail; I would have liked to take more of our guests biking up there when they come too.

Our little trooper was very weary towards the end

Princess Holly got a free ride on her "throne".

Kaitlyn, Joel, Marie, Emily, Holly, Steve

Emily caught doing the "goofy" :) ...and I just couldn't resist one baby butt picture.
Again Steve is appalled but I think it's cute.

YAY! We're finally finished the exterior painting. Drywalling is also complete and mudding and taping should be finished in about a week. We're preparing for interior painting, installing laminate & tile flooring and cabinets.

On a technical note, for any fellow bloggers who have had trouble uploading pictures or not having their posts show up, I found some help on both problems. As for the pictures, don't upload more than 3MB at a time (total) because blogger will not handle it... best to reduce the size of each picture before uploading, and save the smaller files in a separate folder. And as for posts not showing up, turns out you can't blame that one on blogger. It's probably your own computer's cache, which means other people can probably see it. Try refreshing your browser (F5 or Control + F5 ), adding a question mark to the end of your blog's URL, or empyting your temporary internet files.

And on another completely different note (this post is about as focussed as my mind is, of which Steve will readily attest), we are so excited about AIG's Creation Museum opening this past week! We are so thankful for this powerful and well-presented testimony to the truth of God's marvellous creation work!

I found this comment online... interesting: "About the actual museum he said it had one of the top security (whatever guarding it) and that includes being on the list for homeland security. This is because so many people want to destroy it. He said he was able to go into the security 'office' and was shown awesome things. Like they know where every single person is at all times. The security video and cameras work at about 400,000 frames/sec! So every person (especially if they are on their watch list) who is seen by cameras (which is everyone) pops up on the security monitor and gives the security people a complete makeup of the person, including name, etc. (he knew someone on the inside so he got to go in!). He said people at the top of their professions help create this museum. The guy who did the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park worked on that. A major construction company CEO sold his company and came to construct the museum. A former security guard for the White House left his job to run the security team. This museum is top of the line everything! Scientists from universities left (who were at the top of their game) to come and invest their time and life into this museum. Evolutionists who have gone through said it was scary --> Because their children in schools would be given such an incredible presentation of Biblical Truth that they could not leave the museum without questioning their beliefs in evolution (what they are taught in schools). My assistant pastor said it was exceptional and done in a presuppositional format!"