VBS Day 2

Tonight's snack was a warm tortilla cut into an arrow. The point of tonight's lesson was to make Jesus our "coach". So the tortilla arrow was to remind the kids to look "up" to Jesus. They spread butter on their tortillas and sprinkled cinnamon and sugar on top. Yum! I enjoyed one myself.

The game station assistants: Joe, Jasper, and Justin.

Peeking through the window of the babies class.
These two ladies are doing a great job with sometimes 6 little ones under 3 for nearly 2 1/2 hours!

The Apostle Peter stopped by to talk about his experiences and particularly when he professed Christ as his Lord (coach) on the mount of transfiguration.

Morgan...can you tell her mom is a blogger, too?

VBS Day 1

The fun officially began tonight. The theme for our week is "Fix Your Eyes on Jesus". The whole unit has an athletic and olympic tone. Tonight, the focus was on entering the race and finding your talents. I think things went pretty well, especially for being the first night. And the most important thing is that the kids had a great time, learned new things about the Bible, and we had some visitors to share it with.
My ABSOLUTE FAVORITE part of tonight was watching the skit at the lesson station. The girls who did the puppet show--and did it very well--were also in the skit tonight. They re-enacted the parable of the talents. The BEST part was watching Monica in her "acting zone". She played the part of the "wicked" servant who buries her master's talent and doesn't use it to earn him any more money. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in my opinion. She really got into it and had everyone--especially me--rolling with laughter at her facial expressions.

Here she is pouting because her master told her she was a lazy servant.
Her expression is just priceless!

Just look at the audience!

snacks: edible torches
cupcake in a cone with icing to look like flames

crafts

games

carrying their talents (water balloons)
each runner had to carry their own balloon plus the ones from all of their other teammates who had already ran

In Search of Halibut

It's almost been two weeks since we went out on this fishing excursion, but I wanted to post the pictures anyway. It was a beautiful day in Juneau. Some would probably call it down right hot, but we loved it. It was definitely hot enough to enjoy being out on the water. I think it was 86 that day. VERY hot for Juneau.
Carly absolutely loves going fishing with her Daddy. Isaac enjoys it too, but he can't go unless Momma goes too. Carly has gotten to tag along on other trips with Shawn too. Today they went out for a few hours with Lee.
One of Carly's favorite parts of fishing is "bonking" the fish with her "fish bonker", as she calls it. This is her practicing her swing. She got a couple of chances to do some bonking.
This was a beautiful halibut that we got up to the boat. Shawn barely had his line down for 5 minutes when he had a bite. This one was nice. Shawn estimates that it was about 30 lbs--nothing huge but worthy of a meal or two. Unfortunately, this is the closest we got to it. With in seconds of me taking this picture, it wiggled off the hook. And unfortunately, it was the only halibut that we caught that would have been big enough to keep.
Shawn posing with the decent sized rockfish that he caught. We kept it and had it for dinner the next night. I coated the fillets with a parmesan bread crumb mix, baked them, and had them as burgers. They were pretty good.

Shawn thinks this is Eagle Glacier, but I thought it might be Herbert Glacier. Either way, it's one of the two and we saw it on our trip.An Alaska ferry passing by on it's way to the next port.
We went out near Poundstone Rock. There is a large bell marker out there that the sea lions like to hang out on. The kids enjoyed hearing them bark and seeing them jump off into the water.
Isaac took his nap in the v-berth in the cabin. I'm so glad he did.

A small halibut just before we tossed it back.

Shawn says this was the biggest Double Ugly he's ever seen. I'm not really sure if that's the technical name for this fish, but that's what he calls them.