Family Visits

About three weeks ago we had some families stop by from out of town. The Anderson family (above) live in Missouri where we met them at a concert we did down there. They were coming up here to spend the Fourth of July weekend with relatives so it was fun to see them again; in a different state!

Isaac usually jumps so high that he hits his head on the tree branches!

Mom and Mrs. Anderson preparing the food

We had fun playing ping pong, around the world ping pong, Foosball, ultimate Frisbee, catch phrase, jamming, and an interesting game of volley ball. :)

My mom knew both of these moms through college and they have a lot of good memories together. It just so happened that they both called our home in the same week and asked if they could stop by while in the area. We don't see either of them very often because they live in two different states so of course we were happy to have them over. The funny thing was neither of them knew the other one was coming and they both planned for the same day! Mom told Mrs. McCormick who was coming so she could get there early to open the door and surprise them. It was pretty funny.

Mr.and Mrs. Shaw, Mrs. McCormick (her husband was at home,) and Mom and Dad.

All of the children in order of age. From left to right: Isaac, Lucas Jonathan, Me, Nathan, Emma, Abby, Tessa, Max and Caleb.

Max and Emma are sibs from the McCormick family and Jonathan, Nathan, Abby and Caleb are from the Shaw family.

Taco salad

We had fun playing catch and throw, bachee ball, trampoline games, ladder ball and Fooseball.

If you can't tell, there's someone in there!

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Canada Music Festival

This was our second Canada music experience and also a very interesting one. This festival was like the other one, (see other post about Canada,) in that it was run by Mennonites, but different from the other one in that the people that they were ministering to were Canadian people from their community and any one who wanted to come, instead of Native Americans and Ojibwa and Cree tribes. My Dad did the captions on this post because I am cleaning rooms getting ready for Nickolai our Ukrainian orphan who is coming THIS SUNDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Enjoy!

Here we are standing beside a beautiful blooming field of Canola preparing for a set up music at the Thousand Oaks Gospel Camp near Morden, Manitoba, which is southwest of Winnipeg. We had never seen Canola in a field, but it has gorgeous yellow blossoms cover fields hundreds of acres across. The Gospel Camp is run by Mennonites in the area, who mostly are immigrants to Canada from eastern Europe and South America who speak low German as their first language. They were wonderful hosts and very friendly and welcoming. The festival was very nice.


We had to play four sets of music, so we had to brush up on some old dusty songs!

It is not hard to sing to the Lord in such a beautiful setting as this.

We stayed in a little motel in town each evening. Here I am firing up the engine one morning to head to the festival, which was out in the country in a nice park area with lots of shade trees (and next to the beautiful field of Canola).

Doesn't Lucas look "spiffy" in his suit and tie? This was Sunday morning before we sang our last set of music.

My two crazy girls!

A brook near our motel in Morden, Manitoba.

Glorious Canola field. Unfortunately, the yellow doesn't show up very well in this photo.

Festival goers in their seats. There were easily more than 1000 in attendance.

The sound man is preparing for the next group of musicians.

Another view of the festival seating area under the trees.

Sisters forever!

Door County

Door County WI was a fun place to have a mini vacation. We took a few days off of concerts to just have fun around the area in which we were playing . We stayed in Fish Creek which was a cute little tourist town with lots of places to shop, eat, bike, and swim; which is just what we did. We also got to experience a neat tradition called a fish boil that I will tell you more about later.

- Swimming

They had beautiful beaches with soft sand and some pretty big waves. When we went to the beaches we could hardly believe we were in Wisconsin! It seemed like the ocean or something.


We had really nice weather which was great because we found out that before we came it was cloudy and rainy.

It was cool 'cause when you swam out to where it was kinda deep, It got so shallow that it was bellow my knees!

Our Frisbee comes with us where ever we go.

- Biking

They had some beautiful trails in Fish Creek so we decided to get hot biking and then cool off swimming.

This is after the long biking trip so apparently we were both tiered and hungry!

Along the way there were little stops so we were able to take breaks and take pictures.

There were some pretty interesting boats out there!

-Shopping

We found this funny little hat shop called 'Hat Head' where they had a wide variety of all types of hats.

They went all the way from regular base ball caps...

to strange irregular hats!

Isaac found a new best friend!

I thought these coats looked like they came from the wardrobe of the Chronicles of Narnia.

One store had baskets and baskets of beautiful flower arrangements.

When we were in the store with the coats I found these sunglasses that I really liked. I thought about buying them until I looked at the price tag...$87 dollars!


Fish Boil

I don't know if you've ever been to one of these but you've got to try it sometime.

First they take the fish and put it in a kettle to cook outside. Then they add whole onions and potatoes and they light it on fire to make it boil over in one big burst of flame!

As you can see in the previous picture Isaac got a little too close!