field trip

We took an end of the school year field trip this week to the Holy Land Experience in Orlando. Once you get past all the cheesy parts, there are some good things. Brendan and I have been studying ancient history, so I wanted him to see the Jerusalem model and the Tabernacle. It's great to get a visual on what we see in the textbook. We also visited the Scriptorium and got to see a collection of Bibles dating from the B.C.'s until the present time. It was incredible to hear the stories of the godly, courageous men who gave their lives so we can read our Bibles today. We were struck at one of the Bibles that had the blood of the martyr who owned it on the pages-someone who died for owning the earliest version (Tyndale's) of the English Bible. Made us examine ourselves: what are we willing to do for the sake of the gospel?

On a lighter note, they had a kid's section of the park where we played a bit. Brendan got to try rock climbing for the first time and did a great job. Here's just a few pics from our day:

9th birthday

Well, I'm a little late posting this, but we celebrated Brendan's 9th birthday a few weeks ago. We just had a few of our good friends over to Grandma's house to go swimming. Almost everything Brendan received for his birthday was Star Wars related, because, of course, this is the new phase. Long gone are the days of Thomas the Train and pirates... Almost every conversation in this house revolves around or digresses to light sabers, Jedi masters or X-wing fighters. Even Mackenzie joins in on the lingo because she wants to play with her brother. And Kylie refers to Darth Vader as the "bad guy." There is an entire fleet of Rebel and Republic lego spaceships in Brendan's room and every day he has a new one to show us. Oy. I am happy to say that Brendan started karate last week and loves it, so at least he escapes from his space world sometimes :) So here's just a few pics from the day: