Fifteen

Fifteen years today. 

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Working at the Harrisburg Christmas Show

I'm always looking for remaining vintage stuff in this old building (Farm Show)

    

What my days look like. Toddler Control. 

Cousin Lisa comes to see the puppies.

Jana's sweet baby that we are all wishing to squeeze! 

Bath time. 

The Blood Drive bus tried to back into my driveway to turn around. 

I happened to be outside at the time so I tried to take a picture for Nate (driver was struggling) 

Stuart and the nervous clown cake

His teacher made the students these Lowly Worm's. So cute. Her theme is Richard Scarry. 

Olive Turns Three

 She thinks she's big stuff. 

She's been on a napkin kick lately... needing one for every meal. So Grandma gave her a big stack of napkins for her birthday. She plays with them like they are toys. 

She has some other funny quirks but I can't think of them now.  

She was so ready for this birthday.  

Chorus Tour

The Chorus Tour

I have been reminded of several things after spending 4 days on chorus tour.         

I need to be friendly at church and take an interest in the visitors. I can easily tell you which church was the friendliest out of the 5 we visited over the weekend.  I do think that if you find yourself in an unfriendly situation you should still be friendly yourself and make conversation happen. You can’t expect people to seek you out.  This has me thinking of the Miss Mannerly article in the Caravan Issue of DOP. by Emily Smucker. Seriously I wish it was a blog post so that I could link to it. So so good. She talks about throwing the conversational ball back. Like if I say Hi, then you could throw the ball back by asking a question like how was your day, what did you do? and so on. I just loved that entire article. It is pretty tiring to try to talk to someone when they are not throwing the ball back, ya know? 

I would get to these churches and feel like, “Oh man, these poor ladies are making us supper, and then they are probably hosting us too….” The one lady I stayed with had a wedding that coming weekend and had to make soup for the wedding people who were setting up on Friday. I was feeling so bad as she set out killer good food for us the night we got there and was up before we were the next morning frying bacon and eggs. They sat around and hung out with us and we had a great time. I had this weird mix of feeling bad for everybody but yet I wanted to be the one hosting too.

There really is not a better way to get to know the chorus kids than ride around on a bus with them for so many hours. We had good times.

I have a greater appreciation for my chorus directors when I was a youth. I look at our chorus kids and realize that they have no idea.

We had so many people support us, watching the kids back home. And the puppies. So many people praying for us. Thank you.

Nate insists on ordering every restaurants specialty in this case it was called the big fish. 

 There was a moment when a travel mug rolled out of an overhead compartment and hit our bus driver on the head.  I kept my eyes on him the rest of that day looking for signs of passing out. I really meant it when I thanked the Lord for safety that evening. 

We were fortunate enough to get to stay with Nate sister Carla and her family.