Trip to Ohio

We took our first family vacation in years to Ohio in November.  We stayed at a gorgeous hotel on the 11th floor next to the Northern Kentucky Convention Center where Priscilla and Miriam helped judge at the National Bible Bee. While the girls were there, Arthur and I enjoyed visiting Hosanna and Nate who were only an hour away. The hotel had this beautiful gazebo in the center of the building.

One day we went to the Air Force Museum in Dayton. This is a WWII RAF plane. If you've ever read the children's books about the RAF you will appreciate this! Good books for boys, by the way!

Priscilla in a space suit at the museum!

This museum was a pretty awesome place to go. There were SOOOO many airplanes starting with WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Others, Presidential, and space. It was during the week and we had the place almost to ourselves.  If you ever get there, go! Plan for a long day though!

My favorites were the Air Force One planes. And yes, you got to walk through them! This was the newest one they had that a number of recent presidents used.

The whole way down to Ohio we could hear a strange noise in the vehicle. We pulled into Nate and Hosanna's place and right away the water pump went bad. So thankful that it didn't happen on the road! God was watching over us! So Arthur was able to use Nate's tools to replace that. Then one of the breaks started squealing really  bad and he ended up replacing that too. He didn't want to get his shirt dirty so we popped into a thrift store and he bought a cheap suitcoat to wear to do his car repairs!

The view outside of our hotel window! This was taken outside but this is what we watched at night. So beautiful and so nice and warm compared to home!

We enjoyed watching the Bible Bee finals that were held at the Ark Encounter. I get so edified listening to these young people quote scripture! Also, we are so thankful for the Bible Bee and the help its been even in our family.

We took some time to go through the Ark. What a great place!!!

The Ark had all their Christmas lights up.

And this picture, a little blurry, shows just how big the Ark is!  Pretty impressive!



Priscilla and Miriam in front of the Ark.

Nate and Hosanna were living in a studio apartment when were there but just got a bigger apartment with two bedrooms. Which they will need come next summer!!! Around June 20th to be exact! So we helped Hosanna clean the apartment. It was already clean but you know how you like to KNOW its clean! They moved in right after we left and Hosanna said she is already enjoying the bigger kitchen and space!

And the sisters together once again for the first time since Hosanna and Nate's wedding. We sure missed them!!! And its hard not knowing when we will see them next. So thankful for phones!!

On our way home we took a few hours to spend at the Creation Museum. I've been there before but I just love this place. We really enjoyed the 4D theater of the six days of creation. Their bookstore is pretty awesome too!

With a trip that long, you need to eat out and we enjoyed Steak and Shake which we don't have up here. We also did a lot of Christmas shopping.

Okay, my family groaned when I said I wanted to go to a corn maze but they went along with my passion for that kind of thing and we visited the Rader family farm. Their maze was closed but their gift shop and food stand was open. They let us look around and we got some great ideas and enjoyed some good fellowship.

When we got home it was hunting season and Arthur got the two deer he was wanting. So our freezers and pantry are full despite the difficult fall for gardening and farming.  We never did get all of my father-in-laws beans harvested and none of the flax.  We get so many flax calls in the fall that finally we just quit answering the phone. People just didn't understand that with 12+" of rain, the fields just weren't good for driving in. Hopefully nobody's septics will freeze this winter.

So now, after a good Thanksgiving, we look forward to all the activities of December.  The house is decorated and warm and I can smell the corn chowder Priscilla made for supper so I better go.  Don't forget to be thankful every day for the blessings God sends your way!

Hosanna is Home!

Hosanna here - I am finally back home after being gone for around seven months! For those of you who may not remember, I've been interning/volunteering at the Bible Bee Headquarters. After being in the Bible Bee for three years it was fun to see and be able to help with the behind the scenes work. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. While I was working there, I ended up running the Bible Bee E-Store for a while - including onsite at the National Bible Bee. In the above picture, I am at Nationals sitting with J.B. (She helped me a lot there.) in front of the Bible Bee onsite E-Store Booth.

This year the National Bible Bee was in FL! What you can see in this picture is the view from one of the hotel's ground level doors. It was very warm there during Nationals and a couple of the days I would even say that it was hot. It was fun getting to see all the palm trees - they are a bit of a novelty to me. :)

On the way back to OH from Nationals, I got to ride on a charter bus with a lot of the other volunteers and even a Bible Bee contestant family. Everyone was tired after Nationals so I think most people ended up taking a nap on the bus at some point. We were able to move around on the bus some, so we were able to visit with different people on the bus and even play a few games. I think the trip was around 20 hours.

The church I attended while in OH (Sligo Baptist Church) had a goodbye party for me. They were so sweet and made me feel right at home there. If any of you end up in that area on a Sunday or Wednesday, I would recommend that you stop by and visit them.

Back at home, Isaac caught four different animals today while out trapping.  Anyone want to guess what they are from left to right?

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 :)

Bible Bee 2013

We're home from the 2013 National Bible Bee in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee!  The pictures are a little out of order but I'll try my best to share with you some of what happened.

One of the things that Priscilla was really, really looking forward to was meeting Ray Comfort.  He spoke at a luncheon and so she got to visit with him a little. Ray Comfort is one of Priscilla's "heroes" and his books and materials have been really spiritually challenging for her.  (Sorry the pictures aren't very good.) Micheal Farris of HSLDA also gave a challenging message at the closing celebration.

Another things we really enjoyed was a showing of the movie "Alone, Yet Not Alone".  We've been waiting for this to come out for a long time!  It isn't out in theaters for a few months yet and then DVD's a few months after that so this was a really highlight of our trip.  It was a very good movie!  

During the opening ceremony they had all the contestants march up on stage one age group at a time.  Priscilla spent a lot of time with her group of about 100 so she made some good friends and had a lot of fun.  She thought she did okay on the written part of the test but not so good on the oral part which means she didn't make it to semi-finals. It was intense and an emotional time for the contestants. That's okay though, as we all know the real reward is the actual hiding of God's Word in your heart. For those that want to know, next years National Bible Bee is in Orlando, Florida.  

We didn't do a lot other than the Bible Bee but we did find time to do a little hiking with the M. family of the Mieczkowski Musings blog.  We've met them before at National Bible Bee and read their blog for years and when you meet fellow believers in Christ it's like you've always know each other.  The weather was really nice, at least compared to here, and some were even brave enough to go barefoot in the river.  That's Arthur in the black pants. Arthur enjoyed the hiking and climbing up and down the hills with the M. guys.

Hosanna came along to the Bible Bee as a volunteer and worked at the information booth and helped set things up for the family fair night.  There's a few things that my kids will always talk about as highlights of their school years and the Bible Bee will be one of them.  If you've never been a part of the Bible Bee, start with the local Bee's next summer!

Back to the hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains, here's the M. family, minus parents, and Priscilla and Hosanna.   There are more pictures on their blog if you want to see more.

A highlight of the trip for me was visiting the Titanic museum.  After doing the Titanic at last years maze, and studying all about the Titanic for the maze, I really wanted to see this.  (The other "half" of the Titanic is in Branson, MO.) This is really worth going to if you ever get a chance.  Probably the best part for us was Captain Smith.  He really looked like Captain Smith and had actually gone down and helped collect artifacts for the museum.  Anyway, the room was quite full and he told the story of the "Titanic's Last Hero".  For those of you that know of John Harper, it was so nice to hear his story told and the Captain made a point to share the verse "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved"  several times when telling about John Harper. The room got pretty quiet as he told the story of this pastor who was on his way to preach at Moody Bible Church.  He shared the gospel with passengers as they knew their lives were in danger and even gave his life jacket up to a man he knew wasn't saved.  He went to this man twice in the water encouraging him to be saved.  This man was saved and was one of the few that was picked up alive and so lived to tell the story of John Harper.

Other highlights:
The weather!  We went through rain, thunderstorms (Awesome display of God's power in those lighting bolts!), tornado warnings (we followed the bad Illinois tornadoes), wind storm (first time I've ever seen Arthur clenching the steering wheel to keep the van on the road), ice covered roads (saw three accidents), but beautiful weather while in Tennessee.  

We had a great visit with the Pecks and McCanne families on the way down. Such good fellowship!

We stayed with Aaron and Naomi and the girls for a couple of days!  We won't see them at Christmas so we were glad for the chance to visit.    We left Silas there during the Bible Bee and he took tons of pictures which will take another blog post.

We visited a nice little church down in Pigeon Forge and had great fellowship there as well as with many families we visited at the Bee.

We're glad to be home!  We're thankful for God's protection on the roads, for all the verses Priscilla has committed to memory, for the chance to see old friends and make new ones.  God is so good!