A Weekend With A Niece

On Friday night I dropped my dad off at my brother's house, and my brother (Emily's dad) invited Emily to spend the weekend at my house, to which Emily said, "Okay" and started packing her bag. Then my brother said, "Oh, as long as you're going over there you should probably bring your science project. Maybe you could work on it together" (oh, he's a sly one that brother of mine). Emily needed to make a model of the solar system. 

So, off we went to my house. 

The next morning, I had her make a plan of the supplies we needed to get. I showed her how to use Dragon (voice recognition software), and she loved it. She typed up quite a nice little plan with it, and off we went to the craft store. 

Thankfully, at the craft store we found a kit for making a model of a solar system (oh how far we've come since the days of using wadded up newspaper, wire coat hangers, fruits, and vegetables to complete such projects). We took home our kit, Emily painted it (she wanted it to look exactly like the pictures of the planets we printed off the Internet, ahh the Internet, another tool that makes these kinds of projects much easier), Greg cut the wooden sticks to the appropriate size, and I helped her assemble it.

And voila. One model of the solar system, done! We were pretty happy with it. We sat and stared at it for quite awhile.

A visitor

Haven't been blogging much this week. My dad has been here visiting (he lives in Panama). It has been a few days filled with Spiritual discussions (whether we wanted it or not). I am a Christian, my dad is an atheist (who occasionally reads this blog, hello Dad). Our worldview touches everything we do. Even drinking a glass of milk or eating a sandwich can be controversial subjects when you're as evangelistic as the two of us. Clearly, God made me like him (in personality) for a reason. I love ya, Dad. 

Cookie Baking Night 02/20/12

Tonight was Cookie Baking Night. In attendance this evening: Carissa & Ethan. We made M&M cookies, played games, finished the Cars movie we started a few weeks ago, and read from Leading Little Ones to God (lesson 63, God's Children Suffer For Him, which led to some pretty good discussion). 

As usual, a fun time was had by all. 

Time With The Nephew 02/10/12 & 02/11/12

Our nephew Ethan turned 9 years old on January 16. For his birthday, we gave him the choice of a gift or an activity. He chose "activity", and he chose an evening at Grand Slam (a local arcade/entertainment extravaganza center). He particularly had his eye on "laser tag" which he thoroughly enjoyed (he really liked the part where he played one game against Uncle Greg and me, it was two other boys and Ethan against Greg and me, Greg and I didn't win--we weren't even close--Ethan talked about that all night--and Greg and I spent the rest of the night trying to catch our breath). 

You can see by some of the pictures above, he had a fun time with the many activities to choose from.

Ethan also spent the night at our house. Ethan knew I had Dragon (voice recognition software) on my computer, and he wanted to learn how to use it (it's my job at work to train physicians how to use the medical version of this software, so I have a home version that I practice on). Ethan and I had a little training session in the morning before we took him back home. I think that was almost as fun for him as the arcade.

It was fun for us to spend time with Ethan alone. I have a feeling he might be choosing "activity" for his birthday again next year......

Cookie Baking Night 02/06/12

Tonight was Cookie Baking Night. In attendance this evening: Carissa, Emily, and Ethan. We made red velvet cupcakes (highly decorated as you can see from the picture) with the filled cupcake pan Jon (Ethan and Carissa's dad) gave me for Christmas. Needless to say, they had a great time with this project.

We also played air hockey and Zingo and read from Leading Little Ones to God by Marian Schoolland.

Tonight's lesson from Leading Little Ones to God was lesson 62 titled "God's Children Tell God's Story" describing the passage where Jesus told his disciples, "Come and follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." We talked about what that means, and one of the questions at the end of the lesson was "How can we be 'fishers of men'?" Emily said, "We could go to parades and pass out gospel tracts and if it's a Halloween parade you could wear a Superman shirt to be festive" OR "You could have a bunch of kids over to your house and do fun things with them, maybe bake some cookies, and teach them Bible lessons." OR "You could invite them to Vacation Bible School at your church." (Hmmmm. Those ideas sound very familiar.) I told Emily, "I'll have to try that sometime."

We had a month break from Cookie Baking Night due to a weather cancellation last time. It was good to have them back. As usual, a fun time was had by all.