Well, our first official day in DC was rather interesting. Because of the time change, Zoe, Ace, & Liam were all up at 5:00 a.m. We made it down to breakfast as Mark was leaving for work.

After breakfast we loaded up the stroller and headed for our first official trip on the Metro (subway). We all enjoyed the ride.

We had a detour on our first day of sight seeing. Zoe has been so interested in painting, drawing, and doing whatever she can with arts, that I thought she might enjoy the Smithsonian Gallery of Art. We went to the classical wing first. I was right…she loved it! Especially, when we found some of Degas’ Ballerinas (one painting and several statues). I was so upset when I realized I forgot her sketch pad…she would have had fun “drawing” some of the art. After spending a couple of hours of Zoe asking about every single picture, we went down to the basement level to eat our sandwiches. Ace was out completely through lunch and Liam woke up halfway through and ate a little (did I mention he had a stomach virus and very little appetite). Ace woke up as we left the art gallery and proceeded to pitch a fit because he was hungry and he was also soaken wet! After a quick change and eating lunch, he was much better and ready to go look at planes and space shuttles.

Our next stop was the Air and Space Museum. I thought they would enjoy it, and they did. But being preschoolers and craving more hands on, they wanted to push all the buttons and climb on the planes and touch everything…not a good place for two preschoolers. As we left the Air and Space Museum tired and done with sightseeing for the night, we had our first big adventure.

I came out on the Independence Ave. side and searched for a ramp to roll the stroller down…nowhere to be seen and the guard wasn’t much help either (but he did point us in the right direction for the metro). We crossed Independence and made it to the curb. As I was trying to get up on the curb, the strollers left front wheel broke and folded up underneath the stroller! So, with two kids in the stroller and one wonderfully obedient little girl holding on to the stroller, we popped a wheelie and went about 2 1/2 blocks to the metro with Ace’s legs high in the air (Liam was sleeping so that made it a little easier). After getting to the metro (and across the street to the elevator), we went down two levels still on the back two wheels. Once we got on the metro, I realized that I could probably wheel the stroller backwards and be able to use all wheels. So, we tried that at our metro stop and it worked. I walked through DC with a stroller high in the sky and then walked backwards through Pentagon City! Yes, it was very funny and very hard all at the same time.

When Mark got in from work, we headed out 8 miles and 45 minutes away to a Babies R’ Us to get a new stroller…my souvenir!

Here is the stroller before it broke!

A neat little sculpture in the Smithsonian Sculpture garden. It was a granit seating area where we nursed Liam and took a quick break.

Liam at the National Mall.

Our first two days were a lot of traveling. We went as far as Raleigh, and stayed at a friend’s house, Ryan and Mandi. They are expecting their first little one, Jacob, in December (if he can wait that long). Zoe, Ace and Liam enjoyed the break from traveling. They also enjoyed rough housing with Ryan. Mandi let Zoe and Ace help cook pancakes in the morning!

I forgot that we were going to do our Halloween pics and go “trick or treating” at one of our community parks. They have a “Trick or Treat so Others Can Eat” deal at Patriot’s Park in Evans. Admission is can foods to be given to our local food bank. So we took pics, headed out there for free hot dogs and drinks, and then walked around the gym letting the kids get goodies from local merchants. They have a costume contest every year for the age groups. In the 3 and Under…Liam won for his great impersonation of The Cat in the Hat…as usual, the announcer and judge called him Dr. Seuss…I guess they are synonymous (did I spell that right??) with each other. Either way, we got three free pizza coupons (one of which will be used tomorrow night so I don’t have to cook before our trip).

So, here are all the cute pictures of Thing One, Thing Two, and The Cat in the Hat:

This will be our last post before we head to our country’s captiol, Washington D.C.! We will be leaving Saturday and come back on Friday. Mark is going for work/training/stuff he can’t talk about. We (Zoe, Ace, Liam, and me) are going for sightseeing, relaxation, and a lot of fun! I can’t wait to revisit all the sites and more. I took a school trip to Washington when I was 12 and I know it’s changed a lot. I’m going to be journaling our trip and make sure to take pictures along the way to include on the blog. So, stay tuned…

I thought I would take a post and try and explain our Halloween traditions that we are using in our family. No big reason, except we’ve heard and seen several different views on how to celebrate Halloween and this is our take on it for our family. I know not everyone agrees with our views but this is for our family and what is going to work for us to bring glory and honor to Jesus.

Mark and I both have very fond memories of getting all dressed up for Halloween and all the candy we enjoyed. It was never ever a scary time for either of us. My dress ups included a princess, Princess Leia (from Star Wars), an angel, a clown, a punk rocker (that one was pretty funny) and anything else that mom could make or we could throw together. None of the store bought stuff for me. I remember my mom, sister, and I (and sometimes dad if he wasn’t working) traipsing through our neighborhood picking up candy. We loved it.

Mark and I both wanted to allow our children to have the same happy memories of trick or treating and playing dress up with a lot of other people for one night. However, we both realized that as time goes by, Halloween has gotten, for a lot more people at least, to become a pagan/scary celebration. We have agreed we didn’t want that for our children.

As we’ve heard and read several people talking about the origions of the actual Halloween, we’ve realized that the term Halloween and the official holiday is rooted in Christianity. All Hallow’s Day or All Saints Day is November 1st and is a celebration of the Saints who are now in heaven with Jesus. All Hallow’s Eve is also a time to celebrate the Christians who are alive with Jesus today. So, we’ve agreed that this is the route we are taking with our celebration. Right now, our children are young and their knowledge of the saints is very limited. So, our celebration is limited as well.

We allow them to dress up but in nothing “scary.” This year, the Cat in the Hat and Thing One and Thing Two will make an appearance on our blog. We’re still working out how to share with them now about the saints, but that will come.

Also, we don’t hide behind closed doors and turned off lights on Halloween night (well, this year, we’ll be in another city so technically we will have a turned off light). Instead, we pick the best candy we can afford and hand that out. We’re still discussing handing out a trac with the candy but haven’t decided on that. Our reasoning behind welcoming trick or treaters is because Jesus welcomed ALL people to come to Him. If we close our doors and hide, what does that tell the ALL about us? That we don’t want them to come to us.

I heard about this just this year, and Mark and I both think this is a neat way to share the gospel and the honor the saints who have died on this earth. When the kids get older, we will host a Halloween party for friends and neighbors. We’ll have hot dogs, roast marshmallows, and towards the end of the night, we’ll gather around the campfire and tell a “scary” story. This story will be about one of the martyrs who has given his life for Jesus. We’ll also be able to share the gospel after that story.

A lot of our ideas have come from a book called Redeeming Halloween by Kim Wier and Pam McCune. I confess, I haven’t gotten to read the book (on my to do list) but I have heard them being interviewed several times and have read other things about Halloween.

This is just a little bit about how we are and will be celebrating this controversial holiday. As stated earlier, we will be out of town for Halloween, so I’m not sure what we will be doing on that day (besides sightseeing) but we will participate in a canned food festival on Thursday in which the kids get to dress up and walk around to area vendors to get candy (mine and Mark’s munchies for our trip…I’ll write about that later).

Tonight we carved our pumpkin! Before we carved the pumpkin, we had to set up the tent to let it dry out (see Our Camping Adventure Day 2). So, we kept our pumpkin design simple this year and followed The Pumpkin Patch Parable by Liz Curtis Higgs design. Zoe, Ace, and Liam all enjoyed digging in. Well, Ace didn’t enjoy it as much as Zoe did. Liam loved checking everything out…despite being a little cranky.

Liam enjoying making goofy faces at the camera. He’s got remnants of chili on his face…saving it for later! I love his big blue eyes and goofy grins.

Day two was definitely adventurous. We started out with breakfast which was great. Mark and I just want to say a big thank you to Craig & Martha for giving us the dutch oven! It came in handy making Monkey Bread on Saturday morning (And cobbler on Friday night). Yummy! We walked around with the kids and ate a late lunch since we all had a late breakfast. After lunch, we split up and some of the kids went fishing with Missy and Hal and the rest went with us on a nature hike. We visited the nature center and then took off on a trail. Liam fell asleep after a few steps on the trail. Halfway through it, Ace decided to sleep. He went from me to Mark! We gathered back at camp for a little nap and quiet time. While some adults napped, the kids and I watched the first three quarters of the Alabama game (glad we didn’t see the last quarter). That was thanks to a Christmas present from my parents to Mark of a little lantern/tv/radio/siren. We ate supper and then headed to the beach house in the park to attend the Fall Festival and then back to the campsite for much needed rest. I’ll just show the pictures for most of the story and then finish up at the end of the pictures.

Playing Duck Duck Goose!

On our hike. I was trying to get all the beautiful colors in this tree but couldn’t get much. That’s Mark with Liam in the shadow.

A cool picture of the sun through the treetops!

Zoe an dAce taking a break (before he fell asleep of course).

Our goofy hiking crew!

Holly and Grace are cats!

Thomas with a spider on his face.

Miss Nicole the Cat!

Zoe’s butterfly!

Okay, so here’s the rest of the story. See Ace’s lovely Animal Crackers?! Yea, well, we got to see all of them again (along with a hot dog) on Sunday morning. He woke up early during the night and was crying. I heard the “throw up” burp, and told Mark that I thought he had thrown up. When he went to check on him, he didn’t see it, so we thought he was fine but there was a lingering smell. We didn’t connect the smell until about 6:30 the next morning when Mark shifted him back onto his air mattress…yes, it was on everything. We thought, at first that it was because he ate too much (he downed the snack bag of animal crackers in a matter of minutes) but today (Monday) he threw up again and continued to have…hmmm…”whispers” in his diapers! So, he has a stomach virus. He’s eaten a little today and has not had any more “whispers” since before nap time…maybe he’s on the up side of it (The “whispers” thing is an inside joke with our camping friends…sorry, but I didn’t think it would be “nice” to write what it actually was…which was gross).

That’s not all…about 4 a.m. Sunday morning it began to sprinkle on and off. We knew there was a chance of rain but were praying it would hold off until we could break camp. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. About the time that Mark walked out of the tent for me to start passing things to him to go into the car, it started raining a lot! Not pouring but just enough to leak through the rain fly and also enough to soak Mark as he ferryed things back to the van. I got the kids ready and packed up the inside of the tent with Zoe’s help (she put socks on everyone and squished air out of mattresses). After getting loaded up, we raced the kids to the car and Mark helped Craig and Martha load up their tent. Hal & Missy had shuttled their kids to her mom’s and then came back to load up the tent and other things. So, that’s why there are no pictures of day 3 of camping! And that’s the end of our camping adventures for this year. I’m trying to talk some other friends in to going camping in the spring to the beach…we’ll see how that goes.

Our first day of camping was mainly a lot of working to get everything together, making sure we had camping sites close together (because of our size we had to get two sites), setting up, and eating and exploring the site area. Mistletoe State Park is a really nice park. We were close to the bathrooms (big convenience with eleven kids) and within walking distance to the lake. One of the couples, was even able to drive home to pick up some much missed items after the first night (mainly blankets and coats!). Here are pictures from the day:

Zoe and Nicole waiting anxiously to play in the tent. Our tent was never played in but the one that was resulted in three busted air mattresses! That ended the tent playing for quite sometime.

Liam wasn’t quite sure what was going on. While we set up our site, He watched in the wings.

A BIG Thank you to Grace who helped keep Liam entertained while we cooked, saw after other kids, and just visited. She was a big help and Liam enjoyed her company!

Zoe enjoying some delicious roasted marshmallows. Under our watchful eyes, she roasted the marshmallows herself. She’s like her mama and loves them scorched and on fire!

Craig takes a sniff of some kindling before starting the fire.

I believe we utterly confused some people. A lot of times the group would split up. Craig (who is married to Martha) and Missy (who is married to Hal) and I took all ten of the kids to the lake while our spouses hung out at camp when Liam was napping. We ran into one person who saw two women with a lot of children and one man. As we left the lake, we joked that he must have thought that Craig was married to both of us and that ALL those kids were ours! Okay, so maybe typing it out isn’t funny, but we thought it was.

Hey everyone! I just wanted to write a quick note before we took off tomorrow for camping! I’m excited. We are going with two other couples…so that makes six adults and 11 children! The children are ages 10-9 mths. It’s going to be fun.

I’ll post pictures when we get back.

Cheer on Newnan as they play Tri-Cities this week.

Say a prayer for Kennis, she is back in the hospital with throwing up and headaches. A ct scan revealed that all was clear! She wants/needs to get better so she can see her friends and go to school (she’s only been to school a handfull fo times this year and misses it dearly).

Zoe and Ace are really excited about camping…this after they’ve been “camping” in the playroom under my computer desk for months now…we’re finally getting to do the real thing. It’s going to be nice cuddle weather at night and comfy cool weather during the day so we should have plenty of fun.

That’s all for now. I was going to post pictures but can’t get it to work right now. I’ll have to try when we get back.