It's Been Awhile!

This is one of the things that I knew would happen when starting this blog. Life would get busy and I would completely forget that I even had a blog! Oh well. Let's see what's been happening over the past month....

There was a fire four houses down from us a few weeks ago. We were sitting around on a Friday morning, reading about Ancient Greece, when *bam,* something made a loud noise. It turns out that it was a large garage, sort of like a machine shed, and a car inside blew up. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the building burned all day and was pretty much destroyed.

Later that same day, the kids participated in our homeschool group's Art and Speaking Fair. Zach and Hannah brought home blue ribbons, Natalie brought home two reds, and Grant brought home a white (although we scratched our head at that one - he did exceptionally well and it turns out the judge had added up his score incorrectly). Here is Natalie receiving one of her awards.

Two of the kids learned what to do with young coconuts. They scraped out the meat, which in a young coconut is very soft and gel-like. We then threw it into the blender with some other stuff for a treat that tasted like banana cream pie. Yum! Except that there were a few shells going crunch crunch! Below is Grant wielding his ax trying to open the things, and then Hannah scraping out the stuff. One of them had purple filling! Weird - we didn't eat it.

I (mom) participated in a women's retreat for our church this past weekend. It was a lovely time up at the Heidel House on Green Lake here in Wisconsin. I was able to participate on the praise team, leading worship for the event. No pictures, sorry! The weekend was very uplifting - great speakers, fun stuff to do, good fellowship with friends - all the makings of a great retreat!

At the end of this month, our family will be attending the Wisconsin Above Rubies Family Camp near Lake Geneva. Friends from the Twin Cities will be joining us as well. We are looking forward to that! Watch for photos in April!

I just finished the study of the book of Daniel (Beth Moore's study) with a group of friends. It was a wonderful study that I highly recommend! We were sad to see the study end, but are planning on doing a study of 1 Peter starting March 23. That should take us to summer, which we will take off, but we are hoping to find another Beth Moore study to do in the fall.

The kids and I started a new tradition this year. I was going through our large stack of Christmas cards that we received this year, and of course I never want to throw any of them away. We decided to pick one every day and pray for the person or family that we picked during our morning before-school prayer time. Then when we get through the whole stack, we go back and start over. That way, I don't have to throw any of them away (at least not until next year when we get the next crop). Last week my friend Jesse called me - I hadn't talked to her in weeks and weeks - and we had just happened to pray for her and her family that same morning! It was fun to get to tell her that!

Time to wrap up my rambling. Hopefully I won't let it go a month before posting again. We have tons of snow on the ground (March came in like a lion) and it is strange to think that I could be gardening in four weeks!!!