Fall Outings

This past Saturday we went to the Meridian Heritage Festival and the apple orchard. We all had a great time and it was such a beautiful fall day to be outside.

The Heritage Festival was by the old school house, general store, and pretty much everything from the "Old'n Days". We saw some funny alpacas, watched the traditional Irish dancers, ate popcorn, and took a pony ride. Lilly loves animals. When the Irish dancers were performing she was distracted by the pony giving carriage rides in the background. She pointed and yelled (pretty loudly), "Neeeeeiiiiigh!!" You can guess what we did right after the dancers were done.

I like this picture of Dave and Lilly with the Alpacas. They look like they're all posing for a group shot.


After Lilly got up from her nap we decided to go apple picking. Well our first priority was to get DOUGHNUTS and cider. Why did we pack our Saturday with so many outings? I scheduled to get my wisdom teeth out the following Monday, and I really wanted to eat and enjoy those delicious doughnuts (only found at Country Mill). Mmm. They were good! The apples were good too! The Gala apples are really sweet and I already made some apple bread with some Northern Spy apples. Dave's hoping for some apple pie muffins and apple pie sometime soon.



So good!



Picking fruit is always fun. This summer we picked blueberries and Lilly did more eating than picking there. This time she didn't eat any of the apples that we picked because she's never bitten into a whole apple and doesn't eat apples with skin on it. Lilly didn't try picking apples from the trees. She was very happy to be handed apples to place into the bag. I'm glad she learned the word "apple" before we went to the apple orchard!



I'm so thankful for Saturdays and time spent together as a family.

Just Like Mama and Baba

I like to do the same things as my mama and baba.
They both like to use the computer, and they both wear glasses.















I love mama!
I love baba!

The Gospel Song

Holy God, in love, became
Perfect Man to bear my blame
On the cross He took my sin
By His death I live again

Over the past week or so Lilly has started singing her bedtime songs with me. I sing her a "Go To Sleep" lullaby that I kind of made up and "The Gospel Song" lyrics by Drew Jones and music by Bob Kauflin. It is so sweet to hear her sing. Not only is it cute but I can hear her sing the powerful words, "... cross ... took ... sin ... by ... again." Hehee she doesn't sing every word but she'll jump in on the words that stick out to her.

I know my nephew, Ethan, can sing this song by himself. Even though these little kiddos don't understand that this song proclaims the Gospel message, they have the words in their memory. I pray that one day the lyrics and the message will impact their hearts and lives.

August 2008

August was a busy month for us. We went to two weddings, visited Maryland, North Carolina, Christine and Noah spent a weekend with us, and I went to a Backstreet Boys concert and had an eLLe sleepover. Although it was busy, we have some great memories from all those events.

Congratulations to Loren and JY and Cassie and Carmichael!!!


It's always fun to have Christine and Noah visit us in Okemos. We wanted it to be like a last hurrah for them before they started the new school year. We went to get bubble tea, swam at the East Lansing Splash Park, went go karting, and played a game of putt-putt.


eLLe didn't just have a one night sleepover. It was an entire weekend together. We had so much we wanted to do together! Friday night we drove to the Detroit Energy Theater for the Backstreet Boys concert. It was fun! It was fun together. Saturday we watched the movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. We also sang together and recorded 2 songs that night. On Sunday the girls were able to visit our church. I've told them so much about our church that it was nice for them to visit. Our weekend together concluded with a delicious brunch at Dusty's, our most favorite brunch place ... ever.

Visiting Maryland is always a good time. Everytime we visit we rethink moving out there to live by Kelly and Andy. For now, God has us staying here in Okemos and we're happy with that. We love our church here and actually like this quiet town.
Lilly has so much fun with her cousins. She loves Ethan and Evangeline. She also loves the ocean and playing in the water! Our vacation in North Carolina actually started in September. So it should probably go in a separate post. Oh well ... here are some pictures. Look for the rest on Flickr!

100 push ups

Lindsay and I started this 6 week exercise routine that's supposed to have you doing 100 push ups by the end of it. It only takes 30 minutes a week (10 minutes a day 3 times a week). Check it out:

http://hundredpushups.com/

We're only on week 2, but it's kind of fun to get back into working out. We've been doing our sets between rounds of Super Smash Bros and during commercials when we're watching Jon and Kate Plus 8.

Lindsay may be younger than me, but I can do the same number of push ups as her!

Blueberry Picking

This was the first time blueberry picking for all of us. We went for about an hour and a half and got about 5 pounds of blueberries! Dave and I both agreed that picking berries can be addictive. We said a few times that we were going to stop after this bush, but then we would keep going on a few more bushes. The bushes are close together so when you spot some big, plump berries on the next bush, it's hard to leave them unpicked!

As you can tell from the picture, Dave and I wore the color blue for blueberries (not really) but Lilly was just cute and colorful! She picked a few green berries (not quite ready to be picked) from the bushes, but she thoroughly enjoyed picking handfuls of blueberries from my bucket and stuffing them in her mouth!

So far we've enjoyed eating the fresh blueberries and I made blueberry muffins. I'm thinking about making blueberry banana bread today.

We all had such a good time blueberry picking and it's cheaper than buying them at the grocery store. I think we're going back sometime this week/weekend. Hopefully blueberry picking will become a family tradition in the Summer and apple picking in the Fall.

A note unrelated to blueberry picking but something that's come up between Dave and I is he'll say he feels old but I always (or usually) feel young because he'll always be older than me. I just turned 25 and Dave is 27, turning 28 this December. I'm glad God made us with this 2 1/2 year age difference. :)

Real Words

Lilly can say a few real words now. I wanted to document them for my records:

- Mama & Baba
- Woof woof
- No
- I got you!
- Thank you! Sometimes she'll sneeze and then say, "thank you!" Haha! She'll also say, "thank you" when she's handing me something.

Don't worry, she still does her cute, nonsense babbling!

Lilly's already showing signs of being a girly girl. She likes to hang purses and bags on her arm. She also likes to pretend that she's cooking! I washed out some big yogurt tubs for her to play with and gave her a wooden spatula at different times. The other day she put the spatula in the tub and started stirring! Then she'd stop to do a little taste test! It was so cute :) Lilly's also very generous so she stuck the spatula out for us to taste. We didn't really teach her to do these things. She must have learned from watching us or something. Anyway, it was really cute to see her starting this pretend play stuff. I'm looking forward to more fun imaginary play!