T-Ball

Today Elizabeth had her first T-ball game. We decided it's good for her to have new experiences. She is still very much the ballerina and loves her ballet classes, but she had a great time at her t-ball tame today too. She's playing with a church called People's Church and so all the kids have Pittsburgh Pirates hats, which Luke thinks is really cool. And her friend Aaron is on her team too. Caleb's too young to play, but he wishes he could! He's very much the ball-player, you can see him with his glove he got for his birthday. When Elizabeth went to buy a glove, she chose the pink and purple one. It was quite the thing to see the 4-5 year-olds try to play t-ball, but they did a pretty good job! They all hit the ball and Elizabeth fielded it a couple times and Luke got to help "coach". (He's not the coach, but they need parents' help!!) So it's fun. We're off now for our last pre-baby vacation to the W.I. beach house for a week. Yay!!

Excited kids

Here are the kids, excited for their "sleepover". Elizabeth is growing out her bangs at her request, so we have to be creative about how to keep them out of her eyes!!!

Beautiful snow

We just returned from our annual staff retreat - and where do California missionaries go for a retreat? To the snow!! We were blessed to go to Hume Lake Christian Camp again, which is only about an hour away from Fresno in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The one day we were there it SNOWED a lot! About a foot where we were, and when we got up for breakfast today, this is what it looked like. Beautiful! The retreat is so great: staying in a lodge in hotel rooms, eating yummy food that the camp cooks for us, worshiping together, sharing what we are learning, taking long walks (although the snow made that a bit more challenging!), laughing a lot, and ice skating! Oh, did I mention no kids? Elizabeth and Caleb stayed with their friends Toby (2 1/2) and Amanda (9 years) and their family. They were excited to have a sleepover! You can see from the pictures above that they were very eager togo, and they had a great time although they missed us a bit. We're happy to be back in the land of sunshine and no snow, though!

And it's a....

Today was my 20-week ultrasound and we were hoping to find out the sex of the baby, but wouldn't you know it, it's a modest baby who wouldn't show us very well!! The technician said she's about 70% certain it's a girl because she didn't see any boy parts, but the view wasn't great, so it could have been hiding!!!

I was sad to not be able to know. I have felt like it's a girl and others have guessed that, but I guess that's not enough to say for certain. Guess we'll have green and yellow ready.....

Other than that, we're getting lots of rain here. We've seen multiple rainbows everyday. That's one of Caleb's new words. "Rainbow". And "milkshake".

Hopefully I'll post some pics soon.

Kids and life...

Life was busy there for a few weeks, but now it should settle down - at least for awhile! We've been enjoying warm temperatures in the 70's here for a couple weeks, but in a day or two it will be back to the 50's. Spring is the best time in Fresno and the most beautiful months - I think - are March and April. It's like summertime is in Erie. Our flowering trees are already flowering, which makes me laugh because they just lost their leaves around Christmas.

Oh! The picture is Elizabeth with her friend Abby dressed as princesses at one of our nights with the babysitting co-op. They are both so girly! It's fun....

Things in our neighborhood have settled down considerably. Some of our other W.I. staff had a shooting on their street last night. At least 2 young guys who we all know were shot and have lived but have extremely serious and possibly still life-threatening injuries. It was a gang thing. It's hard when the children of good people are involved in things like that.

The pregnancy is going well. Now that I'm past the sickness and extreme tiredness, I'm feeling happier in general. I still at times feel scared of having 3 kids, but I think it will work out. Elizabeth and Caleb have been playing nicely together more and more often, and it's so awesome to see.

Well I'm off. One thing - I keep getting colds during this pregnancy! My lowered immune system plus kids bringing in every sickness around has hit me hard, so I have another miserable one right now!

Happy Valentine's Day tomorrow!!!

Lemons!!

Our lemons are ripe on our lemon tree, and the kids are so excited! So today Luke and the kids picked a dozen lemons and made lemonade. We'll be tasting it at dinner time......
By the way, Luke is super-excited about tomorrow's STEELERS game, and we are not having a party tomorrow so that we can have a big one for the super bowl!!! Yay!!

Caleb is Two!!

Well Caleb turned 2 on Monday and had a little party with the staff at our house. He especially loved blowing out the candles on his cake, and he did a great job! Now, whenever I mention his birthday, he makes a blowing noise. He got lots of Thomas wooden railway things, so now we play with "choo-choos" almost all the time. Luke also got him a very cute little baseball glove and a wiffle ball. Today was his annual doctor's appointment and he is doing well. In his usual tough-guy fashion he didn't cry at all for his shots - just gave the nurse a look like, "What are you doing to me?" When I told him it was all done, he actually shrugged, as if to say, "That's IT??"

Here's Baby 3!!

I don't know how well you can see it, but that's little Raughley #3. Hopefully in a couple months we'll find out the gender. Elizabeth is praying for a girl!

Can you believe I took NO pictures on our 2-week trip to PA?! What was I thinking?!!!

Christmas in our neighborhood

Yesterday I wished I had a camera next to me as I sat eating lunch with my kids and looking out our window onto the street. Down the street came an obviously drunk man stumbling along, pushing his shopping cart with a santa hat on his head an holding a half-full bottle of wine. It wasn't even in a bag as usual, just out in the open. Anyway, I thought it would make a great "Merry Christmas from the Raughleys" picture. Too bad....

Thursday World Impact held what I like to call our Christmas Flandango. It's a huge Christmas party for the community with tons of craft and ethnic food booths. We try to make it a family-centered event for people to make memories together. Since we haven't done it in a few years due to many reasons, our numbers were down from 600 to about 250-300. But that's okay with us! In addition to food and crafts, we had a petting zoo, health fair, prayer tent, living nativity, and a paintball target-shooting trailer. Since I was on the planning committee, that's been occupying most of my time these days. Needless to say, my Christmas cards and presents are not ready or mailed yet. Hopefully by the beginning of the week....

THat's all for now. I still need to recover.

Christmastime!!

We are excited to be getting ready for Christmas! We enjoyed a quiet Thanksgiving at home and got to share some of our feast with a neighbor who has come asking for food previously. Then the day after Thanksgiving we made our now-traditional trip to Cobb's Ranch to cut down our California Redwood tree. I realized this was our 6th trip to Cobb's to cut down a tree...

Elizabeth was SOOOO excited to have our tree and help decorate it. Caleb keeps pointing at it and saying, "Tree, tree!" He's not a big talker yet, so when today he said, "My tree", that's a pretty big deal.

Our whole family - except Luke - have had the stomach flu over the last week. Thankfully it's only been a 24-hour thing for us, but I currently also have no voice! It's hard to keep the kids in line with no voice....

So, we are getting ready for Christmas, and it's fun with the kids. We're also excited about our trip to PA starting Dec. 27. Yay!!!

Roses in November

One of the benefits of living in California is having my roses blooming in November. These are just a few from my rose bushes. At this house there are probably 20 rose bushes. You may know that I LOVE roses, so this is a huge blessing for me!

Last week the kids and I went to Los Angeles for a few days and stayed with the Engel family. It was a great time to catch up, and I also made my first ever visit to Ikea. Very fun - Elizabeth loved the children's area where they have babysitters!!

All dressed up...

We went to two harvest parties on Halloween. Elizabeth was a pumpkin and Caleb was a doggie in a costume I put together very quickly. He was pretty cute when I painted a nose and whiskers on his face, but by then he was tired of pictures. They both had fun playing the games at the parties and winning candy.
Now that Halloween is over, Elizabeth is anxious for Thanksgiving, but I think it's because she knows Christmas is not far behind that. Tomorrow the kids and I are going to Los Angeles for a couple days while Luke is at the directors' conference. We'll get to see Elizabeth's "best friend" Chase and hopefully our friend "Shovel" too!!

Pumpkins!!

We did carve some pumpkins....not scary. Caleb now loves pumpkins wherever we go!

Elizabeth's dance

Yesterday Elizabeth's dance class had a special visiting day and did a special Halloween dance. It was open to family and friends. She did a great job, although she was visibly nervous. I think she felt very special, too, because she had lots of people come to watch her. Luke was away at the Oaks and thought he wouldn't make it back, so I invited our friends Maggie and Danette (WI staff) to come, and they were there and then Luke showed up part way through and Elizabeth was SOOO excited to see him. She chose her pumpkin costume, and not a princess, which was surprising....

Fall in CA

We took a day trip to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks this weekend, in hopes of finding some cooler temperatures and fall leaves. And yay, we did!!! The kids had a GREAT time, running and running and running. We are thankful to have mountains within an hour and a half drive of our house. At 7000 ft. the temps were in the 60's. We have more pictures, if you're interested, email me. Today and tomorrow Luke's gone to the Oaks, WI's camp, to help them with their strategic planning. So the kids and I are on our own. Thankfully it's only 2 days this time.....

Caterpillar

Luke found this caterpillar eating my tomato plant and he loved it....He wanted to post these pictures on our blog. I think it's gross myself, but it is pretty big. Of course, he put it back on the tomato plant to feast away.....

King and Queen

"Look, Mommy, we're the king and the queen!" Elizabeth yelled as she and Caleb came into the kitchen dressed like you see in the picture while I was making dinner. She had put the crown on Caleb and he didn't really like it. She's been having fun with her princess things. Caleb has had his first solo timeout. He's been asserting his will lately, which includes hitting his sister. Usually we have to hold him still for a timeout, but this time he sat still by himself. He's been learning lots lately -- doing wooden puzzles with us, finding the ducky in his Usborne books, and "counting" things. He'll point at three things lined up and say, "two, two, two." They are great.....

Caleb

Caleb enjoyed the party too. He pretty much did his own thing....

Elizabeth's Fourth Birthday!!

Elizabeth celebrated her 4th birthday on Sunday with a party at our house - mostly staff and their kids and also her friends Amanda and Toby. (It's hard to get a good picture of her, she is silly...) We had cake and ice cream and she opened her presents. Almost all her presents were princess-type dress-up things. I'll post some dress-up pictures later. She had a good time, but had some sharing issues.....we had a talk about it and when the kids came to our house again today for staff fellowship she was SOOOO much better.

We have a busy week ahead of us....partly my own stuff and partly Luke's busy-ness. But the light at the end of the tunnel is our date Friday night. For those of you who don't know, we've had this awesome babysitting co-op for 3 years now. Currently there are 3 families involved, so every third week we babysit all the kids (9 altogether) and the weeks in between we get to go out on Friday night from 6-9. Sometimes I think I take it for granted, but this week it will be greatly appreciated. I highly recommend the arrangement for those of you with young kids. A frequent date night is wonderful for marriage!!

Elizabeth hates all the Halloween stuff at the stores. She had a major breakdown at Target this morning when I tried to walk through the Halloween display to get to the Garden Center. I needed to buy flowers to take to a meeting tomorrow. Instead we did our best to walk as far around it as we could and only cut through a tiny corner. She's gotten worse and worse about it and especially hates the "bones" (skeletons). I don't blame her. It's just hard when she causes a scene in a store...

Caleb is bothered by little and throws himself headlong into whatever he's doing. Literally. He often has bruises, bumps and cuts on his head. He can catch the chickens now and likes to carry them around with him. He's very sweet and says "Bye" to everyone he sees. He still loves hugs and cuddling.

Fall here means temperatures in the 80's and sometimes 70's. And eventually rain. But not yet. This week it's actually supposed to be 90 a couple of days. Yuck. The leaves fall off the trees in late November. But anything is better than 100 degrees!!! So I'm enjoying it as much as I can.

Let's Go State!!!

We are just super-excited that Penn State just beat #6 Ohio State! Let's go State!!! Woo-hoo!!! (We do our best to keep track of the Lions from way out here in CA....)