Faith In Motion

Today she turned one.

It has been one whole year since I first touched those long little fingers. I remember studying her fingers in the hospital. All of them wrapped tightly around my giant pinky finger, and kissing their sweet tiny-ness all over. And now, I could pick those puffy appendages among dozens with a blindfold on. I KNOW them...

The way they scratch the sheets like a cat preparing to settle in. How they strum invisible guitars and harps as she goes toodling about her day. Her fingers have never stopped exploring her world, even in the early stages of sleep. Tears would come to my sleepy eyes at 3:00AM as she nursed and dug her nails into all of the tummy rolls she could find. How I know that no amount of sanding or clipping can dull the tactile sensitive razors at the tips of her fingers. How her fingers could dance as she experimented with airy hellos and goodbyes. And those are just her fingers...

I could go on for hours and hours about each and every piece and part of Faith. I KNOW her. She knows me. And at this precious age of one, she can now return my love with her own lean in hugs, and her own wet droolly kisses. She's been the most challenging motor on wheels to raise in the first year, but I wouldn't change a second of it. There were few times of second guessing or worrying over this and that. I've had time to enjoy Faith through the eyes of a more experienced and relaxed mother.

My baby girl is now a blur of activity that the shutter on my camera cannot match.

And yet, every once and a while, if I keep the camera clicking, I catch her face. An impish grin caught in the frame that says, "I'll always be one step ahead of you. But don't ever stop trying to catch me Mom."

I won't sweetheart. How I love you.

An Online Math Resource Goldmine

I've been looking for online math resources for over a year. Some of them were OK, but this one deserves many accolades!

eNLVM is an OUTSTANDING and FREE online resource put on by Utah State University. Really, this will blow your mind. You can create your own classes and lesson plans, using virtual manipulatives and games. No ads. No pop ups. And excellent quality lessons. Give this one a shot, and you will not be disappointed. Kudos to eNLVM for making this available for FREE!

Other math resources we have found valuable and entertaining include:

APlusMath.com We've been using their worksheets for counting money, and it has worked really well.

Homeschoolmath.net Another excellent site for online worksheets.

The kids have been doing online math games during our school time using PlayKidsGames.com

Another site is Mathsisfun.com. We've used this for printing out worksheets on 3-D shapes we can cut, fold and glue.

Christmas Day 2006 - The Letter

I better finish up retelling our 2006 Christmas before the next one rolls around!

Christmas Day, was different. Very different. In fact, Ken and I weren't sure what to expect from the kids when they took a peek in the early morning hours under the tree. Both of Ken's sisters and families would not be arriving until the afternoon. Upon their arrival, Santa (Grandpa in full attire) would show up at the door a bit turned around after just returning from Germany. The problem was, in order to make it work, our children would wake up on Christmas morning with nothing under the tree. NOTHING.

Our hearts were torn as we both thought about how the children might feel in the morning, after days and days of counting down...

To soften the blow, after the kids had turned in for the night, Ken composed a letter written by Santa, informing the children that he would be returning that day to visit them in person. The letter was laid by the munched on cookies and carrots in hopes of being found.

In the morning, the children visited our room first, and after giving them the OK to have them peek under the tree, we huddled in our bed waiting for the children's reactions. We could here Jack and Grace whispering excitedly to themselves, and then there was silence. After a moment, they checked the plate to confirm if Santa ever arrived, and then to our relief there was great excitement as the children sped up the stairs announcing there was a note!

All in all, the children took it very well. And they were extremely patient as the day passed along. Here is Grace showing Grandpa "The Letter".


Grandma had the perfect idea of passing the time by baking a cake for baby Jesus. This we all throughly enjoyed over the next few days. And it smelled wonderful on Christmas day!

I have to say, it certainly was nice to be showered and dressed for once before all of the candid Christmas picture taking.

Staging Christmas

While we were in Colorado, there was a sub-plot simmering just below the Christmas hub-bub. Before vacation, Ken decided that it would be really fun to build rockets together with extended family circles and then to have a grand launch date on open acreage. His idea turned out to be fantastic. Every family had up to three rockets they spent time constructing, painting and detailing over the course of the vacation. A LOT of work went into each piece, with some rockets requiring multiple stages and high skill levels. It was difficult to tell who was more excited about the rockets...the children or the grown men.


Ken and Grandpa probably spent the most time together on this project. At times, trying to make heads and tails out of some of the very cryptic instructions. Perhaps the most challenging was Grandpa's rocket that was quite large. There were a couple of times when the room erupted in laughter over glued mistakes and short cuts gone bad.


The launch involved the entire extended family with successful launches for all but poor Grandpa's rocket. How I wish we would have had a video running! The big black two footer struggled its hardest to handle its own weight, losing to gravity after 40 feet and hitting the snow nose first. For added emphasis, the booster then decided to pop off in delayed fashion, which had us all in stitches.

If you have the open space, this is a wonderful way to spend time with family. And the kids love it...especially the part about chasing down their rockets as they float back to earth.

Shoeless Joe Jack

On Wednesday night, we were doing our usual after dinner scramble to get to AWANA on time. I went through the mental check list, barking orders and reminders to the children, "Brush your hair...get your AWANA vest...where's your book...Jack you need your shoes and socks on still...Grace your clogs aren't going to work, the teachers want you to wear something you can run in...ya-da, ya-da, ya-da."

We swerved into the church driveway five minutes late, (as we do every Wednesday), but I was feeling like a slightly late success after a full day. I opened the van door for the kids to hop out and Jack realizes, in that moment, that he has "forgotten his shoes". One of the coldest nights of the winter and my son "forgets" to put his shoes on before he leaves the house. Standing in just his socks he waits with a visible cringe for the other shoe to drop (forgive me).

After a few choice words to my son that probably walked the line in a church driveway, my mind raced through the options. Unfortunately, this was the second time that Jack had forgotten his shoes at church so I was going through the What-Is-Wrong-With-This-Kid's-Mother mental beating while clenching my teeth in determination to teach my son a lesson. My eyes scanned the car floor in hopes of finding a stray pair of shoes. Any pair would do.

And then I spotted them.
Cue in the angelic music from above and the spotlight.

For five seconds, I debated the years and years of therapy my son might have before him if I followed through on the shoes. But I knew I had the opportunity to provide my son with a memorable lesson in attentiveness. I decided to take the risk...

"Jack, I'm not going to let you go shoeless in the dead of winter. I don't know how you forget to put on your shoes, but you're going to have to wear shoes." Reaching under the seat for the spotted extra pair, I whipped out Grace's pink plaid flats with the pink strappy buckle. Reluctantly, sliding his tube socked foot into the shoe, to my delight, they were a perfect fit. The boy knew he could say nothing.

More than amused, I watched him run into a class full of boys that night wearing his baseball shirt, sporting a swollen blue nose from a fall last week, green military camo pants, and of course, the pastel pink plaid flats. I'm quite sure I won't need to remind him to put his shoes on again for a long while.

Snow, Snow, Snow

Our family couldn't have asked for a more wonderfully white Christmas in 2006. We spent 10 days in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains underneath a blanket of fresh snow. A Christmas dream. Hours before our vacation was to begin, Colorado was pummeled with more snow than they could plow, closing the Denver airport. We were extremely fortunate in that our flight was the first plane into Denver once the airport opened its runaways again. Our prayers for a snowy Christmas were answered...and then some.

As we waited for our baggage to arrive in the airport, the children stood nose to the glass outside, desperate to get their Georgian hands in the cold snow. They had ample opportunities throughout our visit, that included nature walks on the farm, a scavenger hunt across 25 acres of snowy fields (more on that later), digging a snow tunnel, chasing down descending rockets in the fields, and a snowy bonfire.

So imagine my surprise when after downloading all of our Christmas videos and pictures, not a single picture shows any of us doing anything in the snow in the daylight. OIY.

On one of our last nights at the farm, all of the extended family had left (except us staying beyond our welcome). Despite the post holiday exhaustion, we decided to build a bonfire and roast smores. Ken whipped up a blazing fire, capable of scorching nose hairs and anything else found within a 3 foot radius. The night was perfectly still and the sky was clear, except for the sounds of six silly voices singing belated Christmas jingles and playing rounds of the game "Operator". So here's us, in the snow...in the dark.

The Princess Has Found Her Legs

I'm in total post-Holiday blog catch-up mode. So much has happened on the ever changing Faith front. The most notable accomplishment is that THE PRINCESS WALKS. She's unstoppable. Crawling is SOOO out of style. Faith started walking right before we headed out to Colorado. She hadn't even hit the 11 month milestone.

The footage below is already outdated, but the moment is priceless. Here are Faith's first steps from mid December with Daddy as her "Bipedal" coach. And just like our daring Faith, she goes for three.

They Went All Fancy on Me

Blogger decided to ring in the New Year by going live with their former new fangled BETA version. Which means two things: My three blogs were forcefully messed with, and now since they have added the lovely labels option, I might as well buckle down and convert the Trinity'o Blogs into ONE blog that will surely be the size of a small planet.

Our family has so many stories to share from our Christmas trip in Colorado. However, I just can't work under these conditions. I need to clean my desk (so to speak) and obsess with web re-building for a week.