This Is How We Welcome The Weekend

It was Friday night. They were high on McDonald's and frozen yogurt. And we all love weekends. Happy boys make for happy parents.

Because They're Cute

These boys are fun. Loud, silly, loving, energetic, and an amazing blessing from the Lord. Come visit any time you want to partake in the craziness :)

What should we do with our jungle?

Our back yard looks like a jungle. Ok maybe it IS a jungle. We can tell that once upon a time it was a nice yard. There seems to be the remains of a fern garden and some hostas with a brick outline.

But no one has lived here for several years. It's very overgrown and seems like a big job to us. We aren't sure what to do or, more importantly, how to do it. What can we do ourselves? What should we have someone else do?

So now you can give us some pointers. The yard is all shade and has a lot of ivy. It doesn't have grass but does have some non-ivy ground cover. Here are some pics to get you started!

Oh and that last pic is just for fun. If you look closely you can see a brick building. It is an abandoned, broken down old building that we think was at one time the community pool building! It is actually kind of creepy!

A day at the park

I am trying something new: a blog post from my phone! Maybe this way I'll blog more? Anyway, today we took the boys to the park for a picnic lunch. We're trying to get our errands and chores done during the week so we can just have fun the one day everyone is home. This was an easy outing but Nathan's already requested the aquarium sometime! I know this isn't the most exciting post ever but it will at least serve as updated pictures of my four little men. :)

The time a tree fell on our house

Well, the short version is a tree fell on our house, we're fine, we were out for three weeks, and now it's fixed.  Below is the longer version :)  (Disclaimer: I am not an author or even a particularly good writer, so this is just the basic story.)

As we were leaving St. Louis we bought our first house, a home in Atlanta close to the church where Jimmy works.  (He's the Director of Children's Ministry at Church of the Redeemer.)  Some things were fouled up with the closing resulting in a few more days in a hotel than we were anticipating (no small thing with four young boys!), but we got in and we were enjoying more space.  Four bedrooms instead of two!  Three bathrooms instead of one!  A finished basement devoted to being a playroom!

Three weeks after we moved in, however, some things changed.  Friday night, July 13, Jimmy and I were greatly anticipating the next night because we had set up babysitting starting at 5:30.  We were trying to decide where to have a nice dinner and we couldn't wait.  We went to bed as normal and woke up at 2am.

The ceiling was falling on us.  For a brief moment I thought someone was in our bedroom throwing things at us.  I woke up Jimmy (how had he slept through it?!) and immediately realized the ceiling was caving in on us.  We'd had a lot of rain the previous week and I thought maybe the roof had rotted or crumbled under all the water.  I got up, found my phone, and called 911.

When the firefighters got there, they told us a tree had fallen from the neighbor's yard onto the house.  They said if that side of the house hadn't been brick, the tree likely would have fallen all the way through the house.  The paramedics checked us out and said that we did have some cuts (which we already knew; there was a lot of blood everywhere) but we didn't need any stitches.  They made us move everyone into the basement for the night, just in case the tree moved some more.  They suggested we clean up all of our blood before we woke the children who had slept through the whole thing (again, what?!).

A picture of our bedroom the next day before the tree was removed.
See that bed? Yeah, we were sleeping in it when the tree fell.

This is the back of the house.  On the left you can see the base where it came from the neighbor's yard.
It was a BIG TREE.

I'm not going to lie; it was a surreal experience.  But God's protection was amazing.  I just felt that He really physically protected us that night.  Trees falling on houses in Atlanta is not really something new.  But this tree fell in the middle of our bed in the middle of the night and we only had cuts that didn't require stitches.  The tree fell on our bedroom and not 5 feet over; had it done that, Zach would have been covered in all of those bricks.  I have a feeling we would have been going to the hospital or worse in that case.

Another view of the tree.

The tree got removed the next day.  We were gone all day so they could do it, but in the few minutes we were there, the boys really enjoyed watching them work.

Having to be out of the house for three weeks while it was repaired was kind of a pain, but we were thankful we had a place to go.  We spent the first night at our friends, the Sanders'.  We spent the next five nights at a hotel with a room that was basically a one-bedroom apartment, while our good friends took the two big boys to the beach.  We spent the next nine nights at the home of a family in our church while they were on vacation, and we spent the last week in the mountains with Jimmy's parents.

Picture of the bedroom once the tree was gone.
I think it's easier to see just how big the hole is when the tree isn't blocking the light.

All cleaned up, waiting to be fixed.

At the end of the tree weeks, the house was fixed right on schedule, with a new roof!  That was definitely a silver lining.  The insurance also paid to have all three bedrooms painted so we got to choose colors to have the prison gray repainted.  (Now we just need to repaint the rest of the house!)  The elders of our church came and prayed over the house (we'd had several other unforeseen unfortunate things happen and we really felt we were being attacked).  Before the tree fell on the house, I felt defeated by homeownership and all of the little things that come with buying a house that's 50+ years old.  Now I love it.  It's got quirks and there are things that need to be fixed.  The people that sold it to us "flipped" it and every day I find some other thing they did and just wonder "why???"  But it's also the house where God intervened and protected us.  He held up those rafters from falling on us.  He guided the tree to our bedroom and not one of our children's.  He preserved the life and health of the parents of four very young boys.  He gave us a renewed sense of purpose here in Atlanta.  We don't know what He has planned for us, but we know it's good, and we know the enemy doesn't like it.  

Only problem is we still haven't had that date we were looking forward to.*

*This is not 100% accurate.  While we have not done exactly what we were planning, we did have a wonderful, wonderful woman babysit for us one day so we could go to Six Flags and ride roller coasters all day with the church staff.