Sunday, February 17, 2008

The week in review

So the weeks come and the weeks go. This post we will start with Sunday (today) and work backwards. Today was one of those wonderful Sunday's with nothing to do. We went to church and listened to a sermon about persecution Matthew 5:10-12 it was part of the "Things I wish Jesus never said" series. It was a good reminder for all of us to remember the need to pray for our Brothers and Sisters in Christ. Then during Sunday school we got to hang out with the 2's & 3 year olds. It was so fun. Kids are so loving and friendly at this age. Lydia and Abigail also enjoyed having mommy and daddy in Sunday school with them :-) We came home ate leftovers and then took a nap. (I love naps!) When we finally woke up at 4 we talked on the phone with family members and watched a movie while eating popcorn. Over all it has been a great lazy Sunday day.

Saturday Glenn worked an 8 hour shift at the hosptial while Sonja and the kids acted like it was Friday and did a little home school with the kids. (Sonja's face book information stated "Sonja is pretending it is Friday because she pretended yesterday was Saturday... gotta love homeschooling:)") During the afternoon Sonja made bread and cheese fondue for our planned party in the evening. At six our baby sitter Jenn (a friend from our Houghton days) came to watch our kids so we could go to Brian and Kristina's house to get together with some of our community group for a dress up at home date of shish-ka-bobs, cheese fondue, and fixings. We then went out to Phillipes European (a semi-formal restaurant known for their great desserts). It was really busy though so we ended up getting our desserts to go and went back to the Lishawas' to have some coffee and cake. Over all it was a great evening and when we get pictures for Melissa we will post them or link to them here.

Friday Glenn was off and had the pleasure of returning a favour to Sonja's brother Russ and his wife Camy by taking them to the airport in Buffalo. (one favour returned 9,999 to go :-) On the return trip Glenn talked to Sonja the whole way back it was nice and one of our longer uniterrupted conversations in some time so Sonja enjoyed it as well. Sonja also acted like it was Saturday on the homeschooling front and didn't do any. That afternoon Sonja went to the mall by herself (first time in who knows how many years). She was able to find quite a few bargains and made Glenn glad that she doesn't go shopping by herself very often (just kidding :-)

Thursday Glenn very intelligently self scheduled himself to work a 12 hour shift on Valentine's Day. So...Sonja already talked about her day below but here are some pictures from the museum of play showing the kids with their tattoos. Sonja and the kids also made sugar cookies and delivered them to our neighbors here in the apartment. She then fed the kids a hot dog dinner which they loved and then had a candle light dinner of fajita's with Glenn. It was a great end to a long day and Glenn is very blessed to have the best Valentine in the world.

Wednesday Sonja says the highlight of the day was a quick trip to the Library to return a video and then sitting out on South Ave. watching Frontier guys go down into man holes. We also started Financial Peace University at church tonight instead of our normal community group. It is what it sounds like a program on helping people control their money instead of the other way around. All of our community group decided to do it and we went along but as one of the group members said, "I kind of felt bad dragging you all into it, but now I don't because if you don't get anything out of it, it is your fault". I think it is going to be really good for us.

Tuesday Sonja and the kids went to Tinker nature center to get together with a 0-5 homeschool play group. There they were given a guided tour and learned about and saw animal homes. The fox den was neat as well as the owl boxes. They had a great time and some day will get Glenn to come along with them. Glenn worked a 12 hour day.

Monday Even though it was was Glenn's day off he got called in to work four hours as a one on one. It was a normal day of homeschool for Sonja and the kids and then we all took Sunday afternoon naps on a Monday (it was nice.)

Well that was our week in reverse. It was a fun week hanging out with our friends and a normal week of work and School.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Happy Holiday :)

This morning Lydia came up to me looking all sweet and said, "Happy Holiday Momma. Today is a Holiday." It was so cute. I think that someone must have told her last night at AWANA that Valentine's day is a holiday so she wanted to say Happy Holiday instead of Happy Valentine's Day.

Another cute thing heard around here often is from Abigail. She loves to count!! One, two, free, six, nine. I am hoping that my older ones will learn to count by threes from her. I always continue on her count 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30...

Well, we have made heart sugar cookies, done a math test, had a few fights, read a few books and now we are off to the Museum of Play for the Valentine's Day Party. Hope your Valentine's Day is great!

Saturday, February 02, 2008

A busy week

This has been a busy week in the Maas household. I guess I will start with last Saturday when Glenn was working and the kids and I went to the market. I love having a farmer's market that runs year round even when it is FREEZING outside. We all had on our snow pants because we wanted to stay warm! (We should have put on a double layer of socks as well as we all got home with cold feet. Anyway, there is one stand at the market that we like to buy from and they are only there on Saturdays. To help us move faster I had Abigail in the backpack and Lydia in the umbrella stroller and Caleb, Hannah & I walked. We bought a 50 pound bag of potatoes. It is the 3rd one we have bought since we moved here. I guess we are going through lots of potatoes. We also bought 30 pounds of onions from them - small, sweet and purple. YUM! We will be eating well! We also needed fruit so we bought a huge bag of Crispin apples and a half that size container of Golden Delicious. They are very tasty. We also needed peppers but we were running low on the cash that I had set aside for the market so only bought 6. Of course on every market trip you have to buy a box of Tastykakes because they are only 50 cents so we got chocolate cupcakes with cream filling.

On Sunday after church we had most our community group over for chili which was fun. It was the first time we had really entertained more than one or two people at our house. We actually had to put the leaf in our table for the first time. The leaf is in so much better condition than the rest of the table I can tell it was not used very often by the people who had it before either!

On Monday the kids and I went to Strong Museum of Play for their Monday Kicks program introducing the new Elmo's World exhibit. There were special activities going on around the museum and we really enjoyed the girl that was there doing music and movement. We also ran into the VanHeukulems and the kids had a blast trying to get Riley to play everything with them.

On Tuesday we went to Hansen Nature Center for a 0-5ish homeschooling playgroup. The kids had fun playing with other kids even though the other kids were all 3 or under. We looked at the exhibits and took a walk and played on the playground.

Wednesday we took a walk to the library to return our books and visited Glenn at the hospital during his break.

Alright... I started this on Saturday and now it is Wednesday again... this busy week that I wrote about was last week. This week we have decided to mostly stay home besides the normal - visit the library, AWANA, etc. Glenn has his interview at U of R tomorrow so that is central on our minds. Glenn is off on Friday so if we have a good handle on school stuff and Glenn isn't too drained from his 8:15-4:30 interview day we are going to check out the Rochester Museum and Science Center.