A BIG decision

One of the most important decisions you make in life is to follow Jesus and put all your trust in Him and ask Him to live in your heart.  And as a parent you are daily in prayer for your children to make this decision and fully understand the decision they make.  For the past year or so, Brody has been asking questions about asking Jesus in his heart.  Jason would ask questions back to help him get his mind working and thinking.  We just wanted to make sure he completely understood the decision he was making and it wasn't something he did just because it was the thing to do.  However, I know sometimes we as adults make the decision more difficult than it really is, but we just want to make sure our little ones really understand.

On Sunday evening, August 11 after our crazy church fellowship, we put the kids in bed and about 5 minutes later out walks Brody.  Usually when he comes out he has something crazy to say just to stay up.  However this night he says "I just asked Jesus in my heart" and Jason and I look at each other with a look of "what did he just say? and what do we do now?".  Here it was late on a school night, but Jason called him over anyway to talk through what he had just done.  Jason asked him lots of questions to make sure he understood the decision he was making.  He had the right answer for everything so we felt he was ready.

It was one of the sweetest sights to see and hear Jason lead Brody through the sinner's prayer.  I was so proud.

He was so excited after saying the prayer.  His excitement made me realize how if we have been Christians for a long time we sometimes may lose that excitement of a new Christian.  I was quite convicted.  His first call was to Nini and Papa and of course they were so excited for him.

Now, Brody isn't the most outgoing of children so we really thought him having to go down in "big" church to tell the preacher the decision he had made was going to be an issue.  However, he was so excited to go down and couldn't wait until the next Sunday and he even thought he could tell him at Wednesday night church.

We as parents are so proud of him and this wonderful decision he has made.  My prayer now is that he will always stay this excited about being a Christian and he will have courage to tell his friends and family about his decision.

A different type of church fellowship

Sunday evening, August 11 our church had a church wide fellowship.  Jason and I originally thought it was just like any normal fellowship we would have - food and chatting.  Well, we were wrong.  There were 4 teams of 15 people which had to include senior citizens and 2 young kids under 6.  Well, Trevor and Brody were asked to be on a team along with my mom.

The Pesata team

I thought Jason and I would just be spectators until that Sunday morning when John recruited us for his team.

There was a great crowd at the fellowship which was organized chaos.

Jason and I really had no idea what was going on.  As we split into our 4 teams, we decided who was going to do what relays and we quickly realized that John had not recruited 2 little ones so we grabbed Tyler and Tucker

The relays were

Blowing ping pong balls out of a bowl of flour - glad this wasn't my relay

Bob for apples - I really didn't think Brody would do this and that he would freak out but he totally proved me wrong.  He grabbed 2 apples in no time at all.  So proud of him

Egg toss - this was my relay.  I sure am glad I didn't drop them.  We really had no clue what we were supposed to do or how except toss the eggs back and forth and hope they don't break.

Burrito roll - Use 8 people and they lay down and continue 1 at a time to get up and move to the end of the line until you get to the finish line.  Jason and Tyler participated in this

8 person pyramid - check out Tucker on the top

The last relay was to eat an apple pie.  I think you had to use 5 people to finish the pie.

Damon doesn't need a fork

When the fork doesn't work, just go right in

We were so close to finishing 1st.  Brody and Trevor's( he freaked out with all of the noise and wanted nothing to do with it) team won even though we found out they didn't use everyone on their team.  Oh well it's all for fun and we definitely had fun.

 After the relays, they had places for the kids to enjoy a few crafts - finger painting, molding clay, etc.  Trevor loved the finger painting and thankfully it was washable.

Trevor and Leah.  I was shocked that Trevor wasn't all into like Leah

But give him a few minutes and he was.

A picture of beauty.

Corn hole time

It was such a fun night and a great way to end out the summer as well as get us all ready for our upcoming Global Impact Celebration

Riding for ice cream

We decided to go over to Stephanie and Adam's for a little bike ride after working on our pantry all day.  The boys were pretty excited to be taking our bikes somewhere and then super duper excited when they found out we were riding to get ice cream.  How cool is that?

Stephanie recently bought a new bike so Jason had to try it out.  Doesn't he look cute with the pink basket?

While the kids were playing on the playground, Adam thought he was riding a BMX or something instead of his beach cruiser.  As he was trying to fly across the grass his chain came loose.  I guess that wasn't enough because about 30 minutes later he came flying up the street and slammed on his brakes to skid his bike and his tire busted.  Oh yeah, it was a good laugh.  It might be time for him to get a new bike.

The start of my new pantry

One of the main reasons for all of this remodeling / renovation is so we I can have a bigger pantry.  We turned our old laundry room into a pantry.  I couldn't wait to start this project.  Our current pantry was SOOOOO small so when I tried to buy things on sale they were overflowing and the walk in closet in the office quickly became a second pantry.

The old laundry room

Jason decided to build the pantry himself instead of just buying wire racks and doing it - I DISLIKE wire racks!!

My first job was to paint the pantry.  You would think this would be pretty easy, well it wasn't.  You see 12 years ago when we built the house I decided to paint the laundry room with a sandpaper paint.  I loved it, however, my dad told me that he would NOT help me repaint that when it came time to do so. Well the time came to repaint so it was all me.

The walls had to be sanded so talk about a mess.  Don't you like the towel around my neck - that was my mask.  I looked like an old person with my grey hair from all of the dust.

That dust was everywhere!!  Pictures don't really show it, but I was one dirty girl.

Once sanded, I started painting the trim.  Since we have gone with a grey scheme in the house, I chose a light grey for the pantry and it's very neutral.

It's hard to see in this picture, but I ended up repainting all of the "white" trim in the pantry ie baseboards, door trim etc.  After 12 years, the florescent light turned it all a shade of yellow, so it was in desperate need of a crisp white coat of paint, but not before the white trim was sanded because oil based paint was originally used.  Yuck more sanding.

We I read so many blogs and looked at so many pantry pictures before we finally came up with how we wanted our final product to look.  I was so excited to go get all of the wood - which meant A LOT of painting for me one day.

3 sides of 16 pieces of 2x2's had to be painted.  I put one coat on them and realized that I should have sanded for a better look.  I gave in and sanded away and put on another coat of the Silver Lake paint.  

 The pantry all painted and cleaned out ready for my shelves.  My sweet husband measuring for the shelves.  I only had one plan change in the middle - but it wasn't a big deal - thank goodness.

While he measured, I started putting my baskets together.  This was a purchase from my last girls' trip to Orlando with a stop by IKEA.  I bought 2 of these and they are going to be perfect for snacks, bread, miscellaneous stuff, etc.

Remember all of those 2x2's I painted, here's the first one up.  They will be used as the brace for the shelves.

All of the braces up by the end of the Saturday.

After much research and debate, we decided to use melamine for the shelves.  I didn't want to have to prime and paint plywood - even though it may be sturdier.  The melamine would withstand cans and such going on them without scratching.  At the end of Saturday, my hubby wanted to at least put one shelf in to see what it was going to look like.

I was so excited to see the progress of the pantry.  All in a day's work.

A busy Friday

Friday, August 9 we had a home preseason Jaguar game, but our first stop was for Trevor to have a Meet and Greet with his new teacher for VPK - Ms. Cicero and Ms Hodges.  He was so excited to go check out his new school.

We found out that the "Three Amigos" are in the same class this year.  This would be Trevor, Nate and Foster.  These 3 are in the same Sunday School class and there really hasn't been too many others with them so they get into all kinds of trouble and really up to no good.  Needless to say the Sunday School teachers always have funny stories to tell us.

We saw that all 3 of them were at the same table - oh my!!  I wonder how long that will last?

Once we left there, all 4 of us were off to the Jags game.  We still only have 2 tickets but Christi and Mike who sit behind wasn't using theirs so our boys used them for this game.  They were both pretty excited to go to the game until about 15 minutes into the game.  They then were begging for food.  This proves they aren't quite ready to go to the games.

They were pretty excited that Ava was there.  The three of them chatted and ate roasted peanuts through the entire game.  It wasn't that exciting of a game but of course we stayed until the very bitter end AND we lost!!  The kids were so tired as we walked back to the car, but I'm pretty sure they had a blast.