It's branding time!

It has been a few days since I have posted b/c we are out of town this week. We are currently at the Merrihew family ranch in the Nebraska sandhills for their annual branding. For those of you not familiar with ranch life, branding is where they put the brands on the calves so that the calves are identified as your own. It is quite a big get together for family and a lot of work as well. The actual branding takes place thursday and friday so i hope to put pics on soon...if you don't see them in the next few days i will get to them monday or tuesday. We are having a good time getting a break from our "ordinary" and it is so great to see the kids have fun with cousins and grandparents. Oh yeah, and the homestudy went smoothly and we anticipate no problems : )

Twas the night before homestudy...

Of course, it had to happen the night before our social worker is to come..ha ha! Evan conked his head and scratched right under his nose in an incident with the Scollard's lion scooter. I think the scooter won. It was nothing a chocolate frosting covered brownie couldn't fix anyway :) I LOVE those dimples!!!

Watch and Enjoy!

I almost forgot!

Yet another extension of grace during garage sale weekend...My friends Andrea, Makayla, and Cassie had come to help us set up Saturday morning. By time they arrived things were pretty well underway. Instead of wishing us well and going home, they stayed and helped me clean the whole house while Craig manned the front porch pay table! This was such a HUGE blessing! My house was in complete disorder when they arrived and when they left I had not one dirty dish, my floors were all vacuumed, the loads of empty boxes and trash were hauled out of my basement and my kitchen sink was beautifully bleached shiny sparkling white! Yay! I had so not been looking forward to tackling the aftermath of the sale and what a blessing it was to sink into bed that evening at a decent hour without having to shut out the chaos of a house out of order. Thank you girls - i will be looking for ways to return the favor!

Homestudy

We were scheduled to have our homestudy this thursday, but I recieved a call from the social worker tonight asking to reschedule it for friday. We are looking forward to getting that step of the process done. I'll let you all know how it goes soon, hopefully. Still no sign of the tax form from the IRS...that might be the paper that will be last in coming as we get our dossier wrapped up. Please continue praying that it comes soon! We started looking at the applications for grants and assistance again. We have done really well in recent months with the barbecue, selling our grand-am, and the garage sale. We have raised approximately $6,500 in the past 2 months! Added to our savings that puts us about 2/3 of the way to where we need to be in total. Without crunching actual numbers I think we are still $6-8,000 away from the $24,000 needed. I take comfort in the fact that the Lord is faithful and as we continue to walk in obedience to His will, He will provide all that we need to glorify His name.

Garage sale details

So, for the first picture...the clock says 5:08 am. We made it to bed at 2 am and planned on waking at 4 am. Craig accidentally set the alarm wrong and i just happened to wake at 5:00! It had taken us about 5 hours to set up friday morning so we thought that we would have to get up at 4 to even be close to ready for the start of the sale at 8. It turns out we were wrong. We had a few people come at 7 to help us (and bring us donuts!) and everything was actually set out and ready to go before 8. The Lord, in His sovereignty, granted us an extra hour of sleep that we desperately needed! Saturday was a much slower day than Friday and by lunchtime it was looking like we would have stuff left at the end. While going to get lunch for us I remember a short prayer to the tune of "please Lord, could there just be nothing left at the end of our sale. I know you CAN do it, so please will you make it all go somehow." I kind of forgot that quick little prayer and the day went on. We drastically cut prices at noon and told people if they would like to come back at 5 the leftovers would all be free. 5:00 came and we didn't have anyone come back...but one lady and her three girls showed up. Craig let her know that she was free to take what she wanted and she quickly got on her phone and called for back-up! She started packing boxes and her three girls were packing and hauling as much as they could. Then her boyfriend came with a pickup and the rest is history. I could hardly keep from laughing out loud as I watched our leftovers disappear before my eyes. They took EVERYTHING! There really was not much worth keeping anyway, but what a blessing it was to not have to pack up, store, and get rid of what was left! I genuinely hope that it will be a blessing to that family. I assume they will be garage sale-ing their new loot. All we had to do was clean and fold up tables. Thanks Tollivers for help in cleaning up tables! It was quite comical to watch the loading process as the gentleman standing by the truck did absolutely 0% of the work. The load in the pickup ended up about 8ft tall above the pickup bed. What a crazy answer to prayer! Afterwards we had some friends recommend a show that was at the Fox theater here in town at 7:30 that evening. We couldn't decide whether we should splurge on the tickets after just having a sale to raise money, but then decided it would feel really good to get cleaned up and that it would fit in our budget. So, on our way walking in to the theater we ran into some good friends...without us asking, they paid for our tickets! I seriously was in tears a few times b/c I could not believe how the Lord extended His grace to us in such a compassionate way this last weekend.

A weekend of sufficient grace and MORE!

I wish I had time to post the recap of saturday's sale right now, but it might have to wait a day or two. The plans for today are to go get the kids right after lunch - Yay! I can't wait to see them! So playing with kids is on the agenda today as well as a nice relaxing viewing of National Treasure 2 tonight with Craig in our nearly empty basement - Yay! I have posted some pictures to peak you interest...you won't believe it until you read it! Oh yeah, we made in total $1,944.86. Have you ever heard of making that much in a garage sale?!? Isn't that crazy?!? The title for this post is the best way i can describe the weekend in full. Stay tuned for the details in the days to come.