End of the school year!!

Josiah and his best friend, Rawson. Every time they get together at least 2 or 3 hours of their time is spend on legos!
The Beartooth Club boys with Pastor Brook. We had a lunch after church last sunday where the boys put on puppet shows for us with the sock puppets that they had created. So fun. and funny. :)

Josiah and Mrs. Rich at the 2nd grade awards assembly. He got the national physical fitness award and an honor roll award! We are very proud of both kids this year, they did a great job in school.
Kylie and Mrs.Coleman on the last day of school. What a great 3rd grade year Kylie had!! She continues to prove herself built for school. :)

I looked up online how to make hairbows and went crazy with the ribbon and glue gun last night. Probably not what I need to be doing with all the packing that I need to get done, but they turned out really cute...all 3 girls wore a handmade bow in her hair to church this morning!

playing catch up!

We went to Naturefest 2009 a couple weeks ago and one of the things that the kids could do was hold an alligator. Here are Josiah and Kylie taking their turns....

My spunky little Leighton puckering up. :)

A twin moment.

I took the 2 big kids out of school earlier this month (along with a friend) so that they could join us on a trip to the Lakeland common ground playground. We went up in the morning and had a picnic lunch while we were there. The kids had a great time!

Kylie's piano recital was last week. She played and sang a piece, and she was in an ensemble, singing, too. We are very proud of how much she's learned in our two years of taking piano lessons here.
Leighton's last day of TB meds was last thursday!! We were so thankful for Teresa from the health dept. coming by every monday and thursday for 6 months....but we're also very glad that she's not coming by any more. :) Leighton had gotten to running to the opposite side of the house and hiding whenever Teresa would arrive.

Today was water day for the 2nd graders....I brought the little ones by with lunch to watch a little bit and then we went to the 3rd grade award banquet (which I didn't get a picture of b/c of bad lighting).

We have been blessed to have Mrs. Rich as Kylie's 2nd grade teacher and Josiah's 2nd grade teacher. It's been fun to be in the class with our kids and to have relationships with their teachers...we will miss Wauchula Elementary School a lot!

Josiah's class this year.

karate, field trip, field day...etc....

Josiah had another great season of karate at the YMCA this year. He learned enough to earn his yellow belt before our instructor went back to NC for the summer. He has really enjoyed learning karate and we are hoping to find a class for him to get involved in in Arkansas! Kylie even took it this year and had a lot of fun with it, too.

Last friday was a fun, yet crazy day for our family. Josiah's class had a field trip to a blueberry farm (where we rode around the farm and saw how they grew the blueberries) and then to the packing plant (where we took a tour of the inside...which got down to 34 degrees...and saw how they put the picked blueberries on a conveyor belt and got them ready to send to the stores. It was a lot of fun (they got to pick some blueberries at the farm) and very interesting.

That same friday, Kylie's grade was having field day at the school! So, Tom and AJ (after dropping the twins off at a sitter's house) went to the school and watched field day for a little, and helped grill hot dogs for lunch for all the 3rd graders.

The battle of the books competition was this past tuesday evening. There were 6 kids on each of the teams from the 5 elementary schools in hardee county. Kylie's team spent the past two months meeting before school, after school, and some in between learning the ins and outs of the 15 sunshine state ready books for 2008. The competition was set up in a double elimination bracket... with each round having 14 questions about those 15 books. The kids would answer the question with the title and author of the book that the question was referring to. It was an incredibly stressful competition....my stomach hurt most of that night and I was drained by the time we got home. Thankfully, Kylie wasn't that stressed over it. :) Wauchula elementary didn't win (sadly, they went out b/c they didn't answer a question in time...even though they had the right answer)...but they did a great job and we were very proud of them!

The twins have started to really get into dressing up. Here's Leighton in her pretty shoes. Matthias was wearing the pretty shoes with his firefighter helmet earlier, but had them off by the time I got the camera. The latest on Leighton is...I took her to the pulmonologist and she had a chest x-ray which was "the best chest x-ray (the dr.) has ever seen on her!"...which was good news. She has had a cough that she's had a hard time getting rid of, so he increased her flovent prescription with the hopes that that will help over the next month or so. She has been up every night for the past 3 or 4 weeks, usually between 3 and 4 o'clock...the other evening we found her fast asleep in the hallway in front of our bedroom door...usually she opens the door and comes in, but for some reason she didn't that night. Needless to say, tom and i are both exhausted and are hoping for her to return to sleeping through the night normally, soon!

I am blessed to have these 5 sweet, wonderfully different, beautiful children.....what a priviledge to be their mother. And, thanks, Mom for being my mother...and thanks, Rose Marie for being my husband's mother! Happy Mother's Day!!!

He's got the whole world in His hands!

It's a little long, but you have to watch until the end!!

Josiah's circle block kata!

The past week or so....

We did an easter egg hunt with our mom's morning out group two weeks ago....it was a lot of fun! I'm really going to miss these mom's and kids, they've been such a blessing to me and my kids here in wauchula!
AJ painted a picture of our family...it's definitely a happy picture!

Josiah's best friend here is Rawson...he's come over to play a lot recently since both boys have sisters on the battle of the books team (and they practice after school)....another sad thing to think about with us leaving in two months.

Kylie won 2nd place in her age group (3rd to 5th grade) in a poetry contest that the library had going on this month. She got a 20 dollar giftcard to wal-mart...and spent it on post-it notes, index cards, a pencil sharpener and mechanical pencils! (shows a little of who she is in what she bought) :)

A friend in town has been giving us fresh eggs for several months now...she took a dozen of those eggs and put them in incubators for 3 weeks and ended up with eleven chicks!! We've had fun going to visit the chicks...they are so sweet! Kylie and Josiah have even named a few of them.

Kylie with wise-guy (who has a little owl-like face)

We went to Orlando this weekend to meet Mr. Bill (who was in florida for work)...we took the kids putt-putt golfing and went to Golden Corral for lunch...which was a lot of fun. At the putt-putt place there were live aligators that you could feed with a piece of hot dog speared onto the end of a fishing pole type of thing. The kids had a blast with that. You can imagine what it might've been like with 3 adults, 2 big kids, 1 little kid and 2 toddlers all with a golf club and ball. Needless to say, I was carrying 3 clubs and 5 balls by the end of the 5th hole (the lady had given us extra, anticipating that we'd lose one or two)...it was exhausting and fun! Thanks, Bill, for driving out to see us!! It's always nice to visit.

We got back from orlando just in time to get the twins set up with the babysitter and head off to our youth choir banquet at a restaurant in town. Here are the kids with "big momma" (Mary) who has worked so hard teaching them songs and is so patient with them. She had trophies for all the kids, it was a really nice time!

I cannot believe that May is this week!! It's such a crazy time of year with everything wrapping up and school ending...I was packing a few boxes today of things that we won't be using in the next two months and was amazed as I thought back to how faithful God has been to provide for our family....a great house, friends that we have only known for two years but love dearly, a chance to be in the midst of the saints here at Faith PCA...we're definitely going to miss it. But... I am excited about Trinity Fellowship and I am excited to see how God will work in us and through us in Sherwood. Please continue to pray for these next couple months...for our house to sell (we have an open house next saturday)...for the 7 of us as we begin to think about saying our goodbyes. Thanks for checking in!!

Arkansas bound!

Hi all! Just a quick note to let all my non-facebook friends know that Trinity Fellowship in Sherwood, Arkansas voted to call Tom as solo pastor of their church and we accepted their invitation! We will transition in early July from Wauchula to North Little Rock by way of Virginia. :) Thanks for all of your thoughts and prayers. Tom will go before the presbytery in late May to transfer his ordination....which will be the last detail before it's totally official! We are excited about how the Lord might use us and grow us in this next step. I'll try to keep you updated on these next few months as we say goodbye to sweet friends here and move on. It's a bittersweet time. :) :(