Church

At today's service, the elementary children sang 17 of the songs they had learned this year. In place of the sermon, they sang anthems from the church year, Advent through Pentecost. Alexander and Benjamin have beautiful, strong voices, and Alexander especially looked very comfortable up there, leaning with one arm on the piano as he sang. He can reach the high notes better than I can, I think! They both know how to project their voices.


At the end of the service, they processed out and sang "Go now in Peace" around the baptismal font. Then they stood in a receiving line as everyone left the service. Nice job, boys!

Benjamin in the paper

When we opened the Hometown News last night, there was Benjamin's picture. It's really cute - go to this website to see all the pictures they took of Benjamin and Alexander.

http://www.photoreflect.com/pr3/thumbpage.aspx?e=3799592

Number 21 is the one that made it in the paper. Enjoy!

Chorus Concert

Tuesday night was Alexander's chorus concert. The theme this spring was "Disney." We sang fun Disney songs like "Mickey Mouse Club," "Heigh ho!" and "Winnie the Pooh." These pictures were taken at the evening concert, when it was performed for the parents. Jonathan sat at his usual place, right next to mom at the piano.

Alexander had a solo in "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." You can see he got a little nervous, but did a great job singing! He didn't like the lyrics, though: "But better use it carefully or it could change your life. One night I said it to me girl and now me girl's me wife." How embarassing to a second grader. It sure was cute, though.

His good friend Lynnlee led the pledge before the show started.

New camera!

The pictures you see on yesterday and today's entries were taken with our new camera. Since we're about to leave for Europe, we thought we should have a camera that takes good pictures indoors and outdoors. We bought a Kodak, just like our other one, but with more features. This first pictures shows the panoramic feature. Cool, huh? I took this picture to show our back porch. We cleaned the gutters on it, and discovered hundreds and hundreds of....


...tadpoles! So, since we're a family of 3 boys, what did we do? We caught them, of course. And just to be extra nice, we caught some extras to take into school. Won't their teachers be thrilled???

We took these next pictures at Elke's house. Chris tried a panoramic shot of her cool car. This last picture of Alexander is taken with a 10x zoom! In the picture of Elke's car, you can see our van, which is where he was when Chris took the picture.


We also bought 3 - 2 gig memory cards. They each hold about 400 pictures or so. It will take us forever to sort through our pictures when we return, but that's part of the fun of traveling, isn't it???

Our next project...

Now that we are done with the fence, we'll have to either fix or replace our rotting shed. As you can see, our termite service covers only our house, not our shed!

Don't Fence Me In!!!

It was a beautiful Memorial Day, with temperatures in the upper 70's (rare for this time of year). I went out for a 7 mile run, and when I returned, I found Chris and the boys working in the backyard, cleaning out the shed and washing the awning. As I helped them finish up, I looked over at our pathetic fence and said, "We really should take down that fence." Immediately I saw this look of sheer joy on Benjamin's face. He was thinking only one thing: DESTRUCTION!! As you can see from this picture, our fence is rotting. We've had it since we moved in 8 years ago, so it's done well for us. We originally had it put in to keep our young toddlers contained. Now that they are all school age, we don't need the boundries. So, with two eager boys (Jonathan wanted nothing to do with work), we decided to tackle this project.

We got out the tools and began taking it down, piece by piece. We had to be very careful to get all of the nails out - some of them were so rusted they looked like they had been in there for 100 years!

Chris was quite a sport - working, despite his sprained wrist. The boys were troopers, working for 3 hours and helping us haul all of the boards out to the street. They fought over the sledgehammer, but in general were very helpful.


I felt kind of bad, because we're taking away the anole's habitat. They love hanging out on the fence.

Our final pile was pretty large.
We're hoping they'll haul it away with the trash on Thursday. We were amazed to see how much the wood had rotted underground. Florida weather is fierce to anything wood.

The last thing we had to do was pull up the stakes. As you can see, it was a rather deep hole. The holes are still there. We'll have to fill them in later to avoid any sprained ankles. Here's a final picture WITHOUT any fence. The boys are now free to run, for better or for worse.

Lost and Found

We've heard the group "Lost and Found" a few times at youth gatherings and concerts. They wrote "The Lutheran Song," a tribute to famous Lutherans.



This link has different pictures and the words written out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=102kvQ1dWoY

Enjoy!