October visit from Grandma Dot and Grandpa Fred

We had a fabulous week with the Grandparents. We had 2 big highlights. One (that I forgot my camera on) was seeing all the trains (approx. 35) in Snoqualmie. We walked down the sidewalk on a gorgeous day to see them all. The other, below, is our trip to the Seattle Aquarium. We got a year family pass, so please come visit and we'll take you!!

Jeremy has an eye for good color. Pretty good picture for our "run of the mill" camera!

The whole crew (except me) looking at the wave pool (for lack of better words).

After the Aquarium, we went to Ivar's for some delicious seafood. Grandma Dot graciously shared a clam with Connor. He said "yuck" and proceeded to let the clam shell "eat" his hamburger (the shell became a good distractor, a.k.a. toy, for the rest of the meal)

Grandma Dot was gracious enough to share her birthday with us and make her own cake. Great carrot cake, yum =)

Just enjoying time together.

Beginning October trip to Idaho

We were so blessed to see Jeremy's Dad in Idaho, and also stop by to see his Mom's family for the last day (end pictures). Our purpose was to help out around the house since his Dad has to stay off his feet for 6 weeks. Jeremy enjoyed playing on the tractor.

Grandma feeding Katie. What a pleasure for the kids to spend more time with Grandma!

Grandma let us come to the hotel's pool. The kids had a great time with Daddy (Mommy was definitely 2nd choice in the water!)

We tried our best to still do "quiet reading time" on our vacations so that Mommy and Daddy would read their Bibles.

Woo-hoo. Working (or playing or both) around the house! Jeremy got to spread manure with this tractor, and he fixed both the tractors to get them ready for the snows ahead.

Grandpa supervised and drove Connor around with the 4 wheeler. He did a great job of staying off his foot and elevating.

Sprinklers! Connor was a bit more enthusiastic than Katie. We had absolutely gorgeous weather the weekend we were there!

The last day we were there, we got to spend time in Boise seeing the Calnons (Jeremy's Mom's family). A BIG hit is the large trampoline in the backyard. Both kids were running around and "ker-splash"ing.

Group shot with Jeremy's Mom and Fred, Grandma, and our family.

end of September visit from Aunt Mary

My good friend from college, Mary (Collier) Russel came to visit for a long weekend. We had such a wonderful time catching up on what God is doing in their ministry at Camp Bighorn in Montana. And she is a great "Aunt Mary" to the kids. They had a ton of fun (so far she has avoided teaching them the song "Pardon me, that was so rude..." that she taught to James and Erika Scott. I'm thankful for that! If any of you want to get in touch with James and Mary and/or support their ministry, please let us know: jmputman@hotmail.com, and we will get you hooked up!

Unfortunately, we did not get any pictures =( But here is a picture from James and Mary's visit this past April:

mid-September trip to Asia

We were So Blessed (thank the Lord for His provision!) to go see Liz and her family in Asia. We were there for Lydia's 3rd birthday (Connor will be 3 in Dec.) the 2 little girls are 3 weeks apart, and Jacob will be 5 in March. So we were quite busy. The Lord's provision was obvious even with the kids being sick. We had a great time. Below we are enjoying Lydia's birthday cake (Liz and I got to make it).

Yummy Western food for Lydia's birthday - pizza!

The cousins sure did love on each other.

Feeding the fish. A big highlight for all the kids!

One of the highlights was visiting the Panda preserve. We saw quite a few pandas including 4 or 5 babies (less than 2 months), a few toddlers (1 year olds, wrestling), and some red pandas.

We tired the kids out pretty much every day and they slept when they could (and we just didn't at all try to worry about a "schedule"). God provided.

Any foreign children attract attention, but 5 under age 5 - and BLONDE! We got a lot of comments and stares.

The kids did great on both airplane flights (thank you everyone for your prayers!!). Jeremy's juggling skills with the Katie and the food are quite impressive! Connor's a little bitter about being woken up (he FINALLY fell asleep for the last 2 hours of an 11 hour flight. We departed AFTER naptime, but he still pushed through for 9 hours. Crazy! We had to wake him up for the descent - he had been sleeping on the floor).

"I am a Jedi, like my father before me."

Meg captured this shot at just the right time. That's my girl!

Happy Moments

I have had 2 particularly happy moments as of late.

The first happened yesterday. We were singing together for family devotions and Connor requested "Rock I stand" (which took us a while to understand the words he was saying) and we then thought maybe "wise man built his house upon the rock." But no, he wanted to sing my favorite "The Solid Rock" - "On Christ the Solid Rock I stand (which he emphasized each time) all other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand". What a joy to my heart!

The second has been an ongoing happiness (almost repressed at times by an ongoing nausea). We are going to (correction, we do) have a 3rd baby. We are only 8 weeks along, due mid to late March. Boy, are we going to be busy... and blessed!

Video!

Our video camera is HD (which is awesome, but if you're technologically as un-adept as I am, it is tricky to get it to post). So I made sure to take this video with our regular camera so we could share it. Katie started doing this a few days before she turned 1. This was on her birthday (I think!)