January 2017

Katie

I still don’t have my computer or know if they can retrieve the information for my pictures from the hard drive or not. It will apparently be another week at least. I really miss my computer and being able to load my pictures onto it.

In all the sickness and visiting and everything that was going on at Christmas there was something I forgot to mention. Our daughter, Katie, is engaged. She got her diamond on Christmas Eve and showed us at the candlelight Christmas Eve service. We are so happy for her and Ben. I would post a picture of her and Ben but can’t because I don’t have my computer. But, I have a couple of pictures of Katie from 2011 that I found and I will post those. Hopefully, she doesn’t care, as I never know if one of my girls will say — why did you put that up?

I asked Katie when they planned on getting married and she told me she had no idea. Funny thing is that she is marrying a guy whose mom has been a friend of mine for around 17 years. Katie moved out in June of 2016 after she graduated from nursing school. She moved into an apartment with one of her friends. Katie was so quiet and calm when she lived at home, and I can honestly say I don’t think I ever heard her say one angry thing to my younger kids. I have no idea how she lived here with so many kids and stayed so calm. But, she did, and they all love her to death — especially Bella.

Reading Log and Memory Lane

We are still using our mark-your-time bookmark when we read each day. Each day that we read we pull out the bookmark and push the button and it continues to log our time. Yesterday it read 10 hours and 2 minutes so far for this month – 21 days. I am a little surprised we haven’t read more but we have had a pretty busy month getting things done and putting away all the Christmas stuff. We haven’t even read today. But, we do enjoy just seeing how much we have read each day. We still have 9 more days this month so we will see how that goes.

Since my computer is in the shop and my hard drive being replaced I have no pictures really to post. Then I decided to go back through old folders that had a few pictures in them that we had used in the past. I got on Bill’s computer and found some old pictures of several of the kids and had fun looking back. So, I am posting a few of them. They are from 2007 and as I look at them I kind of miss my girls being so small.

The first one is of Caroline and Katie on the merry-go-round at Kings Dominion. Caroline was around 6 years old and Katie was 13.

I’m not sure why, but I have always loved this next picture of Sarah raking in our front yard. She was around 8 years old. How I miss her being so little.

Next is Abigail having a tea party when she was 10 years old. She used to love to have tea parties with her dolls and the other kids.

And the last two are of Megan. Megan is a resident in Georgia and she is an Internist. She graduates from her residency program in August of this year. She has always worked so hard at everything she does. It has been a long hard road, but she is just about done. In these pictures she was in Ukraine working in an orphanage. We adoped Caroline from Ukraine in 2001. One of the families that we traveled with started a special needs program there to help kids that were not adopted and families with special needs children. Megan traveled with them every year to help in the orphanages or to teach Bible School or whatever they needed her to do. She was sad when she joined the army — to help pay for medical school — and they would not allow her to travel to Ukraine to help in the summer. But, knowing my daughter, she will travel there again one day to help with a medical team. She is just that kind of person – always wanting to help.

Not having my computer and pictures has sent me down memory lane looking at the really old photos we have of our kids and I have actually enjoyed it this evening. Maybe I will look at more tomorrow.