Here's what they look like...in case you forgot from no pics forEVER

 With the serious lack of pictures lately (storing all our pics on our external hard drive crimps my style when it comes to editing/posting pics) so I thought I'd at least steal some from Facebook and show off Amy's recent photoshoot of the kids while we were in Toronto.

 

Catching up

This poor blog has been neglected.  Meanwhile...

• Ella was the star student last week at her school! She got to wear a special hat and necklace all week and had all kinds of fun priveleges including a special display on the wall with her favorite thigns and picture of her and her family.  So proud of her!
• Sadie Grace is 18 months old!  She is super lively, sweet, and smart.  She has also learned to say "no" and "mine" and run away from me in Target. Alas, it happens to the best of 'em.
• Sadie talks A TON and pronounces many things perfectly.  I can tell a big difference between having a child without hearing loss.  She hears every whisper and dog barking down the street and is able to pronounce words more clearly much younger than Ella did.
• Chris and I took an awesome 4 day trip to Canada (our belated 10th anniversary celebation). It was wonderful to get away and came at a perfect time-things have been seriously, psycho-stressful around here lately.
• Chris and Ella went to visit our friends Lucas and Anne and their baby Mae on their farm in Virginia.  Ella got to feed chickens, gather eggs and paint the new beehive among other farm-y tasks :-)  They had a blast!!
• In our lifegroup's quest to find a ministry we can serve in long term we got to join a ministry at our church and walk around in the city and pray with and serve food to prostitutes in a rough area of town.  It was much less scary than everyone anticipated and I personally LOVED it and hope to partner with this ministry again.
• I'm graduating in 80 days.  Just try and stop me.
• We put our house on the market last week-praying for a somewhat miraculous sale price asap so that we don't have to put ALL our savings into getting out of this house.  I'll miss this house but I'm hopeful this is the time for more space.
• In the last few weeks both kids have had pink eye and colds, I've had a cold and I tore ligaments in my back which was wretched and took 2 weeks to feel normal again (and one lovely pack of steroids)
• Let's see, what else...lots of tough stuff going on that's not blog-worthy but hopefully peace and good news on all those fronts is coming soon.
• I have zillions of pictures to share...someday I'll get to that.  Hopefully sooner rather than later!

Let the little ones come to me...

Ella is in a very spiritually interested and open place right now and I have to say I'm loving it. It's been my prayer since I was pregnant that she would come to know Christ at a young age and walk with Him for a lifetime. Those words almost sound like one long word to me because I've prayed them so many times. So, though I know it won't all be smooth sailing, I'm loving seeing her interest in God explode!

We've been having "family night" once a week for a while now and she and I do her devotional book most days after school. She's been asking questions about the trinity and heaven and what God looks like:) when she was talking about what God looks like she said "does he look like a ghost? They say he's all white and glowy."  Ha!!

At family night we do/read/talk about some spiritually focused thing, read/write letters to our sponsored kids and pray for them, and pick a new memory verse to work on. Ella still loves the method of writing a verse on a whiteboard and erasing a word at a time until we know the whole thing. She's been a good memorizer since we started verses a long time ago but we'd only do them occassionally. She's been begging to do more so we've upped it to one a week lately. Why not lean into what she's interested in? ESPECIALLY WHEN IT'S THE BIBLE!!???

She's also such a reader now that she's been asking to read out of our bibles and learning how to look up books and verses in the Bible. So, I took her on a "date" last week to buy her own "big kid Bible."  She was SOOO happy. She spent a long time deciding and she settled on one because it was called a "backpack bible." She said " Mom! That means I can take it in my backpack and even read it on the bus! This is amazing!" SO cute! I casually mentioned to her that not all kids would be interested in it (I wanted to give her some warning) but she didn't care:)

Well, I didn't realize how serious she was. We had family night tonight and when we started talking about our verse over dinner, I thought "oh we haven't practiced together that much this week and it's a longish one so we'll probably need another week to learn it."  But, I asked "do you guys remember our verse?" And Ella said "Hebrews 11:6..." And quoted it quickly and perfectly. What? I was shocked! My jaw dropped and I asked Chris if he'd been working on it with her but he was as shocked as I was. She was smiling and giggling at our being dumbfounded and then after we told her how amazed we were, she told us her secret. "Mom, I've been finding it in my Bible everyday on the bus and practicing. In the afternoons I work on 2 Corinthians 5:17." What??? Cue heart melting. Needless to say I started crying and hugged her forever. I told her she won't totally understand til she's older why I'm so proud but to trust me, earnestly seeking God (Heb 11:6) is worth it. I donKt want my kids to do spiritual things to make me happy but Ella's interest seems genuine and mostly motivated by her own interest and curiosity. Praying her relationship with God grows and can be her foundation in tough times. Love her!!