Missouri Weekend

We had a great Memorial Day at our friends the Ehrenberger's. They live on a small farm in North East Missouri. We arrived Sunday evening just in time to set up our tent before it started to rain.

This is the view Monday morning from our tent.

The event was attended by several other families. After a cookout lunch we had a short time of singing hymns and patriotic songs. The fellowship was sweet.


The Ehrenberger's pond may be the finest fishing I have ever experienced!


We actually lost count of the number of quality bass we caught.

Colton James may have discovered a new passion!

Levi Matthias weilds a mean cane pole.

Jedidiah & Skipper

PJ's...Patriot Hat...and "Boots On!"

Jedidiah helping the "big" boys put the trash out.

Who Are These People?

I’m not really sure who these people are…but I think I like ‘em.

Bryan

Well...

Well…our water supply seems to be holding out. After the first signs of low water we instituted our “water conservation measures”. (paper plates, plastic bowls, cups and utensils)

We ask that you continue to pray for rain, I’m sure the farmers would appreciate it too, and pray that we will be able to find a long term solution.

Bryan

Well...it begins again...

Please pray for my family as we begin to deal with our low yield well, again.

Bryan

aaah, Virginia!

This is from Dave Black's blog.


"This is one of my favorite views of Nathan's (Mr. Black's son) farm house. The outbuilding in the left foreground dates to the late 1700s."


(must...stop...coveting...)

Bryan

Gardening

Three new tomato plants.

Two more.

Four new pepper plants. (one is out of view) 2 cayenne – 2 chile Who's ready for some homemade salsa!

Strawberries!

Twelve new cucumber hills. (marked by sticks)

We also weeded the blackberries and planted some herbs in the flower bed around the front porch.

Bryan

From the Kitchen

Jacob Allen made pumpkin cake for dinner. Yum! As I post this he is finishing the peanut butter cream cheese frosting. I can hardly wait to eat.

Bryan

Funny How Time Changes Things

This was the family vehicle in 1987. 4 passenger and well over 40 mpg!


This is the family vehicle 2005. 15 passenger and 10mpg!

Mercy

"The Lord's mercy often rides to the door of our heart upon the black horse of affliction." -- Charles H. Spurgeon

Bryan

Swamp Boat

This morning before breakfast Samuel Logan asked me about the "swamp boat" I rode on while in Florida. We talked about them for a few minutes then I pulled up a few picture for him on the internet.

About 11 o' clock this morning he brings this contraption into my office and says, "Like this?"

We then proceeded to test its sea worthiness in the bath tub and it passed with flying colors.

Bryan

Gardening

It's good for the soul to see the lettuce coming up.

Kim

Spring Roses

This is a very old rose bush right here in my own yard. The blooms are beautiful and the fragrance is oh so sweet. I can't go to hang laundry on the line without stopping to take it in. It would be so wrong to pass it by without enjoying it and praising our Father for such a lovely gift as this. I enjoy this wonderful view when I do dishes. I can imagine a young mother in her sun bonnet out here on the prairie carefully planting it many years ago. I wonder what her name was. I hope she knows how much I enjoy it.

Kim

And what is EPIC?

EPIC


Bryan

Are your papers in order?

"The US House of Representatives passed a spending bill last week that contains provisions establishing a national ID card, and the Senate is poised to approve the measure in the next few days. This week marks the American public’s last chance to convince their Senators they don’t want to live in a nation that demands papers from its citizens as they go about their lives." - Ron Paul

Story found here - National ID Cards

Bill found here – HR418

Bryan

Babies

Babies
by G.K. Chesterton


The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. . .

The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In ech of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.

. . . If we could see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. . . We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not found - [the one] on which we were born. But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revloutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous. . . [and] that attitude towards children is right. It is our attitude towards grown up people that is wrong. . .

Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect; [we reverence, love, fear and forgive them.] We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. . . If we treated all grown-up persons with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat [the limitations of an infant, accepting their blunders, delighted at all their faltering attempts, marveling at their small accomplishments], we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. . .

The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel oursleves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to been through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small. . . we feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that [God] might feel. . .

But [it is] the humorous look of children [that] is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the cosmos together. . . [They] give us the most perfect hint of the humor that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.

http://www.chesterton.org/gkc/essayist/babies.htm

Bryan

From Our Saturday Night Reading

Read by Samuel Logan -

Give us Men!

Give us Men!
Men from every rank,
Fresh and free and frank;
Men of thought and reading,
Men of light and leading,
Men of loyal breeding,
The nation's welfare speeding;
Men of faith and not of fiction,
Men of lofty aim in action;
Give us Men - O say again,
Give us Men!

Give us Men!
Strong and stalwart ones;
Men whom purest honor fires,
Men who trample self beneath them,
Men who make their country wreathe them
As her noble sons,
Worthy of their sires;
Men who never shame their mothers,
Men who never fail their brothers,
True, however false are others:
Give us Men! - I say again,
Give us Men!

Give us Men!
Men who, when tempest gathers,
Grasp the standard of their fathers
In the thickest fight;
Men who strike for home and altar,
(Let the coward cringe and falter),
God defend the right!
True as truth, the lorn and lonely,
Tender as the brave are only;
Men who tread where saints have trod,
Men for Country, Home and God:
Give us Men! I say again - again -
Give us Men!

Josiah Gilbert Holland

Family Jam Session

Taylor's for Everyone!!!

Motherhood

Motherhood

I hold within my arms to-day

A priceless bit of mortal clay,

Divinely fashioned, and so fair,

The angels well may kinship share.

My soul with gratitude is filled,

My heart with mother love is thrilled,

My eyes brim o’er with new-born joy,

While gazing on my cherub boy.

O precious one! Through tears I see

A mighty task awaiting me.

My happy sky grows overcast,

Life’s duties loom so grand, so vast.

To shield from wrong, to right incline,

This little life now linked to mine—

Divine the gift. Oh, may the mould

A heart of truth and honor hold!

Help me, kind Heaven, to know the way

From out the tangle of each day,

To guide him safe to manhood’s prime,

And all the glory shall be Thine.

M. E. Piatt

The New Baby

The New Baby

“Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God, and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ’s name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation, my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother’s heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her life-long prayers!” – Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Levi's Ducks

Charlie D

Here.

Bryan

Socialized Medicine

This is from a friend's blog -

One small step for me, one giant leap for socialized medicine

Today was part two (see part I here) of the local health care saga. At 4:00 today I met with about 10 other area citizens to consolidate notes and discuss priorities for reporting our feedback to the Illinois state task force on health care.

(the rest is here)

Bryan

Life's Good

Saturday afternoon, chores done, go cart running...life's good!