Rain, Day trip, lots of kiddos, and more

There are so many things in life I am thankful for. One is that my children are great friends and can entertain themselves for hours. It has been raining non stop for the past two days. Just a light drizzle. I could send them outside, but then that means I'd have to give baths again and I'm not in to that today ;-) Instead, they have been playing LEGO all day without many fights and not telling me once that they are bored. They even took a 20 min break to help me clean up around where Beka is crawling.

Yes, that's another bit of news. Beka began crawling last week. She hit 8 months this weekend, and is enjoying crawling, pulling herself up, and eating solids, while making fun messes. We aren't big in to purees, so she's eating everything we eat. YUM to salsa chicken the past two nights- black beans, corn, rice and chicken. She got her bottom two teeth about a month ago, so those have helped some, but she'd be fine if she didn't have them.

Last week was insane, but I think the kids loved it. Our dear friends who watched our kids while Beka was born and are her godparents, they had their baby. So of course, we watched their kids. Unfortunately, there was some small complications, making the baby have to stay much longer than planned, so we had their kids for 8 days, and then 2 afternoons until mom and baby were able to go home. It seems so quiet in our house now! And we all 9 survived.

Weekend before last, we drove two cars and took the 7 kiddos to Belgium to visit a Trappist Cistercian Monastery, Orval Abbey, with our Catholic homeschooling friends. Jon had a lot of fun telling our Abby "Hey Abby, guess where we are. At an Abbey!!" (Similar to how they use to tell their sister Mary "Merry Christmas" all the time.) WE left with some yummy monk cheese and Belgium beer.

 These are the ruins of the first buildings they had.

 Me and my snuggle bug sound asleep.

 Jon and all the kiddos minus the baby... and his beer.

 More of the Monastery. 

THankfully while there were so many kids here, the weather was beautiful and they spent many days outside, using their imagination like crazy. Here, the kids created a barefoot park. Each section had something different- rocks, mud, dirt, etc. During the time, Hannah also learned to ride without training wheels, and Zach lost another tooth (making it 5 now).

I wish I could say we were preparing for our coming school year. But alas, I sent our information in to the new program we're using and haven't heard back yet. I hope I do in the next few weeks, because I know it'll take a while to order our books, which has me freaked out a bit. We've still been doing lots of reading this summer and continuing to work on math. 

The only other thing in life right now consists of telling a lot of our friends goodbye as they are PCSing. Tonight I'm going to a farewell dinner for a very, very dear friend whom I met in TLF our first week here. Three years later, and she's leaving. We should technically be leaving as well, but have extended so have two more years. I'm thankful we have two more years, but incredibly sad to see so many of my very good friends leaving. This particular friend has been an amazing friend and example to me in so many ways. I'm so grateful she's been in my life these 3 years.