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.

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!

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.

Play and Why?

This week our Burb went in to get fixed after our little fender bender. Last report was that it was going to cost over $2K to get it fixed – thank God for insurance!! Glenn had Thursday and Friday off and the Burb had to go in on Thursday morning we were kind of stranded at home. The rental car seats 5 not very comfortably… but doesn’t sit 5 when 3 of them need car seats. We decided to go to the Museum of Play on Friday anyway… it is only about a mile and a half from our house so Caleb and I walked and Glenn took the girls in the rental car. It was a bit of a chilly walk as it was not supposed to get up to 30 yesterday but it wasn’t bad. It was fun to look in the windows at a slower pace up through South Wedge. There was a new visiting exhibit at the museum “Grossology.” It was pretty gross but the kids particularly liked the life size operation game and the big faucet nose guy. Here are some of our pictures. We'll get more next time we go and add them.

In other news Abigail has reached the “Why?” stage. She is always asking us “why?” at all times. It is funny. She is becoming so clear in her words! I am sure that not everyone would understand her but I am also sure that none of our other kids spoke this clear at this age! Her most famous saying lately has been “Member dat?” Usually I am not sure what she is talking about when she asks me if I remember that but it is so cute! “Member dat Mommy?” The age of the questions has begun…

A Wrecking Good Time

So we had some excitement last week in that we were in an auto accident. We are fine as are the people in the other vehicle. Even though we were driving the "fortress of protection" according to the Monroe county sheriff's deputy our vehicle sustained more damage. The front end is a little messed up (see pictures below) and went into the shop today for who knows how long (ps we were not at fault and hopefully will get our deductable back from the other insurance company eventually). Our insurance provided rental vehicle is a Nissan Versa (actually in this color). Which though cute and somewhat fun to drive only seats 5. So.... We are hoping to have a Sonja and at least one kid catch a ride with our friend Kristina for church this coming Sunday and not have to go anywhere too much other than that :-). Other than that we are doing well. Sonja is keeping busy with the kids doing homeschool with the older two and trying to keep the younger two entertained. On the church/community group front we have been listening to two of 10 sermons titled Things I wish Jesus had never said. They have been interesting and good and convicting. For community group we got together last night and watched the kids in Nursery as it was our week. We had fun hanging out as a group playing with little kids and trying to keep them from destroying themselves, each other and objects in the room, it was a blast. Abigail really liked it as she had mommy and daddy to hang out with during Awana. That about sums up the highlights of our last two weeks. Until next time enjoy these pictures of the kids playing rope the teddy bear.

Some pictures

So as promised here is a little more text and some pictures and a link to more pictures. One of the activities that we did when Grandma and Grandpa Maas were here was to go to Strong Museum of Play. It was a fun time and we have some pictures to prove it. So it won't let me load a picture so you will just have to look at the link.

Here are some more pictures, some of them may be duplicates, also included are Abigail's birthday pictures.

A New Year (Resolution)

So it is the 6th day of the New Year and we haven't written a new blog since November :-(
We have been doing well. Went through a bout of sickness both respiratory and also gastric-intestinal but at the moment we are doing well (Other than Abigail has been tripping over everything today and has a big bump on her cheek) We were able to have Steve and Debbie Maas (Glenn's parents) for Christmas which was a lot of fun. The kids loved having Grandma and Grandpa Maas here and I am pretty sure Mom and Dad enjoyed being here with us and their grandkids. So it has gotten late and I should go to bed. I am off tomorrow so will try to upload some pictures from the Holidays and write a little more. The goal is to update this blog at least once a week. So we will see how it goes and if not well you can all feel free to email me comments about the blog not being updated :-) Until next time.