A Day at the Beach

Wade and I took the boys to Birch Bay yesterday after Wade got home from work. Unfortunately the tide was coming in and ate up all the sand pretty quickly (we have very minimal amounts of sandy beach in Northwest Washington), but the boys were really more interested in throwing rocks in the water anyway, so they didn't mind. We picked up a pizza and enjoyed the last few hours of sunshine.
We'll have to go again later in the summer if we want to see an ocean sunset though, since there was no way all four boys were going to last until 9:30 p.m.
Mom Howard is coming out on Saturday to spend the weekend. Isaac's daily mantra is "How many days until Nana comes?"

Our foxy boy

For those who don't know, Isaac has been calling himself a fox (a big, huge purple fox, actually) for almost a year and a half now. Well last night he told me "foxes have pointy little ears, but I don't." I wondered if his days as a fox were over, until he continued, "I'm the fox that looks like a people." Ah, the imagination of a four-year-old!

New Pastor

In case you didn't know. Last fall our pastor left us to be a missionary in China. We've been looking for a pastor ever since...obviously. We didn't like the traditional way of finding one by creating a search committee to go through potential minister's profiles and try to get an idea of who the guy actually is by what he says of himself...not ideal at all. So when a guy called BC called us from Oregon saying he felt called to come to us, we jumped on it. He was invited to be our interim pastor for 6 weeks so we could get to know him, he could get to know us...all that good stuff. After those 6 weeks our church council thought we should pursue him further so it went to a congregational vote today. Of the 106 voting members present, 99 voted for him! Thats like 93%! We are more than excited to have him. He plays guitar(which I love), is involved in youth, writes books and music. He's really great. The really amazing thing is that he has broad support from all age groups in our church, from the High Schoolers to the 80 somethings. We're really excited to have BC come preach for us, probably starting in mid July.

We're back

Okay, we're still getting used to this whole having to report in thing so we're a bit tardy here. The backpacking trip was great, physically exhausting but mentally relaxing. I had no idea how good it would feel to have no meetings, no to-do list, no chores waiting, no work deadline looming, no children to feed, bathe and referee. It made all the blisters and aching muscles worth it!
We hiked just over 17 miles the first day (thanks to a little detour and some impromptu trailblazing). The original plan was to stay two nights at the same spot, but we knew we wouldn't be able to make it back in one day in our sorry condition, so we hiked almost halfway back on day two and stayed at another campground along the way. It was a good thing we did, because it was all we could do to make it the remaining 8 miles on day three. It was an ideal vacation though, cuz you know how at the end of most vacations you're really wishing for one more day? We weren't! We had a blast but were completely ready to come home.