Our Family Blog – Mike, Louanne, Nadia, Amelie, & Dani
We are proud to introduce Dani to the world now that we have LOA. These photos are from when she was 12 months old and now she is 20 months old. We hope to travel in Feb or early March to meet her and complete the adoption.
And one more photo just for fun!
I am thankful for our new dryer. No more SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK!!!!! Our old one was 14 years old and Mike had fixed it a few times, but this time it only lasted about a month. The new dryer is wonderful and gets the clothes dried so fast! During ICEPOCALYPSE I think I managed to try out all the settings.
On Thursday night of last week it sleeted almost all night. I tossed and turned virtually all night because of the “tick tick tick” hitting the window. Rain sounds great, but sleet, not so much. The title of this blog post is just one of the many names given to the insane amount of ice that covered the DFW area. It looked so pretty, just like snow, but it was solid ice. The entire area of nearly 7 million people just shut down for 4 days. Unless you were a first responder, hospital/nursing/assisted living worker or air traffic controller, you stayed home. The photos of 18 wheelers stuck on I35 for 18 hours because they were stuck in ice were so weird. There were an astounding number of car accidents and entire freeways were closed so that “cobblestone ice” could be removed. We are so thankful to God that we didn’t lose power like so many other in our area.
Videos were going around of people ice skating on their street or parking lots.
As you can see from the photos and video, our girls absolutely loved it!! For them it was just as good as snow and I am glad they had so much fun playing outside everyday.
When we finally got out of our neighborhood on Monday to grab some prescriptions and milk for Mike’s mom, tons of the shelves were empty. I have never seen anything like it. I know it’s a big joke that Texans can’t handle the snow, but this was some kind of dangerous and different situation. We still had school, did crafts, and played games so we didn’t experience the cabin fever so many of our friends did. Maybe we should have called it “Jammie-a-thon 2013.”
I have recommended these a lot of Facebook and realized I haven’t talked about them here on the blog. I was looking for a daily devotion we could do with the girls that wasn’t going to dumb things down for the kids or gloss over sin like so many of the kiddie Bibles out there do and this was a perfect fit.
“Long Story Short” is a 72 week devotional with 5 devotions per week – which only take about 10 minutes per day. You can easily do them at mealtime and you read the Scripture from the Bible translation of your choice. It took us about 20 months to get through it. We started when Amelie was 3 and Nadia was 5.5. In the beginning Amelie just listened, but by the end she was answering questions too. The basis of the devotion is to show that throughout the Old Testament the stories point forward to Jesus and God’s promise to send his Son. There are a lot of reviews online about it, but trust me when I say that this is a great devotion.
We are now on week 8 of “Old Story New” which contains 72 weeks in the New Testament. It’s been just as good as “Long Story Short.”
There is also a companion “Gospel Story Bible” by the same author and when we finish a week in the devotion we find the corresponding week and read the review and answers the questions. It’s great to reinforce the parts of Scripture they have been hearing over the course of the week.
(fyi – this post contains affiliate links to amazon)