Sunday, December 18, 2011

I Love to Cook


A phone call came yesterday asking me to make communion bread for our church, Hope church of Christ. It is quite a treat that we have homemade communion bread each week. I would like to share the recipe and encourage you to make it sometime. It is nice to have communion with the family while they are in town for Christmas! It is a great recipe that even young bakers can make.

Communion Bread
2 cups of wheat flour
1/3 cup of brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Mix and then add the liquid
1/3 cup oil
2/3 cup water

Roll out and cook for 20 minutes on 350. Serve when you are ready. I cut mine in quarters because we use four trays!

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Thanksgiving ~Christmas


The celebrating time came and the details had come together. I want to give a shout out to Alison and Justin-- Alison is the planner of all planners. She loves to have people in their home, and to prepare for all of the children. There were a total of 24 adults and 18 children!! Everyone had a chair and LOTS of choices of food. Justin cleaned windows, set up tables, prepared the yard and helped in EVERY way Alison asked!! Notice the children's table!! The table had brown paper on it and there were crayons for the children to draw, there was popcorn, candy and marshmallows, and fruit on skewers on each of the tables. We all took leftovers home!!

We got to help Alison create these little "Mayflower" boats for each child with their name on the sail!


Chelsey and Lindsey from TAMU (interns) and Kami

One of the families made a trophy and organized a washers tournament complete with a tournament seeding, with a poster. The washers tournament brought lots of cheers! John Mark is trying his best!

Wes and Stacey Yoakum won!! Notice the trophy - it may have to be passed on year after year!!


There was a salad bar put together by the four interns with everything you can imagine.

The children had a trampoline in the front and a joy jump castle in the back yard and at some point in the evening there was the showing of the Polar Express. Corban, Kellen, and Kase - the Joy Jump Castle was enjoyed by all!!

Tara and Kase, Sarah, and Stephanie - even with all of the people we had plenty of room!


START THE CHRISTMAS MUSIC!

We decided we would not wrap presents but we would have door 1 and door 2 - we put sheets over 4 chairs. Daniel and I would put a gift behind the sheet and call someone to lift up the sheet and get their gift. It was a fun time! "Christmas Morning" - really the day after Thanksgiving began with donuts!!


Excuse the bulk of pictures of Corban -- but if I only had a video! Before opening presents we talked about our anticipation of the gifts and how that was the excitement we wanted to grow when we thought about Jesus coming. We decided to get into the excitement about Jesus with a song. "Give me a J - J, Give me an E- E, Give me an U-U......what does that spell?? Jesus!! Well, Corban became the most animated ever, moving to the tune! Great laughter came from all of us and as you can see Cailyn stood waiting for the part where she would say JESUS!! (that was her part, not the dancing as Corban proceeded to do) There was definitely JOY by ALL!! Do you see Door 1 and Door 2 in the background??



Down on the floor - lifting his leg!! So funny!! Can he express himself any louder!!


Peaking under the door to grab a present!! We may have to make this a tradition!


Thursday, December 1, 2011

JOY~JOY~JOY

We enjoyed more than two weeks in Lima and just returned home today, Wednesday, Nov 30. I would like to give you a glance at how most of our days were spent in Lima. Alison and Justin gave us their bed and they slept in Cailyn's room. Her room is very big and even with her trundle bed there is room for an extra mattress. So we slept in comfort and enjoyed our own space. On the first morning Corban and Cailyn headed to our bed and we read and talked!!


Cailyn has to be at school by 9:00am. She wears a uniform which makes for a simple dressing time. Breakfast time before Cailyn is off to school.

While she is at school, Corban enjoys us reading and playing with puzzles, stacking blocks and playing with all of the animals that he has. One of the new animals we learned about was the Ibis!!! He is just getting into dinosaurs and so we enjoyed pretending with all of sounds they make. The door to the back yard is a sliding glass door and Corban is ready for it to be unlocked as soon as breakfast is over. Out he goes to kick balls and find snails....we brought a magnifying glass and he loves to check out all of the snails and leaves in the backyard. The boy can really kick the ball and he is always ready for a ride on the tricycle or walk to the park (he calls his adventures)!!


Cailyn gets out of school around 12:30 except on Wednesday and that is because she has ballet. We went early to pick her up and looked at the ballet class practicing through the window. She will have a ballet performance the day after we leave. Pictures will have to do!! The little girls at her school have their hair always fixed with hair twisted and then in rubber bands. Alison enjoys fixing Cailyn's hair, but Cailyn is very good at fixing it herself. On the first Sunday night as we went to meet with the community of believers here we noticed she had fixed three ponytails and had some hair hanging down also...made us think of some others in our lives who are free spirited with their taste in fashion. She is also very good at dressing herself. She wears leggings under most of her outfits and so she has one of every color. When she matches it all up we are always surprised to see her outfits!! I remember Alison wanting to pick out her outfits at four years old.

Corban is quite the charmer. He loves to smile and move around with lots of activity. Some of his favorite question are "what was that sound?" or "what does that mean?" There are workers everywhere you look - shoeshiners, workers in the parks raking leaves, workers cutting trees, workers cleaning windows, workers helping you get a parking place when getting into the grocery store or coffee shops, workers sweeping in front of residents and watering the yards. Corban notices each one and is constantly saying, "he working". He is able to say everything he wants to in English and Spanish. He talks constantly.



When Corban wakes up there is time to play in the backyard - we talked about some of Jesus' followers being fisherman and we pretended to go fishing. We also had a grand game of kickball. Cailyn is very celebratory when she wins!!




Each evening as the children went to bed the four of us played Settlers of Catan, speed Scrabble, and talked about their lives in Lima, the ministry of teaching about Jesus and enjoying outings with girls and guys groups.

Lee Fletcher and Wes Yoakum getting ready for Catan.


The girls (alison, angela, cathie, tara, stacey, and kami) gathered for a time of meditation and praying. This is a new monthly activity lead by a friend,who is in Lima with her children and husband (he is the director of Feed the Hungry in Lima, Angela and Ryan Smedes.