A family of 6...

The other day we were walking into Sam's or Sam's clubhouse as the kids call it. Sean was walking next to me and said, "We have 6 people in our family." I said "Oh yeah, 6?" and to that he replied "Mommy, Ethan, Kaitlyn, Daddy, Sean, and hippo." Hippo is Seaners Ty beanie baby that he carries around everywhere with him. Sean has built Hippo a bed to sleep in, a car to ride in (out of kinex), and a staircase to his bed. He LOVES hippo! So hippo is a part of our family just like Kaitlyn's baby is a part of our family!

Seaners!!

Today is Sean's 5th birthday! He's pretty excited to turn 5 and be a big boy! We're going to have a party in KC today with my family and then next week he is going to have a party in Oklahoma with his buddies from church. I put a few pictures up of him so you can see just how cute my boy is!


This is Sean without his teeth for the past year!



This is Sean at about 2 years old. He loved his blankie and his two fingers!



This is Sean when he was born! Sweet baby!



Happy Birthday Sean!! We love you so much!

The first one....

Well Ethan is officially our first kid to get stitches!! He was climbing up the ladder to his bunk bed and he slipped. He hit his chin just right on the ladder and split his chin open. It looked pretty deep right away. We took him to a urgent care center and he got 3 stitches in his chin. He did amazing through it! He was so brave and didn't cry at all! He sat perfectly still and just held my hands. The doctor kept saying over and over how great he did! He gets the stitches pulled out on Thursday before we head to KC. Poor guy! I guess he's keeping the Graunke tradition of splitting your chin open! :-)

Busy, busy....

Well April appears to be a pretty busy month! Besides the day to day business of life, we have something going on every weekend too! This weekend is Easter. I'm excited for it. The group I've been working with doing the hand mime to "Who am I?" will perform the song this weekend. Jarod and Julie (the youth minister's wife and our good friend) will sing the song for us. It is a really neat thing, so check out the video on youtube that I talked about in a previous post. For Easter lunch we are going to the Brust's home and having an Easter egg hunt. It will be a good day, and I love that the kids get that it's not about candy and bunnies (I'm sure I'll post on that soon!)!
The weekend after that we are going to KC for a few days. My dad is turning 60, and we wanted to go see him for that. It is also Sean's 5th birthday! So we'll have a birthday party for both! While in KC we are hoping to see some friends, too!
The next weekend OCC is having their women's retreat. I'm not sure if anyone from KC is going (??) but I plan on going up for a day or two. Jackina Stark is speaking and I really enjoy her stories and testimony.
The next weekend is the minister's and spouse retreat. I'm really excited for this! We will be shipping the kids off to the farm and heading out with the staff from NCC for a great weekend together. It's an area wide thing so other churches will be there too. Jarod is leading the worship and Jim Johnson will be the speaker (he's a former OCC professor and now preaches in Stillwater, OK). I really look forward to spending time with Jarod and the other staff members.
SO that's our April! Crazy but fun!! So much to look forward to and so much to be thankful for!

What an amazing morning!!

Wow! That's all I have to say! Okay, I'll explain a little bit! :-) This morning was our first morning in our new building. You could just feel the excitement in the air as soon as you came in the front doors! The lobby was full of families enjoying the free refreshments provided by the cafe' and the preschool wing was buzzing with tons of little kids! The worship service was wonderful and Jarod and the praise team did a great job leading us in worship! Jarod put a video together of Northside's journey from its beginning till now accompanied by Chris Rice's version of 'Great is thy Faithfulness.' It is so clear that God's hand has been in this whole journey for this church, and we are honored to be a part of it! There was a baptism in each service and many moments to make you just pause and praise God. As Jarod said so well this morning and as I've tried to say too is that it's not about the building, but it's about what God can do using the building as a tool to reach many! Both services were pretty full- Jarod guesses we may have been near 1,000 people this morning. I can't put into words this morning... it was a great morning!
I'm going to go up to the church tomorrow and take pictures of the inside so you can see what it looks like! Here's a couple more of the outside of the church after they put the logo on.