Twinkies and Snow

This weekend was very memorable. For those of you who care please read on, those who don't, don't but if you do I must ask why? You don't even care yet you read, maybe you need help. Anyway, we started off Sunday with a happy meeting with all the saints as we hope to every Lord's day. Then my friend and brother Ben and I rode our mountain bikes from Greenlake to my house in South Everett. I must say that that was pretty fun, we even earned a dirty look from a lady we zipped by on the Burke Gillman trail. By the time we arrived at my house we had gone 26 miles and were pretty hungry as we did not eat lunch yet. After eating a tasty lunch we decided we needed to have a campfire in the ol' fire pit. This sparked a memory! Oh yes!!! We need to roast Twinkies! And so we did.
As you can see in the picture above Ben and I are roasting Twinkies. Now, I know that some people who are wrong most of the time don't like Twinkies, please remember that those people are wrong most of the time which leaves few things like taste in food a thing to be right about. Twinkies are great by themselves, however everyone who is anyone knows that when you roast things they only get better.
Now when you roast a Twinkie the outside shell becomes nice and crunchy. This crunchiness gives it a wonderful SNAP-O-RIFFICNESS to a normally soft Twinkie. If you have not yet roasted a Twinkie I must say that I am firstly sorry that you are missing out on one of life's finer things. Secondly I must say GET TO IT!!!
In the above picture one can see the sheer delight of one who is about to partake of a roasted Twinkie. You too can be delighted by a roasted Twinkie.

The next day I went on a hike with my family and my sister Lori her husband Erik and one of their 4 children Eliora. We hiked to Heather Lake which is just out past Granite Falls by Mount Pilchuck for you north westerners. The trail was 4 miles round trip with an elevation gain of 800 feet. Nothing to fancy but a great hike for the kids.
We started off just as happy as can be and were blessed with some cheerful sunshine!!
At this point Erik and I decided to stand in a tree. It was lots of fun and I recommend it to anyone who has not yet stood in a tree. Oh and then I decided to point at a guy walking by and say "Hey, I am pointing at the guy in the red hat!!!". Erik thought that was lots of fun too.
Here the kids decided to stick the hike out a little longer. (that is for Mr. B because he is so punny)
Then we found the snow!!! I knew some hikes still had snow but I thought we would be safe here as it was a bit lower elevation than the other hikes I looked at, but I was wrong. I even called the Ranger Station in the morning but got their voice mail and they said they would get back to me the next day. Oh well, good thing we like snow.
Here is Leah and me liking snow!
And Heather Lake was Glorious. We approve.

P.S. Why in the world did the silly blogger thing underline some of what I wrote here and not the other? Strangeness.

Leah's First Sleepover!

So Leah and her friend Emilie have been concocting a plan to have a sleepover for the past couple months. So last Saturday, Emilie came over to be our guest. Here's just a little of the evidence that they had a blast:

A little marshmellow roasting in their jammies!

Then they practiced their photography skills and took the next couple pictures:

Finally, here they are at bed time! Not exactly going to sleep...but we got there eventually!

My Real Enjoyment

Because I am human, yes it is true, I have a need of entertainment. Along with this entertainment comes some amount of humor and even oddities, thus the last post I did was well, a bit odd I suppose. But everything dries up with time. The first time you hear something funny it may make you laugh, but by the second, third, forth, fifth or sixth time it may not be so funny. Eventually if you hear that joke too many times you will begin to hate it. Now, not everything is this extreme, but deep within every human is a longing for satisfaction. Man is looking for something to satisfy. There was a famous French scientist named Blaise Pascal who said that there is a "God-shaped vacuum" within man. No matter what man fills himself with, if it is not God it will not satisfy that deepest part within man Pascal called the "God-shaped vacuum". So this leads me to my post in regards to my REAL enjoyment, which is a wonderful living person who is both God and man and satisfies my deepest parts, Jesus Christ.

This last week I have been impressed and touched by many things, one of which can be found in Mark 8:22-25, these verses are:

22. And they came to Bethsaida. And they brought to Him a blind man and entreated Him to touch him. 23. And He took hold of the hand of the blind man and lead him forth outside the village. And He spat on his eyes and and laid His hands on him and asked him, Do you see anything? 24. And he looked up and said, I see men, for I see them as trees walking. 25. Then again He laid His hands upon his eyes, and the man looked intently and was restored, and he began to see all things clearly.

I have been coming back to this portion over and over this last week breathing it in as God breathed it out. Here Jesus comes to a man who is lacking sight and others are even entreating the Lord to restore his sight for him. But the Lord does not do it right away, first He takes the blind man by his hand and leads him outside of the village. In my experience I have found that when I am lacking in sight I need to go to a quite place, somewhere where there are less distractions to have personal contact with the Lord(Matt. 6:6). We all need to have time with the Lord outside the village so He can restore our sight.

When the Lord restored the blind mans sight He spat on his eyes and touched them. The spit came out from the Lords mouth, this to me is like His word which proceeds out of His mouth. I need the word which God breathed out(2 Tim. 3:16). I also need His hands to touch me. So when I come to the word I need to touch Him in the word. That is to touch the Spirit which is the word, by taking the word "by all means of prayer and petition"(Eph 6:17-18). When I do this I receive sight, but my sight may not be so clear. So I need to continue to come to the Lord outside the village in the word and by the Spirit. If I continue to come to the Lord in this way surely my sight will be restored little by little and I will begin to see clearly. The divine seeing comes from Him alone.

-KP

This morning I...

...woke up and made a conscious decision to jump out of my "I-have-no-teaching-job-in-the-fall" funk. I reread my "The Lord is Faithful" post and decided to live by it again. It wasn't that I stopped living by it, but just that when my "lay-off" became official last week, I officially started feeling discouraged and a little hopeless. Today, I hope my continued prayers to the Lord and hope in Him and His purpose can renew my inward being and restore my personal relationship with Him. Teaching job or no teaching job, my life is for the Lord and I need Him!

Raising Cactuses

So, I have this thing for buying cactuses. I really like them and have a shelf in my dining room devoted to them. Unfortunately, the feeling is NOT mutual. I buy them perfectly pretty and prickly and vow to give them the proper sunlight and only a smidgen of water (even though it's hard to see that dry soil). Then within a month most of them look something like this: So you can imagine that absolute delight and sheer joy I felt when I looked at one of my beloved cactuses and saw this:

At first I thought the flowers were fake...maybe Leah had taken them off a little necklace and stuck them on the cactus. But, alas, after plucking one off and examining it, it was really a bloom. And it was then that I had my Mother's Day epiphany: if I am able to bring a finicky cactus plant to blossom these beautifully delicate pink blossoms, there's hope for me as a mom when it comes to raising the other two finicky "cactuses" in my life! Okay, I sort of made up that epiphany just now, but isn't it a beautiful thought? Happy Mother's Day!

Here are a couple cute shots of the kiddos by Green Lake this morning:

The Surfacing of the Mean Teacher Lady

My first year of teaching has had the usual ups and downs. More ups than downs I'd say. But the past two weeks, the Daily Downs started outweighing the Usual Ups so thus, Mean Teacher Lady was forced to surface.

Yes, this week boisterous boys were "benched" for shoving in line, the entire class was made to walk in silence to and from the lunch room an extra time for talking in the halls, one baseball cap, four erasers and one "really good book" were confiscated indefinitely and two chatting chums are writing essays tonight to discuss their plans for keeping their mouths shut in class (I already slashed their suggestion to tape their mouths shut and the one where they said if they could just sit side-by-side they wouldn't have to yell across the room at each other).

So today, after a week of playing Mean Teacher Lady, in walks one of my happy room parents, trailed by a few of my students. And with huge grins on their faces the students presented me with flowers, read me a poem they authored and gave me a copy of the newspaper they had secretly created filled with kind thoughts about their teacher (a.k.a Mean Teacher Lady) for Teacher Appreciation Week. My class ROCKS...even during Mean Teacher Lady slumps!

The Lord is Faithful!

I know many of you have heard about the state of education across the country. Here in Washington funding for schools is being cut dramatically for this coming fall. In the coming months many teachers will be laid off due to these budget cuts. As a new teacher my chances of being laid off are fairly high (in fact out of every teacher in my district I am the 2nd to last person on the seniority list). It's been really interesting for me to watch the reactions of all my colleagues to the possibilities of layoffs, class sizes increasing, special programs cut, etc. All day at work anxiety and negativity surrounds me regarding these matters. I however, have felt such a peace about this coming fall. I know it's because I have the Lord and have experienced His faithfulness throughout my whole life. No matter what happens, God wants to gain my heart and draw me closer to Him. I know that whatever happens it will be according to His will and purpose for me. Hebrews 10:23 "Let us hold fast the confession of our hope unwavering, for He who has promised is faithful."