Open House for Kids Day Out

Nolan starts back at preschool on Tuesday and tonight was the Open House! He'll be back on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 to 2 and he's excited! We are looking forward to Ms. Amber and Ms. Cheri being his teachers!

It is Well with My Soul

Nolan LOVES hymns. It started one day when he was taking forever eating lunch and instead of me jumping up to do dishes I got out a hymn book and started singing to him. He picked up on them right away and it's one of his favorite things to do; carries it around and asks to sing songs like "the power song" (Power in the Blood), "how great thou art" and so on.

Last night I had made a homemade beef soup with dumplins (can't say dumplings or they are not right!). Anyway, there were tons of peas in them and Nolan started singing "When peas like a river........... it is well with my soul!" So cute!! Later after dinner, Nolan was playing with Daddy in our closet (it's like a room) and there is a big roll of wrapping paper that Nolan calls his sword and carries around. He then started singing "it is well with my sword". When Mark told him "it is well with my soul", Nolan said no Daddy my SWORD! OK, so our little prodigy has some big concepts to learn!

Happy Birthday Meema Spaeth!

Today is my Mom's birthday and to help her celebrate, Nolan and I drove out to Big D (Dallas for those of you not from here ;) to her work at the testing office for Dallas School District and met all her coworkers and took Mom out to lunch at Fish City Grill. We shared pecan crusted shrimp spinach salad and a crab cake sandwich. Nolan with his latino blood went with quesadillas and a scoop of ice cream. Mom has bragged to her coworkers about Nolan knowing his letters and numbers so she had one of the testers give him a standardized test for two year olds and he scored a 5 which I guess is supposed to be good (goes from 1-6). She was happy about that! Anyway, Nolan has been talking about Meema's work, going over the big bridges to get there, and playing with the bus (a little toy bus in the office). Happy Birthday Mom!

Breathing cleaner air................

OK so a couple of years ago at least, I noticed in an air vent some brown stuff but once I easily cleaned it out, I thought how bad can it be? If it were mold, you couldn't just clean it off. So occasionally I would clean it then also another vent or two, just thinking that's weird.......... well there was a coupon in the lovely ubiquitous Val Pak coupon pack in the mail for air duct cleaning. I thought, why not? Apparently ours is yucky. Well it turned out today that ours did have mold! Fortunately it was not the black mold where you have to bulldoze your home and dig out 2 meters down into the ground type mold but the good mold, the allergy causing mold. Is there a good mold???? Well, lots of money and plaster chips all around the house later, it's all cleaned and the air ducts have been sanitized, anti-molded, and anti-bacterialized. Apparently, dust buildup and condensation cause the mold. It doesn't pay to not keep them cleaned! Praise the Lord, He has provided for us to breathe cleaner air. Learn a lesson from us: if you don't know the last time your air ducts have been vacuumed or you notice even wipable brown stuff, open your Val Pak and get them cleaned! Oh, I can't believe we've been breathing that mold!!

Church wide picnic!

This was the first year we were able to go to the church wide picnic and we had so much fun! Other years I was on bedrest or we were out of town. I wish we could have these once a month but I'm sure Chris would say no!

Northern New Jersey & Ocean Grove Trip!

We had a wonderful, incredible time visiting with family and enjoying the ocean. Smelling the salt air and feeling the ocean breezes brought tears to my eyes with thoughts of home......... The weather was excellent and the blessings were huge! Thank you Lord!