Grace and Glory

Musings from the Threshold

Category Archives: Activities

BBC Weekend Family Camp

Last weekend, most of the folks from our chapel headed to Dayspring Bible Camp for a weekend family camp. Things didn’t officially kick off until Saturday morning, but we and Jonathan’s parents went down Friday night because that’s easier (and more fun!) for us than getting up way early Saturday morning and driving a couple hours. We made a little campfire and cooked hot dogs/braats over the fire, ate apples and chips, sang, etc, while we waited for Dad and Mom Smith to arrive. After they got there, we wound up at our cabin playing canasta till about 1 in the morning. Fun times!

Saturday and Sunday were full of fellowship, fun, canoing, fishing, learning, etc.



Our speaker for the weekend was Dr. Don Patten from Emmaus Bible College (where I attended a couple years of college). He taught on church history, specifically early church history. I found it fascinating and am inspired both to learn more and to provide opportunities for my children to learn. Upcoming post on this topic!

It was a great weekend and we all had lots of fun, even with little adventures like Stephen putting his hand on top of G’pa and G’ma’s heater and Jonathan overturning into the creek. We are thankful for our chapel family and love this weekend to spend lots of time together!

Gaming

Hello. My name is Laurel, and I’m a gamer.

One of the interesting things about my life that I don’t mention very often is that I married a gamer. Jonathan loved the arcade as a kid, and thoroughly enjoyed console (think Atari, Nintendo, etc) and computer games as they emerged. He’s always particularly enjoyed role-playing games, where you build characters and develop their skills. In college, he discovered a role-playing game that you could play online with people all over the globe. It was completely text-based (i.e. you typed S to go south, etc, with no pictures to guide you), and even to watch him play was beyond my spatial skills. I tried to play with him a couple times, but he had to tell me every step to make!

As time has gone by, technology has made great advances in this area as it has in so many others, and the games available online today have incredible graphics and flexibility. But I get ahead of myself…

In the summer of 2003, in the interest of sharing my man’s hobby, I decided to give his current game a shot. Notice it took me almost 8 years of marriage to be willing! Asheron’s Call 2 was an MMORPG (massively multi-player online role playing game) based in an imaginary world called Dereth. Jonathan’s character was involved in a large and social “allegiance,” a group of people who played together and helped each other, aided by an ingame chat system that allowed chat amongst large groups of people. The people aspect of it was what I enjoyed the most and what drew me in. I got to “meet” people from all over the country and world, even getting to hear their voices with a special voice chat program called Ventrilo. Many evenings after the children were in bed would find Jonathan and I (aka Beren and Luthien) in Dereth, helping our friends and fighting bad guys. Somewhere along the line, I realized… I had become a gamer. I think it might have been the night I dreamed about being in Dereth.

Sadly, the folks at Turbine eventually reached a point where they had to close down Asheron’s Call 2 (Dec 2005). We were very dissapointed and spent months trying out different MMORPGs. We knew then that Turbine was going to come out with an MMORPG based on Tolkien’s works, which we love, so we really just found something to play while we waited for Lord of the Rings Online.

In the spring of 2007, the world of Tolkien opened up to us in a whole new way. Turbine has done a terrific job of bringing Middle Earth to life, and we have thoroughly enjoyed playing Lord of the Rings Online. Since we moved last November, our internet connection has not been very good, and we find ourselves playing less than we once did. Maybe someday we’ll have a good ISP again…

So, where did this post come from? I took some great “pictures” in game the other night and decided to use one of them in my photo blog. I started explaining the picture, and wound up moving that portion of the post over here to Grace and Glory.

A few misc. thoughts on gaming…
~ I’ll just say straight up that lots of people neglect their real lives and responsibilities because they get so into online gaming. I’ll not say we’ve never been there. More than once we’ve had to back up and re-establish boundaries for ourselves. The people in our physical world (especially our precious children) are so much more important than a game. Online gaming can be a lot of fun. It’s like many other hobbies, I suppose. All things in moderation.
~ Real people play online games. People who have the ability to hurt me with their actions and words. Just like the people I see face to face on a regular basis.
~ Real people play online games. People whose lives I have an opportunity to touch for the Lord. Just like the people I see face to face on a regular basis. It has been a blessing to be a witness for Him and an encouragement to others. In one very special friendship I’ve made in LoTRO, I believe the Lord has used me to help give another Christian mom the lift she needed to start home schooling her kids, and to encourage her in her daily walk. Any praise for that goes to the Lord, not to me. It’s just neat to see this outlet as an opportunity to encourage and bless others in a lasting way.

Hope you’ve found this little peek into our hobby interesting!

There’s No Place Like Home, There’s No Place Like Home…

We are headed to Hutchinson, KS in the morning with my folks (who have driven up from Florida). There is a Staff Work Retreat (aka – Reunion!) this weekend at KBC and we are so looking forward to going home for a long weekend. We haven’t been since we were there for Stephen’s birth two years ago. Too long!

Life has just been moving along too quickly for much blogging lately. And this late at night isn’t time to catch up in a wordy fashion. However, I did catch up in pictoral fashion by updating Yesterday. So if you’d like a peak of what’s been going on with us, that’s the place to see.

More next week…

Birthday Bashes, Round 3 – Davey

Last Saturday, Davey turned 13! We normally have small family birthday parties, but he had requested to have some families over for dinner and some guys to spend the night, and we gave it the green light. You only turn 13 once, right?

I forgot about the camera until it was time for cake, but we had a mini Mexican buffet at Davey’s request: Beef enchiladas with green ench. sauce, beef and chicken ench. with red sauce, and chicken ench. with chipotle cream sauce (oh mercy, that was the crowning glory of the evening, at least, as far as my tastebuds were concerned), black bean salsa (mmmmmm good), chips, and applesauce. I was reminded, mid-afternoon on Friday, in the midst of making over 40 enchiladas, of just how much I love to cook – I had a blast!

Here’s Davey careening around the corner, headed somewhere fun, I’m sure. Grace is curled up on Mike’s lap in the background, next to Ellie & Maggie:

The birthday boy had requested a chocolate cake, and I made a pineapple upside down cake as well to be sure we’d have enough. I think everyone had sufficient dessert!

Some other fun pictures of friends and family. I didn’t do as thorough a job as I like of making sure I had pics of everyone, but I guess we were too busy having fun to worry about it!

And this one of Davey with his buddy Nate was too good to not show by itself:

We’re not much for sleepovers, and most of the families we’re close to here aren’t either, so the fact that Davey got to have a sleepover was a big deal. Sleepover is definitely a misnomer, though, because I don’t think any of the boys got more than a couple hours of sleep. They camped out “in” a tent out back, and they also got to move out our little firepit. They enjoyed roasting some marshmallows, and they sat around the fire talking all night long!

I played short-order egg cook Saturday morning, and Barak and I made some biscuits. I thought it was a good sign that the guys all were having a great time when they jumped up and ran back outside for more fun as soon as they finished breakfast.

It was noon-ish before we loaded everyone up and took off to take the fellas home. We enjoyed sweet fellowship with their families when we dropped them off. As you can see, we were all pretty tired when we headed home:

I think Davey thoroughly enjoyed his birthday celebration, and we felt blessed to get to celebrate with precious friends. Happy Birthday, Davey! You are truly a blessing to our family!

What a Week!

Monday, I planted 49 tomato and pepper plants, as well as the winter squash. I also got a whopper of a sunburn on my upper back, due to wearing the tank top part of my new swim suit. My arms and face have gotten a lot of sun this year already from working in the garden and running, but I kinda-sorta forgot that my back hadn’t seen sunlight in who-knows-how-long.

Tuesday, we had fun at Grant’s Farm with Mama Byrd, Dad & Mom Smith, Aunt Joyce, Sarah & her Blessings. It was a beautiful day, and there weren’t many people, so it was very relaxing.

I also learned a lesson Tuesday about sunshine and shirts. When you already have a sunburn, a t-shirt doesn’t keep it from getting worse in the sun. Tuesday night was much more painful than Monday night had been, and on Wednesday I actually felt ill and spent a good portion of the day in bed. The burn is finally starting to feel a little better today.

Thursday was the last day that we got to see Papa and Mama Byrd before they left to go back to North Carolina and Florida. Aunt Joyce very sweetly brought Mama out to the house while Papa worked in St. Louis, and he came out in the evening.

One fun thing that Mama and I have enjoyed this visit is looking through old slides together. When they were missionaries in Spain (where I was born), it was much less expensive to get slides than to have pictures printed. In my memory, I had never seen pictures of me as a newborn, and only a few as a small baby. I also had seen few pictures of the city of my birth, Valencia, Spain. So it was a thrill and a delight for me to see pictures of where we lived when I was born, of our family at the hospital when I was a newborn, of the team of missionaries with whom they worked, of a time when my Bubba still thought I was wonderful and cute, etc.

Something high on my technological wish list is the gadget they’ve come up with that can turn your slides and negatives into digital images at home. It’s not in the budget yet, though, so I contented myself with taking a few pictures of the slides on the wall. I’ll post those separately.

Last night, after a yummy supper of quiche, we let the kids stay up late playing and reading while Jonathan & I and Papa & Mama played Scramble (speed Scrabble). We all had a great time savoring those last hours together for a while. I feel so blessed that we are good friends with both sets of our parents and we thoroughly enjoy spending time with them. This was a sweet visit, and I’m already back to missing them. Love you, Papa and Mama!!

New posts and other news

…on my Yesterday blog! It’s been way too long, and I’m going to try to get with the program again.

Plus, I’m getting ready to post on As we walk by the way. I am just all kinds of crazy tonight!

We had a fun day today… we took a great walk (about 3 miles) with Papa and Mama Byrd and Mom Smith at Shaw Nature Reserve. Then, frozen pizza, apple salad, bacon/cream cheese/jalepeno things for supper, and a fun game of Farkle after the kids went to bed. Whew! Pictures to come…

Good News Club Dinner

Jonathan’s folks are the “directors” (read: workhorses) for the Good News Club our chapel sponsors at a local elementary school. Yesterday was the last Club of the school year, and was also the chosen time for the end-of-year dinner/celebration. We were honored to be asked to host the celebration at our house, and Mom Smith made it very easy to host by preparing virtually all the food. Mama Byrd and I fixed the dessert, and Jonathan grilled the meat. But mostly, I was able to simply enjoy a house full of people (20 of us!) fellowshipping and enjoying themselves. It was wonderful!

The grill chef:
Visiting on the front porch:
More visiting:
Washers game:
And there was fishing!  Max got this catfish; he’s a catch-and-release kind of guy:

Sunshine!

I am loving the sunshine today! If a task can be done outside, that’s where it’s happening. This morning I finished planting the corn, and got the last of Grace’s hem torn out (while sitting in the sun). Before the Littles went down for a nap, we read outside for about a half hour. Now for some logging, then a reward of some more reading outside!

A Fun Afternoon

This afternoon, we met up with Dad and Mom Smith and several families from our home school support group at nearby Shaw Nature Reserve. We’d been there once before, and thoroughly enjoyed our first taste of it this year, taking a close to 3 mile hike.

Also, Dad and Mom Smith bought us a family membership for our birthdays! The membership covers up to 10 adults (children 12 and under are free) and includes admission to Shaw, the Missouri Botanical Gardens (including the Children’s Gardens), and the Butterfly House. The part of it we will use the most is the admission to Shaw Nature Reserve. It’s about 15 minutes away from us now, and has so much to offer! But we’re looking forward to checking out some of the other spots, as we’ve lived in the St. Louis area for almost 9 years now and have never been to any of them. We’re also hoping to take some friends and family to enjoy some of these displays of God’s creation.

I just couldn’t pick a few pictures to post, so I’m embedding another slideshow. Just click on it to go to the album (where you can see large ones and/or download full size pics). Enjoy!