Cookie Baking Night 08/18/14

Tonight was Cookie Baking Night. In attendance this evening: Emily, Ethan, Carissa, and Alli. Alli turns 4 years old in a few days and tonight was her birthday choice. For supper she chose corn dogs, french fries, and blueberries. For her birthday cookie she chose the ever-so-popular blueberry cookie (I tried really hard to talk her out of this decision but she was having none of it).

I told Emily about Alli's birthday choice and we threw around a few ideas, but nothing brilliant came to mind. When we were on our way back from our Iowa road trip last week, Emily and I stopped at our favorite chocolate shop, The Droolin' Moose, and we came across this little treat (pictured above). That's right, chocolate covered blueberries that look exactly like the real thing. Emily said, "Why don't we use these for the blueberry cookie and make them like we do when we make M&M cookies (w/ sugar cookie dough)?" I said, "That's a great idea!" And a container of these little beauties came home with us. 

The cookies turned out to be pretty tasty. My brother, Rob, tried them at the end of the night and he said he thinks Alli is onto something with this one. It might be his new favorite. He is a bit of a cookie aficionado, so that was high praise for sure. 

We managed to squeeze a lot into this evening. We played a couple games of Zingo. 

We read from Training Hearts and Teaching Minds by Starr Meade. 

Tonight we worked on Question 4: "What is God?"

Answer: "God is a Spirit, whose being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth are infinite, eternal, and unchangeable."

That was a mouthful. The kids looked at me like I was crazy if I thought they were going to quickly memorize that and repeat it back to me. So, we broke the ideas down a bit and focused on God being a Spirit who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. Then we talked about some of God's attributes, truth, justice, holiness, goodness, power, wisdom, and what those words mean. 

I'm finding this book to be just a bit over the heads of our varied age group and experience, but we'll stick with it for awhile yet because the questions generate great conversation and they cause us to think big thoughts about God. As long as we can break the concepts down into our language, this train is worth riding for a few more stops. 

At the end of the evening we decided to go for a walk. 

I found the contrast between  cousin Ethan's height and cousin Alli's height to be worth documenting (and they look so cute together). 

We walked to the local gas station for an ice cream treat. Mmmmmmmm.

Alli had a difficult time walking and eating ice cream at the same time, so she lagged behind the crowd quite a bit. Carissa immediately noticed this and stuck right with her, patiently walking slowly next to her until we arrived back at the house. Later, I was commenting about this to Greg and he noted that Carissa is a lot like her mother, Diana (Greg's sister), and that she would have done the same thing. It's true, Carissa has her mother's tender heart for others. I  thank God for that and pray He will use that greatly for His purposes in her life. 

Another Cookie Baking Night has come and gone, another birthday celebrated (Happy Birthday, Alli!), and as usual, a fun time was had by all.