And the bat...Leviticus 11:19

We spent four years at the seminary. Four years.The Man and I both received all kinds of instruction in how to handle situations in churches.  None of it prepared us for tonight.

The night was dark by the time The Man and the older children returned home from the midweek service at the church.  As the kids were tucked into bed, The Man told me that he was returning to the church and asked if I wanted to go with him.

I grabbed the camera and he grabbed his gear.

Tools every pastor needs:  fencing mask, head lamp, fish net, leather jacket and gloves.  The folks that had stayed after the meeting to clean the church confirmed that "it" was still in the fellowship hall.  Apparently doors left open to let cool breezes in can also let bats in.

Our church doesn't have a belfry, so it had to settle for a place high on the wall in the fellowship hall.

Caught!

The bat is now safely outside catching bugs.

Some pastors fish to get creatures into the church...some fish to get them out!  The Man does both.

Bear ye one another's burdens...Galatians 6:2

We are home! The weather was perfect for the church backpack trip.  G walked the entire two miles to the campsite.  Goldilocks was carried most of the way, but she did enjoy getting down and walking with The Man.

She chose her own outfit, by the way.  She convinced someone to put the orange one-piece romper on her when everyone else was getting dressed.  Before long she was back with the denim jumper on asking someone to button it for her.  A few minutes later she returned with a pair of jeans.  I drew the line there.  We are still potty training, and I didn't want too many layers to deal with!

The Man's pack weighed over 70 pounds, but that was before Goldilock's pack was tied on there (G had a backpack, so it was only fair that she also had one).

Not only did G walked the entire way, but he became an expert at pointing out the horse poop along the trail.  In case you are wondering, his pack contained a pillow, a blanket, Curious George, a toothbrush, two pairs of underwear, and a harmonica--all important wilderness essentials!

Don't feel too sorry for The Dog, he practically crawled from the vehicle to the trail head with his pack of dog food.  After showing off his puppy dog eyes, the pack was removed from him and put on Painter, with J carrying the chain for Painter.  The Dog is no dummy. 

Especially since once the dog food was eaten and we were ready to come home, the pockets on the doggie pack were the perfect size to hold the diapers and underwear of Goldilocks that didn't stay dry.

It was a beautiful trip, but I was glad to get home, and Goldilocks is happy to always be within a 10-second sprint of the bathroom.

Bring forth frogs abundantly...Exodus 8:3

Now for an update on the next son! J will be in 10th grade this year. He will be taking Algebra II, Chemistry Botany/Zoology (I knew that, but was confused when writing this post), History (medieval), English, music lessons (most likely trumpet this year), foreign language TBD, p.e., and other various activities. It will be after Labor Day before we start our school year, so we still have time to figure out a few things. I think he will be interested in starting driver training, but that will probably be in January or later.

J rolled his eyes when I asked him to go weigh himself and measure his height. Hey, I need this information for the baby book, right? His height measures 67 3/4", which is about 5 inches taller than my height. His weight is 118 pounds (he hasn't passed me up there :P ). With a shoe size of 10 or 11, he passed up M's shoe size.

He has grown a lot this year and is dealing with the problems that can come with that, including, but not limited to, knee joints locking at inopportune times and pants that resemble tattered capris. I'm only sort of kidding about that last part.  We do have him properly clothed most of the time. He is just about at the point that he can no longer receive M's other hand-me-downs, and he does like to wear his familiar, comfortable clothes no matter how small or worn out they get. I usually don't mind what he wears here around the ranch, as long as he is presentable when we "go to town." 

The Man told J to just be careful how he bends and twists his knees since his problems usually occur when he is kneeling on the couch and shifts around. Yesterday he came in the living room to sit down on the couch beside me and I told him to be careful with his legs. "I should probably just cut them off," he said. I raised my eyebrows in surprise at that declaration. Then he realized that I was more concerned about his knees than the gaping holes in the knees of his pants!

We have so many tree frogs this year. In the evenings we can sit on the front step and watch the frogs hopping all over the yard. We've even had quite a few make their way into the house (ick!) which we've never had issues with before. 

I'll end this post with a picture I took in our front yard this past week. I'm sure the tree frog was very thankful for his long legs as he was able to escape the jaws of baby garter snake. 

As I said on facebook, maybe the snake will have better success next time. If you only go after the ones you're sure you can get, you'll never know your potential!

Poison of a serpent...Psalm 58:4

Although I did complete July with 31 blog posts, I certainly didn't continue the momentum through August! There has been way too much going on to actually sit down and blog, but here are some pics that M took of our adventures over the past week.

Warning: Pictures of a dead snake below. If you don't care to see pictures of the snake OR the dissection, just click away now. :)

Last Tuesday M announced that there was a rattlesnake outside his bedroom. He had been looking out the window and saw it slithering in the dirt near the retaining wall just behind our house. Too close! This is the second one (that we know of!) we've had near the house. J ran to the garden to get the hoes and The Man got the gun. I was impressed that The Man only fired three shots and the snake had four holes in it. The Man was dismayed that he didn't kill it with the first shot. We think the first shot (while the snake was moving) just shot off the rattles. We (not including me!) had to look around a bit to find them. There were at least nine rattles on this snake! The third shot was in the head, and other than the residual movements...it was dead. After removing what little was left of the head/fangs, The Man found a large glass jar in which to put the body. He put that into a cooler with some jugs of ice until he could get around to skinning it.

That time finally came on Sunday morning. We (again, not me!) started the process in the front yard. Pretty snake! Too bad it had to get so close to the house and my babies! Even G helped out with the process. The children finally had enough of the flies and other creatures that wished to watch and bother, so they came inside and let The Man carry on with his project. After The Man separated the skin from the rest of the innards, he came inside also...with the skin. He did ask where he should finish cleaning the skin. I told him wherever he could easily clean and disinfect the mess! He chose the bathroom counter. Ick. Ick, ick, ick. When he was done, he said he finally figured out a good reason for the "his and her" sinks in the master bathroom. I didn't complain when he rinsed the skin in "his" sink. Other than my house smelling like my high school zoology class (minus the formaldehyde) for most of the day, it wasn't that bad of a process. The skin is now hanging on the back porch.

The Man has his glycerin solution ready to tan it. I'm not sure what his plans for it beyond that are, but at least that snake won't be biting my kids or dog!

I will try to check in and blog more regularly, there just hasn't been a lot of extra time. No time? Hmmm...killing a snake, storing a snake, skinning a snake, and tanning the skin were not in our plans for the past week, but it is hard to predict those teaching/learning moments and work them into the schedule ahead of time.

He is a new creature...2 Corinthians 5:17

Yesterday afternoon we went down to river with Grandma and Grandpa. While some went off in search of some nature, I let it come to me.
If you look carefully, there is an itty-bitty fish swimming there in my hands (brown, horizontal line above my palm on the left side of the photo). I scooped it up while sitting on the bank of the river. This was actually the second one I caught. The Man didn't grab my phone to take a picture before the first got away.

While sitting in the same spot, I turned over a rock and found this...
We haven't identified it yet, but it is some sort of chrysalis. It was wiggling a bit, so we know it is alive. It is here at home in a jar with us now so we can see its final transformation. This reminds me of the text from this post title:

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

If I had a better camera than my phone, you might be able to tell that The Man is holding a magnifying glass. I smelled smoke!

I was sitting in the shade of this bridge, thankful that these swallow nests were unoccupied.
Bird nests above the head can make a big mess!

G enjoyed getting his feet wet again. Two times in one week! He spent most of the afternoon throwing rocks into the water.

The younger kids enjoyed swimming in the river, pretending to be beavers.

Although we have seen beaver in this river before, the only beaver sighting today happened to be a stump in the water.

Frogs...Exodus 8:2

I'm missing M. He should be flying home from camp on Sunday. Even though we've sent a few emails to the camp for him, we haven't heard anything from him. That's just what we expected, but it has still been hard! We are glad, though, that no news is probably been good news since we've heard of several campers that were extremely ill. Since we haven't been contacted, he is probably fine. Hopefully his flights home will be a lot more non-eventful than his trip up there!

I've been looking through some of his pictures that he has taken and I thought I'd share these with you. Enjoy!





The End!