Christmas!

On Dec. 19th, our church held our usual Christmas Eve Candlelight Service.  It was a beautiful evening with the Chirstmas story being read throughout the service, and instrumentals and songs woven in between.  We also changed our regualr meal schedule to hors' d'oeuvres for that night, which we all enjoyed!  Below are some pictures taken from that day...

the kids playing outside before the service

Noah!

Dad

Okay, these next pictures don't have anything to do with Christmas, besides the fact that we are all enjoying our Christmas break!  Ethan, Mom, and I recently went riding...

My beautiful Appaloosa, Patches

Passion, Ethan and Savannah's horse

The young goats all wishing they could go too!

Riley

A candid shot of Ethan and his steed!

And...drum roll please...we got SNOW!  The day after Christmas!  It's been the first time we've gotten snow for Christmas since they started keeping track of the weather in the 1800's!  It wasn't a whole lot, but it did make everything very pretty! 

As a matter of fact, it is still out there!  It hasn't gotten warm enough to melt it all yet!

And last but not least, I couldn't end this post without putting a picture of our tree on Christmas Day!

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! 

A lighter side...

Noah has recently rediscovered his joke book that Mom and Dad bought him last Christmas, so we have been hearing a lot of,

"Hey, I've got another joke to tell you!  What do you get when a..."

But he has really been enjoying himself and some of them really do make you chuckle!

So,..from our family to yours, here's some funnies:

Noah:

What starts with a "t", ends with a "t", and has t in it?

Give up yet?

(Answer is at the bottom)

Ethan:

A nun was driving on Interstate 20.  Suddenly a cop pulled her over.

"Officer," said the nun, "I know I wasn't speeding.  I saw a sign a while back that said 20 and that's what I was going."

The officer replied, "No ma'am, you weren't speeding.  I pulled you over because you were going too slow.  The speed limit is 60 mph.  That sign you saw back there was I-20."
"Oh, sorry about that.  We don't get out much."

The officer looked in the back seat where two more nuns sat with their hands grabbing the seat in front of them, knuckles white.

"What's wrong with those two?" asked the officer.

"Oh, I just got off I-95," came the nun's reply.

Noah:

Why was six afraid of seven?

(Answer is at the bottom)

Kelsey:

Two farmers each received $1,000,000. 

One farmer asked the other, "What are you going to do with your money?"

"I'm going to move to Florida, buy myself a big house, and live the easy life!  What are you going to do with your money?"

"Well," replied the first farmer, "I'll probably just keep farming till it's all used up."

Answers:
1st: A teapot!
2nd: Because seven ate/eight nine!

Meet Tasha...

Our very first Alpine!  Her name is Montage Socrates Ziva, but we dubbed her "Tasha" for short!  This is sort of an experiment for us.  We have an all Nubian herd, but we have read a lot in the last couple of years about cross-breeding the Nubians and Alpines.  We are hoping to get the best of both the breeds: the high butterfat content of the Nubian milk, but the higher milk production of the Alpines.  We are also hoping to come out with a calmer, smarter, all around more sensible goat.   

Tasha with her thick winter coat.

Our goats are very hard to get pictures of because every time you go in there they think you have cookies for them.  I kept having to run ahead of the herd to get a picture of Tasha.  These pictures below are of the goats trying to figure out what this crazy girl is doing! -grin-

Our herd (Tasha is in the very back by the gate)

The next pictures are of Tasha at her old home, but they were so cute I had to add them!

Picture courtesy of Diane Cox, former owner of Tasha

   

Picture courtesy of Diane Cox

Picture courtesy of Diane Cox

Picture courtesy of Diane Cox

Picture courtesy of Diane Cox

Love The Church Conference 2010

We're home!  We just got back from a 4 day conference up in Asheville, NC entitled Love The Church.  The National Center for Family Integrated Churches (NCFIC) hosts it each year.  Last year it was in Cincinnati, Ohio.   We are always both encouraged and challenged when we go to these conferences as a family.  It was a full three days of back to back sessions with the fourth day being church on Sunday.  During the conference we met up with old friends and made a lot of  new ones! 



We traveled up one day before the conference started,
so we walked through Black Mountain, NC.  It is a cute little town
with a bunch of quaint shops, including a general store!  While
walking down the sidewalk we found this plaque on a building! 
We all got a good laugh out of this one!



Two little friends of ours that went to the conferecne also!

And low and behold, the very last day....it SNOWED!!!  Okay, for you Northerners, this is nothing!  But we only get snow once every 8 years, so this was big!  So of course, we had to have a snowball fight.

Yours truly getting one ready for Ethan!

Noah and I have the hill...

...however, Ethan is sneaking one up on me!

And of course we had to get Dad in on it!

Pretty soon, another family joined in! 
If you look close you can see the snowballs flying!

It was a very memorable time.  It's always nice to meet families that are like-minded!  My only regret is that I didn't get any pictures of the conference!  However, if you go to http://www.ncfic.org/ there are tons of pictures!  We thoroughly enjoyed each session that we went to and the keynote sermons were wonderful.  We always walk away from these conferences with a lot to think about.

We made it home by 7:30 Sunday night to find that it was....SNOWING!!! Can you belive it!  It only lasted for a couple of minutes and none of it stuck, but it was truly a gift from God!

Posted by Kelsey

The Holidays are Here!

Our house has been buzzing with activity lately!  Thanksgiving started it out on Thursday, with Ethan's birthday following right behind!  In the middle of that we also went and got our Christmas tree!  We usually have a tradition to go cut down our Christmas tree, come home to decorate it, and order pizza so we don't have to cook anything.  With it being Ethan's birthday party the same day we got the tree, we kind of had to change up tradition a little, but shrimp fettuccine was a wonderful fill in (especially when Dad offers to cook it!)

Dad, Savannah, Ethan and Mom



Noah on Thanksgiving Day

 We have been enjoying fires both inside and out!  The other night the wind was really whipping and it had been raining on and off.  It was fairly warm that night so we had our windows open (I know, I know, South Carolina weather is very unpredictable - windows open one day, fires in the fireplace the next!).  All of a sudden we heard a loud crack and then something came crashing down outside!  We all looked at each other, jumped up, grabbed the spotlight, and ran outside.  We knew what it was as soon as we heard it.  We had a dead, old pine tree, about 65 feet tall, in the goat pen.  We had been putting off cutting it down because if we tried to drop it, it was either going to hit the fencing, the pool pump, or the pool and it's cover!  But that wind storm blew off the top of the tree, about 10 or 15 feet of it, just enough so that it could fall inside the fencing!  So the next day all of us went out there to cut it down.  Gram and Pop helped tie the cable up and we all prayed for safety before we began...then Dad cut her down....right where we needed it to land!  It didn't hit anything!  So Dad cut them into 2-3 foot sections and we started a fire!  (For those of you who don't know, we are notorious firebugs!  To the point that the fire department made us put up a street sign for our driveway just so they could find us!  That'll have to be another story, though!) 

Well, after 3 or 4 days of burning, we got the pasture all cleaned up.  Every time a tree falls, the Lord always sees fit to keep the fencing safe!  We have had several times when we had some close calls; one time a pine broke off about 5 feet off the ground, fell and stayed attached by a little piece on the bottom so that it was laying 2 inches off of the fence!  The Lord truly is amazing!