It's a Girl! & Happy Birthday, Miriam!

Little Grace Maria has some very excited sisters!! This little girl will be so loved!!

And the happy auntie! Miriam is wearing her birthday jewels made by Esther and Anna who have been staying at our house while their mom is in the hospital with the baby. Isn't she adorable!

Aimee and Ella got the idea to throw a birthday party for Miriam so that's what they did at their house yesterday. I am so thankful for Miriam. I don't think there are any girls out there who work as hard as she does with as sweet of an attitude. She radiates Christlikeness, and has a strong desire to know God's Word. Sorry, I couldn't find a husband for your gift ;) If anyone knows where he is, send him this way :) I hope you have a wonderful day, Miriam! 

Ella made sure there were lots of balloons and the kids were happy about that!

Amos and Shiloh at the party. 

And another sweet picture of little Grace.

Have a great week everyone!

Amos' Story

I'm not sure how many of you have read it, but Amos and Rebekah's house building story has been featured on the Maxwells blog at https://blog.titus2.com/  I thought some of you might enjoy it.

All in Their 20's!

The 'kids' were all over tonight with their families so we took a "All in our 20's" photo.  I am so thankful for these young adults!  I'm really happy that they get along including spouses and grandchildren! They've been talking about getting this photo for a few years now, and it won't be long before Naomi turns 30, so then it'll be another ten years before this happens again.

Left to right, oldest to youngest - Naomi, Amos, Isaac, Miriam, Hosanna, Silas, and Priscilla. (Samuel would've been between Silas and Priscilla.)

Our Family Christmas

We had Christmas with our immediate family on Saturday. I made sure to get a picture of each family this year and so here's Silas and his family.

Isaac and his family.

Amos and his family.

Us!

And Naomi and her family.

The last few years we've gotten together for brunch but this year we did a noon meal. These four loved that they had their own special table, customized with Arthur "made" stools!

Remember all those stockings? Well, the kids had great fun finding out what was in them. 

Sunday night we headed west to go to Aaron's church's Christmas program where they had two of the cutest angels around!  Anna did have a crown and sash but I caught her after she was already taking them off.

So, that leads up to this week and next, which are going to be really busy. We have some overnight company coming so we're cleaning up the house, finishing wrapping up gifts, etc.

Yesterday we had a cow get her leg stuck in a round bale feeder. Not sure how she pulled that one off. Anyway, Arthur got her leg out, and it doesn't seem to be hurt bad, but the cow won't stand up now. If you think of it, would you mind praying that it gets up? We sure would like to save this cow.

The weather has warmed up for a little bit, and so we're getting a little more snow. It's actually nice having it too cold to snow!

Have a wonderful Christmas this week, everyone! Remember to take time to celebrate the baby, our Savior, the one who left His home in Heaven, came to earth as a little baby. Lived, and died, and rose again for us!

Christmas Party

It was Priscilla turn to host the yearly "Girl's Christmas Party".  They had fun playing Human Clue, singing carols, reading scripture together, exchanging gifts, and of course, eating. From a mom's point of view, I am so glad my daughters have so many good and godly girls to be friends with.  Thank you girls!



Some of you have seen this, but we are redoing the boys room into a guest room and found this cool flower print linoleum
"rug" as its called, under the old carpet.  As far as I could research, its from the 40's.  Anyway, we covered it up with some carpet that I found on a good deal.  And now, I am adding the finishing touches to make it feel a little more comfy. (That's not my foot ;)

Otherwise -

Arthur is busy adjusting to milking cows again full time.  Amos got a job at Marvin Windows and he had been doing the bulk of the milking earlier.  So now, in addition to Arthur's 60 - 80 hours a week of work, he now milks cows.  I think it might be a long winter! Thankfully, the girls, as well as Mathias and Sarah, and sometimes the sons, have been helping out when they can.

No, we did not get Christmas cards out this year so we haven't forgotten anyone.  Merry Christmas anyway!  Maybe next year!  Sometimes there just isn't time ;(

Priscilla is back to her writing after the Bible Bee break.

Miriam and Hosanna have been doing some Christmas baking and wrapped all my gifts. I'm afraid that's one job I don't really care for so I'm thrilled to turn it over! They also continue to volunteer at the Senior Living Center and deliver Meals-on-Wheels.

We have a bunch of snow now, and so we look forward to Christmas and the celebrating of our Savior's birth!



 

Family, Bible Bee, Maze

A four generation picture of farmers on our farm. What a lot of hard work these four do! Well, Daniel works hard for his age :)

The local Bible Bee was this Saturday!  Priscilla did really good and we are happy for all of God's Word she has hidden in her heart.  These are the winners in the senior age division.

Over at the maze, Arthur built a huge bale mountain that the kids absolutely love!!  

This is a Giant Kerplunk game in the fort.  Fun to play, but not so fun to pick back up!  In the background you can see the snake eye game with the dice.  We were very happy to have the H. & H.  relatives come up for opening weekend.

The workers should know better than to get in the corn!  I thought it was a cute pose :)

Both Friday and Saturday night we had smore buffets set up.  I think everyone really enjoyed it, at least we did and will put it on our list to do again, and maybe a hot chocolate buffet if it gets cold out.  

Back to the Bible Bee.  One boy made the Bible Bee logo out of legos.  We thought it was pretty neat.

And our whole local group of Bible Bee contestants.  Thank you so, so much Mitton family for all the hard work you did to host this!!!  We look forward to it next year :)

Addition Progress

I have time for a quick post.  We got home from the Bible Bee with this gorgeous coat of fluffy snow on the trees.  They say we're suppose to get more tonight, but if not, we already have a good ground cover of it.

When we were gone, Amos came over and put up the ceiling fans.  I love having a separate light switch to run just the fans instead of pulling strings like we do now.

The last couple of days I've been laying tile between the two doors.  This corner is where the wood stove goes.  Today I put the grout in and Miriam helped wash the tiles.

Miriam washing tiles.  She also stained the woodwork when we were gone and you can see the "Dried Stem" paint.  At first I didn't care for it but its growing on me!  Gotta go!  Have a great evening enjoying God's blessings!

Spraying is Done

Silas helped Amos texture our new living room ceiling today.  It didn't take them very long at all and it already looks so good!  Lord willing, we'll prime and paint tomorrow.  Thank you dear sons!

On the Farm

This time of year things are so busy I almost, almost, wish winter was here! Just kidding, I love summer!  Isaac spent the week at Camp Bemadezawin and isn't home yet.  Before he left he went around with Silas getting pictures of all the cattle with their ear tags for records.  The grass is so tall in places the calves can hardly get through it.

It's been a hot summer but the cows have done fine, even the dairy cows are doing okay with it.  The flys are starting to be a problem but we expect that this time of year.  The crops all seem to be doing good and we're getting a good amount of hay stored up.  A blessing!

Maze prep takes a lot of our time.  We made a Giant Jenga set for our game alley.  Everyone has had fun trying it out.  You can see the light on in our addition.  No, it's not finished as no one has time to work on it.  Someday.  Meanwhile it's a great place to work on maze stuff.  We've been cutting the animals out for the maze game so that room is full of sawdust and unpainted animals.

Arthur and Amos are over at the maze working on putting up a picnic shelter.  Excuse me, its a loafing shed.  Everything we build over there we try to figure out what we'd do with it if we ever quit doing the maze.  Arthur said this is a loafing shed for beef cows so a loafing shed it is :)

Arthur put up a deer stand in the field using the stairs from the bridge.  Fits in with the Gone Hunting theme we thought.  Anyway, both the loafing shed and deer stand were built with materials Arthur got from a neighbor whose shed fell down last winter due to the snow.  As well as a few things we had around.  I guess you might say we're excellent at recycling.  Most farmers are! The corn has grown since this picture was taken.  Most of it is around 5-6 feet tall.

This time of year we are really starting to enjoy the garden as well.  We've had snow peas and frozen a lot of them.  We've had fresh beans, onions, zucchinni, and now the raspberries are getting ripe.  We made some pico de gallo with fresh peppers, cilantro and onions.  Too bad we had to use store tomatoes, they just don't have the flavor.  But they're coming!  Right now we have a pot of green bean soup on for supper.  With the fresh savory it smells wonderful!

Praise God for His marvelous bounty freely given to us!

Our Trip to Tennessee

Mom here - We put on a lot of miles in the last week and a half.  First we headed down Chicago way to drop Priscilla off  at the IBLP headquarters for the Vessels of Honor program. (The picture was taken there.) It was hard to leave her but sometimes we have to do hard things in order to do the right thing!  Then we headed down to North Carolina to drop Hosanna off at a chalk talk class.  While she was there Arthur and I headed west of Nashville to visit Aaron and Naomi and the sweet little girls.  I'm not much of a traveler but you couldn't help but be awed at the glory of God's creation.  Those Smoky Mountains are beautiful!  So was the snow and thunderstorms!  I think we saw snow in every state except Ohio.  Anyway, it was beautiful and we enjoyed seeing a little taste of spring before heading north again.  We picked Hosanna up and made a stop at the Creation Museum.  We also enjoyed Steak and Shake (the nearest one is hundreds of miles from here), a Bass Pro shop, The Smokey Mountain Knife Works store, and of course we enjoyed all the southern drawls.  I enjoyed doing a little shopping with Naomi, and we loved spending time with Esther and Anna.  I wish I had pictures but Hosanna had one of the cameras, Priscilla has one, and Isaac has one.

Meanwhile, back at home, it snowed, Silas kept the farm going with Miriam and Amos' help.  Today we have a federal dairy inspector coming.  You can pray we'll pass the inspection!   It's the first time we've had a federal inspector here, usually it's just state ones.  Okay, I'll turn it over to Hosanna because the rest of the photos are of her part of the trip.

Hosanna here- Here I am working on the black-light  image for a chalk talk. When the normal light comes on all of the chalk you see glowing now will disappear.

This is the same picture that I was working on in the above photo. I actually did this one in  our church  but we used different colors, and changed a couple of other things.

I met some great people while I was there, and made some friends. Here I am with  two sisters that were there together.  Their easels were right next to mine so we got to talk together quite a bit.

It was fun looking around the room and seeing everyone's chalk drawings of the same thing. Some of the people there were really good

This is the picture of our whole group. The man standing on the far right hosted the classes, and the man standing behind me and to the right is Matt Bowman, our teacher. He is a great teacher and I learned a lot from him. He not only teaches how to do gospel chalk talks, and travels around doing them, but he also makes the chalk. We learned how to do six different chalk talks, and how to come up with our own. I thank God for the opportunity to be there and learn more. Please pray that I would be able to use it in the way that God would want me to.

Homeschool Tournament

I've probably posted these pictures before  but I wanted to do a post about the 2013 Homeschool Tournament.  It's April 16th, starting at 9:00, and all homeschoolers are welcome to come!  We have 25 categories to compete in including chess, music, art, spelling, history, Bible, and more.   This is one of our family's favorite things to do all year even though we only have Priscilla left in school.   It's fun and we would like to invite everyone.  We could use some judges as well.  Anyway, if you are interested, email me and I'll send you the information.  artkrahn@wiktel.com   Chess was always our boys favorite thing at the tournament. The girls didn't do too bad either and this category has some of the toughest competition.

Hosanna judging the US puzzle contest.  There are three age groups so even the younger kids have a good time.

The remote car race.  There's a simple track to navigate the car through.  It seems like this is a favorite of the little boys.

Table tennis is always fun too, especially when you play two cousins against each other!

Amos always judges the senior chess category and so his family gets to comes along.  Daniel is enjoying one of the creative displays.

I love this picture of Daniel and David playing chess.  They look so serious and like they really know what their doing.  I would guess Amos will have them really playing chess before too long.

I'm also excited because our church got a website.  You can find it at www.familyfundamentalchurch.com .

Meanwhile, the guys are cutting up a cow today.  Miriam and Hosanna are off cleaning a lady's house.  Silas is plugging away on his computer course. Both Amos and I try to help him when we can.  It is so over my head!  Both he and I are so sick of computers!! Priscilla is trying to finish up a bunch of things so she can enjoy her upcoming trip. 

Have a wonderful day enjoying God's blessings!

The Grandchildren & Some Other Stuff

Well, the sheetrock is almost all up and Arthur finished insulating in the peak.  Close quarters up there.   We sure appreciate Ben H. coming over and working such long hours to help us get things done.  Some nephews and my father-in-law have put in time too which really helps. 

Oh, did we ever have fun with Naomi and her girls!   (I have no idea why my face is so shiny on this photo, it really isn't!)  Anna is pretty much a mama's girl although she sure doesn't mind anyone holding her and has such a sweet smile.  Esther has a sweet smile too and says the cutest things.  The girls enjoyed being called "The aunties" by Esther.  Not a dull moment!

So many smiles!

Amos and Rebekah and the boys joined us for family devotions one night when the cousins joined Hosanna on the stairs.  Oh the fun of having cousins! We also love having Amos and Rebekah and the boys here for devotions!  

Anna does have an adorable smile!

And we can't forget little Gideon who seems to change by the day.   So cuddly! 

I know icicles are a sign of needing insulation, but I sure enjoy seeing these works of art. Can you see the one reaching down to the window below? They get so long  this time of year. That little window on top is in our bedroom and I just love looking out at the sun shining off the icicles during the day.  Sometimes it's hard reading and hearing about people down south who are looking at spring knowing we have almost two months of winter ahead of us, or more.  But then, I think of all the projects I need to get done and I say,
Let it snow!
Well, I hope you all have a wonderful evening and take time tomorrow to fellowship with God and other believers!