She would have been 83

Nanny holding Timothy at the hospital.

Nanny with Joanna. We had went to Alabama for a visit so that our grandmother's could see Miss Joanna.

Nanny with Leah (my cousin Dodey's youngest daughter). Nanny so loved all her great grandchildren!

I know she touched more lives than we will ever know about. She was a source of encouragement and blessing to many!!

Today would have been my Nanny's 83rd birthday! I am well aware that today will be a hard day for my daddy. He used to take her out to eat on her birthday to her favorite restaurant, Red Lobster. They so enjoyed their time together. I remember when she turned 80 my parents threw her a surprise birthday party, and boy was she surprised. It was so sweet to see the look on her face, she had a great time!

As I read Proverbs 31 for my quiet time this morning I thought alot about my Nanny. As Sarah was having her reading time she looked at me and said "Mom, these verses remind me of Nanny." Some of those verses are.... v.15 that talks about her providing food for her family. Nanny always was cooking, she loved it! v.16 says she plants a vineyard. My Nanny enjoyed having a garden and she worked in it just as much as she could. v.17 talks about the strength of her arms. I have always thought that my Nanny was a physically strong woman. I pray that if I live to be 82 that I can get around like she could. v.27 says she watches over the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. My Nanny was an awesome mother and grandmother. She took care of her family and made sure they had what they needed. Nanny was not the type to just sit around, she was always going and doing, especially for others. I could go on about what a wonderful lady Nanny was, she is missed by all of us! I wish I had the time to post all my pictures of her and maybe one day I will be able to sit down and do that. Just wanted to share my thoughts this morning as I think about her on her birthday!

Happy Birthday Jesus!!

Cupcakes for celebrating! The little boys took turns blowing out the candles.

Elijah really enjoyed the cupcakes!

Timothy's favorite part is the icing! :)

Even Big brother likes cupcakes!

Joanna's first cupcake! She had to have a bite too!!

Sunday afternoon after church we ate lunch and then had cupcakes to celebrate Jesus' birthday!! This has been something we have tried to do every year. This year we all wrote down what we would like to give Jesus and then put them in a box. Next Christmas we will open the box and read what we said we wanted to give and discuss if we have been giving that to Jesus. Our gifts to Jesus consisted of things like the first hour of our day, to having self control. My prayer is that as we do this each year it will be one more reminder of the real reason we celebrate Christmas. Sometimes in all the gift exchanging and hoopla of the holidays we forget that its not about us it is ALL about HIM!! God gave us the greatest gift EVER when He sent His Son Jesus to redeem us of our sin.

Christmas 2011

Joanna's first Christmas! She had so much fun playing with her things and everyone else's! LOL!

The other kids did a great job helping Joanna open her gifts!

Timothy was so cute opening his presents! We got him a train set and when he opened it Elijah said "what you have always wanted Timbo!" Timothy has never mentioned a train set. :) It was so cute!

Timothy has been sharing his sit and spin with Joanna. I hope they both get alot of fun out of it!

Elijah LOVES blue jeans. All the ones he has are hand me downs and most of them are getting holes in them so....he got 3 pairs of blue jeans for Christmas! (and some other cool stuff)

Sarah got Elijah a "Cars 2" calendar. He was so excited about opening presents. He just went wild!

Sarah was so thankful for all of her gifts! She got some really neat things.

She loves to play dress up but her dress up clothes are too little. My mom had some of my things so I gave her a couple of my old things for her to play dress up in. She has played dress up every day. I love that she is still a little girl!! :)

Isaac has been asking for a sports coat to wear to church. I finally found one and that was one of his gifts. He wore it to church on Sunday and he looked sooo handsome!

Isaac loves to play games so we got him a cross word game. He also got some football cards and some other neat things.

Isaac and Sarah earn Awana bucks on Wednesday nights at church, then at Christmas they can buy their parents gifts from the Awana store. My big kiddos LOVE buying gifts for others. They look forward to buying gifts at the Awana store and they do a great job. This year Bryan and I got some really neat things!!
We feel so blessed! It was a good Christmas and the kids enjoyed it! I will post next about Christmas Day!

Christmas Cards

What are you going to do with your Christmas cards? Last year I went to throw mine away (oops, maybe I wasn't suppose to do that), but then I felt that God gave me an idea. Those people who send us those Christmas cards are special to us, so why not use those cards. Here is what I felt the Lord give me... we took those cards and placed them in an envelope. Each night the kids took turns drawing a card out. Then as a family we would pray for whoever sent the card that whole week. We would do this during our family worship before bed. Another thing I would like to do this year is to send a small note to whoever we are praying for. I wanted to share this with you before you "threw away" your Christmas cards. :)

Christmas with Paw and Maw 2011

My dad opening his gift. I LOVE that smile on his face!!

This year we made photo books for everyone. Dad (Paw) is holding up the one we made for them. We made them and Pop and Gigi's with pictures from our Vacation to the Water Park this summer. Then we made Bryan's brothers one for each of their families with pictures of the kids over the past year and things the kids had done. I thought the photo books turned out really nice.

We gave mother a plate that the kids painted while we were at the Water Park in August. It has all the kids hand prints on it, so sweet! That is also what we gave Gigi for Christmas.

Mother opening her presents from us! My kids were so excited about Maw and Paw opening their presents!!

Everyone wants to see what Daddy got! Even Joanna, can you see her?

Opening a present from my parents, with the boys help!

The little boys loved opening presents!! Maw gave all of us a pack of gum and I believe Timothy really liked his gum! We asked him if he liked "this" or "that" and he would say "No". Then we asked "Do you like your gum?" and he said "Yes". Too funny!! :)

Paw and Maw give the coolest presents! :)

Sarah and Joanna got some matching outfits, so cute!

The little boys got a gator and LOVE it!

Bryan made my parents a set of cornhole boards and we painted our hand prints on them.

Maw's is Auburn and Paw's is Alabama

We even got to play some cornhole with Paw and Maw while they were here. We all enjoyed playing!

My mother is going to kill me for putting this on here! :) I told them to get together and let me take a picture and this is what I got! LOL!!

I feel so blessed to have my parents love each other as much as they do. I know they love each other more today than ever!!

I know that this is a hard time for Dad, not having his mom with him this year. I am so thankful for my dad and he will never know the love I have for him! I (we all) so enjoyed him and mom coming to visit and celebrating Christmas with us!!

Maw and Paw came up Friday and we did Christmas with them. As always we enjoyed every minute with them! They got to stay til after lunch on Sunday. We had a nice supper on Saturday night and watched a movie that Paw and Maw gave us. I am sure that when they are here it seems like a crazy house but we love them being here!!

Homeschool Christmas Party!

Wednesday night the kids and I had our "homeschool Christmas Party". We had a lot of fun! We started off by having a simple supper then I had a present for the kids. They love a movie so that is what they got, a new Christmas movie. I let them watch it some while I prepared the ingredients for cookies. The kids came to the kitchen and we made cookies. I wanted them to be candy cane cookies so we gave it a try. Timothy ended up just combining his red and white and the other kids thought that was "cool" so the rest of them were like that. They all had so much fun making cookies!! :) While the cookies were baking the kids watched the rest of their movie. Then we tried our cookies with green and red icing on them. I will have to say the cookies didn't taste all that great but it was fun!

Christmas in Alabama

Elijah and Timothy eating at the high chair thing. It is a high chair but converts into this table thing and flip it over and it is a rocking thing. :)

Timothy enjoyed his pizza!

Elijah is a breadstick man!! He could eat his weight in breadsticks!

Miss Sarah loves cheese pizza!

Pepperoni is Isaac's favorite kind of pizza!

We went to Alabama this past weekend and had Christmas with Bryan's family. We left Saturday at noon and arrived at Bryan's oldest brother's house around 4:45 p.m. We enjoyed getting to see everyone and exchanging gifts! I took my camera but completely forgot to get it out of the van. :( There are 9 kiddos and 10 adults in Bryan's immediate family, so there was a house full. My kids had so much fun. So wish I had gotten some pictures, but oh well! Then we spent the night Saturday and Sunday with my parents. So nice to spend some time with them also. On Sunday night we had pizza for supper. I remembered to get my camera out and snap a few shots. Actually I remembered my camera when the two little boys were sitting at the high chair together. When Isaac and Sarah were little my mom bought this high chair (3 in 1) thing, it's really neat! We have a couple of pictures of them sitting at this thing together. My kids love this thing! So I snapped a picture of each of the kids eating pizza. Joanna had a piece of pizza but I didn't get a picture. :( We came home Monday morning and have been getting ready for Christmas ever since. Can't believe that Christmas will be here THIS Sunday!! We have been doing a Christmas theme for school this week. It is putting us in the Christmas mood! I will share later about all that and the things we have done and are doing!