and at the end of the day, there is joy...

I have a ton of pics to share, so words on this post will be few. Just wanted to pop in, say Hi, and hope you are enjoying your weekend! Amazingly, this Sunday has been pretty relaxed for me. Hubby took the kids to youth group, which let me have time to get chores done. I even cleaned out my closet, and got more scrapbooking done! I have a weekend trip coming up, so I appreciate the extra time to get more stuff done. Yay!

Anyways, here are some pics from the past couple of weeks! I like other peoples pictures posts - I hope you enjoy mine!










Well, that's it for now. I have more pics to post, but I'll save those for another day. Enjoy your week! Remember to play in the rain!

This weekend was nice!
   For starters, my daughter gave the sermon in church.
   Now, just to clarify, she isn't an evangelist in the making. She had to do it for Bible class in school, and she used a power point. But I'm still amazingly proud of her. She got up in front of people and talked for 40 minutes!
   Just to put that into perspective, I had to make a couple phone calls this week to strangers, and I literally had heart palpitations. Me and talking in front of any other human doesn't go well at all.
   So. Very, VERY proud of my girl.
   She was nervous, and she isn't too keen on repeating the experience, but she did well, and several people have told her so. It was a good sermon, and many were blessed, so mission accomplished! :-)
   The kid's grandma was down for the weekend (Hubby's mom). So she got to see her grand-daughter preach. Not only that, but she stayed into Sunday as well, came with me to a morning gathering, and then got to see the kid…

A couple weeks ago, I read a blog post that got me thinking (which is good), but also annoyed and worried me a bit. I shall not go into details, or even provide a link to the blog. Instead, I’ll give a very short summary.
The writer is a young Christian man, and in general I don’t have a problem with most of what he posts. In this particular post, he talked about death and trials. He then discussed how people say God is good. He also said everything comes from God (I don’t agree with this). Therefore, if God is good and everything comes from God, then somehow death and trials are good and come from God as well.
This annoyed me because I disagree with it, but it actually worried me more than anything, because I wondered how many people actually believe this? And how many more will believe this after reading this post? Now, I don’t think anyone will jump from his post to my post, but I still wanted to put my view out there, just in case this young man is sharing a point of…

Today is October 1st, and for me, thus begins the busy season.
   Looking at my calendar, this might be a busier busy season than previous ones. Not sure why, but it seems we have a lot going on this month. A test of my organizational skills, I suppose. :-)
   Today I began the first stages of planning the kids birthdays, which are coming up. I'm finding that as they become teenagers, they are increasingly hard to shop for. I suppose in a way, this is good. They don't have a mile long list of must haves, each costing over $300 (nor, thankfully, did they ever). I'm blessed that my kids could care less for expensive tech gadgets and name brand clothes. However, I do wish they were just a bit easier to shop for!
   My dads birthday is also coming up, as well as a vacation for him to see family this month. I'm happy he's able to go and spend some time with them, even knowing that I will hear about this vacation 342 times before he eventually...maybe...tires of talki…

Here are some pics of what we've been up to...
They didn't upload in order, but here we go!













The end! We've been enjoying life and living as much as this beautiful weather will allow! Soon it will be too cold to even poke your nose outside....so we are enjoying it while it lasts.
Happy Fall!! Enjoy that life you've been given!

But not in that order. :-)
   This past Saturday night we had a going away party for some kids in our youth group. We live near a military base, which means that we often have military families cycle through our church. In a way this is great, because we get to meet new people, and all these diverse people add so much to our church! We become friends with them, learn about them, and in general enjoy having them in our lives! However, the sad part comes when they have to leave us. This is happening with one family, so we threw a going away party for them, especially for the kids.
   The party was fun. It started with pizza and cookies, and ended with some outdoor fun (mostly running around, from what I could tell), and then rounds of Twister! I have pics I may post later - even our Pastor played a round of Twister! I haven't laughed so much in months!
   Today I went on a field trip with the kids school. We went to the state fair. We did some of the usual educational things, watche…