Meaning

Does everybody on your Christmas list already have all the junk they need?
Instead of hitting the mall and buying them one more something, here is a great gift idea that is filled with love and meaning! 

You can give a gift in honor of your loved one, and actually help a precious child who is struggling with serious challenges like poverty, sickness, or malnutrition. Or you might choose to support a family that wants to start a home-based business to improve their quality of life for their children. There are lots of options, and each one is a truly meaningful way to tell someone you love them this holiday season.

Click here to read more about Holt International's Gifts of Hope or to send your gift. 

Holt blesses so many children across the world. As a Holt family, we have seen and felt those blessings in the lives of our own children. We are so thankful for Holt, and can recommend them without reservation. Holt loves God's precious children, and this Christmas you can become a part of their work all over the world! Won't you join us?

Happy Thanksgiving!

R, Mike, HW, HA, Brenna, and Baby S at my brother's wedding last week. 

All my favoritest people!

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.

Serve the Lord with gladness:

 come before his presence with singing.

Know ye that the Lord he is God:

 it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves;

we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,

 and into his courts with praise:

 be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting;

 and his truth endureth to all generations.

Psalm 100

This is one of my favorite scriptures for the children to recite from memory for school. What a blessing to be learning rich passages like this alongside my children ~ messages to us straight from the heart of God. Blessed, indeed. May you each enjoy a blessed thanksgiving with your loved ones, and may we all enjoy counting our many blessings!

National Adoption Day

May God bless all you lovely families He formed through adoption! 

May He bless all of you who support and pray for families like ours.

May we all be moved by His desire that the lonely be set in families. 

"A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,

is God in his holy dwelling.

God sets the lonely in families..."

Psalm 68: 5-6

Fall Festival 2010

Our second annual Pecan Bluff Fall Festival was so much fun. Our dear friends joined us for a wonderful time of food and fellowship. The weather was gorgeous and perfect for roasting marshmallows over the fire. I was a little slow on the draw and missed lots of good photo ops, but here are a few of our favorite game, Bobbing For Donuts. What a fun bunch of kids. A good time was had by all, and we celebrate this autumn with hearts filled with thanksgiving to our Lord Jesus Christ!

Setting up

On your marks...

Chasing those donuts

Trying new strategies and making Baby S laugh

Success!

Now I've got you!

Sweet!

Applauding Mr. Spence

Thank you, Mr. Spence. Your article entitled "How to Raise Boys Who Read" succinctly states exactly what my gut has been telling me all along. Boys can learn to love reading! And they don't need dumbed down books full of gross-out humor to do it. We parents needs to set the bar higher than that.

Our boys are now eight, and they are turning into interesting, polite, educated, funny, well-rounded, and well-behaved young men. I'm proud of them. And, on top of all that, they really love to read. And we've never resorted to any of the foul books mentioned in Mr. Spence's article to pique their interest.

Now, don't get me wrong. HA and HW can hardly contain their giggles if someone burps at the table. They think smells are hilarious. They are absolutely all boy. But they are civilized. We don't feed them books that encourage them to act like animals. That's because we don't want them to act like animals.

Since our boys were very young we've enjoyed reading aloud together from books like The Wind in the Willows ~ it made them laugh out loud, fueled their imagination, and stretched their vocabulary. Now, in addition to classics, they devour how-to books, clean joke books, and science books. (They've learned more about God's amazing insects than I will ever know.) Right now their Daddy is reading Pat McManus to them every night, and they all get so tickled that we have to keep the door closed so they won't wake the baby. There are tons of great stories and great adventures out there for my boys to read. And those stories needn't focus on bathroom humor to hold their interest.

I should add that we don't have video games. If we did, I doubt I'd be writing this post. Instead, I'd probably be scouring the web trying to figure out how to get my boys to read.

Mr. Spence, who is president of Spence Publishing, closes with a great point:

"Most importantly, a boy raised on great literature is more likely to grow up to think, to speak, and to write like a civilized man. Whom would you prefer to have shaped the boyhood imagination of your daughter's husband—Raymond Bean or Robert Louis Stevenson?"

The Statistic That Matters Most: One person can make the difference in the life of an orphan

Creation Groans from Christian Alliance for Orphans on Vimeo.

Here Am I, Lord

True Religion from Christian Alliance for Orphans on Vimeo.

Start Them Young

I love the Managers of Their Chores system for our family. We tweaked it a bit to make it work for us, and we are decidedly less disciplined than the lovely family that wrote the book on it. But, it does work very well for us to require the kids to use their ChorePacks daily to keep our house from becoming a pit! I've found it helps my attitude tremendously for the kids to start the day by tidying and wiping things down. It's certainly no showplace, but it's world's better than it was before we instituted ChorePacks. 

Here is Baby S and Big Sister R doing their very favorite chore: cleaning the front glass door. R sprays the cleaner on the outside and Baby S wipes the inside with a cloth diaper just as hard as she can, copying her big Sissy! It is so cute, and it tickles them both to do that chore together each morning. Baby S keeps that door smudged up watching the birds and goats and cows outside, so it needs that good wipe down every day. You can never start them too young!

One Less