Story time with Carrie

Emma and Zach seem to be playing with each other a lot lately. They are so cute!

Too much time with the Babies

Look! Elisha is swaddled just like baby Ella. She insisted she get swaddled first.

Sports cakes

I made this cake this week for a birthday party. My first paid job from someone I didn't actually know. It was fun!

Fresh Life's 2nd Birthday

A week ago today was Fresh Life's 2nd Birthday. About 2 weeks before that I was asked to make a cake for the celebration. This is what I came up with, the replica of the building. Fresh Life has been meeting in the Strand Theater for about a year and I thought it would be really fun to try and make the Strand. It was a little more difficult that I thought with lots of little details made of fondant and painting with food coloring but I had been wanting to try for awhile and needed a reason to make a cake of this scale. It was REALLY heavy! Thankfully I had my husband there to carry it for me. It is 4 11x15 cakes, the bottom two were French Vanilla and the top layers were Devils food. I got a pretty good response and was able to place business cards by the cake. Hopefully this takes off so that I can be a stay at home mom someday and still help financially.

The last morning before we left

More pics

Getting ready for some Prizes


Communion on Saturday night.

Hanging out afterwards eating Chocolate chip brownie supreme with thin mint ice cream.

Altitude pics 2

Some Pics from Altitude

Kelsey just loves a clean kitchen, I couldn't stop her from doing the dishes, even when it was time to leave!














Saturday hang out time. The girls played games, chatted, did hair, and more!














Time for Snow Angels!














Yay for sledding down skiing hills, we had to watch to make sure they weren't coming and going to hit us!

Technology Frustrations

So I have been really frustrated with our computer lately. It's totally unorganized and cluttered with who knows what information. Mostly it's applications we don't need or old ones that never got erased. We bought the newer version of iLife about a 6 months ago as well and uploaded that onto our computer hoping for better iWeb tools. I was disappointed. I just thought there would be more! In the process though we also got the new iPhoto. Now that had some cool functions but I realized that when I tried to work through finder to find my photo's to upload, they weren't there! I would have to export every photo out of iPhoto into a file there so I could upload them into my blog. Before we got the new app, we had about a million copies of every photo we had put on our computer. Somehow they got saved into multiple folder or duplicated many times over and they were consuming our Hard Drive. It took us FOREVER to pare them down to what we wanted. I didn't want that to happen again if I was saving the pics in multiple places on my computer. I felt like I should be able to access my iPhoto data in the photo cache or data file or library icon in my finder but those files would never open or would just open iPhoto.

I figured that someone on the computer these files must be hiding and thought that maybe if I moved all iphoto stuff into one folder it would be easier to sort through and see if there were duplicates. I mean I had the iPhoto data icons in 3 different places on my computer with different dates and amounts of info stored! That just didn't seem right. So I moved one of the iPhoto icons into the folder and a warning box came up asking if I was sure I wanted to replace the older file with this newer file I was moving in. I assumed (stupid me) newer mean it was the version that we had uploaded 6 months ago and must be the one I wanted. So I said yes.

And I don't have time machine.

They are gone. My entire iPhoto library has been wiped. :'-( I spent 4 hrs trying to recover photos on sunday. I found some hidden in the hard drive. I had to search for the photo names. But I haven't found them all, just portions of each of the many albums I had. Thankfully I had exported some already (I guess YAY for those duplicates!!) but it's so sad. And I have many on my website and picassa, so double Yay. Lessons like this just make me want to go and buy a huge stack of cd's and burn a copy EVERY time I upload anything on the computer. You never know when you'll be an idiot. If anyone has and mad crazy recover skills or 3rd party software that finds stuff like that and you want to help, let me know! But according the the apple website, sucks for me, they're gone. Of course I only read afterward that you are NEVER supposed to do that.

Altitude Day #2

Great and awesome day. We continued in our topic series this weekend "Storms" and looked at two more great storms that happen in the Bible. Devan taught this morning about Paul's shipwreck on the island of Malta. He showed Paul's love even for those who were escorting him off to prison. Paul still rescued people and brought people to shore. It kind of reminded me of Jack from "Lost". Anyways.

Then we hit up the slopes. Amazing! Today we had on the mountain what is called an "inversion". Basically where the clouds make the bottom half of the mountain foggy and cloudy, making it almost seem very cloudy, but once you get half ways up the mountain it is as clear crystal. Here's a pic to show you.














Quite amazing. It's crazy b/c as far as the eye can see you cannot see any of the valley except a few mountain tops. Seeing this made me super stoked to be up on the mountain. It totally reminded me of how the Great Flood would have looked like in Noah's time. Just a ton of water overtaking the valleys and the Earth.

Overall we had a great time up there, except that I took a huge crash and landed on my chest, then slammed my entire face on the icy ground of the mountain. I felt like I just got body slammed WWE style, except this was real. Luckily I was wearing a helmet. I got up from where I was at and couldn't breath for like 30 seconds and on top of the that it felt like I had broken my nose (I don't think I did). But nonetheless my nose continued to bleed like crazy and my goggles scraped the bridge of my nose.

But I was a trooper and hung in there. I hurt really bad and am super sore. In the morning I'm sure I probably will have a hard time moving.

Later that night we met for our last big small group where we had a skit, prizes, and communion. Coy taught on Genesis 6-8 talking about the biggest storm that this Earth had ever seen. Speaking about how Noah was found righteous even in the midst of an evil world. The challenge was to live a righteous life even in today's society.

I can't wait for tomorrows last session where Travis is giving the devo and Izzi is doing worship. Praise God for keeping everyone safe on the mountain and not getting seriously injured. See you tomorrow!

First Day of Altitude '09

In Matthew 14:22-33 we read of Jesus exhaustive day that He had ministering to people all day. Everything from the news of His cousin dying to the telling of many of his parables to the feeding of the 5,000 (not including women and children). What a crazy day that must have been.

I feel like I could relate to that in some ways. Today was the start of our winter camp for Active. This year is our 2nd year doing it, and hope to keep on doing many more in the future. A lot of time and effort has to go into these retreats. I've been on both the students side of things as well as the leaders side of things, but never as a youth pastor. So my first big experience as a youth pastor. FUN!

The last few months of prep work has all come to this weekend. All of the many hours and the many minimal nights of sleep (literally for the last few days I haven't been able to get a good nights rest) all for the students. Sounds exciting, right?

As always we were late to get to the mountain as well as late to start our sessions. We only had the room rented for a certain time so we made the best of it.

On top of that I had to teach tonight. By the time worship began I didn't even have notes typed up or things put in place where I would like them to be. As a teacher I didn't like that feeling. I didn't feel prepared. But as God would have it, that is where He wanted me to be. To be at a state of weakness and vulnerability. Even just moments before going up I almost walked out of the room b/c of how I felt. But I prayed that "God's strength would be made perfect through my weakness". How true that was.

Teaching on minimal notes, minimal study time, and minimal sleep I went up and taught. I felt God's hand with me the entire time. Something so amazing. As we were studying how the disciples dealt with adversity I felt like I was teaching about myself that day. Crazy how God does that.

In the end of my teaching I felt a call to see if someone wanted to give their life to Christ. Sure enough, there was one kid who raised his hand and accepted Christ into his life. AMAZING!

All of the lost sleep, hours in front of my computer, minutes on my phone, and hours studying was all worth it. Praise God for His strength and our weakness. Please pray for him as he is in 7th grade. He will be in the middle school group and I will be able to help disciple him for a couple of years.

A shot of backstage before worship with the worship band.

Hang out time!

Hanging out with students at A&W after Active on Saturday. It was really fun! We all got root beer floats even though there was tons of snow outside. Delicious!

This is not a snow drift or from being plowed. It just straight up 2.5 feet of snow.

Hiding spot?

What a little girl does while We're all cleaning and the house is empty. She was getting into stuff you wouldn't even think a little girl would want to get into. But I guess you improvise when you have nothing else to do.