Samuel Lucas

Ain’t he handsome! Everything is going very well. They both came home this afternoon. So much different than with Daniel. I so thank you all for your prayers and I thank God for all His blessings on us.

He looks a little small in Dave’s hands but he really is pretty good size. He seems to have taken to food like a true champion.

This is Jessica, just a few hours after delivery. I told her she could do an advertisement for the makeup she is wearing. The makeup she is wearing is the same makeup she put on the evening before when they left the house, about 18 hours before. Amazing. I haven’t been home long so there is much to do. Just wanted to show him off a little. Take care and God bless.

June 8, 2010 3

He’s Here

Samuel Lucas Bates arrived today at 10:53 A.M. He weighed 7 lb even and is 20″ long. He, of course, is a beautiful boy. I do have pictures, however, I do not know how to load them on David’s computer. I will post pictures as soon as I go home. Thanks to all of you for your prayers. It was a fast and relatively easy delivery. Both him and his mother are doing very well. Daniel, the girls and I are having a good time together, however he misses his mom and dad terribly. Hopefully, they will be back home tomorrow. I just wanted to let everyone know he is here and well. Thanks again for your prayers. Take care and God bless.

June 7, 2010 2

Happy Birthday

Yesterday was my Julie’s birthday. We celebrated by having a picnic lunch at Groundhog Mountain with our friends, the Horns. The building you see behind the kids is the lookout tower.

This is one of the things you can see from where the tower is. The mountain in the distance is called Buffalo Mountain. I think you can probably guess why.

We had birthday cake, hot dogs, chips and all the things that go with it. We are so blessed to have friends like the Horns. Their kids and our kids have so much fun together.

After the picnic, it was time for some work. We went to Levering Orchard in Ararat, Va. Time to pick some cherries. We had a great time. It is a pick your own orchard or you can purchase them already picked. It is, of course, cheaper if you pick. Besides who would want to miss all that fun. We picked almost 9 lb. or the equivalent of 2 gal. They are very good. After getting all hot picking cherries, we stopped on the way back at this little store for an ice cream cone. It certainly tasted delicious. All in all, it was a great birthday day. Prayerfully tomorrow I will be making a post about a beautiful new baby boy, with lots of pictures. I am making sure I have my camera with me. We are getting ready to leave as I type this. I need to be there by 5:00, as she is scheduled to be at the hospital by 7:00. I know I have asked before, but remember to pray for us. Take care and God bless.

June 6, 2010 1

Garden

Here are just a few shots of our garden. We hope to soon enjoy squash as you can see the bloom on it. This one tomato plant will be an early one. The others are not near as big. Yesterday was a beautiful day here in Floyd. Hubby and I finished getting the garden out. We planted a few more tomatoes and beans and corn.

Later in the evening we got a good rain. I guess God knew our seeds needed a drink. The girls and I are working on cleaning the house today and washing clothes. My house is a little behind as we have been doing up the beef. Our total is 80 quarts of canned beef and 88 bags of hamburger. Pretty good I think. Tomorrow is bible study day. We are studying I Corinthians. Little Samuel will be here in 4 more days. Unless he decides to come before then. We all can hardly wait to see him and hold him. God is good! Also hopefully David will have my computer back in operation soon. I really miss it. It’s sometimes hard for me and Hubby to coordinate on one computer. His free time is usually my free time too. Well, my time is up. The wringer is calling my name. Take care and God bless.

June 3, 2010 3

Memorial Weekend

I have no picture to post today. I just wanted to let everyone know I was still around. David is working on my computer this week so hopefully I will be back in action soon. Things have been very busy here this past week. We were blessed with a beef. Billy had butchered him for someone and they did not want the meat. He was an old bull-about 10 years old and weighed about 1800 pounds. My friend Vicki and I have been working all last week to process it. We are cutting some of the meat in chunks and canning it. We are making hamburger out of the rest. We are about half done (I think). George and Quentin-Vicki’s hubbie-will be helping us tomorrow. I will let you all know the total of cans and hamburger we get when we finish. We went to visit Jess yesterday. She is scheduled to have her labor induced June 7th. Little Samuel will soon be here. We took the cradle down and it is all set up and ready. Just needs a little one in it. Continue to pray for them. We took the long way home today and stopped at a little picnic area. It was very pretty with lots of overlooks. We then stopped at this little store in Meadows of Dan and they were having a craft show. Lots of cool stuff to look at, lots of new ideas for me to work on. Of course, we took the camera case down to Jessica’s however the camera was not in the case. So I have no pictures to show you. Oh well, that’s pretty typical of me. Enjoy your Sunday and God bless.

May 30, 2010 0

Fishing Day

I thought this was just the cutest picture. This little girl was so intent on her fishing pole. Look close you can see her little bare toes sticking out from under her dress. You can also notice her hair is wet. She sat on this drain pipe through a little shower we had. She did not want to give up her spot. I heard we had over 100 people there Saturday. I think they said about 300 lbs. of trout were caught. The kids had a great time. Lots of fun and fellowship. Afterward, we went shopping for a few things. Hubby needed to replenish some of his electrical supplies. Yesterday was church, went into town to pick up some ink for the printer. When we got home, I made some baked beans to take to Sunday Evening Class. Then we worked some on our homework. Sunday Night’s menu was pigs in the blanket, baked beans, chips and homemade dip, a pasta dish, coleslaw. For dessert peach pie, ice cream and a dessert that Becky makes that I forgot the name of. (Happens as I get older) Temperatures have been cool here with quite a lot of rain. We haven’t gotten all of our garden planted because it has just been too wet. Hopefully this week we will get it finished. I am, of course, washing clothes today. Lots of clothes! I guess they will have to be dried inside as it looks like the sun will not shine today. Tomorrow the girls and I are going down to Jessica’s to watch Daniel while she goes for an ultra sound. Samuel is just about ready to be here. Just a couple more weeks, maybe sooner. Pray for a healthy and easy delivery for him and for her. I better get busy. Take care and God bless.

May 24, 2010 3

Roses-Getting Ready

My rose bush is full of these little buds. I can’t wait to see them in bloom! Of course, I will take a picture so you all can see them too. Today we begin our new study today on I Corinthians. Pray for us, as the ladies seem to think this will be a hard study. To me, hard means digging deeper. Hopefully, digging deeper means understanding deeper. We’ll see. Yesterday was a beautiful day here in Floyd. Sunshine, not too warm, just right. I washed clothes again and hung them out on the line to dry. I thought I should take advantage of the sunshine. They are calling for rain this evening through Monday. Every year, our church does a youth Trout Fest day. It is scheduled for tomorrow. The pond is already stocked and ready to go. It is a big day. The kids fish from 9:30 to 12:00. Then we have a picnic lunch. Hotdogs with all the fixin’s. Lots of desserts. The kids and the adults have a LOT of fun. Hopefully, it will not get rained out. We went over to a friend’s house last night. I made homemade cinnamon rolls and took them to share. Good coffee, good food, good fellowship. Life is good and God is great! I took Jessica’s advice and made the rolls a little different this time. I put chopped pecans in the middle along with the brown sugar and cinnamon. Then for the icing I made a quick caramel frosting from my Mennonite cookbook. The recipe is:

1/2 cup butter and 1 cup brown sugar. Melt together on low heat and boil 2 min. stirring constantly. Add 1/4 cup milk and heat just until boiling again. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Stir in 2 cups sifted powdered sugar.

This was very good on the cinnamon rolls. I know it would be excellent on cakes as well. Time for my day to get busy. Take care and God bless.

May 21, 2010 1

Clematis

My first post on the Mac without assistance. I believe I can do this! I thought I would share a picture of my clematis. I think it is very pretty this year. Very exciting day today. We will finish language for the year. Yeah! I will be spending most of my day washing clothes. The wringer will get a work out today. We have had rain all week. I put off during the laundry hoping for sun today. We’ll see. Right now it doesn’t look too promising. The wringer is kinda fun to use though and I am getting faster at it. It requires more attention than the automatic machine. Last nights supper was baked chicken, green beans, stuffing, sweet potatoes and home made rolls. Watermelon for dessert. I am experimenting with using less salt in our food as I have been having some high blood pressure issues. I marinaded the chicken in a Mrs. Dash marinade(no salt). It was really good. I have a cookbook that tells how to make different types of seasonings. The other night I made a taco seasoning to use on our chicken tacos. (Chicken was on sale this week at our local grocery) I did not put any salt in the seasoning and honestly could not tell it was not there. Here is the recipe I used: 2 tsp minced onion, 1 tsp chili powder, 1/2 tsp cornstarch, 1/2 tsp crushed dried red pepper, 1/2 tsp minced garlic, 1/2 tsp ground cumin, 1/4 tsp dried oregano. If you want to use salt, the recipe calls for l tsp. As I said, I used no salt and could not miss it. I got this recipe from my (and Jessica’s) all time favorite cookbook. “Mennonite Country-Style Recipes & Kitchen Secrets” by Esther H. Shank. This is a marvelous cookbook. If I had to choose only one cookbook to use, it most definitely would be this one. Well, my friend the wringer, is calling to me. Take care and God bless.

May 19, 2010 2

Wood

An almost empty wood pile. Remember how this looked last fall. I would show you the picture but all my old pictures are still sleeping on my computer, which is “resting” for a while. Anyway, last fall this shed had 7 rows deep of wood and 2 rows on each side. All gone. We used almost all of the wood last winter. Saturday, we all worked on the wood pile. George and I used the splitter and the girls stacked it up.

This is what the pile looked like. We have about 1/3 of it split and stacked in the building-three rows deep. We want to have more wood this winter than we had last winter. Just in case, it is another hard winter. It is better to be prepared. I want to take a moment to complement my girls. They worked very hard Saturday and did an excellent job stacking the wood. Thank you, Julie and Grace.

Another picture I know Jess will love. The girls found this lunar moth on the building the other day. Very pretty. They enjoy finding pictures for me to use. Rather chilly here today. Upper 40’s for the temperature. Lots of rain. We had a really hard rain last night while we were at church. We do our Sunday night study in the basement. Water started coming in through the basement door. We had to stop our study and get busy-quick. The outside drain could not handle all the water. Thanks to mops, a shop vac, and a sump pump we finally got it all dried out. I’m just glad it happened while we were there. It would not have been fun to discover all that water on Wednesday night. Imagine what damage it could have done. God is good. Of course, after all that hard work, the food tasted extra good. Time for piano lessons. Take care and God bless.

May 17, 2010 5

Butterfly

I took these pictures the other day when we were cutting wood. This butterfly is especially for Jess.

This is the view from where we were cutting the wood.

A picture of a fire pink. There were lots of these blooming in the wooded area.

There is a little trial you can walk that circles around. This is the beginning of the wooded part of the trial.

About 1 second after I took this picture, a squirrel came running down this trial straight toward me. I was not fast enough with the camera to get a picture. I am experiencing technical difficulties with my computer. My technical support team (Dave) says it is my hard drive. For now, I am using Hubby’s computer. For all the people whose blog I read and comment on, there may be a season of silence. I have them on my computer in my favorites list and I do not know how to transfer them. Dave will fix all this in due time. I hope to learn how to post pictures on this computer. Pray for me as you all know I am not very technical. This is my fourth attempt to post this. The pictures were already loaded from my old computer yesterday before it said goodbye. Well, enough of all that. Tonight’s menu at church will be hot dogs with homemade chili, slaw, chips, salad and some kind of dessert (unknown as of yet). Lunch today was beef roast in the crock pot, potatoes cooked in butter, home canned green beans, and watermelon for dessert. I guess I better get started on my study for tonight. Take care and God bless.

May 16, 2010 1