It's a new day

Today is the 10th of January. Brendons birthday. He is 13 today and an official teenager.
I surrvived my 48th birthday. Actually I had a very nice birthday. I took the kids to a homeschool skating party in the afternoon and spent the time while the kids were skating talking to Kim. It was fun. We took Kinzie with us to give Sara a chance to sleep for awhile. She skated with the boys off and on and pretended to play video games with Jesse. Later Lary took me to dinner at Granite City. The food was great. The atmosphere doesn’t seem to match the food to me. The music is loud and it is hard to have conversation. But I still enjoyed myself. Larry and I laughed and talked, someone else cooked and cleaned the dishes so that is half of going out to eat for me.
I have a tradition with the boys that on there birthdays I always ask them first thing in the morning if they feel any different on that day than they did the day before now that they are a year older. They almost always say no.
This year Alex called me early in the morning to tell me happy birthday and to be the first one to ask me if I felt any different. I said no but check back with me when I turn 50.

On Saterday I went to the church to take down Christmas and then ran Alex and Mariah down to Moms warehouse to look at some furniture that she was going save for them and then we picked up all the girls and let Layne and Sara sleep for the afternoon. That night they all came out for dinner. It was an eventful night since the power went out. But we started a fire in the fireplace and lite candles. The boys and I played texas holdem by candlelight. It was fun. No t.v and noise, just us and the candlelight, very cozy.

Sunday Alex and Mariah came out and spent the afternoon, They have left now to go back to school in Colorado. We will be going out for Alex’s graduation the first of May.
One last time in Colorado. I hope we can go to New Life church in Colorado Springs on our way home. The band Desperation is from there and it would be great to go and check it out. Focus on the family is headquartered there also and that would be fun to.

I finally took down all of our Christmas decorations on Monday and Tuesday. I was finally done with Christmas. Now I hear we are getting ready for a snow storm.
I have been wanting just to have just one this winter. The kind where you have a big fire in the fireplace and you sit by it with a big cup of hot coffee covered up in a blanket while you look outside and see the big flakes of snow coming down.
At night you can see the shadows of the trees in the timber on the snow in the back yard.
The snow is sparkling in the moonlight.
But then I want it to melt and be done. That’s a dream winter.

My focus right now is on establishing a regular time of study in my bible.
For the last couple of weeks I had been preparing to preach and that was my study time. But now with no particular direction to go I was having trouble maintaining that. I found a good online daily study by back to the bible. It is short and yet thought provoking. Not heavy. That is what I was looking for.

More later,
B