Lean on Me

Proverbs 3 5&6 says:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.

This is such a simple verse that so many of us have learned as children, and how many times have we tried to make things more complicated than what this verse says?

As you all (faithful readers of our blog) know, we have been learning to trust and LEAN on God in more ways recently! How amazing everyday when we wake up to see His faithfulness to us, and His provisions for us.

We are leaving on Sat. for our training. We are all looking forward to it a change of scenery and a different pace. OK...well Claire is certainly going to be at a different pace. 2 weeks ago she was on a trampoline with a few friends, and was jumped on...(we did bring her to the doctor to check it out and she was not worried about it!)a few days later a cousin bumped into her leg again...and the final straw was on Sunday night when she was being snuggled with and her sister was getting out of bed and rolled over onto her leg. We watched her all day on Monday at our church picnic, I asked SEVERAL people to look at her walking and whether they thought she was limping or not, well Tuesday brought us to the doctors ALL day. To find out at 5:30 pm that yes in fact she has a broken leg. So yesterday (Wednesday) it was casted and has not slowed her down much, I think a full leg cast still would not have slowed her down! :) It is waterproof, YES!!! you did read that right a waterproof cast. They were thinking of NC and the warm weather and pools when they casted her!!

here are a few pictures of the little girl with her purple cast.
oh, and for the record 6 kids and she is the first one to be in a cast! Who would have ever thought it would be Claire!! :-)

We are packing AGAIN!!

Well, we are in the new house, and getting settled in nicely! Oh how I love having everything all on one floor!!! So easy to clean! :)
And now it is time to start to pack up and get ready for CIT. We will be leaving on September 7 for 5 weeks. We are looking forward to seeing what we will be doing and learning while we are there. The kids are thrilled to be going to NC and seeing how different things are there. I love to read through the materials that we received to see what we are going to be doing while we are there. I was never a student it is a little intimidating to see what we are doing but also very exciting to see what we will be learning!
We said goodbye to our friends Steve and Becky Diem this past Sunday. They are now in Costa Rica for language school for the next year. How happy we are for them that they are there!
That is all for now! short and sweet just wanted to let you know where we were!!

Always Abounding in Joy

What a week we have had, I will start of at the beginning.

July 31, Grandma went home to be with the Lord, at 7:09 am.
July 31, My truck had a major explosion under the hood at 8:55 am, on the way to the dentist. We thought it was the manifold.
August 1, We got up early and started moving things to the "new" house. What did we find in our old house?? hmmm....a dead snake and 4 brand new kittens!! We were almost completely moved by 2 pm Friday afternoon and we even slept in the new house.
August 2, unpacked at the new house
August 3, Church and a BBQ for my nephew who is heading to Afghanistan.
August 4, CLEAN the old house
August 5, close on the old house and shed a lot of tears!!
August 6, Pick up my truck which happened to be just a spark plug the broke and shattered!! took 4 hours to replace. Then head to CT to spend the night for the funeral.
August 7, Funeral then head home in the evening.
August 8 ANNA is 6 :) wake up to severe abdominal pains, spend the day waiting for the pain to go away then finally around 9pm tell Phil I need to head to the ER.
August 9, hooked up to iv antibiotics and the kids head to my cousins surprise 3oth party Jay (my nephew) heads to Afghanistan.
August 10, come home from the hospital and collect all the kids.
August 11, get up bright and early and head to eye doctors appt. for 3 out of 6 kids which turned out to be only 2 of the kids, apparently I can not read my own writing!!! ;)

So, as you can see there have been a few things happening this week, and I only touched on the big things that stick out...there are a lot more that I will not bore you with. But the question is does anyone want a cat?? :)

So, there are a lot of prayer requests in here.
Pray for my family still grieving the loss of Grandma
My nephew Jay Pepper who is in the Air National Guard in Afghanistan
Our settling into our new home, and the people who purchased our house will settle in nicely.
My continued recovery from whatever my infection was from.
and as always our support would continue to come in and we can be heading down to Guatemala quickly.