Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas! Can you believe that it is here?? I sure can't. Took lots of pictures. I have done terribly on posting pictures :( Sorry! But I will post when our family gets back from our grandparent's house.
Does anyone have a favorite Christmas tradition? After the "giving and receiving" is done, my grandaddy reads Luke Chapter 2, and then we all have a Christmas "brunch" with family, extended family, and friends.
Fun! Fun! Fun! Merry Christmas to all!

Benjamin

I am at home with my youngest brother Benjamin. He is soo sweet! I could eat him up! We have a lot to do today, and he is offering to help me with every thing:) Right now he is diligently trying to tack up our "to do list."
Well, got lots to do! Thanks so much Ben for being a big boy, and your sister's helper!

Psst! I've been so busy that I haven't posted any pictures of our winter fun! I'll do that very soon! (Hopefully) :)

Snow! Snow! Snow!!!!

It is a real winter wonder land!!!! I am sooo excited! Dad is coming home early today so he can play with us! It is some of our animal's first Christmas, and my first big snow since we moved to Marion. I'm going to eat some breakfast and then go out.

I'll post pictures when I calm down :D

Merry Christmas!

I just love this Christmas season! Merry Christmas all of my blogger friends!

Tomorrow we are expecting it to snow for the first time! You would think that in the mountains, it would snow all the time, but I guess since we are in the foot hills, it doesn't snow very much! It hasn't in 20! We are expecting 3 to 5 inches! Yippee!!!!!!!!!! I'll ask Caelen to take a lot of pictures.

Pom

Another of my white silkie bantams was gotten sometime last night. His name was Pomegranate, and he was sooo sweet! He would go to sleep in my lap, and let me hold him all the time. I loved you Pom! Herbie is the only silkie left now. I am very sad, but I know that all this is fitting into God's plan for me. Praise be to God. He gives, and he takes away.
(I think another sly creature got to him)

Feelin Feminine!

As a young lady, I enjoy wearing my skirts. This is my favorite skirt pattern:

I think that we got this pattern at Walmart. I have been looking around lately, and I have also been thinking about it and, yes I do like my work jeans and comfy pants, but I also love my feminine skirts. It's funny, but when I am walking in the store and see other girls with their skirts on, I automatically think, "those girls must love being girls!"

Come on girls! lets put on our skirts! Lets start not just "feelin feminine", but start being Feminine! Lets love being girls!

Gingerbread House

Making a gingerbread house at Christmas time is a sort of tradition at our house, though we usually just buy a kit at the store. This year I tried something different. I made my own gingerbread! It would have been great, but I didn't roll the dough out enough so I ended up with VERY thick house! Here is a quick link to the recipe that I used for making the house:http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_make_a_gingerbread_house/

In the pictures, you see a blue blob kind of mass. That would be my attempt to make a beautiful smooth glassy looking pond out of melted jolly-ranchers. Things never turn out the way you want them to do they?

I tried to melt the jolly-ranchers in the microwave on a Styrofoam plate. I quickly found out that that didn't work because while they were microwaving, the candy started bubbling, and when I took them out there was a big hole burnt through the plate, and it had gotten all over the microwave and it started to get on me! I ran through the kitchen to the sink while my fingers were burning screaming, "HOT LAVA!!! LAVA!!!" I got calmed down, and then my family and I started to bust up laughing. I tried to eat the melting "lava", but it hardened on to my tooth! I tried scraping it off, then yanking it, and finally Nathan said, "Start sucking it!" It came off eventually. Yesterday was my first time making gingerbread, and boy was it dramatic, but fun! Hope you enjoy the pictures of the outcome of it.

The blue mass of "lava" (. . .sad)

Thanksgiving

This is sooo late! Sorry!!! We had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving!!!! We hosted the dinner this year and there were 25 of us!!! It was so fun! We have sooo much to be thankful for so our family made a list of some of the things. Here are the top 15 that we chose that we were most thankful for out of the 50 or so other things that we thought of:

~God and his Son Jesus Christ

~Salvation

~Family

~Home

~Food

~Bible

~Daddy's Job

~Friends

~Our Church/Pastor and his Family

~Clothes

~Trials

~Prayer

~Discipline (of the children)

~Health

~Our move to Marion NC

I'm making mac 'n' cheese for lunch. Mmmmmmm! Just started school back today after a nice 2 week break! I love getting back to a schedule!

Sermon

We had a great sermon today about how God is watching, caring, and thinking about us at all times. To think that God is actually thinking about us all the time is mind blowing! What a great God we serve.

I just changed my blogger background to fit the upcoming season.

Leaf Fort

This is so late! You can definitely tell by the pics that this was done a couple weeks ago because all the leaves still have color, where as now, they are all dead and on the ground. This was our first model of the great leaf fort. We made 3 others that got better and bigger every time! One of them was so big, Nathan, Ben and I could lay down full length, and all four of us kids could sit up in it! It was soooo fun while it lasted, but we had to take it down before the Medieval Feast. Dad blew all of the leaves into the woods :(

Fort under construction

Done!

The Mysterious Islands movie premiere

Late last night my family got back from watching the movie premiere of "The Mysterious Islands" (Vision Forum's latest film) (For more info on the film, visit http://www.visionforum.com/) in Durham NC. It was fantastic! I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, but I will say that anyone who either sees the movie, or ever visits the Galapagos Islands cannot doubt God's work and beautiful design in creation. The soundtrack to this film is gorgeous! I'm Planning to get it myself! Well worth the money. Besides the movie, seeing all of the Christian home school families there was very encouraging to me.....and inspiring! You just don't see many feminine young ladies or gentlemanly young men anymore. I love it! I hope that we can do something like this again soon!!!




Outside the Theater

Inside 

Medieval Feast

My family has been studying the Middle Ages for school, and last night we had a Grand Medieval Feast! We totally transformed our garage into a feasting hall. 70 people showed up :)!!!!! We all had a fantastic time. There were Friars and Scotts, noble ladies and serfs, cloaked rangers and even King Robert The Just, and Queen Brendalynn The Gentle were present at the gathering. Some of our family and friends acted out parts while Mom read some of the customs of a real feast. It was so fun!  My siblings and I had to read reports on what we had been studying in the Medieval times. Last ,we put on a short skit with our friends. It was called St. George and the Dragon. That turned out to be hilarious! We all enjoyed some great fellowship after the food was gone. Thus ended our Medieval Feast, thanks to the hard work of our friends the Robbins and Willis's.

Preparations

Caelen's Medieval Hair Style
The Feasting Hall (In our garage)

Morning Verse

A Morning Verse~ 1 Corinthians 10:31

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it to the Glory of God.

Old Mitchell in the Fall

Saturday, my family and cousins went on another trip to Mt. Mitchell. The hike is always fun, but this time it was all the colors that amazed us! I love to see God's brilliant design in the ways that the mountains are shaped, to the colors of the leaves. By far, fall in the mountains is the best!

Coming Back From Mt Mitchell Hike

Interesting Recipe

The other day, I got in the "make & bake things" mood. I made up a recipe for chocolate cookies, and they actually turned out pretty good! The recipe is super simple:

Chocolate Cookies~

1/2 Cup softened butter~halved

3/4 Cup brown sugar

1/4 Cup granulated sugar

1 Cup chocolate chips

1/2 Tsp baking soda

1/2 Tsp baking powder

1 1/2 Cup flour

1 1/2 Tsp Vanilla

1 Tsp Salt

2 Eggs


Bake @ 350 for ~15 min/Makes ~ 20

*Stir flour, sugars, powder, soda and salt in one bowl
*Mix egg, vanilla, and 1/2 the amount of butter called for.
*Using a microwave safe bowl, microwave chocolate chips & rest of butter. stir every few seconds until nicely smoothed together.
*Combine dry ing. into the liquid ing.
*With an electric mixer, mix together dry, liquid, and choclate mixutre.
*Bake on cookie sheets for ~ 15 min. they won't look ferm at first, so let them cool for about 5 min before eating.
Hope you enjoy!

Bird Sanctuary

Its October! Hurray!!!!!!!! Last Weekend we went to our grandparent's house. We visited the world's largest Bird Sanctuary in Scotland Neck North Carolina. The facility and staff were fantastic! Caelen took a bunch of pictures, and believe me, it was hard to decide which pics to put on here!

Little bro (Ben) always gets his words mixed up and came home from the bird sanctuary to tell our grandmother that he had fed a pecan (he meant a toucan of course), but we all couldn't stop laughing :)  he is such a sweetie!!!

Laughing Kookaburras

My Family

My family is such a huge blessing to me! I thank God for my parents, brothers, and sister!

Benjamin

Nathan

Caelen

Mom

Dad

Crooks

I have a little brood of white silkie bantam chickens. If you have never heard of them, here is a link for more info;http://http//www.mypetchicken.com/catalog/Day-Old-Baby-Chicks/Assorted-Silkie-Bantams-p681.aspx
Well, my smallest one had a little crooked beak. It looked really funny! She would follow me around like a little pup. She apparently wasn't getting much food because of her beak problem though.
This morning, I found my little crook peacefully lying on the ground. She had died, and I had no idea until early this Sunday morning. This blog entry is a kind of tribute to her. I know she was just a chicken, but once you give one of these guys a name, they really do become pets 

Catawba Falls

This Saturday our family went on a hike to Catawba Falls.

It was beautiful! The hike was very nice. Long, but fun! When we got to the falls, we basically "rock climbed" to the top. At one point we had to use a rope to make it up the face, but we made it! It is really neat to see the beauty of God's creation from way up there!

School Days

I love school.  . . .The organization of it, the literature and writing part, and the cozy days spent inside reading . . . and no, you don't see me in my pajamas doing my school do you???  :P

Algebra . . . now that's a different story . . .

Labor Day Weekend Camp

On labor day weekend the we went camping with our cousins the Cookes and had just a wonderful time . . .poison ivy, scary stories around the camp fire, tents, old mountain songs . . .yep, we did it all!  In the morning we got up (very sore, but still having a great time) and went hiking up at Mount Mitchel.  We always enjoy spending time with the cousins :)

@ the top . . .