Happy 92nd Birthday Grandma!

Today is my Grandma's 92nd birthday. She has lived such a full life and has had a profound positive influence on my life. We are blessed to live so close to her now.  I have always lived two hours away from her my whole life.  Now I live within 10 minutes of her. 

Today we went to visit her at her assisted living home and we walked in to hear a beautiful violin playing.  It was really neat.  It brought tears to my eyes.  This 15 year old girl was blessing all these elderly people with the sound of melodious music.  My favorite song that she played was "Come though Fount."  I think this song and moment will be in my mind forever.  My Grandma has had hospice come in to help take care of her and I know my days are short with her.  I love her so much and am SO blessed to be able to see her sweet face. I am so thankful I felt well enough to go visit her today too.  Another praise. Tomorrow (Lord Willing) our whole family is going to have lunch with her at her Grand Lodge to celebrate.

This picture was taken about 5 months ago.  I still look sick but not as sick as I do now so I will spare you a more recent picture.  This picture is about my Grandma anyway, not me. :-) Love her!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRANDMA from me and HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRAMMI - from the boys.  We love and cherish you! (How awesome that my boys have gotten to forge a sweet relationship with their Great Grandma. Thank you Lord.)

~Blessings~

Summer 2012 Recap

Summer is coming to a close for us.  Even though summer isn't truly over until next month we start school next Monday so I count summer to be over.  This was our first summer in our new home in our new state.  We sure had a blessed time and I truly thank God for His amazing grace and all He has poured out upon us. 

Join me in looking back on some of the "Lazy (or not so lazy" days of Summer 2012)...
(Bear with me - I am a scrapbooker and can't just choose one picture from each event. Pictures are fun anyway!)

Finger Painting

Cherry Festival

The carnival part of it. My cousin John went on a ride with Corbin.

Cody picking a little ducky.

Cherry dark chocolate ice cream.  Read about it here.

Homemade smoothie popsicles

Pool time with friends

Fourth of July

I didn't make these look as good as the links on pinterest but they still tasted yummy!

Burning our last sparkler from our wedding 8 years ago!

Made edible playdough... it was yummy.

Slip N' Slide

Watering the garden everyday and enjoying the harvest from the fruits of our labor.

Green beans

Peas

Roma Tomatoes

Max loves to water with me every night.  He goes to every plant with me and follows me around.  He is so cute.

Going to the water park right by our house for the first time.  We had a blast!

We made our own Gummies.  We learned about seaweed and carageenan which is an ingredient gummies are made from. Actually you can find it in a lot of products - even salad dressing!

Running in the sprinklers

We went on our first real train ride through the mountains. It was beautiful!  We got to wave to all the rafters in the river along the way.

The boys had fun at our table in our train car.

We had Corbin's 7th birthday! Super Mario Themed was his request.

Lastly, we went on our first camping trip here. Actually it was our first camping trip in three years - since I was pregnant with Cody!  We went with our church to "Family Camp."

They had a family activity where the kids got a handful of whipped cream and a popsicle stick.  They got to smear it on their Dad's face and "shave" it off with the popsicle stick. Steve was a trooper for this one!

We had worship everyday by our worship leaders (it was awesome) and Steve got to lead our devotional one night on Initiative and taking our part as the Body of Christ. Our church also provided smores every night for the camp.  That was a huge hit!  We had a potluck dinner one night as well.  I can't wait for next year.  It was so much fun.

Fishing in the river one day during our camping trip.

This was Cody literally 5 minutes after we got into the car to head back home after our camping trip.  He was pooped!

We had an eventful summer.  It has been fun to look back on some of the fun things we did.  I have to say that I am looking forward to the return of the school year.  More structure and routine and hopefully a little less busy.  We will see?

Ecclesiastes 3:1 ~ To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven...

Thank you Lord for a great summer season!

Celebrating and Enjoying God's creation

For my Moms birthday we took her to the beach. She loves the beach.

Now I must say we did not go to the beach with sand but the beach with grass and an option for sand.  I say this because, for me, I am not a huge fan of sand. I have to mentally and emotionally prepare for visiting the sand.  Especially now that I have an 8 month old who will immediately pick up a handful of it and put it in his mouth and crunch away!  I have to prepare to have it stuck to every crack and crevice of my body and my boys bodies. I have to prepare to eat my fair share of sand too because I know right when I get my sandwich out my little kiddo decides to run over and accidentally kick sand all over the towel where my lunch was.  I have to prepare for it to be all over the car and every single item that we took to the beach.  Yep, it's a big deal to me.  But... I digress.  This day was about my mom - so if she wanted to go to the sand I would have definitely done it.  My mom was perfectly happy going to the beach where we could look at the sand and sit on the grass.  Yay! It was a beautiful day there.  First we walked around the town that was near the beach and had lunch at a yummy bar-b-que place and then went to a coffee shop to get some coffee.  My mom loves coffee and an outing is not complete without a stop to one of our favorite coffee shops.  After that we went to the grassy area to sit and relax and enjoy the scenery.

Here we are.  I love that Steve put the umbrella lower so Cody could have some shade.  So cute!

We laid down, looked at the ocean, played catch, sipped our coffee and enjoyed each others company.

It was so bright and colorful at the beach that I thought it was the perfect photo op for Corbins 5th year pictures.  Ha!  Trying to get him to "pose" didn't work but some of the candids I really like because it shows Corbins true personality and genuine smile.  Here are some of them

I do love to see the ocean and one of my favorite things to do is watch sunsets. We did not see the sunset on this day but I will post some sunset pics in the future.  I have LOTS of them.

The ocean makes me get introspective.  It makes me feel very minute.  It makes me think of how creative and beautiful God is.  That He laid out the vast blue ocean before us.  Filled with animals we haven't even discovered yet.  It is so powerful and majestic.  Thank you Lord for your creation!

Psalm 19:1

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.