What I'm making today

Homemade refried beans! Yum! Rylie has been obsessed with bean and cheese enchiladas lately so I'm making her the beans for them. This recipe makes plenty of beans so I can also make up some bean burrittos and throw them in the freezer for easy lunches. I can also just freeze the leftover beans to use in a myriad of ways. Here's the recipe that I'm using (thanks Michelle!).

Fireworks!

Something to bookmark

We now have a web site for our Church Plant! Right now it is under construction, but you can bookmark it because very soon it will be awesome! We're also on twitter if you want to follow us there. And, for those of you who hadn't heard yet, we have a name: Redemption Bible Church! Exciting times!

How can this little baby be done with Kindergarten already?! I'm not ready for her to be a first grader! Proud of her though!

Proud of my Aunt

Newberg Fire Department Dedicates Water Rescue Boat to long time volunteer Rescue Diver Jill Dorrell

NFD personnel recently completed a long and arduous process of refubishing an old Yamhill County water rescue boat. This “new to NFD” boat replaces an old boat that has served it’s purpose for many years but never had the water speed to get where the team needed to be when time was of the essense. At the 2011 Newberg Boat Races on the Willamette river this past weekend the NFD Water Rescue Team surprised long time member Jill Dorrell by dedicating and naming the boat the after her. Congradulations Jill!

Jill Dorrell with teammates Joe Tarmichael (left) and Lieutenant Lawrence Dickenson (right) standing on their new

water rescue boat that has been named the “Jill Dorrell.”

Authors note: This is yet another example of how City of Newberg employees work and volunteer to save money, keep costs down and provide great service.

All I Have Is Christ

Church Planting

This is a panel discussion (from the Plant! conference we attended in Philly). CJ Mahaney, Darren Patrick, Mark Dever, Jeff Purswell, and Dave Harvey. Incredible group of Church Planters, Pastors, authors, speakers. They were a great source of wisdom and encouragement to me. But my favorite Church Planter of all is this handsome guy!

Matching Easter Dresses

My Beautiful Kindergartener!

Coloring Easter Eggs

Over Easter, we house sat for our good friends, the Drollingers. We loved being in their beautiful house and getting a taste of living in Bonney Lake (where the Church Plant is). We are hoping to eventually move to Bonney Lake ourselves (right now we are about 40 min away). We are trusting the Lord that He can work out the details of that (selling our house/renting/whatever). We had a discouraging meeting with our Realator last week because of the market being upside down. But, we know that God is in control and that He has called us to Bonney Lake. We are going to keep trying to get our house ready and packing things up and waiting to see what exciting thing God has planned! We would love your prayers for this whole situation as well!
Anyway, here are a few pictures of us coloring our Easter eggs. This year was the most fun because the girls were old enough to really get into it (and they were old enough to not make a huge mess with it). Ryan showed Rylie how to make stripes in her egg and Anna had a lot of opinions about which colors her eggs should be. It was a great time together as a family!

Aargh!

Hospitality and Small Children

I read a great blog post about this topic this morning. It can be a very challenging thing to try to have hospitality while your children are young. Read this post and get some inspiration!

May Church Plant Newsletter

Read it here!

On my Book Wish List

-The Well Trained Mind : Two veteran home educators outline the classical pattern of education—the trivium—which organizes learning around the maturing capacity of the child's mind.

-The Core; Teaching your child the foundations of classical education: there are core areas of knowledge that are essential to master. Without knowing the multiplication tables, children can’t advance to algebra. Without mastery of grammar, students will have difficulty expressing themselves. Without these essential building blocks of knowledge, students may remember information but they will never possess a broad and deep understanding of how the world works.

-The Story of the World (4 Volumes): The Story of the World covers the sweep of human history from ancient times until the present. Africa, China, Europe, the Americas—find out what happened all around the world in long-ago times. Designed as a read-aloud project for parents and children to share together, The Story of the World includes each continent and major people group.

-Freedoms Stand: This is the sequal to Veiled Freedom, by Jeanette Windle. She is an engaging author of fiction, and her parent's are part of our church! I just finished Veiled Freedom and I'm eager to get my hands on this sequal. It is available for preorder on Amazon, it will be released June 1.


I'm sure I can think of about a billion more books that I want to read, but I've probably bored you enough as it is. What books are on your wish list?

True Woman | Praying for . . . Me

True Woman | Praying for . . . Me

Nancy’s Personal Petitions

• Guard my heart. Make and keep it pure. Protect me from the schemes and attacks of the Evil One.
• Fill me with Your love. Help me to love You with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. Make me compassionate and sensitive to the needs of others around me.
• Fill me with Your Spirit. May I be emptied of myself and filled with Jesus. Anoint my life and ministry with supernatural power.
• Clothe me in humility. May I be poor in spirit. May I esteem all others as better than myself. May I not seek to impress others, but only to please You.
• Make me a servant. Help me to serve You with gladness; to render each act of service as unto Christ; to joyously accept even “menial” or “unfulfilling” responsibilities.
• Guard my tongue. May I speak only words that are true, words that help and heal, words that are wise and kind.
• Give me wisdom and discernment. Help me to see all of life from Your point of view. May my life be ruled by the wisdom of Your Word.
• Give me a grateful spirit. Help me to give thanks in everything. Help me to acknowledge and express the benefits and blessings that I have received from You and others. Protect me from a discontented heart and a murmuring tongue.
• Help me to walk by faith and not by sight. May my life show the world how great You are. May I be willing to step out in faith when I cannot see the outcome, and may my life not be explainable in human terms.
• Teach me the fear of the Lord. Help me to practice the conscious, constant awareness of Your presence. Help me to live my life in light of the final judgment and as one who will give account to You.
  

This is from Nancy Deigh LeMoss, click the link at the top to read the full article. I thought it was a great list to remember what things to pray for for ourselves so that God would be glorified in our lives. It's also a great list of things to pray for other people. I definetly need work on my prayer life, and lists like this help me. Hopefully it encourages you today too!

Easter Sunrise Service

Here is a link to the newspaper account of the Easter Sunrise Service that Ryan preached at last Sunday!

Great Recipe Blog

I am on a journey to feeding my family better foods and one of the people helping me along that journey, is my friend, Michelle and her great recipe blog! I've had the pleasure of eating several of her meals and they are great. Go visit her blog and get a new recipe or two!

I love this girl!

Had lots of blogging ideas/pictures lately but little time. Will be blogging again soon.

April Church Plant Newsletter

Check out our newest Church Plant Prayer Newsletter here!

Where I've been the last week:

Littlest Pet Shop Birthday Party (warning, lot's of pictures!)

We had a Littlest Pet Shop Birthday party for Rylie and Anna. Their birthdays are only six days apart (just shy of three years apart), we combined their parties. They were a little unsure at first if they wanted to combine them, but they ended up having a wonderful time!
I thought I would post some of the details of the party because when I was searching around for Littlest Pet Shop party ideas, there wasn't a whole lot. Maybe this can give someone else some ideas. There was a lot more we could have done with it, but due to limited time and limited budget, this is what we came up with.
We used LPS houses/buildings as centerpieces for each table with some of the LPS characters in them. The kids loved playing with them and it was super easy decorating. I also printed off some LPS wallpaper (turned out a little pixely but was ok) and framed it in frames from the Dollar Tree and placed those around the food tables. I also printed off some small LPS pictures and cut them out and attached them to toothpicks and put them in all the food (I also did this with some generic birthday printables I had found online). Since we were on a budget, we just went with Dollar Tree plates, cups, etc.
We tried to keep with a pet theme for the food. We had cheese for the mouse food, tuna sandwiches and fishy crackers for the kitties, hot dogs and dog bone cookies for the puppies, gummy worms for the birds.
Instead of games, we had 4 stations set up. There was a coloring station with LPS coloring pages (several free sites online), a make your own collar station (I just cut strips of paper and gave them a variety of stickers, I was surprised how many of the boys really loved this), a make your own dog station (out of paper, I found a pattern online), and an animal hospital station (I brought a bunch of the girls stuffed animals and their doctor toys). At each station they got a stamp on their hands, when they had visited each station they got to go to the prize table and pick a prize. I had lucked out right after Halloween, Walmart had a bin of party favors that were on clearance for super cheap!
The best part of the party though was Anna and Rylie's cousins had driven up from California and surprised us all! We were so happy to see them! Rylie said that it was the best birthday ever!

Rylie's 6th Birthday!

On Rylie's Birthday she chose to go to Chuck E. Cheese's for lunch. After her traditional breakfast cupcake that is.
When we were done playing, her and Daddy had a date at the movie theater and at Krispy Kreme. She said it was the "best Birthday ever"!

Anna's 3rd Birthday

The day before Anna's Birthday, we had a fun family day. Anna chose Red Robin for lunch (she hid her head when they sang to her though), and then we went to the Jump Zone at the Mall.
The next day, on her actual Birthday, we had a family lunch. She asked for waffles, bacon, and cupcakes for lunch, so that's what we had.
I still can't believe my baby is three!