Never too young to guard your heart

(This post is written by Paul & Audrea's friend, Dawn)

I have the most amazing opportunity every week to teach young kids about God and His Word. They are always attentive and eager to learn and somehow remember most everything I teach them. It is a HUGE encouragement to me to see how much they learn and remember. I am blessed every week with 3 beautiful little girls, Makayla, Sabrina, and Elayna. There have been though, many a Wednesday nights or Sunday mornings where somehow I know I am at church, but I feel like Art Linkletter or Bill Cosby are present filming a secret episode of "Kids Say the Darndest Things." We added a friend last night to our Wednesday night events. Taylor, a boy, who is in Kindergarten, joined my beautiful girls. We went through our normal activities of Play-dough, coloring books and crayons, and a short Bible Story. I brought in some Kids Worship music last night to play while we ate our dinner and colored. After class, we had a bit before the kids got picked up, so I proceeded to turn the music on and they all decided to dance around and enjoy the music. They were all laughing and smiling and enjoying each others company. Sabrina decided to dance with her sister Elayna and Elayna was more than willing to enjoy that with her. Well, Taylor, my only boy, decides he wants to dance with Elayna as well, so when Sabrina finished, he made his way to Elayna and took her hands to dance. Elayna stops, plants her feet to the floor, quits smiling and laughing, and yells "NO ROMANCE BEFORE MARRIAGE!!!!!" She dropped Taylors hands and went on dancing by herself enjoying the music. I mean seriously, where is Bill Cosby and Art Linkletter when these things happen anyway? :)

Happy New Year!!

Welcome to 2009, everyone!!!!!

My family and I wish you all a happy new year and pray that you will experience afresh God's grace throughout the whole year!

William

Tonight we will look at a few glimpses of the busy life of our toddlin' boy William.

Will turned 1 this year and celebrated with a decorations of dogs everywhere! (Notice the wall of coloring pages and drawings behind him in this picture.)
Will loves to work--especially cleaning. If he can get involved with whatever you're doing, he's happy!


Will is also our little builder. Here he is below after he and I went to Home Depot where they help kids do building projects once a month.
Will is also very strong and agile. Here he lives up to the name on his shirt--Lightning Mcqueen. Audrea frequently catches him up on top of the girls bunkbeds sometimes standing up and dancing to their music.
And speaking of music, he's a huge fan of anything musical (his tastes range from classical to rock, from hip hop to country, so basically anything daddy listens to!)
He has also picked up same love for books that his sisters have. Here he is with them and his Grandma Connie reading to him.
For the longest time he would do this silly little face shown below. He'd scrunch up his lips like so and breathe loudly in and out through his nose. Give it a try. I'm sure your friends will love it!
Finally, I leave you with my favorite picture of the year. Will and his best friend, Caleb, were playing in the bedroom after Will's bath when we caught him just like this. The picture was so hilarious we hosted a caption contest on facebook. The winning caption was "Tell me again... why do I have to be naked in order to escape?" The second place caption was "Uh dude, you're visible again."

Elayna

This morning I want to introduce you to my darling Elayna. Elayna turned 4 this year as you can clearly see in the picture below.
Baby Sweet's happy grin is always such a warming sight! Here she is doing one of her favorite things: munching on snacks!
Here she is doing her most favorite thing: sleeping whilst sucking her thumb under her cuddly "tt-woobee-bubba" (as she calls it--she keeps adding new names that she likes).
Elayna can't decide who she likes to play with more: Will or Sabrina. She has been such a big helper with her brother but does tend to get into the most squabbles with him :)
Here's my little lovely one helping make these flowers look even more beautiful.

Sabrina

This evening I want to show you our "little red"--Sabrina. Sabrina turned 6 this year and is also growing up way too fast!
You may have noticed Sabrina's length of hair in the picture above. She announced to us this year that she wanted to get her hair cut a little shorter. It was the first major cut she has ever had! It was down about two-thirds of her back, but 10 inches later it touches her shoulder.

Though she's not proud of them, notice the freckles that daddy passed on to her that are starting to pop up under her eyes:Sabrina has a darling little smirk (as shown below) that is designed to capture your heart. I will be a very busy dad fighting off the boys with this one!
I love this picture below where Audrea caught her in a natural moment having tons of fun on a hay ride:
Our little Bina has about 45 nicknames that we've given her including but not limited to hoppy, boppy, bina bop, hippity, hoppity, and on and on. One of her other nicknames is revealed here in this picture: floppy.
This was also the big year for her to part ways with her two front baby teeth.
The new ones did grow in quickly before Christmas!

Savannah

For the next two days, I'm going to highlight our four beautiful blessings from God: our children. Today, I start with our oldest: Savannah. Savannah turned 9 this year and is too quickly growing up as you can see in this portrait below.

Savannah loves all things horses. Here she is riding Star at her uncle Rick's farm.
I'm not kidding when I say "loves" horses:
Savannah is also our avid outdoors person. She'll stay out all day if you let her. Here she is with her first catch of the day at our Elliott family reunion.
You'll also notice in these pictures a strange device she is wearing. We discovered this year that she has scoliosis and will have to wear this brace until she stops growing. I wrote a lot about this trial in our life earlier this year on this blog.

Savannah is also the leader of our little artists. Here she is below with a butterfly she painted on silk at an art camp at Sojourn Community Church this summer.

She also wanted you to see this large silk banner that she helped her class paint.

Savannah's accident was a big highlight of her life in November! If you hadn't heard, she fell off a diving board at our school's rec center pool and was taken to the hospital for stitches. Here she is being assessed by the medics.
Here's the Gurney Girl being rolled away!
Here she is being loaded into the ambulance.
And, praise the Lord, here she is with the only effects of the fall: 3 stitches in the chin.
All has healed up nicely and matches the little scar on my chin where I hurt it jumping off the stairs backwards at First Baptist. We've decided to start our own club. Not sure what to call it though: the chin club or the clutz club!

A New Addition to the Family

This September we welcomed a new addition to our family: Suzie Q (not necessarily after the Hostess treat or the Creedence song, however both apply well!). Suzie Q is considered a "designer dog" (pathetic, I know) and is a combination of 3 AKC breeds: Shih Tzu, Brussels Griffon, and a Toy Poodle. She weighed a little less than 2 pounds when we got her and now she is up to 5 pounds. She won't get much bigger than that. She isn't a "yipper" and she doesn't shed which makes her a pleasant dog to have around.
Audrea drove up to Chicago to meet her mom who had brought Suzie down from the Wisconsin Rapids area. Then Audrea brought her back to Danville where we (Paul, Elayna, and William) were waiting for them. She brought Suzie in, tucked in a box that was wrapped up like a present. In this picture below, Elayna had opened the box to discover the puppy and William was pointing and saying, "dog, dog" over and over.
The happy little puppy once freed from clutches of Elayna bounded into William's arms.
It's kind of silly, but Suzie is just like a baby in that she won't go to sleep unless she is being held by someone. Well, at least that's what she tries to pull off. If you ignore her for long enough, she'll try and find a blanket somewhere to curl up in.
One of the funny/bad things she does is find Will's pacifier's on the floor and picks up and walks around the house sucking on them (not chewing!). Here in this picture below we had caught her in the act.
Suzie is basically potty-trained now. It's been several weeks since she had an accident, but getting to that point took an unbelievable amount of patience (or the display of a lack of patience) on my part. We started working with her on the sit-stay-come commands right away. Now, unfortunately, she is obeying better than William!

Reuniting on the Farm

At the end of May we were able to spend over a week at our family reunion with Audrea's mom and dad and her brother, Jared, and his wife, Stephannie. It was such a wonderful time and at such a beautiful farm. Audrea's aunt and uncle who own the horse farm where I had my accident hosted the reunion.

It was great for our horse-loving girls (especially Savannah) because while we were there, at the farm around the corner, a foal was born and all the children were able to go and see it.

We were also able to spend some quality time with Jared and Stephannie. They currently live in the Phoenix area where Jared works at nuclear power plant. It's hard to be so far apart from these two...
One of the funny experiences was getting to see Audrea fire a gun for the first time in her life. I didn't get a decent picture of her actually firing it, but here she is getting the basics from her sharpshooter dad on how to hold and fire a shotgun. (For those of you interested, it was a 12-gauge.)

Cousins

This was the year of reunions! It started off at the end of 2007 with getting together with all the Fuller cousins (Paul's brothers' children--from left: Rhys [Jonathan's], Elayna, Stephanie [Stephen's], Christopher [Stephen's], Mackenzie [Stephen's], Savannah, Sabrina, Will, and Raegan [Jonathan's]).

In May, we travelled southeast into Kentucky for an Elliott family reunion (this is Audrea's family on her mom's side). This was held on the same farm where I had the horse riding accident.

Then in June, we travelled up into Indiana to celebrate the graduations with many of the Walther cousins (these are some of Audrea's cousins on her dad's side).