The Journey of the Jones'

Hard to believe I know, but I am actually blogging TWICE in less than one month! 

We had a great Memorial Day weekend, with family coming over for a BBQ.  Aunt Janel was in town fro CA and Aunt Laurie, Uncle Dave and the Joliffes came as well.  It was great to see everyone.  Between Memorial Day, retirement parties, birthday parties, end of school, graduations, and old friends in town, we have eatin enough BBQ hotdogs and burgers to feed a small army!  The girls are having a blast though.  Ava is officially 6 now and lLeo turns 4 on June 8th.  The big joint party is fast approaching and they are stoked about it.  Yesterday at church Upstream Kids Club (Ava and Leo's Wed. night club) gave a presentation and Ava sang America The Beautiful with good friend and kinder-classmate Cassie.  They did a great job and we especially enjoyed the verse where they sang "...for purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plagues"!!!  

We are ready for summer, Ava has 4 more days of school and a summer pool pass, she is doing track on Tuesday nights and will take swim lessons during the days with Leo.  With VBS at the end of the month and Summer camp in August, we will stay busy.

We are also excited that Chris, Mandy and Malachi and Oma and Opa are all coming for the girls party!  It will be agreat weekend together.

Hope you are all well.  To all of our out-of-Idaho friends and family, if your Summer plans bring you close to Boise, please call us or drop by we'd love to catch-up.

Oh yeah, one more thing... the base ment flooded, again.  I know your thinking, "didn't that just happen?"  Yes.  Thankfully it was only sprinkler water this time. (as opposed to sewage) and only in one room which is drying out as i type.  Not as big of a deal as it seemed like yesterday!  We lost the pad but not the brand new carpet, thankfully.  So it will all be back to normal by the end of the week.  (Hmmm...)

 

I have officially entered the land of Touch-Screen Phone users, and if you have called me in the last two days, you know it because I probably either hung-up on you or never answered your call!  Why so rude, you ask?  I had no idea how to answer your call!  There are no buttons to push to answer a call, and the phone is smart enough to ask me if I want to answer but assumes that I am smart enough to know how to answer.  With a phone this smart you'd think it would just read my thoughts and know if I want to answer the call or not. When some one calls me it speaks and says "You have a call from Kate" (don't ask me how it knows) and I have to confess that in my frustration one time I decided to try something from Star Trek and talk back to it saying "Answer Call"!  To no avail.  Even now the phone is starring at me from my desk, daring me to pick it up and try to call out on it, I am afraid.  I have wanted this phone for a while so I am determined to harness it's great power for my uses, it will just take some time.  I did just figure out how to check me email from it so now the game is on.

Enough about my phone drama, Kate is preparing to go up to Cascade for the church's women's retreat.  She is leading worship for it and I hope she gets a little R & R as well, even though Ellis is going with her!  Ava and Leo are staying home with dad which is great since we have been running around like crazy since I got home last week.

The older girl's birthdays are fast approaching and they are so excited.  Ava will be turning 6 (and she has two more loose teeth) and leo is turning 4 (but she says she is turning "pretend 5").  Ava is almost done with Kindergarten, hard to believe.  She is getting so tall and grown up.  Her class is learning a song for their last day of school to the tune of  New York, New York (you know "Start spreading the news, I'm leavin' today...") it's called First Grade, First Grade!  She sang it for us and it is adorable.

Hope all of you are having a great spring and looking ahead to a great summer!

I just returned from Honduras on Saturday and what a trip it was!  I missed Kate and the girls so much and was able to keep them updated from time to time with an expensive Text or phone call.  They are all champs and seem to have breezed through my absence effortlessly, though they say they missed me too!  The trip was incredible.  We traveled to the town of Trojes and completed 4 houses during the days while hosting outreach services in the plaza at night.  It was great.  We prayed for so many people and saw many healings.  I saw one man heald of a skin disease and he came back the next night to show that it was truly gone, I saw a woman with severe arthritis in her knees leap for joy as God touched her and set her free from pain.  I saw several people with partial or complete deafness in their ears have the hearing completely restored!  There was also a man with very blurry vision who can see clearly now because God healed him.  It was powerful to see God doing miracles there before our eyes, His love for people was so clearly shown.

We also went to an orphanage/school in Tegucigalpa which impacted me deeply.  The woman that runs it is so humble and gives all the glory to God as she rescues children from abusive homes and serves them.  We prayer walked her property and did dramas and clowns with the kids.

We had a great time and I am slowly getting back into the swing of things here.  I hope to post some of my pictures here as well.

Thanks  for your prayer and support for this trip and for those of you that helped Kate out while I was away

I have a hungry baby who is loosing her paticence with me so this will be short... we had a wonderful easter and I wanted to share it with you all.  Brent gets home tomorrow (he has been in Honduras for the last 10 days) I will have him blog about his trip when he gets home.  Also I am now 30!!!! I know that is young, but 30 and 3 kids makes me feels OLD  (in my head I am about 16  years old still). Although I wouldn't change it for the WORLD!!!!

Here we are at the close of March, Spring has sprung (in most parts) and we are spending Ava's spring-break in Spokane.  Family will make you do crazy things, in our case that means to leave 60-70 degree weather to vacation in the arctic tundra that tends to be Eastern Washington!  Fun times!  It has been great to see everyone, and spend time with grandparents, aunties, uncles and of course, Malachi! 

We swam at the YMCA today and had more fun than a barrel of monkeys on Mountain Dew! 

Kate hosted her first Dove Chocolate Discoveries party and she did a great job.  The chocolate was great and the company was even better.

The girls are growing so fast, Ava is entering the homewrad stretch of kindergarten and Leo is changing more and more, with an ever-expanding vocabulary.  Ellis just started on rice cereal this week and she gets happier and happier every day.  She is rolling all over and baby-talks a blue streak, she'll be crawling any day now. (no rush baby!)

Hope everyone is doing well and that spring has come to your part of the world.  Enjoy the new pictures, i am having some trouble uploading with the new format of Windows Live.