Beautiful morning in Black Forest

Getting the second load.Daddy manages the biggest logs. Timmy wants you to know he took this picture.

Danny helps Hannah carry a very little "log."

Mom is running out of energy, after helping get logs for two trailer loads. So she is kicking logs downhill instead of carrying them!

When we got home the first evening with our first load, the children rode on the load of wood on our dirt road the little way to our driveway.

Ordinary and extraordinary

Most days are pretty ordinary around here. It was good to be warm enough outside to hang laundry outdoors. Danny and Hannah let a puppy eat.

One of the less than ordinary days for Jonathan! At work, he stood up from working under a sink, and rammed his head into the sharp corner of a cupboard. Blood began streaming from under his hat. His electricians freaked out and wondered if they should call 911. Instead, Jonathan just had one of them take him to emergicare, where he got this interesting looking headdress. Here, he and I are looking at his hat.

Closer look. He got three stitches. We are thankful it wasn't worse.

Valentines Morning 2011

The children were determined that Valentines Day should be a holiday from school!

Here, their Daddy is getting ready to unload hay gotten down south last week. Daddy celebrated Valentines morning by making omelettes for everyone! Hannah and Danny must stand nearby and "help."
Daddy's three helpers making omelettes. This was the beginning of one of the most delightful Valentines days we have ever had.

Jonathan came home from work early, drew up plans for a work project, then packed in his and my suitcase that I had packed for a romantic, 26 hour get-away. My glasses got badly twisted by unknown hands before we left, but thankfully, Jonathan's strong fingers and pliers fixed them. Then we were on our way to Las Palmitas Mexican Restaurant where we were served an absolutely scrumptious meal. If we can manage to get the photos off Jonathan's cell phone, we will post them. But for now, we just have to say that the restaurant was cozy warm, almost vacant (perhaps due to not having liquor available--all the better for us), and had a wall full of windows where we could watch evening glow over Pikes Peak. Jonathan ordered a Mexican stew chock full of chicken, beef, mushrooms, crab legs (he ate those!), peppers, and the most savory broth I have ever tasted. It was served in a three-legged stone bowl that kept the stew bubbling even after sitting on our table. We could have ordered octopus, but refrained.

We were in an especially happy frame of mind because Jonathan had just called his youngest sister Barbara to find out if anything special had happened to her today. A young man named Chad Clemmons from Idaho who has been wishing for her to say yes to his marriage proposals had been here for the weekend, to finally get to meet her family after over a year of friendship. Jonathan had a feeling something happened today, perhaps because he remembered a certain Valentines Day seventeen years ago when he put his first phone call through to the young lady in Ukraine that he hoped would be his sweetheart. Sure enough, something DID happen! I heard Jonathan tell her, "Congratulations!" on the phone, and act really happy. And that is all I will say about it for now. If you want to know what happened, you will have to call Barbara.

Middle of the Work Day at Garden of the Gods

You will hear more about our work day in the next post. Here we are taking a lunch break, with leftovers from the Mexican meal we had last night, after stopping at Jonathan's folks to warm up the food! Jonathan kept walking at Garden of the Gods till we found a path down to this dried up gully, where we could sit on rocks and eat a picnic.

This is the path we climbed down and up to our picnic spot.

Few people see this side of Jonathan very often, (below) but let me tell you, it is just a peek into his other side that I get to see. I am not going to take all the credit for this my favorite photo of the whole batch taken the last couple days. Just up to the right of our heads is a rock formation called "Kissing Camels" in Garden of the Gods. Don't ask me whose idea it was for this picture, because I don't remember. The camera took the picture all by itself. Now I will let you chew on how it did that.

Here below is a closeup of "Kissing Camels."
No, sorry, you don't get a closeup of the kissing couple.

I wanted another picture of the beautiful scenery around us, so here it is, while Jonathan is digging around in the back of his truck, with the usual hopelessness, for a drink of Sobe. (He quit Mt. Dew a long time ago.) And no, he couldn't find the Sobe, even though there were several bottles. It was his messy truck's fault.

Goodbye, Garden of the Gods, and back to work, Jonathan and Anna!

More Christmas photos

Jonathan's special Christmas gift to me was a repair kit for my autoharp! He bought all new chording bars with the felt pads so that now I have all the chords! He spent a while Christmas morning switching the old to the new. Before he screwed it all down, he wanted me to strum some chords to make sure everything was all right.

It was not! The chords sounded worse than awful. Every one of them sounded awful. We were appalled. What had gone wrong? Jonathan finally figured out that he had put all the bars in backwards, but it was not his fault. The factory had done it backwards to start with. So, he carefully turned all the bars around, and sure enough, now the notes sounded right! I so appreciated Jonathan doing this for me for a lovely Christmas gift.

Christmas morning we had saved a couple gifts apiece to open. Here are Timmy and Danny with their new little tractors Jonathan got at Big R.
We thought we would get a picture of the Christmas mess after opening gifts Christmas eve, just for fun. Then I wasn't sure whether I wanted such a picture on my blog or not! Then I decided that this is the kind of picture that make people laugh and feel better about themselves, so here it is!

Remember it could be worse! I probably already had picked up a lot of wrapping paper! When you consider gifts for nine people... I hadn't expected so many gifts for each other, but the children had secretly knitted, bought, gotten free, or otherwise managed to put together quite a few gifts of their own!
Now below are Crystal and Rose on Christmas morning on our way to Grandma's, ready to drop off a Christmas fruit basket and fresh pineapple which we had forgotten to take to some friends the day before when Jonathan and the boys took them a load of firewood. It wasn't quite like the good deed we had just read about in a Christmas story by Louisa May Alcott, when a rich man took a load of firewood and other nice gift items to a poor family, because we were taking the firewood as exchange for help our friend gave us. But still, it was fun to do it on Christmas Eve. The boys and Jonathan helped stack it, and our friend said he would cover up the pile and surprise his wife with it on Christmas morning!

Christmas Eve Day while the boys were helping their dad with the load of firewood, getting hay and other errands, the girls and I went to Elizabeth to buy and bring home the newest addition to our farmette--a French Alpine buck goat. We put him in the back of the van, and he did great coming home. Now he is making friends with our does.

Christmas at Grandma and Pa Lucas's

Jonathan visits with Grandpa. On the table were some goodies we brought along: a big fruit basket; a dish with cheeseballs formed into a snowman (the hottest, spiciest middle belly ball got eaten up first!), a dish of fresh pineapple, and a big carton of chocolate mint whoopie pies. Here is one view of the long table (or should I say tables?) in Grandma and pa's dining and living room. The ladies in the very front are Jonathan's sisters, Esther on the left and Barbara on the right. Ruth, Dave's wife, is beyond Barbara, and across from her is her daughter, Cheryl who is a little older than Crystal. Stacy is between Esther and Cheryl but you wouldn't know it because she is trying to hide from the camera as usual!! :)

Grandpa got some of the families together by their tree for a picture. Dave and Ruth's family didn't get together for a picture until late in the afternoon, when my camera was gone, so I missed getting a picture of their family. Too bad! Below is Jonathan's brother Robert with his wife Julie, and their two girls, Danielle and Cassady.

Here is Jonathan's sister Esther, with her husband, Jon, and their children, Stacy, Vanessa, Rebekah, and Ryan.

Let's see. Which brother and family is this?

Our Christmas Project for Christian Aid Ministries

One of our family's favorite ministries is Christian Aid Ministry, a conservative Mennonite organization in Ohio. We receive their monthly newsletters and their disaster relief updates. If there is a disaster in the world such as the tsunami in India, or Hurricane Katrina, they immediately send relief. They send humanitarian aid, men to help rebuild, and of course, Bibles and gospel literature.
They also have a project catalogue with ways for ordinary people like us to help. You can put together school backpacks, hygiene kits, or layette bundles for babies who have nothing. This year, we chose to use some puppy money to do projects for CAM. The girls were very excited about putting together layette bundles for a Christmas gift for Jesus. Here we are shopping at Walmart for the necessary items.

The catalogue had a list of exactly what needed to be in each bundle: six diapers, a large baby blanket and a receiving blanket, diaper pins, plastic pants, two onesies, two sleepers of different sizes, two pairs of socks, and a baby cap. They had to be new because of customs regulations in certain countries. The girls are choosing blankets.

It's hard to get pictures to be in order on this blog. In the next post, there are pictures of us putting the layettes together. THe girls put theirs for baby girls together with a friend, and my Sunday School class then put together two bundles for baby boys. On Christmas Sunday, after class when we sometimes go up front to sing or say a verse, my class went up front with the bundles. I wanted them to have a way to feel that they were giving the gifts to Jesus for Christmas. There was already a manger for the evening program, and we had put straw in it. Now the children are ready to go up to lay their gifts in the manger, just as if it were truly for baby Jesus. And I assured them that indeed it WAS for Jesus, because He said that if we did anything in love for one of His brethren, we were doing it for Him.

Here the children have laid their bundles in the manger, and we are getting ready to kneel at the manger to pray for the babies and their mothers and daddies who would receive the bundles. The whole congregation joined us as we prayed. More than one person was touched or moved to tears with this simple time of giving to Jesus.

I was concerned that perhaps some would think we were flaunting our giving. Doesn't the Bible say not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing? Didn't Jesus condemn the Pharisees for doing their alms to be seen of men? Didn't He say we should pray in secret? Yes, He did. But at the same time, He said, "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." He also said, "I will therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting." It is all about the spirit in which you give. If you are standing on street corners, praying or giving so people will see you and glorify you, you are wrong. But if you do something to bring glory to your Father in heaven, that is acceptable to God.
One reason I put these pictures and this project on this blog is to encourage and inspire any of you who are reading this, to consider doing something similar each Christmas. If Christmas is really about Jesus, how about actually treating Christmas that way? How about actually giving gifts to someone in real need who can't repay you? So often we only give gifts to those who will give back to us. But what about making sure we are doing something JUST for Jesus? This year, this is something we did, and we were SOO thrilled to do it.