Heart full of Thanksgiving!

 
 
 
 
My heart is so full of thanksgiving for joys of this past week. The kiddos had a blast watching a cool video about Alaska animals and beginning a notebook on Alaska stuff. For Bible club this week, the Lord impressed on me the need to teach the truth in very vivid ways and equip the kids in the club to search for the truth. I made swords for them (forgot to get a group shot, but caught my kiddos playing with them later) and wrote on the blade part, "Keep contending earnestly for the faith! Jude 3" The swords were a big hit and hopefully they caught the lesson about Queen Esther and how we need to stand up for what is right and true. We celebrated Purim this week a couple of times -- at Bible club and on Friday night with the Messianic Fellowship. How fun it is to celebrate holidays that are pure scripture. We did a play about the story of Queen Esther, had a pinata "Haman" to whack at, and lots of sweet fellowship with dear friends!

Today was a great celebration of the resurrection of our Savior. I had been given a beautiful outfit last year by a dear friend that moved away and blessed our family with huge blessings of furniture and all sorts of stuff. It's always fun to have new clothes and a special joy to have been blessed with such a lovely gift! Garratt began his bout with the flu this morning, so he and Daddy stayed home while the younger 3 kiddos and I went to breakfast and services at church.

Oh wait, this last picture needs an explanation from yesterday. Don and I got to go on another date!!! Woo Hoo!! We went to Arby's for lunch(have you tryed their cheesecake poppers??? -- Wow!), to a movie, and went to Home Depot to get ideas on a kitchen sink. What we ended up with was a set of countertops that the Lord allowed 2 other people to special order and purchase and return before the price was knocked way down! While Don and I were looking at the preformed countertop pieces and began to realize that our planned peninsula for the kitchen would take a special order and some serious cash, we were directed to a set of 5 pieces of countertop that included a peninsula (that just so happened to be exactly what we needed) and a nice long piece to connect to it. Someone had originally paid $1200 for this special order set, returned it, someone else purchased it for $600 secondhand, returned it, and it was marked down to $199 to get it out of the way. This countertop is gorgeous!! It's a far better quality than what I was hoping for and until we can afford cabinets, Dad and Don have some great ideas for making workspaces to use now. I'm thrilled! We'll still need to buy a couple of regular pieces of countertop in a different color/shade (the cheap preformed stuff), but get to enjoy this in most of the kitchen! God is so good to us and is helping us save a ton of money with this project.

Have a great week y'all -- please pray for Garratt and that noone else gets the bug....it's a nasty one!