I Feel Like A King!!

I love Boxing Day sales. Got this baby from CompuSmart for $20. 

Mary Did You Know Tribute

Merry Christmas. Shout out to my Aunt Mary and Uncle Carl. Merry Christmas guys.

The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ from the Thief on the Cross Perspective

The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ from the Thief on the Cross Perspective - Music Video (3rd Day) After Seeing the Price That Jesus Payed for the punishment of our sins - our prayer is that you Trust Jesus for Salvation and Forgivness of Sins Will you go to Heaven? Here's a quick test. Have you ever told a lie, stolen anything, or used God's name in vain? Jesus said, "Whoever looks upon a woman to lust after her has committed adultery already with her in his heart." Have you looked with lust? Will you be guilty on Judgment Day? If you have done those things God sees you as a lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterer-at-heart. The Bible warns that if you are guilty you will end up in Hell. That's not God's will. He sent His Son to suffer and die on the cross for you. Jesus took your punishment upon Himself -"For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." Then He rose from the dead and defeated death. Please, repent (turn from sin) today and trust in Jesus, and God will grant you everlasting life. Then read your Bible daily and obey it.

Plug for Picasa

One thing I would like to say is, if you have ever been sceptical about using Picasa to upload pic, it is awesome! Try it. I have always used it but now it is improved so you can upload 4 at a time and you can edit them easier and do the collages with it, too. It is nice. And you don't have to wait for them to upload like with blogger. Anyway, check out the basement. Shocking how much damage that water does!

A load of pictures

In case anyone wanted to see. I took these pics in case for insurance and stuff. Here it goes. We are kinda starting at the end and going through to the start but that is just the way it goes. Here is the beginning of the clean up. By the end of about 2 hours of vacuuming for me and my mom while Adam was at work we finally got it dry. HAHAHA as if!!! It is still sopping wet but there is no way to get it out of the underlay! What a job!
Looks dry right? Not even a little bit! 

Lino... I think that it should get replaced! It is like this all over now!
After the laundry room drained!
Storage room with the cat's stuff,
This wall, maybe we will just rip it out! A wall made of partical board... that sounds like a great idea hey? haha 

A bit of water. This was the worst. There's the dryer I wanna sell, anyone want to buy it now???
Adam's feet in ice cold water.
That is cat food floating all over! GROSE! Nice color hey?
Here is the awesome kitchen that we did end up buying. The box is a bit wrecked but I think that the kitchen will hold up. 

Can you see the floor sopping??? This is not a good one but I am glad I took it seeing as I removed the princess tables from the basement and forgot to tell the insurance guys about them.
Here is a problem. Bookshelves made from partical board really don't hold up well. Good thing we got all out books off though!
The water about 2 hours into the ordeal, about 1 inch. Our floor is uneven so some spots got to about 2 inches, some about 4.
Adam's strata stuff and my poor washer and dryer just sitting in water! 

The clean part of the house!

Okay, so this is what my house is looking like 6 days before Christmas. You may be thinking... holy shnikies! Clean up girl! But what am I to do with everything from the flooded basement??? That is my question. Doing more cleaning tonight and Hydra Mist is supposed to come tomorrow and rip out the carpet and dry the basement. I am hoping all of it will be replaced or fixed by the insurance. It is up to the Hydramist guy. He seems like he really thinks everything should be replaced. All of you who pray... please pray for God to give us favour in the insurance companies eyes! This could end up being a blessing in desguise!
Cat litter box in my upstairs... not something I enjoy! But this is it for a while! He was meowing at me and looking at me with sad eyes. Then I realized that he needed to go potty so I rescued his litter box from the storage room and brought it out for him. This is a lot of mess... the whole situation. Got to find space for everything where there is no space. Help me Lord! 

Another Update before bed

Well, my mom came over tonight and helped with vacuuming a lot of the water out of the basement. We took about 2 hours tonight doing that and then another 2 hours about, bringing all the books from the leaning bookshelves upstairs (Anyone who has been in our basement would know, that is a huge chore in itself!). All the books are now in my livingroom as well as everything else off the bookshelves. Even though the water only got up about 4 inches in the deepest parts it did a lot of damage. The carpet is garbage! The lino is pealing up all over and cracked along the edges. It wasn't in great shape before but is now much worse. I had a bag of cat food that was new that is now garbage. The drywall at the bottoms is wrecked, the bookshelves, etc. etc. So I got a letter in the mail tonight from the strata and they say we just need to call and add our claim to the strata claim. I am praying that this means we will get everything fixed, and maybe that we won't have to pay the deductable?!? I have no idea though and I need to do some calling around tomorrow. I will write another update after I find out more. Again I say, God bless and I thank God that when we pray, He answers our prayers... fast! I couldn't believe that after we prayed, I went in the basement and Adam noticed that the water was starting to drain, then I went down about 30 minutes later and the one room was all drained! God is so faithful! I pray we will have some headway on the fixing by Christmas!
Goodnight all... 2:30am, I am ready to stop working and start relaxing.

Flood update

At 12 noon I was on the phone with a friend and decided to go to the basement and do some laundry. I noticed a puddle of water on the floor around the drain we have in the basement. Okay, that was weird so I thought that I should get off the phone and let Adam know. I went and woke him up from his restful slumber (he is on nights) and he came down to look. We called the building maintenance manager and he said that everyone's basements were flooding. OKay, so at least we were not alone. I went to have a shower and relax while Adam cooked the kids a little lunch. When I came down Adam broke the news that there was a lot more water down there. We went and looked and sure enough, a LOT more! It was almost to the carpet. Okay so we started to shop vac it out of there but it was coming in faster than we could get rid of it! Adam was really frustrated. We decided it was time to just start to get our stuff out of there. So that is what we did. We brought up everything that was on the floor or the bottom shelves of the bookshelves. I called the insurance agency just to see if it was covered and they said it would be because the water was coming from the inside drain. We will look into that in the next few days and see if it is worth it to us to use the insurance. Anyway, it went up to about 4 inches at the deepest and was over the whole carpet. It didn't quite reach the bottoms of the drywall. The bookshelves we have are made of chip board and will be wrecked and the carpet will definately need to be torn out. I sat down in the living room and we all huddled up and started to pray for God's prtection and for him to make the water drain and for the rian to subside... sure enough, the next time we went and looked, it was starting to drain. I have been walking in constant prayer today. So, the laundry room is mostly drained now and I just have to figure out what to do with the carpetted area. I know the carpet needs to be ripped out but that is quite a job. I would love to be able to put something on the floor but that will depend on if we can get the insurance money. It really depends on if it is worth it to us after the deduction. If there was a $100 deduction I would be jumping at it. The damage is way more than that for sure! Well, I pray that God is blessing everyone with quality family time while all this rain pours down. I know we are having that for sure! God bless you all! I thank God he made the water drain and Christy tells me it is supposed to be sunny tomorrow! THANK YOU GOD!!!

Hebrews 11:6

I love winter fishing. Not only is the scenery usually breath taking but the fish stay very fresh.

Jehovah-Jireh!!! 

This second dolly gave me a hard time as it slipped in between two layers of ice. I had to beat the upper block of ice out to reach it. 

Made it out to the Copper River today after my last night shift. Caught this fiesty little dolly varden.  

Just a bunch of thought and stuff

I was just watching Christmas at the Kranks. Funny show! But not nearly as funny as Elf. I can't wait to rent that! We made sugar cookies today and are decorating them tomorrow. Henny, a friend so close to my heart that she should have been my sister, came over to finally dye my hair! I have not dyed it in so long but finally had enough of the increasing patch of grey hair overtaking the front of it. Thank God that the colour came out okay! I think I like it. I have planned, just in my own mind so far, to make candy cane cookies tomorrow with a good friend of mine and her son and my kids and probably Brenden, the boy I babysit. I hope it all works out! I pray that you are all enjoying the awsome celebration or the birth of our Lord and the wonderful gift that he is to this world.
I am proud to say that Annabelle just started doing, and enjoying I might add, PUZZLES!!! A lot of people know that Joshua was already doing 100 peice puzzles at 2 years old. I guess I had more time to sit and do these things with him than I have with Annabelle, but it begins. She is finally starting to concentrate and love "sit down" activities! Yes!!! I can't wait for Joel to like it, too. Then we can have real quiet time each day, where things are actually quiet, not me loudly saying, "Shush"!!! and "Be quiet! Daddy's sleeping!!!" every 30 seconds! I love doing puzzles, reading to the kids, colouring, painting, whatever! I want to do more of that. I finally see I may get to! Thank God, even when I miss having a little baby in my arms it doesn't last long because all I can see is some wonderful little babies developing in to awesome little kids and I just want to enjoy every minute of it... I don't wanna miss a thing! I am truly enjoying the "slow down"of the winter in amongst the "crazy" of the holidays. God bless you all!

Baby Names

I thought tonight that I would write about something a little different, I would write about our babies names. I am amazed by our children each and every day! Naming our children was extremely hard for me and Adam and we put utmost importance on the meanings of the names. We wanted to be able to tell our children of the greatness that was behind the name we chose for them and that even through their names they would know of Christ! Also bestowing on them some family link besides last name. But at the same time making sure that we loved the way they sounded and that they would not be strange and cause problems for our children. So this is it.

Joshua- God is Salvation
Adam- Of the earth

Adam always wanted his first boy to be named Joshua if he was blessed with children. It is the same meaning that the name Jesus has. I was unsure at first if I wanted such a popular name but realized the importance for Adam and the name quickly grew on me and now I love to be able to tell him of the reason we named him Joshua. And we named his second name Adam because it was important to me to have his daddy's name in there. As the eldest son I wanted him to know his importance to his daddy and it was actually hard for Adam at first. I told him that I really wanted it and he soon came around.

Annabelle- Graceful and Beautiful
Leonora- Compassion, Light

We had a hard time agreeing on a girls name. When we came to Annabelle it was the first name we liked together. Checked the meaning and saw that it was exactly what we wanted. We both said that we could call her Belle and everytime we would say her name we would be calling her beautiful! I thought that it was cute and it suits her so well now. Leonora is my middle name and although Adam really wanted Charlene to be her middle name I thought that it sounded silly as a middle name. I love that Leonora means compassion as that is a wonderful thing to bestow on and speak into her life. Cool thing too that it means light as she opened our advent calander yesterday and today told Daddy, that Jesus is called the Light of the World and His light lives right in her heart! I was so blessed to hear her say that. She just accepted Christ 2 months ago. It is good to hear that she has some basic understanding as she would not let me tell her that she was too young to understand about accepting Christ. She sure knows what she want and for sure knows that she is a princess because her Father God is THE King!

Joel- Johovah is Lord
Andrew-man, warrior

Joel, well what can I say... Johovah is Lord! God blessed me with a third child which I did not expect as Adam origionally only wanted 2. It was funny that we first wanted to name Joel Joseph. Joseph means- to add. That would have been fine but not nearly as powerful as the fact that Johovah is Lord! We loved it, loved how it sounded even before we checked the meaning and then the meaning was what sealed it! I believe that he will declare to many the meaning of his name! And Andrew, Adam's twin brother who has been such a blessing and friend in his life. We did not want to give our kids family names and then have to leave someone out and feel guilty about it. Andrew was an easy one though. They are identical twins and Adam really wanted to honor his little bro with having our child named after him and I didn't mind at all. Also I love that Andrew means warrior, a great thing for a man to be.

So there is a little glimps into our thinking in naming our kids. I was just thinking about names lately as our very good friends Dave and Carmen are expecting their second baby to arrive anyday and our great friends and the god parents of our babies, Chris and Christy, are expecting just in a couple months the arrival of their second. I can't wait to hold these little ones!

Creed - With Arms Wide Open

When I was pregnant with Joshua, this song was really popular and everytime I would hear it I would think of Adam with a new baby after all he had been through and felt in his life, a chance to make someones life great and the miracle of life that God had blessed us with. Still when I hear it I get emotional and remember all the excitment, fear and wonder. I was so scared that I would not be a great mom or that we were not cut out to be parents, but God knew... he knew better than anyone that Adam would be a wonderful dad and I was made to be a mom. I thank God for the blessing our children are in our lives and how just the presence of them in our home makes us want to be better people!

Gingerbread... or Graham crackers... whatever!

One of the highlights of the holidays for me is making the gingerbread house. Last year we did a really nice one with Joshua. After we were done Joshua said that no one could eat it because it was for his Uncle Andrew. We had to throw it out after the holidays because Andrew decided to eat fresh, less dusty and cat furry candy instead and he just didn't have enough room in his bag to take it back to Korea! haha
This year I went to make the gingerbread and the recipe I chose just bit the big one! So, I found a little recipe I had for mini gingerbread houses and we tried that for this year. Just using Graham crackers instead of gingerbread, it makes a pretty sturdy little house. Only problem, as soon as the kids saw what was going on they wanted to decorate right away so the houses kind of collapsed a little... but they still looked pretty cute and the kids have been snacking off them since. What fun! Here are the pics to prove the fun!

Joshua perfecting his house! I love it!  

Annabelle and her house. She was so proud! 

Joel with his house, he sure enjoyed the eating part of the night! 

Enjoying a little treat with Daddy! 

Tupperware Fridge Smart!

Hello all you gals from the same town as me! Hope all is well in each of your lives. I have this thing I want to sell. The only reason I want to is because I have not been using them and they are taking up cupboard space. Anyone who knows me knows that I am an obsessive purger of house stuff. I loved these when I first got them and they work really well. They are designed to keep your fruit and veggies crispy and fresh longer. I just don't have time or space for them. I hope that someone will buy them and put them to good use. They are still like new and the set regularly costs $65 plus tax (that is what I paid) but I thought that maybe I could get $40??? Maybe??? Or whatever I can get... maybe? Anyway, let me know if anyone is interested! Click on the pic and it will take you to the discription on the Tupperware page. Thanks ladies!!!

Cookies!!!

Okay, I have had a few (to say the least!) requests for my yummy chocolate cookies. OKay, I am going to post it now for all. I feel kind of sad doing this as that means that I will not be the only one with the blessed cookies that everyone loves!!! Oh well, I can handle it.
I was going to post the origional recipe but I have made some changes and it wouldn't be the same as the ones I have perfected :) So I will just post what I regularly make.

Chocolate Fudge cookies!

-Box of Chocolate Fudge cake mix
(origionally they called for German chocolate cake mix but they don't sell that in Walmart so it cost a lot more so I switched to this one, but in actuality you can use any cake mix that say "with pudding in the mix" on the box even if it is not chocolate at all. I just can't really guarantee the taste. I have tried Butter pecan mix with Butterscoth chips and it went over quite well. Chocolate Fudge is my favourite!!! Also the name of the cookies is actually German Chocolate cookies, but I thought it a good reason to change it.)
-1 pack of milk chocolate chips or about 1 cup
-half cup of rolled oats (it works with quick or regular, they call for quick)
-half cup oil
-2 eggs slightly beaten

1. Mix all ingredients together in large bowl
2. Scoop onto ungreased cookie sheet by rounded teaspoon (I use my stoneware pan and truly think that it adds to the yumminess of the cookies)
3. Bake at 350 for up to 10 minutes (Keep checking until the center just stops looking wet, then they will be perfect)

Okay, just to let everyone know, I have tryed it with Devils food chocolate cake mix, I think that it is called, before and I found that it made it much more salty tasting, but the people who ate them still liked them. And I through in whatever, m&m's, butterscotch chips, white chocolate, semi sweet chocolate, whatever and it just changes the flavour of course but still tastes good. I think that that is all... HAPPY BAKING EVERYONE!!!

Seems like a good night to blog... catch up time!!!

What Shall we call God's Gift to Us?

Here is our Advent Calander, a tradition that brings fond memories to my mind. We always had one when we were kids, not a chocolate one ever, but one to tell of Christ and lead up to the wonderful day we celebrate His birth! This one says all different names that we can call God's Gift to us!

Angels we have heard on high!

Our craft for today, I got the idea from this little book which came with our Advent Calander. These are Christmas angel bells... they don't all look that mach like angels, but that is what they are. The kids can ring them to tell everyone that Jesus is coming!!!

Socks

My reminder of how Christmas just doesn't seem fair if it is all for the gifts, some people will just always have the biggest sock!!! hahaha Thank God that it is about giving and not getting or I would sure be jelouse! I find it a joy to fill that monster every year! Although we are trying to make Christmas all about Christ and not about Santa, it sure is hard to give up this tradition... I love the stockings!

We are blessed to have a great sunday school!

One of my very favorite crafts that the kids have done in Sunday school so far... they say - Your sins are like deep red cloth. But they can be made as white as snow - Isaiah 1:18 - on their scarves! What a wonderful reminder!

Holiday stuff

My calander that reads, But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because or righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. -Titus 3:4-5