Grandpa, Grandma, and Cecily left early this morning...

for Florida. By "early this morning", I mean about 4 a.m. I woke up when Cecily was leaving, so I got to say goodbye to her, but for the most part we all said our goodbyes last night. We will have only six kids for a week! :( The table was awfully bare at dinner tonight without Cecily, and without Grandpa and Grandma Peterson. We didn't even have Grandma Davis over for dinner tonight! (Grandpa Davis is on a business trip right now.) So with just 8 of us, it was pretty empty. ;)

Knut's Birthday Adventure- Slideshow

Happy Birthday Knut!

The new 12-year-old!

 (Knut doesn't believe in smiling for pictures.) :)

 Well, he smiles sometimes! :)



I didn't get nearly as many pictures as I did last week for Thor's birthday, at least not of the party. Knut's 'Birthday Adventure' is another matter. (post coming soon!)

Drama Club

I haven't posted much about this, have I? I see I have a lot of explaining to do. :)

I'm not sure when I first came up with the idea of starting a drama club, but once the idea did get into my head, it stuck. I think it was from reading a magazine article about a homeschool drama club... or something. :) Anyway, I was nervous. I'm an extremely shy person, and I definitely don't like to get up 'in front of people' and lead something. I do love acting, and since I was six or seven I've been directing plays with my little siblings and occasionally other friends, but this would be much different. Looking back, I have no idea why I didn't just think "no, that would be way too hard. I can't lead something like that.", but like I said earlier, the idea stuck. After a lot of prayer, I presented the idea to my parents. By then I had done a lot of thinking, and started to like the idea a lot, so I was pretty persistent. I started talking to a few friends about it, and they responded positively. I even passed around a sheet in Lyceum drama for people to put their email address on if they were interested. I kept on praying, and getting more and more excited. Early in the year, Mom gave me the 'okay'. I knew I would need someone to help me lead, so I emailed Haleigh June and asked her to do drama club with me. She agreed, and I am so thankful that she did! :)

In March I sent out an email to the people that had given me their email addresses in Lyceum drama, and also put some handouts on the welcome table at Lyceum. Several people responded positively, and by the end of Lyceum we had 8 people signed up. Haleigh and I chose a play to do: New Clothes, Same Old Lie by Denise Busenitz (http://actsone.org/), but in the time right before My 27th (the date of the first meeting) we saw that we were going to need another play, since we had 16 people signed up!

On May 27th, I was pretty nervous. The fact that I was taking the last part of my first-ever standardized test that morning really didn't help build my confidence. Neither did the fact that I would be leading alone on the first day since Haleigh wasn't available! I just had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't doing this for me- I was doing it because I felt that God was leading me to. I was doing it for His glory, not my own. I had peace during the testing and while I was setting up for the meeting. Then, when I saw sixteen kids all assembled in our living room, I was pretty terrified. I guess I didn't quite realize how many sixteen could be- especially when most of them are taller than I! (It was one of those days when I really wished I wasn't so small for my age.) :) In the course of the auditions, I discovered that the script papers I had printed out were missing several pages. Apparently the new printer skips a page every now and then, and also I had not printed out everything I needed to. So between the printer and myself, the scripts were pretty disorganized. Well, we got through auditions and I was satisfied that I had pretty much all the information I needed to assign roles. During the second hour, we did Dialogue Situations (Two to three people improvise dialogue for an assigned or made up situation). That went much better, and I think that everyone really had fun. I started to relax a bit. :) After having brownies that Mom made for us, they all left. Immediately afterward, I was headed off to a youth game night at the house of one of my friends! When I got home that night, no way was I going to sleep right away. I got right to work, and assigned almost all of the roles. I still wasn't totally sure what our second play was going to be.

That week I did hours of research online, trying to find the perfect play. I also used the library, and checked out several books of plays and skits. But nothing seemed to fit. I was getting pretty frustrated, when the idea hit me- why not write our own play?? I was definitely not up to doing it myself, but what if we had a group of people not in New Clothes, Same Old Lie work together to come up with a plot, characters, and then improvise until we had a script written? The more I thought about, the more I liked the idea. It would be a great learning experience, and although the play produced wouldn't exactly be top-quality, it would be very fun for the actors to be able to come up with their own characters and dialogue. After checking the idea with Haleigh, I made some changes to my cast list for New Clothes, Same Old Lie and decided who I would have in the group writing their own play. The second week of drama club I was a lot more confident- for one thing, Haleigh was there as well! For another, I knew what to expect. :)

Since then, meetings have gone fairly smoothly. Of course there have been glitches, but overall I am so blessed with how well things have been going. I have learned so much through leading drama club, and I can't believe how much more confident I have grown just these past few weeks. I'm convinced that God has been leading me throughout this whole process, and reminding me to commit it all to Him every step of the way!

Now I know that a drama club with sixteen kids isn't really that big of a deal, but to me it is much bigger than that. It's a tool that God has been using to help me overcome my issue of shyness and become much more confident, and more importantly, much more reliant on Him. It took faith on my part to take responsibility for leading a group of kids, some of which I didn't even know prior to drama club. I did it only because I felt God's leading, and now I am so thankful for it! I have grown spiritually in so many ways, and I am so thankful to God for leading me through every step, holding me up when I get frustrated, and giving me peace when I'm nervous... or terrified. :)

So that's an overview of how the club came to be; now you can expect a post about it just about every week! We meet on Fridays from 2:00-4:00, and Grandpa and Grandma Davis have been letting us use their rec room at Shady Oaks for meetings (HUGE blessing)! I'll try to get some pictures next week, but even if I don't manage to do that I'll do a quick post about the meeting.

Kitchen Remodeling

It's been put off for years, but with Grandpa and Grandma doing so much remodeling in their new home, Mom has been inspired to start her own kitchen remodeling job. And so since Wednesday we've been scrubbing and scraping, priming and painting in the kitchen. Tomorrow, hopefully, we'll get the new microwave and stove in! Our old microwave is completely dead, so that was another reason Mom decided to start her kitchen remodeling now. :)

A "before picture" of the cabinets

 in progress...

Random Cuteness

More work

The cabinets- finished! (well, except for putting on the rest of the doors...)

The "before" stove...

And the "after" stove, which is not in yet... obviously. :)

This is the sample flooring that Mom ordered.

We've made good progress the last couple days! All that remains is installing the appliances and the rest of the cabinet doors, having the flooring put in, and possibly stenciling the cabinet doors. I'm sure there are a few other minor jobs to do, but I can't think of them right now. :)

Tonight we watched The Runner From Ravenshead. Cecily, Papa, and I have seen it once before at a Bright Lights event, but everyone else was seeing it for the first time.

We watched it on the laptop in the great room, since the movie room is really too small for all of us (Grandpa and Grandma too) :)

Dinner

Both sets of grandparents over for dinner! :) Grandpa and Grandma Peterson arrived late Sunday night.

Princess Gloria



Happy Birthday Thor!

Mr. Thor is 8 years old today!

(isn't he cute???) :)

One of the benefits of being in a large family is that you get lots of presents. :)

Thor graciously let Bjorn open one of his presents for him.

 Bjorn had fun. :)

Grandpa 

 A new pocketknife

If you know Knut, you instantly associate duct tape with him. Only he would use it instead of wrapping paper! :D 

And once the duct tape is removed and the box is opened... ta-da! 

 I wasn't the only one taking pictures...

Thor had lots of eager helpers to get his new nerf gun out of the box.

 Knut with his 'spy' sunglasses and water pistol

 From Grandpa and Grandma- Knut got to open his a week early, since they were both the same thing: inner tubes with attached water guns! (We all went to the pool tonight to try them out.) :)

Thor's "birthday adventure" was going on the little trains in Wildwood, MO. We listened to Adventures In Odyssey during the hour-long drive there... at least, it would have been only an hour if we hadn't kept on getting lost. :D Not that we minded!

 Cecily is so photogenic. :)

 Happy Fathers' Day, Papa!

 While the engine was being turned around...

 Rosemary looking at my ticket

 Grandpa and Grandma

Bjorn

Yes, I have my eyes closed and look extremely weird, and no one is really posing or smiling for the camera... but at least you can see the train cars that we were in! :D

We hit a couple geocaches while we were out there. Well, Papa and I did one and Papa, Grandma, Knut, Thor, and Gloria did the other.

Happy Fathers' Day Papa!

Thank you for being such a great and godly father!

Just a few of the things we appreciate about you:
Mom: Your love for your family
Sylvia: Your wisdom and your commitment to Christ
Knut: You support our family
Cecily: How you teach us about God
Thor: You tell a ton of jokes and you're really nice
Gloria: You do almost everything for me

Papa:

Doing fireworks on the 4th of July

Jackhammering Grandpa's and Grandma's driveway

Goofing off with Knut

Freezing his moustache :)

40th birthday party

Tree trimming

Playing chess with Knut, Connect Four with Sylvia, and Battleship with Cecily- Simultaneously!

Getting shot