Again?

I certainly do not want to say that my little guy is accident prone - really, he's just three. That should be explanation enough.

This morning we headed to preschool. It was snowing, of course, because it is March 31st and March 1st was a beautiful day.

So on the way into the preschool, Jeffrey slipped on the tile floor (feet wet + floor slippery = dangerous situation). However, because he was in the process of removing his coat, he was unable to put his hands out to catch himself and instead caught himself with his chin. Right on the metal strip that separates the tile from the carpet. This resulted in a gash so wide and deep that I was pretty sure he needed stitches.

Thankfully, we only went to the pediatrician's office and he was "taped" back together.

Don't you wish more of life was like that? When we make a mistake, or say something we regret and break a relationship, we could just taped it back together?

Needless to say, the little guy will be fine. He'll have a band-aid on his chin for a few days and probably be a little sore, but I'm sure in a few days he will have forgotten about it completely. Hopefully we won't have a new injury to report!

Birthday Season Open

In case you missed the announcement, Iverson Birthday Season is now officially open!

We start off with Jeffrey, who turned three yesterday. That announcement came at 7:05AM

"Today is my birthday! I'm three today, Daddy!" is what woke Mike & I up this morning.

Jeffrey's birthday always catches me by surprise. I know, it's the same day every year, but I think birthdays are still a long way off. Now that his birthday has come, I will probably have the next six planned by the end of the week. Just to make sure everything is taken care of.

It was difficult to come up with an idea for Jeffrey's birthday. What is he into? Being loud! Eating! and Running! That doesn't exactly translate into a fun party.

However, for the last month he has carried his Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat In The Hat books everywhere he goes. So I though a Dr. Seuss party would be fun. (At this point it would be great if i could come up with some Seussical rhyme, but it's Sunday afternoon and my brain is fried!)

Jeffrey had two friends come over (plus Grandma and her friends) and we had lunch and a simple party.

Right as the kids arrived, I whisked them into the kitchen and had them make a footprint that when it had dried, I framed for their parents. thus representing The Foot Book. (As a side note, it seems that some of the language was changed in The Foot Book from the original.)

Lunch:

None other than Green Eggs & Ham aka lime jello eggs & ham sandwiches.

After lunch I gave the kids some apple shaped sticky notes (what a blessing to find! I thought I was going to have to cut out many apples!) to build a tower of ten. Ten Apples Up On Top. Even though the boys could all count to ten, I don't think the concept was well explained.

Then we did presents and I tried to get the kids to act out Hop On Pop, but Mike would have nothing to do with that. Party Pooper!

Then cake and ice cream. I am not a make-your-own-cake mommy. I look for every opportunity to find someone else to do that job. This year (just like many before) Costco came through with a cake for me. I asked for a plain cake with "Happy Birthday, Jeffrey" written on the short end. Then I added colored coconut (thanks, Jill), Dum-dums, and a stuffed Horton (which by the way is the only Dr. Seuss like thing available out there right now. Thank you Borders for having something!).

Then the boys got to play, which is really all they wanted to do in the first place!

This shirt was probably my all-time favorite present!

Later Mike did take Jeffrey outside to let him try out his new bike!

And Dr. Seuss didn't go crazy, but was very tired!

But starting May 1st we have six birthdays in six weeks. Make sure I come up for air every once in a while!

Intervention

That's what I need.

I love Lemon Bars. Almost as much as I love Creme Brulee. But I really love Lemon Bars.


I've only made them a few times. Each time I labored over making my own lemon curd, carefully separating eggs and cooking it to the right consistency on the stove top. It was a lot of work.


Last Thursday, I had a hankerin' for some Lemon Bars (you must always capitalize this to show reverence to the specialness that is Lemon Bars), but really I did not have the time or patience to make Lemon Bars.


My friend, Pam, (who should have a blog because she would share such amazing things: food, crafts, photography, etc, but doesn't...) told me I should make her recipe. (Since it is after midnight I will ask her tomorrow if I can share her recipe with you.)


And then she shared a little piece of heaven with me...Lemon Bars.


They were so easy. MY work was done in less than 20 min. Then I just sat back and waited for them to cook and cool. That was the most agonizing part. And they were delicious!


Our Bible study group was small, so my family was thrilled when I brought the "extras" home. They were so good that they were gone by the time I went to bed on Thursday night.


I decided they were so good I should make them for Easter Sunday. So I mixed and baked and cooled and cut, and then declared, "They are good!"


And then this evening we held "Party @ the Pastor's". This is an opportunity for people from church to come to our house and get to know Mike and I little better in a setting outside of Sunday morning church. We open our door and serve dessert.


That's right...Lemon Bars.


Folks that is three pans of Lemon Bars in eight days. Three 9x13 pans of Lemon Bars.


And let me be completely honest when I say I'm pretty sure that I have eaten at least 1/3 of the pan each time.


It is now time to let the Lemon Bars rest for a while.


And join Weight Watchers!

My Day So Far...

This afternoon, I thought I'd tell you what happened this morning. Sort of a typical morning for me.

Sort of.

But rather than wait for a great story to share, I'll share the everyday happenings.

6:15 - hubby left for a breakfast meeting & I hopped in the shower hoping to be dressed and somewhat sane before any children awoke. There had been the possiblitly of snow overnight, so I peeked out of the window...no snow.

6:45 - three youngest children awake! I sent them back to Meredith's room to play so that I could apply my face (we don't want to scare the small children too much).

7:00 - too quiet, I went to find where the small ones had gone. This is what I found.

Actual happy children, playing nicely! what a super-natural day this is starting out to be!

7:30 - feed six children and begin wrestling the littlest ones into clothes.

7:45 - check weather. it's only 27 degrees, but by 3pm it is supposed to be mid 40s. there is a hint of sunshine and no snow expected until 6pm. Tell the kids to ride their bikes to school, but you must wear a coat.

7:50 - re-state for the 11 year old that she must wear a COAT, not just a sweater.

7:51 - Give many reasons for why a COAT is necessary instead of a sweater. Main one being, "because I said so!"

8:00 - shoo big kids out all bundled up for the six block bike ride to school. 11 year old still grumpy that I made her wear a coat.

8:30 - trying to find coats for little three. Apparently they are all in the car...cold. Find an extra coat for Meredith and Jeffrey. Both of Morgan's are in the car. Find her a heavy sweatshirt. We'll just run form the car to the building and back. I won't wear a coat either. That way I'll know how cold Morgan is.

8:45 - arrive at bible study and start checking-in kids.

9:00 - finish checking-in kids and go into worship. This is also known as the AHHHHH moment!

10:15 - glance out the window at Bible study to see this...

okay, this is actually the view from my from window, but I didn't have my camera with me, but you get the idea!

WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?????

I made my children ride their bikes this morning!

My youngest is not wearing a coat!

I am not wearing a coat! and I have on heels! (making up for yesterday's outfit)

Now I am home and cozy in my house, hoping that the rest of March will not be like this, just to fulfill the "In like a lamb, out like a lion" phrase.

Seems like this happened last year. You think I'll remember and just expect it next year? Probably not!

Looks like there will be no sidewalk chalk playing this afternoon!


Bonus Feature:

I received the Woodhouse family picture last week and ran over to Hobby Lobby to get it framed. I purchased a frame and they custom cut a matte for me. The whole thing was less than $50 and took less than 15 minutes!

Thought you might like to see, Mom!


Edited note:

1:15 - It is STILL snowing...blizzard like snow!

Edit #2:

3:23 - it stopped snowing about 2:00. the roads were clear and it was over 40 degrees. The kids bikes had to get home somehow, so we made them ride home. Now they can tell their kids that they had to ride their bikes in the snow to get to and from school. I'm sure their kids won't believe them.

And Mikalah walked in the door and said, "Can I thank you for making me wear my heavy coat. Today no one was allowed to play outside for recess unless they had their heavy coat!"

YES!!!!!!

What would Stacy & Clinton think?

Today's wardrobe choice: yoga pants

Reason: "They're comfortable"

Easy Meal

Because yesterday was a recovery day from Easter Sunday, I decided to make spaghetti for dinner.

Today I am cleaning the kitchen and the forty dishes produced by making and "easy" meal of spaghetti!

Profound Information

Throughout my day I think of fun things to share with you, but by the time I get 5 sec. to write, it somehow doesn't sound as exciting as it did originally.

Today, all I have is that Morgan has decided she would like to be a puppy dog and Jarrett has decided to become a monkey.

It was an interesting weekend!

And thanks to three inches of snow Sat. morning, we are glad we decided to forgo the church Easter egg hunt.

And I'm glad I didn't plan on sandals for church!

Because it was a Day...

...and the mommy needs to remember how much she really LOVES her children!

Testimony, Part 2

This morning I had the opportunity to share my testimony with about 200 ladies. Okay, that was a little nerve racking! My hands were cold and my heart was beating very fast!!! But I prayed and asked God to help me slow down and speak clearly. He is so good!

I was able to speak slowly and actually make eye contact with some ladies instead of just focusing on my paper. The ladies laughed at all of the appropriate places, and I even got a bit teary-eyed. Somehow reading it in front of a big group like that made it seem more real.

Which is funny, because it is real - it is my life - but somehow it was the fact of sharing a piece of me with people I didn't know that seemed to put the "real" in reality for me!

Thank you so much for your prayers!

Happy Easter!

Frenectomy

It's a big word, and you may be wondering just what it is!

Well, here is the official Wikipedia answer:

A labial frenectomy is a form of frenectomy performed on the lip.
The labial frenulum often attaches to the center of the upper lip and between the upper two front teeth. This can cause a large gap and gum recession by pulling the gums off of the bone. A labial frenectomy removes the labial frenulum. Orthodontic patients often have this procedure done to assist with closing a front tooth gap. When a denture patient's lips move, the frenulum pulls and loosens the denture which can be quite upsetting. This surgery is often done to help dentures fit better.

When I was younger, I had this surgery performed, and Mikalah has had the same surgery performed. It's just a family thing. Well, last night Jeffrey had the surgery performed...by himself...with the coffee table.

I took him to the dentist this morning just to have him checked, because his gums were still bleeding a little. The dentist informed me that everything looks great and that Jeffrey did, in fact, perform his own frenectomy.

Now, maybe he'll be a dentist, but hopefully he'll use more modern tools than a coffee table!

Spring Break?

Even though Spring Break was over three days ago, I am determined to blog briefly about it! I have fought blogger on getting these pictures up, although now blogger is doing just fine. Must have been a busy weekend!

So my whining about Spring Break not being in the Spring is really pointless, but can I just say, "IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!"

There, now I feel better.

We planned some fun activities over Spring Break, something each day.

Monday, Mike took the big kids to the ranch for pregnancy testing. Really, it was for 4-wheeling, but I guess they needed it to sound like they were doing work too. I stayed home with the youngest three since Meredith and Morgan were both running fevers. that made #6 & #7 down with strep. Mikalah was our only hold-out and quite proud of it.

Tuesday I spent at Jill's, painting. and just to show that I'm okay with embarrassing photos, here is one Jill took of me painting. Really I just want to make sure Jill doesn't beat me to it. Now Jill really is a good photographer, but my critique of this one would not be nice!

The rest of the week was spent with a household full of friends which may sound crazy, but I love that my kiddos disappear and play with their friends all day. It was kind of like having only Morgan and sometimes Jeffrey!

We topped off the week with a Daddy-Daughter day. Saturday started with Mike & Morgan making breakfast. And yes, it was warm enough for shorts! Sorry to those of you that found yourselves stuck in snow that day!

Then in the evening, Mike and Mikalah went to a Daddy-Daughter dance. It was so much fun to get ready for, and Mikalah was very excited. Meredith was not so and so this weekend Daddy is spending some special time with her!

She is really getting too big!

And because there were embarrassing photos of me, I thought Mike deserved similar attention!
Now we are half-way into the next week on a crazy roller-coaster ride!

Trying to remember it's all fun!

Alive!

I am working on a fun post with lots of pictures chronolizing (is that a word?) our Spring Break. However, Blogger is being funny about pictures and only letting me load them one at a time!

So, let's just say (for now) Spring Break is not really when it's not Spring and having six, ten, or twelve kids in the house is not a break!

And daylight savings time...as a pastor's wife, I don't like it! And so as not to complain a ton, so that's all I'll say right now.

Friendship

Last night's bible study topic was friendship. We talked about the differences between men & women, our need for friendships, and how Jesus is our ultimate friend. One of the things I found interesting was what people thought was their #1 need in a friendship. So, that's my question to you,

What characteristic do you think is the MOST important in a great friendship?

I don't have any formal reason for knowing, just really curiosity.

In other news, apparently my small group leader at Bible Study shared my testimony with the pastor's wife and she would like me to share it with the large group on the 20th. That's about 200 ladies. Am I nervous? yes. Am I excited? yes. Am I nervous? yes. oh, did I say that already??? I have always wanted to speak to groups of ladies, but it's still a little scary to actually going to do it. Now is the time I need my friends to pray! :)

Glad I wasn't on this flight!

Deanne, I'm borrowing your YouTube Tuesday! a day early!

Jill, don't watch, but show Kyle!



CNN story: Battling blustery weather, a Lufthansa Airlines flight scraped its wing on the ground during a landing attempt in Hamburg, Germany, over the weekend.

The plane recovered and landed safely the second time around, the spokesman said.

Dramatic amateur video of the incident that appeared on the Internet showed the Airbus A320 teetering as it tried to land during the brutal winter storm on Saturday.

As it nears the tarmac, one wing visible scrapes the ground.

"As we were about to touch down, a gust of wind pressed the left wing towards the ground," a Lufthansa pilot identified only as Oliver A. said in a statement.

"We pulled up immediately. A maneuver we practice in training very often."

The airline said the pilot has been flying for Lufthansa for 17 years.

Airline spokesman Wolfgang Weber said the left winglet, a fin at the end of the wing scraped the ground after a gust of wind tipped the plane. Damage to the plane was minimal and not structural. He said the plane is already back in service.

My Testimony

Last week I had the opportunity to share my testimony with a group of ladies. It's not something I've really ever formally done before. I thought I should at least document it, so I'm not so nervous to do it another time.

For most of my life I have listened to people give their testimonies and been amazed at God’s transformation in their lives. Their stories were always so fantastic, with dramatic life changes. I felt like my story was so boring…no one would be interested in hearing about my life. You see, when I was three weeks old, I was adopted into a loving Christian family – one with a strong Christian heritage. My grandparents were missionaries & preachers, and my immediate family was very involved with Bible Studies and leading worship. We were the family that if the church doors were unlocked, we were there…Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday evening, Thursday morning…you get the point. And we weren’t just there to attend, we were usually setting up or cleaning up, or leading. I used to joke that if you were sick, but hadn’t thrown up you were well enough to go to church and if you had thrown up, then surely you must be feeling better and can go to church.

I knew all my Bible stories and that Jesus had died on the cross for my sins. When I was four I used to come home every week from Sunday School and go sit on my “Time Out” step, pray, and ask Jesus to come into my heart and make it clean. By Sunday afternoon I had usually done something wrong and wondered why Jesus hadn’t made me clean & perfect like him. One day while in the bathtub, for some reason I unrolled an entire roll of toilet paper into the tub with me. I know every mom is cringing! My mother came in, I’m sure flabbergasted, and asked why had I done that. My tear-filled response was to say, “I don’t know, I’ve asked Jesus to come into my heart and make me stop doing wrong things, but I guess it isn’t working.” My loving mother explained that Jesus doesn’t make us perfect when he comes into our heart. We will still sin, because we won’t be perfect until we reach Heaven; but that he guides us and helps us to make right decisions if we will listen to him. Now with full understanding I knelt, literally at the throne, right there in the bathroom and asked Jesus to clean my heart and come and live there.

There was no dramatic life change. I was still a four year old doing four year old dumb mistakes, getting in trouble for them and then asking God to forgive me. I attended church camp and every Jr. High and High school retreat. I was the goody-two-shoes. The brown-noser. I didn’t get into trouble. Even after going away to college I could not say there was anything in my life that I regretted. People would tell me I should be thankful, but I wasn’t. I thought I was boring! Then, after my oldest daughter was born, it began to click.


Jeremiah 29:11 says, “’For I know the plans I have for you’, declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’.” This was the verse that our pastor gave to Mikalah as her life verse when we dedicated her. Even though I had heard the verse many times, this time it made me pause and think about my own life. I told you that I was adopted. What I didn’t tell you was that I was born on the heels of Roe v. Wade. Or that my birth mother was told to have an abortion or leave the house. She chose to leave her family. The adoption agency that I was placed with had placed over 800 children in 1973, but in 1974 when I was placed with my parents I was child number 8. Now no matter what your political standings are, I feel truly blessed to be alive. And after reading that verse in Jeremiah, I began to realize that God had put me with this family for a reason. Maybe he knew how reckless I really could be and he gave me a family that would help to keep me in check. Or maybe he had a plan, one that required a strong Biblical background, one that had had God as its foundation since I could remember.

Six months after Mike and I were married, we were in a pretty bad car accident. The result was that I had to quit school to recover. By the time I was well enough to continue my schooling, I was pregnant with Mikalah and Mike only had a few more months before graduating. I never finished my schooling. Several years later, one of my younger brothers unexpectedly chose to end his life. Each of these situations was an opportunity for my faith to be rocked, but because of its firm foundation, I was able to thank God for his blessings. And have now been able to come alongside others that have experienced or are experiencing similar situations.

And then came “The Big One”. I was enjoying my comfortable suburban life, married to an engineer, stay-at-home mommy to four children. And then my loving husband came home one day and said that he thought he’d like to be a pastor instead. That one little sentence turned my whole life upside down. I did not feel that God was calling me to be a pastor’s wife. I dug my feet in and challenged God every day. I even went so far as to hide a few phone messages on my husband’s messy desk from people interested in having him come pastor.

But God had plans for me, and as He says in Philippians 1:6, “Be confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.” Through many “Dutch Uncle” talks with God, He softened my heart towards being a pastor’s wife, to starting a new church, and to moving to Montana…a place I said I never move to. That doesn’t mean my day-to-day life is a piece of cake, but it does mean when I’m discouraged, frustrated, mad, sad, or over-whelmed, my uneventful, boring life I thought I had as a child reminds me of God’s unfailing love and faithfulness. Now I am thankful that my testimony is mine – even without a bunch of drama!