More Matching Jumpers...and more pictures!!!

   First of all, we want to say  THANK YOU to all you wonderful people who voted for us .  It was SO much fun!   The polls right now say that we came in first, but we haven't heard who has won "officially" .  They still need to make sure all the votes were fair and "legal".   Hopefully sometime today we will find out who the official winners are : ) 

      And now, for the pictures!   About a month or two ago, we bought 30+ yards of the same material Cassia's giveaway was made out of---we just loved it so much!  Late Saturday night, we finished the last of them, and once again, our wonderful photographer, Mommy, took some pictures for us!

All along the fence...

We all decided to try a "twirling picture"  : )

Bekah with the kitten : )

Bekah trying to keep the kitty warm .

All of us trying to keep warm, in between pictures...or so we thought!

Noah and Isaiah know what their sisters' skirts are for!

A jumping picture...we laughed and laughed when we were looking at the 5 or so jumping pictures we had taken!  They were all so funny, but this one is the best one!

Charissa and Bekah, peeking out the barn window!

Anna, Bekah, and Charissa  : D

All of the farmgirls, peeking out of  the barn door : )

"Bye!  See you next time!"

~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~

Beautiful Sunrise!

This morning and another morning the sunrise was SO pretty!   Just the color and the clouds....absolutely beautiful!

Here are some pictures of it:

I really like this one .....

...and this one

Hope you enjoyed it!

~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~

Cakes, cakes, and more cakes!!!

       A few weeks ago, a friend of ours got married.  She asked if I would want to decorate her wedding cakes.  So I thought I'd post some pictures of my four day adventure of decorating eight sheet cakes!!!

The ingredients...

 Mix and bake...I hogged the whole island (which is our main kitchen working space).  My poor sisters had to fix supper on the smaller counters!  Which isn't exactly an easy task : )

          A few days before the cake marathon, we had defrosted this freezer.  I didn't put all the food back into here until after the cakes were done, so I'd have room to freeze a bunch at a time.  Frosting frozen cakes makes it soooo much easier, and I wish I would have done it this way a long time ago!  It helps to seal in all those crumbs.

        Whenever I decorate cakes, if I am under stress (icing is acting up, time crunch, etc.)  I start to get grumpy with whoever is asking me too many questions.  It isn't a very nice character quality (or maybe I should say is more of a character deficiency!). 

     Of course all your little siblings think what you are doing is so very neat, (and tasty!), so it is just natural that they would ask so many questions! 

    Anyways, the reason I tell you that, is because I was telling a dear friend of mine about this, and asked her if she would pray for me.   The wonderful thing is, it went very well : )  I only got grumpy a little, instead of a lot : D  And another neat thing is...my friend asked me on Sunday at church what time I had finished them (the wedding was on Sunday afternoon, so I had to have them done by Saturday night).  I told her that I  had finished decorating at about 12:30, and completely cleaned up by 1:00 a.m.  She got so excited and said, "I prayed that you would be completely done by one 'o clock!"  Oh my!  Then that got me excited, too : D  Isn't it just wonderful how God answers even our "little" prayers?!

 In this picture, I have finished the cakes, but not cleaned up the mess.  I included  the clock in the picture on purpose : )

 All cleaned up!  See the clock again?!

Now, do you want to see the cakes? 

I must not forget to mention my little helpers!  I needed help cleaning up somewhere in the middle of decorating, and these two little dears did it for me so I could focus on the cakes : )

Anna and Bekah, my little helpers : )

                          The cakes turned out fine, as you can see, and we only squashed one small corner of a cake as we were transporting :-)   We placed them on our 15 passenger van floor (one seat was out), and Daddy drove slowly and carefully to the reception place :-)  I was so grateful to him for doing that!  I told him that I thought he was even more careful than I would have been driving with all those cakes, even though I did make them!  If I would have drove, we might have had more than one corner smashed : ) 

   What?!  No!  I am not a crazy driver...not usually... I don't think  : D  Oh forget the driving!  We were talking about cakes!

       Have a great day!

~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~

I Was HAPPY!!!!

Lately it has been cloudy in the mornings so you couldn't see the sunrise.....and I was disapointed. So this morning I looked out and was happy to see the starting of a sunrise!!!!! It was really pretty, not as pretty as the one a few days ago, but it was still a thrilling sight to see.

 No, this is not a panoramic picture....I unfortunately don't know how to take those. For this picture I just cropped it. (It's actually the same one as above.)

                    Have a nice day, and don't forget to check back later when I post about my giveaway!

~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~

One of God's Many Wonders!

...."Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and  true are thy ways, thou King of Saints." 

                                  Revelation 15:3 KJV

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Incredibly Adorable

  At lunch time Isaiah told me:

 "Cassia, food me"

Oh, you are SO cute Isaiah!  I love you bunches!!!!!

~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~

The SURPRISE You've Been Waiting For...

        A Note about our further problems:  We got our template switched over, and when we went to go look at all the comments we were getting, WE COULD NOT SEE THEM!  Do you know how maddening it is to know you have seven comments, and not able to read one of them?!  It is very maddening!  Well--the comments are fixed, but our homepage is very  W-I-D-E!  Oh dear!  Well, it's getting there!   Thank you all for your comments!  We LOVE them : )      ~Jessica

Hooray!  The Surprise is here! 

   Do forgive us for the delay...we would have had it up last night, since we were up until midnight anyway, but we had some technical difficulties .  Such as things getting mixed up on the sidebar, or the blog template suddenly getting bigger than what it was on our testing blog, etc, etc, etc!  We still have one big problem, being the picture at the top won't center for all screen resolutions, so if it looks off centered, that's because your computer has problems!  Just kidding!  Right now it looks fine on our screen resolution, and we are going to try and fix it before long, so that it will look centered to everyone.  If you happen to know how to do this, we would be happy to hear from you!  I googled it, and googled it, and I am not finding anything very helpful---at least for what would work for homeschoolblogger : )

      AND having a new blog template is not the only surprise, we are going to be hosting four giveaways!  Stop by next Monday, September 7th, for the first one!  Each of the following three Mondays, we will  be hosting a new giveaway.

      One day, Susannah and Cassia told Leah and me that they had this great idea...we should CHANGE our blog template, AND host a giveaway for our  one year "blogoversary" : )  At first I thought they were crazy!  The giveaway was doable, but changing our template was another story.  We all agreed that it had to be something we all really liked, not just something we could put up with.  So in the past few weeks, I have gotten a crash course in HTML .    What you see is the finished result of  trying "this", and trying "that", and approving everything by at least 5 of the seven sisters : D  It's amazing it's even done!

   Okay!  Now for some pictures : )  This past Easter we took a lot of group pictures as you probably remember, and so a few weeks ago, we decided we needed some updated, summer pictures : D  Enjoy!

Being the oldest, it has taken a long time for me to be able to "look up" to any of my sisters : D  As you can see here...I finally can!

In order: Bekah, Leah, Cassia, Susannah, Jessica, Anna, Charissa

 Forget the tree huggers!  We're corn huggers .

 Well, Susannah is tall, but not that tall...she had to stand on her tip-toes.

This one is my favorite!

What happens when somebody on the bottom decides to be ornery, and fall down?!

We are all supposed to be whispering and pointing at the camera, but it looks more like we're just sharing secrets : D  Something sisters do well, right?!

Stair steps.

And our two, very cute, adorable brothers, who kept running in and out of the corn while Mommy took our pictures : D

I made the next pictures bigger, so you can see what we're doing  : D

We can be pretty goofy sometimes....

And serious when we need to be...

....but not for long!

We were trying to do the "serious face" pictures, and as you can see in the picture above, some of us were having some trouble : )

Watch out!  It's a good thing we weren't shooting at Mommy!  Although it would have only been fair....she was "shooting" us!

Thanks for visiting!  Be sure to visit us next Monday for the start of our giveaways!

~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~

Handsome Helpers, Funny Sisters, and Me : )

Tonight while I was working on supper, I had two very handsome helpers offer to assist me : )

They were so cute, I decided to post a picture of them : )

Then I decided to do a short post on what we are all doing at the moment.

Here's what Anna, Bekah and Charissa are doing... playing dollhouse : )

And I am making bread.  No, that's not me, that's the bread!  Surely you can tell the difference! The bread is in the rising stage right now.

And what is this, you say?!  It is a picture of where Mommy and Daddy were, because that is where the truck was parked, and they got in the truck and left to do errands : )

Later I'll post pictures and recipes of what we're having for supper : )  Yum, yum!

~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~