After months of planning and looking forward to our Midwest P&R Jubilee picnic, the day finally arrived! We had five different churches represented, lots of fun activities, wonderful fellowship, incredible food and just good old fun!

The day started out a bit chilly, but it soon warmed up and the weather was just lovely. The first half of the day was cut out for relay races and family Olympics. The Servens coordinated this part and did a fabulous job! Everybody had a blast and many memories were made. After our lunch, we gathered in the sanctuary to sing for a while, and then headed back out to enjoy God's wonderful creation and some more games. Here is the first half of our day...boffer wars and baseball games pictures next!

Opening the games with prayer.

Dads and their little girls.

Off they go!

Abigail takes a moment to pause and get her picture taken...Grace on the other hand is still trying to move!

Mr. and Mrs. R. go around.

Rebecca and Ben were incredibly fast at this relay! I thought for sure they were going to win.

Hey! Look who it is!!! Loved seeing you two! :)

Awww, little Jonas got to play while being toted in mama's arms.

Ashton likes to make up his own relay races.

Mr. Castle and lovely Mary Michelle.

Caleb takes care of chickens at home and gathers eggs each day...now it's his chance to run a race without dropping an egg, or maybe let it crack just because...

Around the cone, Aaron...

You see that...Matt dropped it!

That's better...now, make up for lost time.

Hey Peter...you aren't holding that egg, are you? ;)

The best player on the field!

Jess has a very feminine way of doing an egg relay. Isn't she cute?

If you ask me, it looks like they've all gone scooters.

Step 1. Run dad, run!

Step 2. Place bat between eyes.

Step 3. Spin around five times fast.
You can see the gentleman beside Mr. Candler working on the last part which is:
Step 4. Try your hardest to get back with no serious accidents.
Watching this game made me dizzy.

William isn't quite sure what think as he stands surrounded by those girls.
Photo Credit: Peter Sanford

We had a joyous time singing praises to God.
Here is a clip of the little people singing a Psalm 117. Thank you, Mrs. Yen, for the video!!

i'm asking for your advice....

Alrighty...after a lovely weekend with wonderful friends, I'm facing a serious dilemma. I sorted through the...*goes to get exact count after chucking the bad ones* 175 photos I took on Saturday, and narrowed the blog selection down to 43. So, now I can't decide if I should put them all into one post, or divide them into two or three blog posts. Your input and advice would be greatly appreciated... :)

The geese flew by this morning. The sound of geese is very welcoming in the Spring, because we know it's beginning to thaw...the sound of geese now means that Summer is almost over...which is sad, because it really just began! Summertime here is very nice. It's cool for the most part, low humidity (well, coming from a former Texas resident, anyhow :)), and huge blue skies. Each time it rains, it seems to cool off just a little more.

The last post has pictures of the big storm from last week. I'd post pictures of us pulling our tree down, but the pictures from our walk yesterday were much cuter, so they made it to the blog first! :) We like to take walks and since the lambs were tired of being stuck in the "barn" during the rain storms, the little girls decided to take them out for some exercise. Cute, but very stubborn creatures...makes me wonder why the Lord compared us to sheep. ;) Taking Jeeves and Wooster along brought up some good conversation with the little girls, and great object lessons, though! So without further ado...the pictures:

Dad burning some of the brush and such from pulling our tree down. He's lovin' that fire pit!

Hey, it's my ham! With the amount of time that he spends in the sun, you'd think his hair would be white. Mine is getting lighter (which must explain why I was more "blond" than strawberry the other day :)) but his is getting darker. How odd is that?

William gets a nice head-butt from Jeeves.

A giant little girl on her bike. I can't count the number of times she's fallen off that thing! But she loves to ride now that she can without training wheels. If she can't be found inside, we know where to find her! Don't know what we're going to do when Winter comes...

It was 84 degrees, I believe at the time this picture was taken...Abby played all day in a long sleeved dress with a turtleneck. Grace on the other hand, knows how to dress for Summer!

The shepherdess... Oh, you see that blurry roundish light in the back? A car. Hmmm. I wonder.... perhaps if we could get the sheep to run at it, if we could shorten the butchering job...

My dahlin' sistas! Check out the reflection in Abby's sunglasses...

Awwww, but he's so cute, right? This is Wooster.

This is Jeeves, the big annoying one who likes to be the center of attention.

Awwww, Emma had two little lambs with fleece was black as....soot?

Ha! Check out the terrified look on Grace's face! Those sheep act like they're about to run you down... Not a pleasant feeling, I assure you.

Hehe...he likes flowers... *not laughing anymore* He ate my Hostas and Tulips...

We'll see you down the road!

Wednesday morning started out as a lovely perfect summer day. Mom and I had a few errands to run that day, and after getting caught up in other projects, we decided to head out after lunch. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and we are both thankful that we weren't caught out in the storm that passed through that afternoon. Instead, we were all together in our basement waiting for the tornado like storm (micro-burst), high winds, rain, thunder and lightening to pass over.

It wasn't long before we lost power, so we turned on our emergency flashlights and the girls worked on the Psalm we set to music. While the storm raged outside, we were warm and safe inside. When it finally calmed down, we went out to see what our yard looked like. Another lighter storm came through yesterday, we lost power again and yet another one today...complete with hail! :) Enjoy the few photos below...

It started out as a normal day. See happy Miss Suzy busy eating the pecans we set out for her? Cute, huh?

This is what it looked like in the early afternoon. We were unable to see the other side of our lake.

Father and son, surveying the damage.

Our playhouse was all over the hill.

The flag used to stand somewhere on the left side of this photo. You can see my dad walking over to were it landed.

Thankfully none of this came through any of our windows!

Caleb gathering playhouse pieces.

The tree tops which are now on the ground.

Isn't that sad?

Here is what most of our tree tops look like now.

Trying to figure out where these came from.

Our neighbors flag pole snapped in two different places. Yeah, that blurred long pole-like thing on the ground is the rest of the pole and flag.

What our back porch looks like right now...