Our Family

Yes you read that right a PMS Picnic.  Penfield, Monahan, Sanders…why…what were you thinking?

My father’s family, his two sisters and his brother, and ALL of their families (well all but one cousin and his wife) made it to the picnic this year.  We’ll keep trying and some year at either christmas or the new annual picnic we will get everyone together in one place!  This year we met at a park in Olympia, we played some games the kids swam and we ate our hearts out on delicious picnic treats! YUMM!  What’s a family gathering without great food?  RIGHT?

It was a great start to an awesome new tradition, looking forward to many more years of getting together and making Grandma Del proud.

This summer we had fun visiting with family! on the 10th we headed down to Rochester, WA to help Uncle Mark paint his barn. It started out bare wood brown, with a quick coat of primer and then a bright red it was transformed in just an afternoon. While it still needs another coat of red, a shade or two darker, it looks so much different! (we won’t tell anyone that the back and opposite side aren’t done at all yet)

This trip was just Zoe and I as it was on Dade’s 8th birthday and he got to visit with Grandma Ann. Zoe had so much fun playing with the dogs and seeing the brand new puppies (unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of those)! She met some new cousins and a great great Aunt, along with her dog Timber. Timber and Zoe had so much fun playing together that he even sent her a present!

Eli and I were blessed with an incredible opportunity to travel to Ireland for nine days at the end of April, early May, this year. It was a special time to experience something new and exciting together. The history, the architecture, the driving it was all so different. But the green was the same. Many times we’d look out over the rolling hills and the green pastures and think, “wow, this looks so much like where we grew up!” It reminded me of how beautiful of a place we are blessed to live in.

To start our trip we flew to New York where we had an eight hour layover. Since we were right there in New York we decided to hop on the subway and take a quick walk through Manhattan. It was crazy busy there. Fun place to visit, I could not live there! But the pictures were fun.

At about 8:00 we headed back to the airport to get back on a plane and head off to Dublin.

We had such a great time today with friends, fighting roots, rakes and rain!  As part of our summer “Yard Work Exchange” with the neighborhood friends it was our month to host and have some help with an outside project.  Since we have so many to choose from we figured wecould easily fill up the day.  Well, the way those guys worked they had their jobs done with time to spare!  I guess it was a good thing it started raining torrential downpour.  At least this way I didn’t have to worry about watering all my new transplants.

And because pictures tell a thousand words.  Here’s a few:

Zoe loves to match Saige, it’s like her own real life American Doll.  But the age difference makes it difficult to find matching outfits as the infant/toddler section seldom carries the same lines as the Girl section at the department stores (unless I want to pay an arm and a leg for boutique stuff, and, lets face it, we all know I’m not going to do that.)  So my solution?  Make them.

And with the help and inspiration of a friend of a friend who makes these for her little girl I was able to put together a few fun dresses for my girls!

I love saying “My girls”  or “the girls,” I don’t know what it is about that phrase, but it makes me smile inside every single time.  Anyway, here are the dresses.

We have been blessed in out of this world ways over the last few months.  And by “out of this world” I mean directly from Heaven.  God has been good to us.  In mysterious and unexpected ways.  The biggest of which is our home.  While it was a blessing and a miracle that we came upon this home to rent in ’07 when we first moved down to the Federal Way area, He has expanded that blessing once again.

Though renting was fine, I was content paying what we paid and never once felt that “we’re just throwing money away” feeling that so often comes with renting, I was still feeling a little in flux.  Mostly because I wasn’t sure where we were supposed to “settle.”  We miss family in Whatcom county immensly and that was pulling us to think about moving back.  At the same time we have made some incredibly wonderful friends down here and leaving them was not something we wanted to do, or looked at lightly.  This torn feeling made me feel confused and frustrated, and we knew we weren’t going to be able to rent this home forever so with the market in such an awesome place for buyers we started to look around.

Our landlord is a real estate agent so we called her up and let her know what we were thinking about and she showed us a few houses, but also mentioned that she was thinking about offering us the house we were renting.  She knew our price range and situation so there would be no ‘negotiating’ because she knew our funding couldn’t really be adjusted.  A few days later she called and said, “well, I’ve decided I officially want to offer you the house, and if you’d like it, lets move forward with the paperwork.”   And so began two months of mailing, faxing, signing, finding and sending paperwork back and forth with the lender and us.  Leading up to December 31, 2009 when we went in to the title office and signed all the closing papers making our rental house, OUR house.  So not only were we blessed with a beautiful home, in our price range, we didn’t have to MOVE!  Hooray!

Over the past month and a half we’ve busied ourselves with dreaming, plans and a few work parties to begin truly making this house our own.  We started with the bathroom in January and just yesterday finished the living room.  It’s warm and fun and refreshing.

And each day I’m reminded to give thanks to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than we ask, or imagine.

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