playing catch up

I feel like all I do is catch up on things that I have gotten behind on: laundry, cleaning the house, dishes, picture uploads, books, and the list can go on and on and definitely can include my blog. I pretty much fell of the blogosphere for all of the summer. I guess we were just too busy having fun and enjoying the beautiful sunshine to spend time at the computer blogging. So, now I will do a quick update. We finished out the school year in June and immediately got busy doing more interesting things. For starters, I turned 30 in June. That is not the exciting part. The exciting part was the surprise birthday party my fantastic husband threw for me. He held an amazing surprise party with our friends and family in MI. AND he invited my two best friends to come into town and join me and my other bestie for a GLEEful 2 days of pedicures, shopping, dinners out, slumber parties, and (wait for it) the gLee Live concert that happened to be touring in Detroit at the same time! Yes, I know, Josh is the BEST! We immediately followed the birthday celebrations with a trip to Kings Island in Ohio with the kids and my parents. The kids all enjoyed some summer camps. And we spent a fantastic Fourth of July weekend with our good friends, the Ross family, at my parents' house in Ohio. This has become somewhat of a tradition I guess as long as we are all available and I must say, it is a wonderful tradition. The kids have a blast with their best friends swimming, fishing, boating, hot tubbing, and the adults do the same! =) The rest of our summer has pretty much just been hanging out. We've crammed in a few interviews for jobs around the country as Josh is beginning the process of job hunting. We are praying that God shows us clearly the right job for Josh in the right community for our family. We got lucky and were able to coordinate a Pennsylvania interview with a visit to the Newman cousins in NY and had a fabulous Labor Day weekend with our 7 kids together. We also got to visit with our Tulsa family during the Tulsa interview, which was awesome. We have one more interview scheduled in TN and are still keeping our eyes open for other interesting opportunities. Josh has had a busy summer and will have a busy final residency year because he is now the residency program's administrative chief. So he is crazy busy most of the time and has also been doing a lot of traveling for conferences and stuff. He'll be heading to South Africa in February for a medical training outreach for 3 weeks that he is very excited about. Me? Not so much. Any visitors would be welcome during that time! =) Seth started school last week (first grade) and is loving it so far. We are praying for a better year for him academically and that he really just has a great experience and makes some big leaps forward academically. He has been doing physical and occupational therapy, which has been great. He is currently trying an audio therapy program that we're hoping will help with his attention issues and visual motor development. We're doing gymnastics for the Seth and Lilah and will be starting swimming soon. I am just hanging on by the seat of my pants as our schedule gets busier and we are fully entering the "school aged kids" stage of life. Lilah is doing a homeschool pre-K program with me and we're enjoying the extra girl time together. Lilah just turned 5 last week and had her first big girl slumber party with her friend, Katie. They had a princess dress-up slumber party and fulfilled all slumber party standards by playing, doing make-up and hair, staying up giggling until midnight, and watching girly movies with donuts for breakfast. It was a blast! Isaac is just as active as always. He loves sitting with me and Lilah and "doing school", when he's not busy being Superman, that is. We are starting the potty training stuff with Isaac. I'll let you know how that goes... gifts of chocolate and wine might be appreciated! lol =) I think that is the update for now. As the weather gets cooler, maybe I will take more time to sit down and type something more interesting than this random update. For now, I will leave you with this:

Psalm 19: 1-4

1 The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship. 2 Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known. 3 They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard.[a] 4 Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world.