Choosing Thomas - Choosing Life

This is an amazing video - one that I think everyone should see. It's about a couple who chose life for their unborn son who was diagnosed with Trisomy 13. It shows their struggle, the sweet little boy's birth, short life and death. It also shows the love and grace that God has bestowed on us to be able to get through such a difficult situation still trusting in Him. Please let me know if you look at it.

Choosing Thomas

Just call it Lazarus

My computer is back - with a new hard drive. Thank goodness for a geeky husband AND a hubby who doesn't toss things out. He had a same vintage drive as this computer so he replaced it, and got me all set up. Fortunately, he had saved my bookmarks back in December because of changing me to this "new" computer from my old Windows98 machine so I even got all of those! Oh - and all my documents were safe because they were on the server! Woo-hoo!!

Wanna know what's even better? DH got PAID for the hours he worked on my computer! He has a client in Switzerland who shipped him this computer back in 2001 to use to test the software for their product and since he hasn't used it in a few years, it was just sitting upstairs in his office. He figured at Christmas, he could set it up for me and allow me to have a computer - and it would still be available for him to use if his client contacted him (since he's not doing the consulting full-time anymore). Well, they contacted him on Friday about a bug and he HAD to get this computer going because he needed the old operating system. So even if it weren't my computer, he still needed to resurrect it - and those were billing hours! So fixing this computer paid for our entire two week vacation. Can you imagine??? How cool is that???

So now I'm back online on my OWN computer which is so nice. I can also finally get my homeschool paperwork finished **blush**.

RIP

SNIFF

I'm so sad.

My "new" computer that I got at Christmas seems to have bitten the dust.

What's even sadder is that my PC is still going strong (running Windows 98 and my 2001 Mac is toast.

DH will look to work on it this week but for now, I'm on his old laptop (thank heavens for a computer geeky hubby who has lots of spare computers).

What I'll miss most are all of my bookmarks. :(

Strong words from Mark Driscoll - but he certainly has a way with them!

Mark Driscoll is a controversial pastor at times but I have to say, he says what he means and doesn't mince words. Read the following to see:

Self-righteousness has so seeped into American Christianity that being a missionary to one’s neighbors is easily overlooked because of the sickness of our faith. How sick are we when the most popular books among American Christians are about how to get blessed by praying a small section of the Old Testament Scripture like a pagan mantra, and about the Rapture, as if the goal of the Christian life were to get more junk and leave this trailer park of a planet before God’s tornado touches down on all the sinners? Only through repentant eyes will we see that God has a plan, by the power of the Gospel of Grace, to build a community of transformed people.
“
— Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission, p. 78

Back from vacation - pics to follow soon!

We're back from our 2 week vacation and all went great. Weather cooperated for the most part, our ports of call were fun (we got as far as Martha's Vineyard - Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven) and we got to swim a lot. Now it's time to face the music once again - and do the gazillion loads of laundry that we produced. 2 weeks with a family of 6 and me not even hand washing anything - OY!!

So I came home to over 1700 e-mails (well, actually, I got rid of over 1100 of those in Newport earlier in the week) and even my Google Reader has 455 new entries for me! YIKES!!

Well, a girl must do what she must do. Off to go through my Reader entries! Call in the National Guard if you don't see me in a few days!

Is the world ending? I'm ... shhhh....ahead of the game!!!!!

Of course, now that I said that, something will come up to ruin everything but I think we're ahead of the game a bit for getting ready to go on vacation! Yep - another vacation. DH gets 3 weeks off a year and all 3 weeks are done during the summer since we own the sailboat. Today I purchased all of the non-perishable food and put it all away already. I went through the cabinets, took off things that we won't need and made all the beds. Everyone has their towels for the first week (each person gets a fresh water towel and a salt water towel so we don't end up with a gazillion dirty towels) too. We sent our 17 year old up the mast to fix the wind vane (it tells us the wind speed and wind direction on a display at the wheel) and we got some great pictures and even a video! She had a ball going up there - DH and I about had a heart attack hoisting her there. LOL So to share what she saw, here are some pics:








Here's the video too:

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CRAZY Busy - VBS was the best one yet!

This week was our VBS week. Our church is a bit atypical to most churches in that our VBS is large. We had over 450 kids registered (not including worker's kids in nursery and PreK - VBS is for K through 6th grades) and 250+ workers. It was amazing to see God's hand at work all through the week.

I run the refreshment department. That means that I run the department that puts out over 400 kid snacks per day plus keep 2 tables of food going for all of the workers and any parents that wish to stay. To give you an idea of what we went through this week, here's a partial list:

10 large canisters of lemonade mix
1800 Oreo cookies
900 Chips Ahoy
45 1 lb. boxes of Golden Grahams
30 bags of mini marshmallows
12 bags of M&Ms (these three ingredients made up a trail mix)
1050 cups of coffee
3 gallons of milk
2 gallons of 1/2 and 1/2
12 large flavored creamers
46 Entenmann's cakes/donuts/cookies
15 cantaloupes
35 dozen bagels
15 tubs of butter
7 lbs. sugar
3000 cups

We also had a lot of donations of food so we were all pretty well stocked. I only had a few leftover Oreos and some lemonade mix left. We stayed under budget by $600, which was GREAT!!

But better than that, we collected enough money to help build an orphanage in Burkina Faso in Africa (over $5400), over 1400 toiletry items for the local needy families and we had MANY decisions for Christ (I kept hearing about them - but don't know the numbers yet). It was such an exciting week but oh, so busy! I had to be at church each day at 8:30 and never left before 1:30. Thursday I left at 4 and today (Friday), I left church at 4:45 only to return for our fair at 5:45. I had a cup of tea at home and that's it!

I'll try to post some other pictures but here's one from our opening today, and then the second picture is my "office" at church - my station in the sound booth. My job is to set up the computer to project the words and graphics on the screen and there was a LOT of that for VBS.