our elise turns 4!

just born!  9.2.2008

1st birthday

2nd birthday @ disneyland

3rd birthday @ wallowa lake

4th birthday

random as random can be

it's been awhile so i thought i'd just post some random things that have been going on over in our neck of the desert.

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my parents came to visit last month to celebrate emma's 5th birthday.  our baby girl turned five!  i am getting really sad that my kids are growing up so fast.  my sis and i planned to just take my mom to get a pedicure, but then we thought it would be fun for emma to get one for her birthday.  even my dad got in on the action!

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my cousin, kenny, and his girls came to visit from california.  emma wanted to go to chuck e. cheese's for her birthday, so here we all are in front of the ticket booth.  1372 tickets, yeah!

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our friend jordan made this cool bow out of pvc for lucas and emma.  here's lucas ready to go 'get some'!

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about three years ago we went to an REI garage sale and purchased this awesome beach cruiser electra bike for emma.  it was a steal at only $30!  (they used it for photos and that's it!)  well, we waited and waited and waited for her to grow into it.  it sat in our garage for-EVER.  finally, when we hosted a garage sale last month for our friends who are adopting from africa we decided to put this puppy together.  lo and behold, it fit emma!  she is so awesome at riding a two-wheeler!

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here is lucas' soccer team - the bulldogs.  this is a great bunch of boys who have improved so much and learned to play so well together.  they had a fantastic season and we are excited for the new season to start!

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have to brag on my dear friend brenda who sewed up this beautiful garbage bag for me and my car! thanks, bren!

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some dishcloths i crocheted up for my mom and mil for mother's day.  (told you this was going to be random.)

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a group of friends came up with this idea of doing pinterest parties.  we each take turns choosing a project from pinterest, gathering all of the supplies, and hosting the party at our house.  when you're the "guest," you get to just go enjoy yourself and make a fun craft!  it's a great way to get our craftiness on without having to come up with the ideas all on our own.  this was the last project we did - a pretty wreath made from strips of fabric.  mine was springy/summery, but everyone did something different and they all turned out beautiful!

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one of my favorite comfort meals - a bowl of soup noodles with some meat and veggies.  nom nom.

our friends are adopting!

the story is crazy, their faith is amazing, God's love is steadfast and abounding. our friends are adopting twin girls from the democratic republic of congo (DRC) and i want to help spread their story! you can read more about it on their blog. they would love your support!

leap, leap hooray!

happy leap year! nothing much going on around here today. i did come across an interesting offer online from zappos. i guess they normally have a 365-day return policy for their products, but if you buy something from their site today they're offering a 4-year return policy! whoa. who is going to buy something and keep track of it enough to return in four years? i can't think of a scenario where i might do that.

something a little more interesting - i have been knitting up a storm around here lately, and here is the last thing i knitted...fingerless gloves for emma! lucas wants a pair, sans flower. he asked for flames instead. we'll see what i can come up with, but definitely no flames. i'm not that creative.

(here's the pattern)

cheap and easy DIY bulletin board

check out what i made a few months ago. it's a HUGE bulletin board to display the kids' masterpieces, and i love it! i have been wanting something like this for a long time, but everything in the stores or online were super expensive. after doing some research, i found this building material called homasote that makes an amazing bulletin board...and it is CHEAP. it's made of compressed paper and works better than a cork board, in my opinion. i paid $25 for an 8x4 sheet. $25! now that's a great deal. the one you see in the picture is 6x4, so i used the remainder of it for my office (which i will post pictures of soon!). i found it at our local home depot. but, a word of warning. it is not popular here on the west coast yet, so no one knew what it was. i had an amazing service rep help me. she called the distributor to find the local dealer of this material, then called him and placed a special order for me. i love helpful sales people. here's a quick tutorial in case you want to make one for your space:

materials

homasote

fabric

4 anchors

4 finishing washers

4 long screws

tools

scissors

measuring tape

exacto knife

level

circular saw

staple gun

drill

how-to

1. cut homasote board to your desired size using your circular saw. you may want to do this outside because it makes a bit of a mess.

2. cut fabric to size, leaving at least two inches on each side to wrap around the board. if you are making a larger-sized board, you may need to sew two pieces of fabric together. or, you can be creative and sew together various fabric designs to cover your entire board!

3. lay your fabric face-down on the floor and center your homasote board on top. if your fabric has a design or pattern, be sure it is facing the right way and that the design lines up with the edges. using a staple gun, staple the center of one side, then the opposite, and then the center of each of the other two sides. be careful to pull the fabric nice and taut before you staple. then, work your way from the center of each side towards the corners.

4. for the corners, pull the point of the fabric down over the corner of the homasote, making a 45 degree angle. fold down the two sides of the fabric and tuck in the excess along the sides (like you are wrapping a present). make this as neat as possible so that there is not a lot of fabric between the board and the wall when you hang it.

5. once your board is covered, use an exacto knife to make a small 'x' in each of the four corners where you will pre-drill holes. (making slits in the fabric will help prevent the fabric from ripping or torquing when you drill the holes.) pre-drill four holes, one in each corner.

6. have your hubby or a strong friend hold the board up to your wall where you want to hang it. level your board. using one of the long screws, poke through the pre-drilled holes to mark the wall. pre-drill for the anchors.

7. hang up your board using the finishing washers and long screws.

8. step back and admire your new bulletin board!

getting back into the flow

so, i had the best intentions of blogging and posting pictures from our trip to china and hong kong soon after our return, but getting back into the flow of things, especially with it being so close to christmas, was challenging. now that things have settled down a bit, i finally feel like i can (and should) get back onto this old thing and share a bit of what's been happening on the home front. in a few words, not much! december and january flew by. we had a relaxing and meaningful celebration of christmas with my cousin and her family, and my sister and her boyfriend and boyfriend's family. it was nice to have the house full of people sharing a meal, singing carols, opening gifts, and making another great christmas memory for the years to come. we scaled back quite a bit this year with our gift-giving to the kids. it was really, really nice. it was a bit odd at first because they opened their present from us (one each) and that was it. but in the end, and now looking back on it, it was freeing not to have so much "stuff" to deal with after the holidays. it felt a lot less overwhelming. of course, they still had gifts from grandparents and aunties and uncles to open. :)

a new sushi place called mizu sushi opened up in our city so allan and i checked it out last month. it's one of those places where the sushi runs on a conveyor belt throughout the restaurant and you grab what you want as it goes by in front of you. then, they tally the plates according to color to calculate your tab. it was okay. it was nice not to have to wait for your food, but we quickly realized that almost everything was a california roll. they just added things to the top to change it into a different type of roll. for that, we just made our own cali rolls at home, and they were scrumptious.

homeschooling has been the most challenging this year, mainly because both of the girls are no longer napping so i have the two of them to contend with as i try to school lucas. next year will be a new experience as well, since our plan is to start homeschooling emma in kindergarten. you can start praying for me now! i think the most challenging part of homeschooling is the parenting aspect that comes along with it. you can't get away from it. you play both the mom role and the teacher role, which i think is not as true in a traditional classroom setting. (teachers out there can correct me if i'm wrong here.) and all the interruptions of having a three- and four-year old running around you while you try to teach can get exhausting. this may all sound very discouraging, and i admit i've felt that way this year, but a phrase allan and i heard recently got me recharged again. we were reminded that the days with our kids are long, but the years are short. how very true. lucas is turning 7 this month, which means half of his home-time with us is almost gone! in another ten years or so, he'll be off to college and out of our home. thinking on that makes me realize how precious these years are with my kids. and seeing how quickly our little elise (our baby!) is growing is confirmation that time is passing by faster than we notice on a daily basis. sniff. to all my young mom friends, enjoy your days with your kids though they may feel long...for the years are incredibly short! (lucas is reading to the girls as i blog this, bless his little heart!)

we're back from china!

we're back from our two-week vacation to china and hong kong! it was an amazing experience, for sure! we have quite a few pictures to share, which i will do soon, but just wanted to post and let everyone know that we are home safe and sound, praise God. the last few days and nights have been pretty terrible, with all of us up and not able to sleep even at 3 am in the morning (ugh!), but we are slowly working our way back to u.s. time. to keep ourselves awake on our second day back, we headed out to get our christmas tree and decked our halls so that we are now ready to celebrate Jesus' birthday!

our first day in beijing, at the Temple of Heaven (Tian Tan)

our last day in hong kong, all of us inside one small hotel room

with ALL of our luggage (Packed Sardines)

halloween festivities and a pinch kindness

so, as last-minute as i was, we still pulled off some halloween festivities tonight...yay! we made a quick run to target this afternoon to pick up candy and the kids dressed up for the trip. we got some looks, but it was fun. a little while later, my cousin and her kids came over and we had our traditional halloween dinner -- pizza! after some face-painting and costume-selecting (they each dressed up as something different than what they wore to target), we hit the streets for some CANDY! at the end of the night, we had quite the loot. at one point, three girls came trick-or-treating at our door and they were each holding a boxed barbie doll. allan asked them what that was about and they said that some house was handing them out instead of candy. interesting! when they saw our girls, they offered the barbies to them. our girls were ecstatic! thank you to three kind young girls who blessed our girls with dolls! now maybe they'll forget about the candy. :) this is just one example of why allan and i think that the tri-cities is unique. we've lived here for 10 years now but continue to be surprised, impressed, and blessed by how nice the people here are. let me give two more quick examples; an employee who was helping us at home depot this weekend held emma in her lap as she was looking up information for us on the computer. not many people will do that. then, today, a serviceman came out to fill our propane tank and ended up helping me start up our fireplace. he gave emma a piggyback ride before he left, and this was after he patiently answered a multitude of questions my girls asked him. you could tell he was a grandpa...we found out he has 9 grandkids. :)

we hope everyone had as safe and fun of a halloween as we did!

my beautiful baby emma!

my pretty little elise!

the motley crew!!

click-clack, ding!

sometime near the beginning of last summer, i began a search to find a good, old fashioned, manual typewriter. don't ask me what it was that started me on my hunt -- actually, scratch that, i just remembered. i wanted a typewriter to type out bible verses that i am memorizing onto cards that i store in a little wooden address file. yeah. so, i started with craigslist (where i always start my searches), then went to ebay, then to the internet to do some more research, and finally back to craigslist to see what i could find now that i had a better idea of what i was looking for. this is what i ended up with ...

my hermes 3000

my favorite color is green, so naturally i really like the color of this machine (the keys, especially). i really like the shape of it. i also like that it is manual and portable so i don't need to plug it in to use it. the click-clack sounds that it makes when i type and hearing the "ding!" when it comes to the end of the margin is pretty neat. i told allan that i would type love letters to him on this thing. i've typed him a total of 1. :)

in the process of getting this typewriter, i sort of befriended the person who sold it to me. his name is michael. he took immaculate care of this machine (which i am thankful for) and gave me a bunch of tips and articles on the on-setting trend of typewriters. after i mentioned that i had sewed a cover for my typewriter, he asked if i could sew one for his and i gladly said yes. here are the before and after pictures he sent me ...

before

after (it fits!)

and here's my own cover

my lovely green hermes 3000 sits in my new office!, which i will share about another time. i will say, though, that it is a space i can call my own. and, what i appreciate about it most is that it has a door that i can close. :) more on that later!

batman and robin??

we're only 9 days away from halloween and we haven't done a single thing to prepare for it. no candy, no costumes. we don't even know what we are going to do - take the kids trick-or-treating? ... or ... stay home and pass out candy? since we haven't given a single thought to costumes yet, we will most likely pull something out of the kids' dress-up trunk. anyway, in honor of the upcoming festivities (whatever they may be), here's a picture i dug up recently that was taken back in june 2010 (lucas - age 5, emma - age 3). so STINKING CUTE!

from pasco to minneapolis and back

towards the end of september, allan and i got the awesome opportunity to travel to minneapolis, minnesota to attend a conference put on by desiring God. the theme of the conference was finish the mission, bringing the gospel message of Jesus Christ to people who have never heard it and/or do not have access to a local church. hands down, allan and i thought this was the best conference we've ever attended! our hearts and passion for global missions were re-ignited and we are excited about the day when every people will confess that Jesus is Lord! allan and i have a hope that one day we will be able to be a part of global missions by being a "goer," living abroad somewhere and sharing the message of Christ. for now, we will do our best serving as "senders." :)

in addition to the conference, we got to spend some time (5 hours!) at the mall of america. it was pretty overwhelming, even for a shopper like me. there is a theme park smack in the middle of it, complete with roller coasters and even a water ride. i have to say, though, that it wasn't all that i thought it would be. there were multiples of the same store scattered on various levels of the mall, which was a waste. my feet were aching by the time we decided to call it quits. i think we spent more time walking from one store or escalator to the next than actually shopping. nonetheless, i am glad to have visited the largest shopping mall in america and more glad that i didn't walk away broke. unfortunately, i don't have any pictures to show for it. so, hopefully you'll enjoy all of the ones we took from the conference (mostly self-portraits!).

our comfy bed in our hotel SUITE. sweet! you can't see it, but our room was huge. we had to walk through a sitting/living room to get to our bedroom!

finish the mission ... here we are!

second self-portrait at the conference ... all smiles!

pastor john about to intro louie giglio ... so excited!

a pic of the conference from our vantage point.

a fighter-verse knight we picked up from the conference. it's standing on the bar of hell's kitchen, an awesome underground restaurant we had lunch at while enjoying some live music. the food was delicious. (btw, the purpose of the knight is to remind us that we are putting on the armor of God every time we memorize scripture. awesome! and, pretty apt, too, for being in hell's kitchen and all!)

got to meet JP after lunch!! mission finished! totally kidding! he was gracious and asked us to keep praying for him. we also got his autograph for his newest book, bloodlines. still need to read it.

our last morning at the conference ... still smiling.

waiting for the train to take us to the airport. goodbye, minneapolis!

p.s. a huge thank you to my parents for coming and staying with the kids while allan and i snuck away! thanks, mommy and daddy!

goodbye summer 2011 ... hello FALL!

i am SOOOOO happy that fall is finally here! noticing that i didn't blog at all, almost, over the summer, here's a quick look back at our summer.

activity-packed days ...

meeting our new friend, natalie ...

meeting our other new friend, ellianah (born on the same day!)...

lots of park days ...

a visit to husky stadium's hall of fame ...

huskies' end zone ...

on the field ...

jedi knights ...

snuggle time ...

3rd birthday celebration at wallowa lake ...

trips to the grocery store ...

sharing cold drinks ...

story time with miss kelly ...

barbequeing and four-wheeling ...

dinner at red robin's ...

saying "bye for now" to great friends ...

biking ...

climbing ...

boating ...

and the best for last ... SUCCESSFUL potty training!!! no more diapers!

a wonderful summer indeed.