Knick knack Paddy Whack..Give A Dog A Bone.....

We could have named her JAWS. We could have named her TROUBLE. But regardless of what Yazzi's name could have been, this dog CHEWS. Bones that advertise to last days last a mere hour, if we are lucky. She has not been destructive, probably because we watch her like a hawk when she is inside. Outside, she has chewed up a rubber boot. Inside a few shoelaces off of shoes. She seems to have a shoe thing!?!

Anyway, Sam comes home the other night with a new bone all wrapped in shrink wrap with a guarantee of lasting for a LONG LONG time. And out he pulls a cow femur. Bought it from the cattle ranch down the road.

At first, she wasn't sure what to do with it, as it was to big to carry. But after a few minutes, she lay down and chewed and scraped and licked until I took it away at bedtime. That was over a week ago and she has hardly put a dent in it!

Good shopping Sam! That was a well spent 12 dollars!


Yazzi would say THANK YOU, but she is to busy with her cow bone.

4th annual Smith summer water war!!

Something is up! Yep, we surprised them again!!!! Time for the annual WATER WAR!!!!
Grab your buckets, your water guns and your hoses, because NOBODY stays dry in this war!
(Except Mommy, as she has the camera and can't run anyway). :)
Aunt Erin, Uncle Phil, Aunt Heather and Cousin Noah joined us this year for the fun! It was Noah's first time participating and I think he enjoyed it! We missed Daddy and Collin though (they were in Belize). Daddy and his siblings get VERY competitive and the war goes up quite a few notches!













A fun , fun time and GREAT memory making for the kids! Kaebrie is asking me in the above picture, when are we going to do it again?
Lord willing, next summer!!! :)
(I am a little late in posting these. School started the day after we got back from Alabama and my "free" time has been greatly reduced!)

2009 - 2010 School Year

The new school year has begun! Above is Kaebrie, our "kind - of " Kindergartner. Age wise, she isn't old enough, but smarts and enthusiasm wise, she is ready! So while she is begging to learn, we will go with it and she is going through the kindergarten curriculum.

Below is our new first grader. He seems to really catch on very fast to math and enjoys that subject the most.
Kaitlynn, our fifth grader. On her plate this year is Bible, Saxon Math 7/6, Shurley Grammar, spelling, handwriting, Spanish, Latin 1, piano, science, history and literature.
And our first Jr. high school student. It is hard to believe he is a seventh grader now! He will have to juggle Algebra 1, Greek 1, Grammar and composition, literature, history, science, Intro to Logic, vocabulary and guitar.
Below is our classroom closet. All my teacher books and supplies are organized in here. As are all of Tiff and Kaebrie's books. Collin and Kaitlynn have work stations in their rooms and keep their books in there. When the school work is done, the doors close and I don't have to see it for the rest of the day!
Add in 3 of them playing soccer, piano lessons, guitar lessons, ballet, boy scouts, 4H, youth group and church activities, home school field trips and activities, then all of my bones had better stay put together this year! I am on an EXTRA special combo of multi vitamins which looks like I am going to need!

Youth Group Reunion

In 1985, I was fifteen years old and my dad retired from the Air Force. We were living in Belleville, Illinois at the time and my parents decided to return to Montgomery, Alabama where they owned a house. A good friend of my dad's encouraged him to take me and my sister to the youth group at a local church so we could meet some people and make some friends before school started. So they drug me, kicking and screaming, in a DRESS, to church on Sunday mornings.

This youth group is the means God used to change my life. Through our youth pastor, Keith Waldrop, and other young adult couples that discipled me and spent time with me, and choir tours, and mission projects, and ski trips and camps and Sunday schools and so many other activities and people, I discovered the Word, and discovered what it meant to have a personal relationship with Christ.

The friends I made in those high school years meant everything to me. I was so much closer to these people then the ones in my own high school. The relationships were real, they were deep, and they were special.

Though 21 years have passed since we graduated from the youth group, I still have so many memories of friends and events. A lot of them I have reconnected with this past year on face book and I am so thankful for that.

A few months ago, some friends decided to try and do a reunion for all the youth group that were there under the years that Keith Waldrop was our youth minister. The idea was immediately encouraged, so a date was set, the details planned, and last weekend it happened.
How amazing it was to spend the weekend with people who were my best friends in high school and college. To meet spouses and children and to hear stories of where they have been for the past 20 years! People drove from Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and other places to make it.

It was a VERY special weekend for me and I am so glad I went!

Keith married Sam and I. The main reunion night fell on our 17th wedding anniversary. Above is a picture on our wedding day with Keith. I said that if I couldn't spent my anniversary with my husband (who was out of the country) I would spend it with all the friends and the minister who were with us on our wedding day! :)

Below is a picture from last Saturday. I wish I could have gotten it bigger! Keith is down in the front, and behind him are "his" youth. Just a few of the thousands who came under him in his 14 years at Frazer.

It was wonderful being reminded of some very special and life changing years in my life. They are planning another one in 2012 since this one was such a hit. I am ready to mark it on my calendar!
:)

More Belize picures

I am adding on some pictures to our "family scrapbook". These came from other people's cameras and I want to include them! Above are the tough guys, Sam, Elliot and Fred. There really has to be a story behind that picture.

After they finished pouring the concrete for the new sidewalk, they were told to leave their mark!
And they did!
C.A.S. is Collin Andrew Smith!
Lots and lots of work in the heat!


My boys!
Collin told me another story this morning. Toward the end of their trip they ate at a Chinese restaurant. He asked for a hamburger. They delivered him a bun, with ham on it. :)
He ate it!!!

Knutty Knitting

Sam met the ladies that own and run Grace Hardware Store downtown a few weeks ago and found out that they give knitting lessons. He asked Kaitlynn if she would be interested and she was! She wanted to learn to make baby blankets. So we signed her up for a month's worth of lessons, and she and her fingers got really busy!
I was first inside this store at Christmas time. The colors and lines just fascinated me! I have wanted to get my camera back in here to see what I could capture. Her lessons gave me the perfect excuse!


I enlarged this one to the size of my computer screen and I LOVE it! The colors were amazing. I think it would make a great giant framed poster in a craft room then have the room painted to match some of the colors!


Here is the first few minutes of her first lesson. She now has a vocabulary that means nothing to me: pearl stitch, etc. She has this coded sheet where they made up their own pattern for the baby blanket she started last week.
I am glad she is learning! She can use this skill for decades to come!

Belize!

After gathering together most of the pictures, I spent most of the morning fighting with Blogger. For some reason, pictures did not seem to want to upload. These took over 2 hours to upload! But they are worth it! As I was not on the trip, I am going to hand over the narration to Collin. Remember, we have this blog made into a book at the end of every year, so a lot of the extra details and pictures are for our family scrapbook!
Anyway.. HEEEEEEEEEEERE'S Collin!!

Mommy had already blogged some pictures of the day we left. We were supposed to make it Belize that same afternoon. But only 4 team members did, the rest of us did not make it for another 24 hours. But it was worth the wait!

When we got there, we went through customs. I got a "pat down" because I would not take off my insulin pump. Then we got on a bus and drove for two hours to Corozol with our guide, Lupe.
We made it to the hotel and met the other team from Houston who was with us for the entire week and met back up with the rest of our group. Daddy and I had our own room. It was one room, with two beds a small fridge and a microwave and a shower that ONLY had cold water. bbrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!

After we unpacked and showered we went down for supper. I had been VERY nervous about the food, but I knew that Mommy had sent one entire suitcase packed with food just for me in case the served food was really bad. But it was good! We ate meals like chicken and rice, pork chops, beans, potato salad, etc. NORMAL stuff. :) That night the two groups met together and learned a little bit about each other and had some time for singing.

The next morning we got up at 7am and ate breakfast. There was eggs EVERY morning. Then we got on the bus at 7:45 and drove 30 minutes to the work site. We were working on a side walk for the new church high school that was being built.

Below is a picture of me and Joe and Lauren laying steel bars on already dry concrete and then we poured wet concrete on top of the bars.

This picture did not get flipped, but here is Daddy and Mr. Fred talking about the project.
Here is a picture of what I had for lunch on Thursday. It was like a taco, but shaped different and tasted different. I like the American tacos better.
This is Ms. Snooky, our church secretary, (and it was also her first mission trip) at the clinic.
Here is a sign explaining about hyper and hypoglycemia.
Every afternoon we did a VBS for the neighborhood children. We were told to expect around 50 kids, but 80 showed up the first day. The next few days, we had over 140 show up! They ran next to our bus. They were SO excited!
This was the craft room. Their favorite place. The first 2 days some of the kids went through this part twice so they could make two crafts. We were running short of supplies so we had to stop them from doing that.
This was the game area. We did things like freeze tag, Frisbee, four corners and duck duck goose. Most of these kids only spoke Spanish, so we had an interpreter explain the games to the kids for us.
This was where we did the music and the lesson. No air conditioning, only the ceiling fans. And it was HOT. Way hotter than Mississippi. They learned English praise songs.
Mr. Elliot, our youth minister, led them in songs every day and I got to help.
Here are two kids showing one of the crafts they made.
This little one really liked Mr. Elliot.
Ms. Snooky holding one that got really tired and fell asleep.
Ms. Terri also got to hold the sleepy one.
We did the concrete work and the VBS Monday through Thursday. It was a lot of hard work in the heat, but it was also a lot of fun. I think the kids loved it. When we left they would yell "MANANA", really wanting us to come back the next day. On Thursday they asked if we would be back next year. Seeing all the poverty, I realized how blessed we really are with all the things we have.

On Friday, some of the group went to the Mayan ruins, the Houston group went cave tubing, but me, Daddy, Ms. Terri, Mr. Fred and Mr. Elliot hopped on a small plane and flew out to San Pedro island to go snorkeling with the sharks and sting rays!

I was SO nervous that morning we almost missed our flight. We got on the small plane and took off. The plane ride was 15 minutes long and we had a really cool view of the bay.
Here we are on the way to the island!
This was us lost in San Pedro!
We found the place and got on the boat for about 30 minutes. The water was pretty smooth and very clear. We had a snorkeling lesson and got fitted for our masks. Then it was time to get in!
I did not have an underwater camera, so no pictures of what we saw. But I will try and describe it.

Daddy took me around for a few minutes to see how well I would do. And under our boat was all these big, colorful fish just sitting there. Then our guide took us away from the boat and we saw a giant sea turtle swimming. I swam right over the top of the turtle and almost touched it. Then we went farther away from the boat towards the coral and our guide fed a moray eel some lunch in a conch shell. It was about 5 feet long and that was my favorite part of the snorkeling trip.

Then we went to a big expanse of coral and saw Sergeant fish and barracudas and many others. Then we went over a 30 foot drop and swam over that. We saw sting rays and that was cool. Then we got back into the boat and went out to shark alley. One of our guides threw bait into the water and we waited for the sharks to come. We got back in the water and there were about 15 sting rays and 6 nurse sharks. Ms. Terri held one of the sharks! I was a little scared and didn't stay in very long. Daddy got sea sick and made his own bait for the sharks.
This picture was after we had swam with the sharks. It was a very fun experience and I hope to do it again. Next time I won't be as nervous and might stay in the water a little bit longer.
Here I am back on shore. HUNGRY!! We ate at this really good grill and I had a cheeseburger! Daddy left his pack with his wallet and our passports on the boat, but so many people had cell phones and knew each other on the island, that somebody called the boat driver and he brought us our stuff back.


This is me walking down one of the main streets in San Pedro.
This was the little plane we flew on to the island and back.
This was some of our group with Lupe, our guide.
This was all of us! The Yazoo team and the Houston team.
This trip was fun, exciting and a lot of hard work. I enjoyed my first mission trip and want to do more. The Bible says to spread the word, to go out and make disciples in all nations and that is what we did. Thank you to our family and some great friends who helped make this trip possible for me and thank all of you for your prayers.

Below are a few videos!