A Gospel Encounter

"Mom, mom! Look it's the "special!""  Joshua holds up these....

("Special" is defined as communion juice and cracker, in this case just the juice, aka red blocks.)
"Joshua, do you know why we drink the special?"
It was an amazing opportunity to present the gospel to Joshua, just a normal day with it's up and downs. It makes me ask myself, have I missed other opportunities to teach Joshua about God? Have these opportunities been drowned in the up and downs of a normal day? I'm sure I have. This makes me thankful that I find God's grace in my parenting. He gives us ample of opportunity to love and teach our children on a daily basis, but we must still take hold of them and use them. It is not the Sunday school teacher's job to be the main teacher of God's love, though Sunday school is a wonderful thing, our children should see Christ in our life and learn about him everyday.

 Joshua is learning and watching every day, even at church while we take communion.
Joshua handed me one of the "specials" and after I told him WHY we drank the "special", he lifted up the "special" and said "Lets all drink this together"...

Our children are watching...

A bit more SPRING in our step!

Ahhh, spring... we get whiffs of it here and there and sometimes all day, it's not quite here. Here are some pictures in honor of spring!

  

Sports confusion

The other day Joshua found some pink "tennis balls" I had bought for using in the dryer ( those didn't work out, but that's another story). I found him in living room rolling them across the floor with a pitching motion. " Look mom a baseball stadium!" ( He has quite separated the game from the building). He rolled a few more balls and finally one went where he wanted and he raised his hands up in the air and yelled " GO STEELERS!"

Haha!

Now I lay me down to sleep....

Joshua prayed his first prayer on his own! We were having family devotions and Joshua says " I want to pray!". Well of course he can, so after Elias is done praying he lets Joshua have a turn.

"Dear God, Thanks for bokchoy and dumplings! Amen"
LOVE it!

A Fine Performance

This year Elias, Joshua and I went to see a live theater production of the Musica Christmas Carol, with my family. I've seen it a few times, but I'm very glad to have gotten a chance to go see it with my whole family! It's a little pricey for a family of 8 plus to go. But a special give away my sis discovered gave us a an opportunity to get all the tickets 50% off! :)

This was Joshua's first real show and I was a little worried he may get a bit antsy, but he LOVED it and sat so wonderfully through the entire thing! At the end a few people around us said they didn't even realized Joshua was there. These moments are always so encouraging to me. They say, you are doing a good job parent, maybe not perfect, but a good job. Your time and effort is not being wasted.

Brianna had some girl time with Olivia while we were out, it was nice to be able to focus on Joshua for the evening.

To wrap the evening up, we went to Cheesecake Factory to eat cheesescake, yummmy, yum!

I have no pics of the evening. :)

A Christmas Shopping Climax so far...

We went to about 5 clothing stores in the mall and I found Joshua in the front display window 5 times...

Joshua and I were sitting across the table eating our "on an occasion" McDonalds and Brianna was in her carseat sporting a light pink bow in a colorful girly blanket with a pink "Bundle Me".
A lady across the way started cooing over Brianna saying how beautiful she was, then she looked up and asked Joshua how he liked his new sister. Joshua " Noooo, my baby brother". I never got a stare like that in my life, it was awesome. The lady stuttered " Is it, is it..." and I reassured her Joshua must have wanted and baby brother, because he had a sister. :)

Joshua ( While walking through any stores that had something interesting to him) " Mom, mom, can we bring it home...pleeeease?" and " So. Mom. How about [insert whatever item]".

In reality, it's not easy to go Christmas shopping with 2 kiddos....glad I can write a few highlights. :)

Three!

Well my handsome little man is three....all grown up. I'm glad, really, I want my children to grow into godly young man and woman. It just seems so fast, POOF, and he's three. Thankfully with growing up comes benefits...like being fully potty trained and quite independent and helpful.
We enjoyed our day out to Panera's for lunch and picture taking. It was quite chilly out so we warmed up with hot chocolate at the end. :) I successfully had Brianna in a ring sling and Joshua in the stroller. No double stroller if I can help it thank you.

  

Chocolate Mommy! Yum...?

He's so goofy!

Hot chocolate after the chilly walk!

Not even a picture...

Really, not even a picture could capture this sight... not sure WHAT he was cooking, but it consisted of flour...lots of flour... and my real maple syrup....

The things I find....

Steamed butter cookies, why didn't I think of that?

Q is for...

So I finally started going back to have a bit of a "learning" time with Joshua. So I've started by refreshing with his letters. We were on the letter "P" and this is what followed.
Me-"Joshua what letter is this?" Joshua "P"! Me-"Good! What letter is this?" Joshua- "O"! Me- "No, it's Q, say Q". Joshua- "QQQ...QQQ....QQQcumber"!

Ahaha, I love him!

A Pretty Black Eye

Looks real? Well Joshua did a good job for sure...

Today ( Though it was yesterday technically), didn't start off well whatsoever. I'm a deep sleeper, and abnormally deep this morning. I woke to Joshua stomping on my floor, no idea why till I get up and see he was splashing in the puddle he made with the humidifier water ( great...). Normally, when Joshua wakes up, he wakes me up. Normally Brianna will wake me up much earlier then she did. So not only was Joshua jumping in puddles this morning, I woke up 10 min before someone was going to be at my house....lovely. I rushed to get Joshua dressed ( meanwhile the baby decides right then she's hungry, not at the appropriate hour and a half earlier). I sit down and Joshua is in front of me with a big black circle under his eye. In utter astonishment and horror on how he could have gotten a black eye before I was even up, I called him over closer.

Ahhhh, it's not black, but purple...wait it's shiny silvery? Eyeshadow.... how he got a perfect circle under his eye with the perfect shade to look like that, no idea..

Lesson Learned...Maybe

The other morning I set Joshua down for his breakfast of Honey Bunches of Oats...Aldi's style. I went to feed the baby and left him to eat it ( which I'm slowly starting to acknowledge it's not a good idea). Awhile later I heard him moving about downstairs so I called to him to come up, which he did not do, instead quickly started running about. I figured he was into something, sure enough he had gotten the salt and pepper shakers and had it all over the table. :P He had been trying to clean it up...we finished that and headed up stairs. Fast forward to lunch time. I had decided to have one of Joshua's favorite lunches, dino chicken nuggets and I tol him so before going down. He excitedly proceeded me down the stairs and as I start to get lunch read I discover his cereal bowl in the sink... half full? Taking a closer look I could see he had generously doused his cereal with salt and pepper ( mostly pepper I think).
I called Joshua to sit down and I placed the bowl in front of him and asked him why he didn't finish it. "Pepper, mommy". "Did you put the pepper in?". "Yes, pepper". "Then you have to eat it, you made it you eat it, you can have chicken after you finish your cereal."


He ended up eating cereal till dinner time ( it was his lunch and snack and pre dinner), where he finally finished it so he could have some spaghetti and meatballs. Less learned? We'll see....

Language Discoveries

So we had a few people over for a dinner and a planning meeting the other night. We were talking quite a bit about potty training since we're in the midst of trying to get to full potty trained status. I don't think we use the phrase "potty training" very much around Joshua until the other night while talking to others.
Later Elias brought him up to go potty on his little potty which is surrounded by different toys. He sat Joshua down and Joshua starts moving his toy train and starts saying, "Potty training! ... potty traaaining... potty TRAIN-ing." :) I can see what kind of track his humor will be on. ;)

Um, yah....

We've decided to start a small family devotions before Joshua goes to bed. The first night we asked him what song he wanted to sing....he started beat boxing. Beat boxing is something Elias likes to fool around with him as Joshua sits on the potty at a restraunt or changing him.

It was a convincing moment that we needed to focus on other things. :)

Haha

Obedience has it's Interpretation

Yesterday I was sitting on my bed chatting while Joshua was playing. He was suppose to play in my room or his room, at this point he was in his room. Then I heard the bathroom door open so I called and told him to get out of the bathroom. I heard him quickly leave the bathroom and close the door. All is well! A few min later I heard swishing water, I immediately thought he was in the bathroom again, all geared up I headed for the bathroom to find it empty. Going to his room, I see this.

He had decided the bucket of water I left sitting in the bathroom would be great to wash his ducky with! He was SOAKED and so was ducky...who is still drying.











He was so proud of himself.

Fun in the Park

We have a small War memorial down the street. It makes a triangle and is inbetween 3 different streets. You can imagine Joshua was thrilled when we sipped our Starbucks in this little park. There were buses, big truck, small trucks and cars of all shape and sizes zooming by him.









The "special drink".



Watching his beloved modes of transportation. :)



"ROAR!"

Introducing....

The new mega roll! Never miss a spot!

I walked into the bathroom the other night and found this and the regular roll thrown away in the trash can. It was a good laugh, and I thought I would share!