all the smiling faces

Here are just a few of the awesome pictures taken this weekend!! So many smiling faces.  Friday night was my c-group (10th grade girls) Christmas party! I taught them to crochet.. Sheri taught them how to make potholders and we all had the privilege to laugh at ourselves playing Just Dance 2.

Then Sunday was the Tacky Sweater Party at Church for the youth! These kids are awesome!

Please tell me you have noticed “THE HAT” in almost all of the pictures.  This was my first finished crochet project last year.  It turned out to be HUGE!!  The girls love it and take turns wearing it around.  It’s too funny that it’s my most embarrassing project ever!  I mean the stitching is good but its just like an enormous bowl!

Then Mike and I went to my work party and when we came home… Avi decided that she wanted some snuggle time.  This is the picture of her waiting anxiously for mom to join the daily family snuggle ritual. And meet “Moosen”… the new addition to Avi’s toy collection.

now that’s a wrap.. completed

Just wanted to share the “final” product of this year’s Christmas wrapping theme… Here’s the link to the original post where I got the idea from…now that's a wrap

I think it turned out really well.  When I went to buy the “brown paper” at the craft store.. the guy asked what I was using it for and I said for Christmas wrapping.  He looked at me like I had three eyes… and said well I guess if you put some stamps on it or something.  Little did he know that it would turn out to look beautiful without much alteration!

And Avi supervised the whole time =) So… if you get a little piece of Avi hair stuck in the tape, don’t think that I didn’t clean before I began wrapping.  You’ll just know that she loves you and helped me wrap the gift!

THE holland patch

Mike recently decided to grow out his soul patch.  It’s the little patch of hair just below the bottom lip.  He has done this a few times just for fun and each time it grew in blond… so he calls it his holland patch.  Just wanted to share the documentation with you so that you believe me.

 

 

I guess there is a chance we could have a blond headed child!! who even knows!

 

 

And here is the second hat of the season I have made =)  Pretty excited to keep making a few more before the season ends.  UMM what a good looking model! He really wasn’t intentionally trying to have squinty eyes but it was late when we took the picture and he said the flash was bright =)

official sightings

 

 

of the new sous chef at Bishops Bridge Road. I was making a double batch of Chex Mix and had it all cooling on the dining room table. I had to blockade the table from my sous chef so as not to have any cross contamination. =)

 

 

 

 

 

… of snow at Bishops Bridge Road before Christmas! Ok we only ended up with less than 2” of snow but it was still pretty

Snow at Bishops Bridge VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

that’s right, there’s snow in Minnesota

Just a little good humor for the morning.  Here are some pictures from the weekend with Dad.  I flew up Friday morning starting at 5:15 a.m. and arrived around 10 a.m. with no glitches.  We stopped by the Mall of America (yes its super huge and no I didn’t buy anything) and looked around for a while and looked even longer to re-find where we had parked the car. =)  We then headed to the salon so I could get my hair cut.

The snow started falling around lunch and didn’t let up until after we went to bed.  MN already had some snow on the ground but the new snow was beautiful… light and fluffy and no good for making snowman! 

Saturday the girls, dad, jessie and I all went out and played in the fluffy snow! It was lots of fun to watch jess run after the girls down the hill and help bury the girls in the snow too.

 

silly snow shots VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

After warming up, we all went to the salon and I got some new color in my hair and then even got it straightened! (just temporarily) We had a great time. Later Saturday, Dad, Kim and I went to a party.  Then on Sunday after going to church and hearing a wonderful sermon on being ready for Christ to come back, the girls and I took some crazy pictures just for fun.

fun with the camera VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

We opened presents and I got some great things!! new flips and hair products and new warm winter socks which totally rock my world! Anyways, I had a wonderful time hanging with the family and enjoying the snow and just having a relaxing weekend.

Here’s the album in it’s entirety.

In recent news…

(pictures and blog from my weekend in MN are forthcoming)

Mike and I have been trying to work out more.  As in, get in the gym… pump some iron… try a few new things and get “beastly.”  For all you ladies out there that are thinking, “Katie! aren’t you going to bulk up and get huge??”  DON’T FREAK OUT!  It’s pretty much genetically improbably (I won’t say impossible b/c that’s not true) for ladies to get huge.  For ladies to get big big big they have to work like wicked hard and eat all kinds of crazy things to come anywhere close to looking like that –>

Now, while we have slacked a little between being in Portugal, Minnesota and Nashville (between both of us)… , we have done lots of reading in the meantime on some new exercises to be adding to our routine.

These are exercises you probably have never seen performed before in the gym… but the guys we’re getting them from know their stuff.  They approach bodies as advanced pieces of engineering. As human engineers, their primary purpose is to make each piece of "machinery" as strong as it can possibly be.  Somehow I feel like saying that with an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent… just make it seem more macho.

So without further ado… here are a few exercises you can try: (side note: if you only have time to watch one… please watch the 4th one down!! it’s the longest but will change your fitness life)

This is called the Goblet Squat.. I’m super pumped to try this!!

 

Excellent warm-up to help with mobility

OH MY! I tried this one a few weeks ago! Make sure to start with low weight =) and enjoy!

BEST MOVIE OF ALL!! Within a matter of a few times doing these exercises, I’ve notice a huge improvement! My good shoulder has become weaker and these exercises have helped a ton! I only use 3lb weights and trust me that’s plenty!

 

SUPER AWESOME AB WORKOUT! You can do this kneeling or standing but it is one of the best abs workouts of all times and no crunching! (which is terrible for your back anyways). Pull the cable out until its off the stack of plates and then maintain your balance while you press out and back. Your obliques will tell you later how much they enjoyed this one.

Check out this awesome article I ran across today: Five Moves to Make you Hate Life... but are totally worth it!

Avi the Squirrel

So!! I came home today to find a very sheepish looking dog in front of the back door.  She usually comes from her bed “pretending” to have slept there all day, so I knew something was amiss.  I looked into the living room to find two chewed through gallon sized ziplock bags.  Empty.  Upon investigation I discovered one was to 3/4 of a loaf of artesian bread I made last night…. not a crumb in sight.  The other was partially full of some tootsie roll products, some granola bars and a pop tart.  We had taken these to Portugal and I hadn’t put them away yet.     (this is a picture of the continued shame that Avi feels when we mention the incident)

I did not see any of the items from the second bag laying around…

until I looked further and found the pieces of candy and granola bars and pop tarts undamaged and squirreled away in different corners of different couches and in a towel on the stairs and even one in her bed!!!  I guess Avi got full on the loaf of bread and decided to hide the rest away for a late night snack!  What a goof! I’m sure we’ll be finding more in the next few days.

Needless to say… I think we’ll be putting her in her box tonight when we head out to church. =)

Welcome Wintertime

Happy December 1st to everyone and happy day to those in Knoxville seeing a few flurries of snow! What a way to start such a packed month.

Let me see if I can finish off the blogging on our trip to Portugal! What an amazing God we serve.  He showed us so many wonderful things, beautiful creation, tender hearts and lots of laughter! 

In between my last blog and the blog previously, here are a few things that we did.  We set up a picture scavenger hunt for the teens to do around the town.  They had to find things like a fish or an “oversized” object and get as many people in their group in the picture as possible.  Here are a few of those pictures. (reenact a scene from a movie, in a fountain, with a fish, and “hang 10”).

Online album 1…. Online album 2

Then on Thanksgiving day the whole conference group went out to the beach, taking a small ferry boat to get there.  We played “dads v. kids” soccer on the beach and had a blast! It was super pretty and loads of fun.

 

 

 

 

 

Friday took us shopping into the larger town of Faro.  The mall was already set up for Christmas.  It was lots of fun.

Saturday we took the teens into Spain to see the replicas of Christopher Columbus’ ships.  It was rainy and wet but we had a great time still.

Throughout the week, we played lots of silly games such as: see how fast you can pull all the tissues out of a Kleenex box… who can spray sour spray in their mouth the longest without giving up… mafia… and even a fun game called signs.  There was even an incident of “cake in the face.”

Here’s the link to our entire album! Enjoy

We truly had an amazing time getting the know these teens.  Often they feel like outsiders no matter where they go… never quite fitting in in the country their parents are missionaries to and never quite fitting in back in the states when they are home on furlough.  They just want to be kids.  So, this week allows them to be crazy and have lots of fun and to share struggles that they face with each other.  It’s a great time because this small group of missionary kids is the only group of people that truly understands what each other is going through.  It was awesome to hear their stories of high moments and low moments… Thank you for your support of us going on this trip!  We came away changed.  We learned about traveling internationally (you learn something every time), we learned about missions work with ABWE, we learned about how it feels to be a missionary kid, we learned how to get creative on the fly when it’s raining, we learned how to sit and enjoy hearing the stories of these teens, we learned how precious God has made each one of these teens, and most of all we learned how easy it was to fall in love with people after only knowing them for less than 1 week.  Thank you for sharing in this journey.