Courageous Joy

Mike’s Grand Day Off
The Wing Commander declared 3 July to be a “family day”. This means that only essential personnel had to go to work today. Mike took the day off. With a whole, wonderful, day off to play we had to consider options. This is what we settled on.

Strange fish
We were going to simply say “Mike went fishing” to tease Josiah…but he probably won’t read the blog while on the mission trip – so we’ll tell him that if he calls again but put all the facts here.

Mike found these fish while out on a run. Jared, Nolan, Arielle and he then rode their bikes back to look at them. Anyone know WHAT kind of fish they are. They have a long snout with a ton of teeth in them.

After lunch, Mike suggested we go view the movie CARS. Mike does not usually suggest we go see movies in a theater and we all jumped at his suggestion. It was a CUTE movie. We thought it was very well done and we all greatly enjoyed it. We had planned to go swimming at 6:00 p.m. but we didn’t get out of the movie until 6:30. We knew that it would be 7:15 – 7:30 by the time we got home, got swimming stuff, changed, drove to the pool and the pool closes at 8:00. We moved on to plan B.

New Bike
Arielle had been given the options of a new bike or a sewing machine for her birthday. Her birthday was May 23rd. She decided on a new bike. She has outgrown hers and it needs some repairs. We had heard that Academy had reasonably priced bikes so we checked them out. She got a really nice bike – a couple of sizes bigger with SPEEDS and hand brakes for $58.00.

We had planned to tie dye red, white and blue shirts today. I checked out the instructions on line and we decided it was far more involved than we could tackle in the a.m. The kids said their last year Old Navy shirts would be fine for the 4th. I found a $5 tank top at Academy that will work for me. MY Old Navy shirt fits an 8 month pregnant De’Etta.

New Fish (Photos by Jared)
The little ones had been begging for some new fish. As we were in the general vicinity of Petco, we stopped in and picked some out. We purchased 3 Dalmatians and 3 large Tiger Barbs for the tank. We don’t think the giant scum sucker will eat them….I think the catfish must have eaten the others. I specifically stayed away from guppies as the older kids thought it was too traumatic for the little ones to have to deal with all the babies. No matter how quickly we isolate many of them seem to get eaten too. Jared, our 12 yo, wondered if the Dalmatians would be like our hamsters. “Will we wake up in the morning and have 101 Dalmatians?”

Fireworks
Stacia was awake at 3 a.m. Monday morning (and this a.m. in fact). Mike suggested I keep her home, get her in bed and then go to bed myself. I agreed. He took Jared, Arielle, Nolan and Zander to find a good view of the city fireworks. Not sure WHY but our fireworks are on the 3rd of July here. I had just begun to get Stacia in bed when they all trooped back into the house. RAIN – the fireworks display was rained out. I have no idea if they will try to reschedule for today or what. This happened last year as well.

Krista called earlier in the day. We gave her a call back and we all got to chat with her for a bit. We’ll try to reach Bre today. The boys called on the 2nd and we should probably not expect many more calls from them while they are gone. {G}

During our car time Mike and Jared discovered that Stacia would quit crying when the camera was pointed at her. This resulted in about 30 pictures of Stacia in her car seat….many not smiling at all. (Photo won't upload)