My Favorite day of Laundry

Here at the Mateer household, we do mounds of laundry every week. It seems that every single day, we do at least one load of laundry. I have learned to be thankful for our five beautiful children who fill all that laundry and dirty it up. (Laundry used to be one of my least favorite tasks.)

Well, I took a picture of the best load of laundry ever found in our laundry basket. Here it is:

4H Booth - so proud of these kiddos

Back in September, a friend down here in Florida and I started a small 4H group. We had never done anything like this before, but it was fun to try something new and learn some new things together. There were 3 or 4 main families who decided to join our little group (two other families besides our own). The Central Florida Fair begins this weekend and a few weeks ago, the other leader and I decided to go to a meeting to learn what our little 4H group could do. We decided to enter a booth into the fair.

So yesterday, after recovering from a terrible bout with the flu, our kiddos came and helped Bonnie and I set up the booth. They did a great job. Everyone has had projects they were to work on at home for weeks and then yesterday we all brought what people had been working on, put it together and made our booth. Here is the end result:

Jonathan, Josh, Landon, & Sarah

 The finished product

The theme of the fair was "Indulge!", but we had to do the booth with the 4H themes of healthy living in mind, so we did a booth called "Indulge the 4H way" in which we featured different sports stations where they had to see how many they could do in a minute. (For example - how many baskets can you shoot in one minute, how many times can you bounce a tennis ball on a racquet, etc.) The kids did a great job.

Our Old Kentucky Home

A few weeks ago Dave decided to give me a trip to Kentucky to visit our old friends and to see our ole' KY home. It was a wonderful weekend. When Dave first suggested that I fly up to KY, I said, "What do you mean - Anna and I or Anna and Sammy and I?" He said, "No, just you by yourself." It was such a sweet gift of love from his heart to mine and it was wonderful to see all our dear friends from back home. Thanks to everyone who made it such a special weekend - esp. to my sweet hubby who stayed at home with the children.

 my dear friend Angel

 Stacia and I at the super bowl paper - too bad about them Steelers

dearest Tracy

the sweet Ramseks who gave sweet gifts to EACH of our children

the dear and beautiful Wilt ladies

And of course, I can't forget the Gaskills, the Acevedos, the Zordels, Kenton Baptist Church and the Oertels. (Sorry, I didn't get pictures of all of you!) What a precious time it was. Thank you Lord for such wonderful blessings (and the biggest blessing of all - coming home to my hubby and my children!!!)

My favorite Samuel in the whole world

Samuel and I building with Lincoln Logs one day while Dave was out with the older kids biking and Anna was taking a nap. My Sammy is such a sweet little guy. He is so funny and loves to read books and cuddle. He keeps telling everyone he is 3 years old, but he is growing very fast and soon he will be 4. I love it.

(Thanks to Aunt Diane for the idea for this post!) :)