Lemon-AID

On Saturday, our family hosted a Lemon-AID stand for Blood:Water Mission at our local Farmers Market! We had a great morning! Here is a picture of Beckett and Helen early that morning before any customers arrived standing behind their table!

Will and daddy came right before things got busy, so I snapped a shot of all three kiddos in their Lemon:AID shirts!

The kids made some great signs! Beckett made this one to let people know how their donation for some lemonade would ultimately help people in Africa!

Here is one from Helen. It is her interpretation of a lemonade stand!

Will loved sitting on the ice cooler behind the stand!

This next picture is a shot down Broadway at some of the other vendors that morning. There were peaches, corn, squash and tomatoes for sale! Good stuff!

Papa and Will sitting on a bench watching the cars go by on Broadway!

Nana was one of their first customers of the day!

Helen working the crowd and ready to tell them about building wells in Africa!

Will did a good job drinking lemonade!

And drinking lemonade.....

And still, drinking more lemonade!!

Many friends dropped by to visit, drink lemonade and give donations!! Here is Will with his friend, Eli!

Some more friends getting lemonade and reading about Blood:Water Mission!

Here is Helen pouring up another cup of lemonade!

We had a great time doing our Lemon:AID stand for clean water in Africa! Donations are still coming in, but so far, they raised $395 to send to Blood:Water Mission! Pretty awesome for some lemons, water, sugar and a little time! They are ready to do another stand, so we are looking into some other locations! Stay tuned......

Lemon-AID Stand

Please drop by our Lemon-AID stand this Saturday at the Lenoir City Farmer's Market from 9am to 12pm! Beckett, Helen and Will would love to give you a cup of lemonade and tell you about how we can all help to provide sustainable access to clean water in communities in Africa. We will welcome your donations so that we can send any money we raise at our Lemon-AID stand to Blood:Water Mission to help with their current projects in Africa. If you have any questions about the LC Farmer's Market and where to find us on Saturday, just leave a comment or send me an email! Thanks for your support! Come enjoy some lemonade and let us tell you about this amazing organization and the wonderful ways that they are partnering with our neighbors in Africa to build healthier, stronger communities!

LEMON:AID from Blood:Water Mission on Vimeo.

A Half Birthday Celebration and Other Summer Fun!

We celebrated Helen's half birthday on July 14th by going to Menchies for frozen yogurt with all the yummy toppings! Helen has a good friend named Sophie whose birthday is the day before hers. We told Sophie's family how we like to celebrate 1/2 birthdays, so they joined us at Menchies so we could celebrate both girls turning 5 and 1/2! Here is a picture of Helen with her special treat!
Here are the girls with Will and Sophie's little sister, Lane. After they ate their yogurt, they drew on the chalkboard. It didn't take long until they were running all around the shop, so we decided to head to a park to run off some energy.

We went to a neat little park by the library that has lots of statues. Helen and Sophie posed for pics with ALL of the statues while the daddies tried to keep Beckett, Will and Lane out of the creek! This was my fave "statue pic" of the girls! These friends are so sweet....they always greet each other with big hugs and are so happy to see each other!

We have enjoyed spending time at the lake this summer. We live near a couple of lakes that have beach areas and we have enjoyed meeting friends there to play, swim and have picnic lunches. This day, we met the Parsons and had a great time!

Loved this shot of Will with the little bit of sand on his head!

Here are Kaelyn and Helen sitting at the picnic table. Helen has a peanut butter smile! Kaelyn is always so sweet to play with Helen and this day, she was trying to teach Helen to swim.

Will and Shae...cheesin' for the camera!

In my last post, I explained how Will got to have his first sucker. Well this is a picture of Will enjoying his first popsicle! He LOVED it as well! It is hard to beat a grape popsicle on a very hot day! The kids have been enjoying lots of popsicles this summer! It has been so hot that one of the only ways that I can get them to go outside to play is to bribe them and promise they will get a popsicle!

A couple of weeks ago, our friends the Campions came to visit for a day. They live in south Florida now, but were vacationing in Cherokee, NC for a week, so we met them in the mountains for a fun day of play and catching up! Sean and Jeff spent some time fly fishing.

This picture makes me laugh! Here we are in the middle The Great Smoky Mtn. National Park....such a beautiful place......and our little ones were playing with their big brother and big sister's video games!

So while the daddies fished, Stephanie and I had our hands full watching the kiddos and making sure no one busted their heads on all of those rocks! They had a blast in this little swimming hole!

After our time in the park, we headed into town to get some lunch. JT rode with us and these three had a fun time laughing and hanging out!

Summer is flying by! I'm busy with a couple of projects at the house. We are painting a couple of rooms and re-organizing some things for this coming school year. We have purchased a new curriculum for our school year and I'm spending time thinking about how we are going to schedule our days now that I'll be teaching my 3rd grader and my Kindergartener! It's going to be a fun year....but there is a lot to do in preparation! We have lots of fun activities coming up in the next few weeks, so I'll post pictures as soon as I have a chance!

Fourth Festivities!

We had a great weekend filled with many activities to celebrate Independence Day! It all started last Friday night when our church hosted a fun evening with games, food, live music and fireworks! It was great fun and I didn't take any pictures! I spent the majority of the evening standing in line with Helen and two of her friends waiting to get their faces painted! Oh well! The fireworks and fellowship were great!

On Saturday evening we went to Nana and Papa's house and enjoyed a cook-out with all of the cousins present! That doesn't happen very often, so it was great fun! Here is a picture of all seven cousins! It sure is hard to get all of them to look in the same direction and smile...but a cute bunch of kiddos none-the-less! Yes, Helen is wearing a night-gown and Ty is wearing Superman pajamas in the middle of the afternoon!
After dinner, we headed out back by Papa's garden for some baseball practice. Beckett and Connor practiced pitching and Ty practiced throwing. It was fun watching the "boys of summer" play ball!

Another pic of Beckett, Connor and Ty taking turns pitching!

Then it was time for a ride on the "gator"!

Papa took us to the back of his property to pick and eat some blackberries! Yum!

Will didn't pick them.....but he sure liked eating them!

Then we rode over to the "creepy tree". That is what the kids call this particular tree that is dead and stands out in the middle of a field.

Then they hammed it up a bit to show how the creepy tree really creeps them out!

Back at the barn, Will had to sit in the seat of the tractor for a little photo session!

Then on Sunday after church, we headed downtown for the LC parade. This year, to kick off the parade, they held a "firecracker run" down Broadway for the kids. Beckett and Helen both participated and we were so proud of them. I posted two quick video clips at the bottom of this post of each of them running!

This was Will's first experience at a LC parade and it did not disappoint! Let me just say that this expression on his face just sums up a small town parade perfectly! He seems to be thinking, "Did I just see what I think I saw?

For example, men with funny looking hats on their heads racing little go-carts around and doing routines where they about crash into each other. How is that for entertainment?

And I kid you not, this guy was in the parade, riding in the back of a truck that had signs for one of the local candidates who is running for Judge. Yes, that is a monkey sitting on his shoulder and yes, it was wearing a diaper and drinking a water bottle. No wonder Will had that confused look on his face in the earlier picture. I'm not sure that I even understand this!

Now THIS is a float that I think makes sense at a Fourth of July parade! This is what it is all about!

Did I mention that at a small town parade, every person who is riding on some type of float, car, truck, ATV or go-cart, throws candy to the on-lookers? We came home with a Halloween-type stash of candy! (Except none of it is chocolate because it would melt immediately in this 95 degree heat~so that is kind-of a bummer!) Helen would grab the candy and stash it in the basket of Will's stroller. Well, somehow a dum-dum sucker made it into Will's seat! He managed to get the wrapper off and stick it in his mouth before I saw him, so he had his first ever sucker at the parade! He thoroughly enjoyed it and now he wants every sucker that he sees! Smart boy!

This is Helen running down Broadway in the Firecracker Run! Her video turned out blurry, but you can still see her hot, red face and sweet smile as she ran by me!

And here is Beckett as he ran by me toward the end of the race!

So proud of both of them!

It's July Already??

I can't believe how quickly the summer is going by! Here is a quick update from our family for the last couple of weeks! I'll begin with a picture of Helen with a rainbow painted on her face. She went with me to our local homeschool curriculum resource fair last week to pick up some items for next year. She was excited to get her new math books that she will use when we begin Kindergarten in a couple of months. I can't believe my little girl is beginning Kindergarten! Anyway, there were a couple of young girls at the fair who were doing face painting and Helen picked this FULL face rainbow with glitter and everything!
We've done a bit of swimming this summer. We've gone to the lake a couple of times with friends and also to a pool or two. So thankful for friends who share their pools with us on hot summer days!

Beckett got to go to Atlanta with Nana, Papa and Connor for a couple of days to see some Braves baseball games, so Sean and I took Helen and Will to Chuck E. Cheese's. Helen thinks this place is "the bomb"! She was SO excited when we told her we were going! Here she is with the big mouse himself!

This picture makes me laugh! These two were both cheesin' hard for the camera! Will was genuinely having a blast, and Sean.....well, not so much. Chuck E. Cheese's is not his favorite place to spend an evening....but he always has fun hanging with the kids!

We don't go to Chuck E. Cheese's very often, but Helen always likes to have her picture made by this sign when we are there.

Beckett and Helen both went to VBS a couple of weeks ago and then last week, Beckett attended Worship Camp all week. We got to enjoy their program last Sunday night where they sang, danced, participated in a "black light" song and did sign language as they worshiped. Beckett had a great week and he learned so much all week long! Here is a picture of him singing along with several other kids in the choir!

Here is a picture of Beckett (was he scared?) with some of his buddies after the program was over. They wore black clothes through the program because of the black light songs, but for the last song, they all wore their camp t-shirts. It was a great week! We LOVE First Baptist LC and their children's program! So thankful for this opportunity for kids to gather together, have fun and learn the many ways to worship and praise our Heavenly Father!

This was Beckett's third year to attend worship camp and the first year he came home one day and wanted to know what a "solo" was. I explained it to him and that was the end of that. The next day when I picked him up, the camp director told me that he had tried out for, and gotten a solo! This year, Beckett tried out and got a solo part again. We are so proud of him for using his talent to praise God and thankful for all of these kiddos who led us in a sweet night of worship! There were four solos in this song and Beckett sang the second solo.