sweet and thankful

It's official. From now on when Matt's gone, all our friends have to take turns coming :)  I'll take you wherever you want to go, and you get to spend quality time with these adorable kiddos, and I get to live life with another adult or two and get good friend time...win win!!  What a sweet weekend it was catching up with Elisa, spending good time with Nikki and the kids, the Edlers, Granny, the Haris, the Stolbergs...and spending a day at the beach, doing lots of paint/craft projects, enjoying lots of different parts of Haiti...all the things I'd never dream of doing on my own with four!

There were also lots of sweet moments I would have totally missed without the cherished help of friends.

Like sweet Sofie and her love for Granny, standing the whole prayer time while everyone else was sitting so she could stand with Granny.

Like sweet Ben, smiling away at hands lifted in prayer in the arms of a friend who's been a really good one for fifteen years.

Like listening to Sofie and Sam talk about everything under the sun and love being friends.

Like enjoying how much Nora ADORES pah-sgheti.

Like watching how excited Nora gets to tell Joel all the things...

And like how Nora has f-i-n-a-l-l-y decided that Nikki is as awesome as she is.

And sweet rare moments of Lily being a dork :)

Like baking with this happy little doughboy while Aunt Elisa's painting with the girls!

And enjoying the sweet ways God's providing for us...like when the team that came in yesterday had some old Sonlight homeschooling materials and asked what we needed, and exactly what we needed was exactly what they had - and brought!!  SO thankful.

Matt's been having a very different, but really good weekend...spending time with lots of GREAT OMS folks, speaking at the gathering and even spending some time with Steve Green, who's been the worship leader!

He's now back in Miami and coming home tomorrow and we can't wait to hear more about his time when he gets home tomorrow!!!

I've got no pictures from the rest of the busy weekend, nor am I going to talk about the 75 minute long desperate search for keys that ended up being in Nora's Tinkerbell Purse, nor about two RIDICULOUS traffic experiences in town.

This is a BUSY week and my heart's getting sad about Elisa wrapping up her time...so I'm just going to stick with the sweet and thankful for this precious time!!

Also Matt's going to be gone again the first week of November...any takers?? :)