a weekend with twelve kiddos!

We had some more friends visit us last weekend!  

This semester we have really seen  God pour His grace on us as He brings these visitors from IN to encourage us.  We do not deserve it at all, so we really do see it as God being so gracious to us.

This was a special weekend, because these families have so many kids!  If you add in our four, there were twelve kids altogether (minus Bodie, who we all missed!!) --so as you can imagine, our kids were ecstatic, looking forward to it for sooo long!

These four girls...all really close in age, and they are little best friends.  I hope and pray that they will always stay best friends!!

 (Daisy, Adalynn, Layla and Sunny)

We had some fun with glowsticks...

We took advantage of the guesthouse (where our friends stayed)--there is a HUGE kitchen and so much room for the kids to run and play.

The creek area was a hit with the kids...

and the adults!

The boys played "toilet tag"...

Here is Nathan, waiting for someone to "flush" him...haha!  Who thinks up this stuff anyway?  What happened to good ol freeze tag?  Of course, the boys think toilet tag is way more fun :)

The kids had slumber parties...believe me, these girls took a LONG time to go to sleep!  But they hardly ever have a chance to do this, and they had a lot of fun, so it is totally worth it in my opinion :)

We got our "baby fix" with sweet baby Brenna :)

Of course, we had to visit Ha Ha Tonka to see the castle...the kids loved it!

So thankful for these ladies in my life!

The dads did a devotion with all the kids at the castle.  Nick talked about the guy who built the castle, how the man put all of his resources into building this huge structure, just to live in himself...and it ended up in flames as there was a huge fire.  Now it is just in ruins.  There were some great spiritual parallels there!   

Nathan ended the devotion by putting firecrackers inside objects and comparing it to living for temporal things...for example:  "Hey kids living for sports is like putting a firecracker into this piece of banana...lets see what will happen to the banana!"  Of course, the banana is blown to smithereens...and then at the end of the devo, he put a firecracker into a crack in the rocks of the castle...and he said "Hey kids, lets see what it's like to live for Jesus!"  And of course the castle wall stood firm :)  These dads are so creative!!

We ended our weekend with a great game of "Chubby Bunny"...haha!  It was so funny. 

The kids begged us moms to try it...it was pretty funny :)  Amy won!  She is one talented mama :)

Thanks, friends, for visiting us!  We cannot tell you how much we appreciate you driving your families all the way here to see us.  We love you guys!!