Merry Christmas

Christmas Caroling by Lindsay and Leslie

The girls wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Below is three Christmas songs for everyones enjoyment. Consider this our Christmas card! :-) You will see how Leslie is Lindsay's biggest fan... uh... biggest copycat. She is able to add her own flair to the ending of the song however! Enjoy!!

JINGLE BELLS


AWAY IN THE MANGER!


FELIZ NAVIDAD

First Baptist McKinney Christmas Eve Service

This is our Lead Pastor. He is also an art major and brings artwork as a way to glorify God with the ability he has been given. Truly a great form of Worship. This is pretty neat piece too. You can thank God for sending his Son as you are watching. This was sent out as a preview for our Christmas Eve services coming on Monday.

Funny

A dear friend in Washington sent me this email about living in Texas. And it is so true!! I just want to add one thing. I knew we lived in Texas when we were driving behind a truck with four deer legs sticking out of the back! Oh and when you see a Texas orange Peterbuilt pickup truck (not a semi) with huge set of longhorns on the front grill driving to Walmart.

I can probably list a million other things that make Texas "special."

:-)

If you don't like the Weather, wait 20 min.

That is what they say in Texas. If you don't like the weather in Texas, just wait 20 minutes. Well that is exactly what it has been like. On Friday and Saturday of last week we had 85 degrees. The Christmas Journey was nice. On Sunday we were cleaning the different scenes from the Christmas Journey and it was 32 degrees outside. CRAZY! Well, on Tuesday we woke up to 75 degrees again. The picture below is of a cold front that moved through at 3pm CST yesterday. You can see the 20 degree change once the storm pasted through. Today it is in the high 30's again, and they say we should not have to use the air conditioning again until March....at the earliest! :-)

Christmas Journey

Some of you have heard that I was involved in our church's program called Christmas Journey. I did not have any speaking to do. Just sit and pretend to take the Lord's Supper for four hours a night. This is a drive through Nativity Scene. We have 15 different scenes from Jesus' life beginning with His birth and ending with His ascension. As you enter in your car, you are given a CD that plays while you drive from scene to scene. It is a narration of the different things you are looking at and in turn presents a clear gospel message.

It takes many weeks to get ready for and we have over 600 cast members from the church taking part. It ran Wednesday - Saturday nights. 6pm - 9pm on Wed. & Thur. & 6pm - 10pm Fri. & Sat. However, it really ended about 30min after the cut off because it takes approximately 40-45 min. to drive through the whole thing and we were one of the last scenes. We had about 10,000 people come through over all four days. I did a little asking tonight and found out that there will be many calls over the next week to individuals who either made a decision or are looking for a church home.....or just had questions. There are contact cards that are filled out as you drive through.

Below are a few pictures taken from the first night as Katie and the girls drove through and then from tonight as I snapped a few before we got started.



This picture was of the line of cars Katie was behind waiting for the gates to open on Wednesday.


The Girls eating it up!
Wide shot of Bethlehem .
Closer view of Bethlehem.
Jesus and the thieves on the Cross. These are real people. They subbed out every 20 min.
Us at the Last supper. I am on the far right. We were ask to not wear head coverings for the rest of the week even though we were told to have head coverings. It made sense to not have the coverings as we were supposed to be indoors.
A shot of the Last Supper tonight before we got started. The camera bag and cell phone were removed before the first car came through. I am the second from the right.

Me!
Me and three others. Bryan Faus is our Minister of Discipleship. He is the first one the left and yes, his beard is painted on. Dont ask me what the guy on my left is doing!
This is the trial scene where Barabbas is freed in stead of Jesus. Bet you did not know that golf carts were used in Jesus time???


The Open Tomb!

Christmas Tree "Farm" and Turkey Day

We made turkeys on Thanksgiving Eve. We used chocolate muffins with a nutter butter cookie with fruit roll ups for tail feathers. The girls loved it! They were tasty too, as Lindsay says.



This picture is of the girls at the tree farm. The Wal-mart tree farm, that is. We decided that since the trees were shipped in from Michigan and were cut for more than a month by the time you purchase them, we would get a fake tree. Also, Lindsay dressed herself. Do you like the black dress shoes with her tank and shorts??? It has been in the mid 70's all week until yesterday. The temp dropped to the high 30's. We have a great video of the girls and the tree, but we can't seem to load it right now.

A little catching up to do.

Well, It's been a while since we've posted, so we've got some catching up to do. We've had a busy couple of weeks!

We made caramel apples

We got to eat caramel apples!

We were visited by dancing princesses on Halloween ( I couldn't convince them to be anything else)

We decorated for fall, some of which got a little out of hand.

We had a visit from Grammie Donna and Papa Jim and showered them with gifts as they entered the door.

Lindsay taught Papa how to put elbow pads on.

Lindsay and Papa read the hardest book in the whole wide world (a title given to the book by Papa Jim).

And finally, we celebrated Thanksgiving a little early!

We had a great visit with mom and dad but it was very sad to see them go. I don't know if anyone had a dry eye as they left. It was really heartbreaking for Lance and I to try to console an inconsolable 4 year old.

Lindsay's Bike

What an exciting night!!! Lindsay did not suck her thumb for a whole week and was rewarded with her first bike. We are proud of you Lindsay!!! :-)

Marbles Game

Show Time!

Lindsay and Leslie put on a show for us tonight. This first video is of Lindsay's
"Gallop Dance." Looks kind of like an Irish Jig. The second is of the Girls looking for Praise!

This date in our history.

Two years ago, October 20th was the day that Lance left for Texas. It was a pretty sad day for us because he left without us and we didn't know when our family would be together again. Thanks to our friends and family, that couple of months apart was survivable. John and Nichole were there as he left and Kathy met with me for coffee that morning as I just needed to be away from the house. (I remember asking her if she wanted to go to the park, instead of pointing out the idiocy of that since it was cold and wet that day, she kindly said, "how about coffee?" instead of "are you crazy?!") Looking back at where we are today, some might think that the move to Texas was a crazy mistake. But, despite the intense desire to move back and "freedom" to do so, we find that we have been on the Anvil and are better for it. What do I mean by that? Christian author Max Lucado refers to being on the Anvil as God's shaping us into who we are meant to be. Being on the anvil is tough, not easy, but very necessary. Maybe what we are going through today is going to shape us to help us go through something even more significant in the future. And we are thankful that we are worth reshaping. All that said, we really want our house to sell or rent now!!!! :-)

Welcome Fall....Well, sort of.

Fall hasn't come to our corner of the world. Which is unusual, even for Texas. My brain doesn't quite get it. I look at the calendar and it says it's the middle of October. But it has be in the 80's or 90's since the actual first day of fall. So we were quite delighted Monday night when the temperature dropped and we had storms all night long. The next day we woke up to a perfectly dreary, though slightly warm, Autumn day. In Seattle, we might be wearing shorts in this temperature, but since it is Texas, somehow 65 is cold. So I excitedly broke out the jeans (yes, for the first time since being in Washington this summer) and the girls insisted on wearing their jackets, at least until they got sweaty. Even if it wasn't a real Fall day, at least the girls got to do some puddle jumping!!


This is a video of the girls playing in the play room. This is for the grandparents more than anyone!!

Guess Who??

I am cleaning up our computer before it crashes and we lose all our pictures. I came across these two pics. NO, they are not pictures of the same girl. Can you guess who is who??

1

2

A few pictures.

We have been a little behind on pictures lately. Maybe it is because of the nearly 10000 pictures in iPhoto, but the whole photo thing is a little slow, making it a bit of a task to upload photos. So enjoy these, please!

Lindsay recently made a self portrait on the whiteboard. Some of the "extras" are courtesy of her sister.This past weekend we joined Lance on his business trip to Birmingham, Alabama. A friend who is from Birmingham gave us a neat place to visit before we left for home: The Vulcan. It is a giant statue on Red Mountain that overlooks the city. The Vulcan is a god of Iron Work. Anyway it was a beautiful day and a great little stop on our trip. Alabama was a new state for all of us so that was exciting. So was the 10 hour drive back and forth through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Driving through Birmingham was a lesson in History, as well as through the other deep south states. We crossed the Mississippi at Vicksburg, where one of the most significant battles of the Civil war took place. We also saw cotton fields being harvested and a bayou or two along the way.

Leslie, all ready to fall asleep.

Our apologies, if we woke the poor man.

A few weeks ago Leslie discovered the volume nob on the stereo in the game room. Of course, she turned it all the way up. So, Lance came out into the room and said "You'll wake the dead man down the street!" A common Gordieism (Lance's dad). So fast forward to one day this week and Leslie is again messing with the stereo. She turned it all the way up and of course I came sprinting in from where I was In an effort to save our eardrums. As I was running toward the offensive noise (even Laurie Berkner can be offensive at a high volume), Leslie was running straight to her bed with a very concerned look on her face. When I lowered the volume, I could finally hear what Lindsay was trying to ask me over all the noise. "Did we wake the poor man, momma?"

Balloon fun!

Something we have discovered since moving to Texas is that hot-air balloons are not an uncommon sight. In Washington, we may catch them once or twice a year. In our part of Texas, it is possible to see them nearly every Saturday or Sunday and the occasional weekday during good weather. Anyway, today, we went to the Plano Balloon Festival with some friends from our small group. We had one of the best times we've had in Texas. It was quite exciting and we took lots of pictures so please bear with me and enjoy!

This is the common positon while balloon watching
Lindsay wasn't too excited about this picture but we thought it was cool.
After all the balloons that are going to take off, take off, the "Just for Looks" balloons come out and as the sun goes down they do something called a "glow" The bunny and the cow on the right are demonstrating.

Go Blue??

Michigan Football. The winningest team ever!! Not this year! OH & 2!! Who would of thunk it??

I want to thank many of you for your phone calls and emails over the last two weeks. I think some of you have wanted to call and rub it in, but really feel bad for me (at least that is what I am telling myself).

To be honest, I think this is a really good thing because it is time for Lloyd Carr to step down and turn the Wolverines over to a new coach. Someone with a new mind set and who is able to handle the new spread offenses that are being played by many colleges, and after the results of the last two weeks.......WILL BE played by many more colleges very soon.

Anyway, the reason I was prompted to post on college football is because tomorrow at 2:30pm (central time) I have a choice! I have the Michigan/Notre Dame game on ABC. I heard one commentator say this past week that both programs would be 0-3 if they were not playing each other.......he might be right. OR, I can watch the 2-0 Washington Huskies with their new freshman quarterback (who is a stud) on ESPN. The bonus of the Washington game is they will be playing the Ohio State Buckeyes. I would love to see the Huskies win and hit the Buckeyes with their first loss of the season.

Anyway, think of me tomorrow when I am flipping between both games. Feel free to give me a call as you are doing the same. I find that I am pulling for the Huskies without really trying to. You know you are pulling for a team when you look Monday mornings to see where that team is in the national rankings. I actually did that for Washington this week. With a win this tomorrow, you should expect to see them in the top 25 on Monday. After all of their turmoil over the last six years, it is exciting to see them playing well with the hope of a great season. It is amazing to think that the coach(Ty Willingham) of the 2-0 Washington Huskies was fired by Notre Dame three years ago who is about to go 0-3.

Enjoy the college games tomorrow, you know I will!

Katie Bauslaugh

(JK...this is Lance)

It is a ZOO in Texas!!

Tonight in about 20 minutes we saw fireflies, bunny rabbits, and our first TEXAS TARANTULA!!!! We did not have our camera with us, so this is my best shot with my phone in the dark with the headlights pointed at him. I was about four feet away with my arm extended out. Katie picked her feet up off of the van's floor boards, as if the spider had the power to jump through the van door. :-) The big spider was about the size of a softball. When we got home we were talking about our night and Lindsay said, "IT IS A ZOO IN TEXAS!!!"



Once we were home, we had another first! The TEXAS TWO YEAR OLD went potty on the big girl potty!!!! Here is a picture of her eating her candies for her reward.

I have to brag on my Wife

We had Lindsay enrolled in preschool at our church. It was three half-days a week at $187 a month. Not bad, but we thought about it and really began to feel that Katie could provide the same and Leslie would also benefit. The only bummer would be the lack of social interaction she would get at the church preschool. WELL....

Katie did it and boy did she. She started a 38 week program this week. She is doing curriculum for both girls to meet their needs at their ages. She is getting direction from a website that you can check it out here. Below are a few pictures. The girls are really liking it!!!