An Icy Saturday

We had a wonderful day of ministering and celebrating Jesus and Christmas today!

We're enjoying our Christmas tree in the living room; it's a particularly lovely one this year!  And, I think the "Auto Awesome" feature of Google+ Photos is pretty cool...It automatically makes Christmas tree lights twinkle!  Nifty!

This morning when we woke up, everything outside was covered in a sheet of ice that seemed to be getting thicker by the minute!  However, the kids and were scheduled to be part of a Christmas music program at Evergreen Place, and assisted living community in Normal, and I wasn't about to drive on ice.  Jeremy had been planning to go to work, but chose to drive the rest of us to Normal instead.  I'm very grateful.  We had a great time making music for the folks at Evergreen Place!  Caeden started off the program playing Jingle Bells on his guitar, and Annah did a beautiful medley of O Come, O Come Emmanuel and O Come All Ye Faithful on her violin. One of my voice students, Allison, sang Welcome to Our World and Here With Us and I accompanied her on piano.  Her mom Joyce is the director of Evergreen place, who invited us to be part of the program along with her family.  Joyce sang a beautiful performance of Ave Maria.  Sylvia played a violin medley of Angels We Have Heard On High and Hark! The Harald Angels Sing and Annah added some nice harmony to parts of it. I sang and played Christmas Is and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and at the end all of the families joined together to sing We Wish You a Merry Christmas.   Then we were able to spend a little time visiting with some of the sweet residents.  We were so blessed to meet them, and Jeremy and I spent quite some time talking with a couple in their 90's who will celebrate their 68th anniversary tomorrow.  I'm sure we were ministered to more than they, and I'm so glad we could go!

On our way home, we had lunch at Moe's--YUM!!!  Then this afternoon, the kids played Wii and watched Christmas movies while I baked more Christmas cookies and Jeremy worked on pumping water out of the basement.  It rained all day long, and I heard we had a 1-3 inches of rain.  There was beautiful, scary thick ice on everything when we went back into town to set up for Open House at church.  In fact, Jeremy and I argued loudly in the car about whether or not we should be going at all. Neither of us won the argument.

At setup, Kim had me get the girls going on making adorable chocolate dipped marshmallows with candy canes for people to drop in hot chocolate at the open house tomorrow.  So cute!!

We left church before setup was completely finished, since Jeremy had left the pump running in the basement and we needed to get home to attend to it before it ran dry and burned up.  He has spent quite a bit of time not sleeping but attending to that pump lately.  Such a never-ending frustration.