Going's On's

Well my good intentions of starting to post again haven't lasted long now that we're home.  Everyday things aren't quite as exciting as traveling to Israel:)  But we have done quite a few fun things this month.

Our High School and Jr. High teams played against some of the teachers and adults in town including Mom and Dad.  It was a fun game but they had a little size on us.
First Half - https://vimeo.com/38132335
Second Half - https://vimeo.com/38879503

 On a normal year we can drive our truck across the ice and down to Iliamna but this year we've almost broken the snow fall record in Anchorage and there is too much snow to get past fish camp.  Since we couldn't drive our truck down, we drove snow machines and 4 wheelers across the lake.  Mr. Clark came up from Iliamna to fish camp and picked us and a couple more people from town up with their van and drove us all down to watch Dennis Agajanian.

He is an amazing guitar player who has toured with Johnny Cash and now works with Samaritan's Purse touring around villages. 

 We had family fun night at the community building to raise money for the carnival .

It was a fun night filled with speed scrabble, but no good pictures.

(The boys weren't into scrabble so much.)

 Last week, Dad and the four oldest kids spent most of the week in Anchorage watching state basketball and helping some friends get a cabin ready to live in.  

We were a little crowded in the plane.

Mt. Redoubt steaming.

 Newhalen and Aniak boys both made it again and Newhalen won this time!  Yay, one championship for each of them.  I think they could have easily got first and second again but being as how they don't seed the 1A teams they ended up playing each other first.  That ended up being the best game of the tournament and they easily won the rest of their games but with a loss the first night the best Aniak could do was 4th.

Newhalen and Ft. Yukon captains.

Aniak warming up.
All the yellow warmups are their seniors.  They're going to lose half their team next year!

4th place game.
Aniak rather ran away with this game.  All the non-starters got to play.  Go Andy! Go John! :)

The Newhalen and Aniak girls also made it to state and also played each other first and the Newhalen girls also won the championship!!  It was a big week for Newhalen.  It was a little scary to watch the Newhalen girls.  They had a tendency to get behind in the first quarter then come back and win at the end.  It made for exciting games though:) 

Newhalen vs. Aniak

The Martins are in the process of moving to Wasilla and living in Ms. Regina's cabin.  Ms. Regina only lives there for a couple weeks in the summer so there was a lot of snow to be shoveled and monitor wasn't working so in between games we were up there working getting it ready for them to move. 

There was LOTS of snow.  We're talking record breaking snowfall here and a super long drive way.

Dad working on the monitor.

Plus all that, we've had just normal everyday things doing on.

Hazel and Sarah helping Deborah cook.

Caleb and Hazel doing school.

Dog pile on Dad.

Going fishing in the living room.

We've also had a few birthdays but I'll save those for later. 

Spaghetti & Marshmallow Towers

The school had one more Family Fun night that was open to the community before the teachers left for the summer. We took the family up and joined them. We had to split up into three different teams. Paul and the boys made one team, the girls joined up with Lavonne and Tia, and Josh and I joined our friend Darcelle and her girls. The first activity was to see how many worksheets each group could complete in a given amount of time. They had them color-coded for different age groups.

Paul had his hands full helping the little boys figure out what they were supposed to do.

The girls got second place even though they didn't have anyone young enough to do the pink sheets.
The other activity was a contest to see which team could build the tallest tower out of spaghetti sticks and little marshmallows. It's harder than it looks, it would've been easier if they'd given us big marshmallows. (Do I sound like I'm complaining?)

It was a good teamwork exercise, it took several hands to hold up the spaghetti and marshmallows so they wouldn't slip around until they got balanced.
Below Josh A. and I are working on ours. Everyone was having so much fun they extended the time by ten minutes. Big mistake, we would have done okay if it had ended on time, but our tower collapsed before they came to measure it :(

The girls also came in second place in the tower building contest. In fact, they have come in second place in every Family Fun night activity we have participated in.
Paul and the boys came in first (Paul got to put his Mechanical Engineering degree to good use). Mr. Metzger measured their tower just in the nick of time as it was slowly collapsing.

A very pregnant Mrs. Metzger is calling out the winners. Everyone got to pick out a prize.

Fooseball

Our Basement has many uses. Our library is shelved along one wall, we have a guest apartment where Lavonne and Josh lived for a year. We also have tables set up and I instruct students who are studying to take the GED tests for and hour or two most days. It's very flexible. We also have a thrift store down there which has taken on many forms over the years. At times we've had all the clothes displayed on hangars on the walls, now all of the sizes are separated into totes and whenever someone comes to shop we just empty the tote and fill it back up as we look through the clothes. There is also a fooseball table in the basement and in those rare moments when all the thrift store clothes are sorted and stored in their proper totes we can actually play fooseball. The kids convinced Paul to play with them.

Sarah is trying to play along.

They even got me to play a game or two.

I don't play much so normally I'm quite a handicap. Anna and I had to resort to drastic tactics. I had Anna use her toes to start the ball in play. It grossed the guys out so bad it was good for a point. The rest of the points we scored were because my balls rolled so much slower than everyone else's, it caused their timing to be way off. I think Anna and I actually won.
The last match was the four youngest boys (I can't really say little boys any more) against Paul and I.

They each had their own row of players to manage.

Kids sure are fun!

Spoons

There is nothing that the kids love better than to have Mom & Dad take the time to play with them. We sat down and played a game of spoons together and it was great fun.

The little kids didn't last too long because it got a little wild.

Deborah didn't have any letters so Paul took off his sweatshirt for better mobility and sat next to her to make sure she didn't end the game without any letters.

Rubber Band Bungee

The school had a family fun night so we went and joined in. They asked us to bring an action figure and they supplied us with ten rubber bands. We measured how far the action figure would fall each time we added another rubber band. We graphed the results of our ten rubber bands and then they told us to figure out how many rubber bands we would need for the action figure to drop 196 inches. The object was to get our action figure as close to the floor as possible without touching the floor. Our family with Lavonne and Josh, split up into three teams.

Paul and Anna and a couple of little boys gathered the data with their ten rubber bands and Jay Jay the jet plane.

Abigail, Deborah, Lavonne and Josh worked together.

Quentin, Joshua and I carefully measured the jumps taken by our blue teddy bear.

Sarah helped Regina take photos of the event (by posing several times).

After we collected our data we analyzed it by graphing it and doing the math to figure out how many rubber bands we needed.

Quentin is adding the rubber bands we calculated we needed. (We were too conservative and came up too far away from the ground.)

One at a time Cam made the action figures walk the plank while we watched from below. Abigail, Deborah, Lavonne and Josh did the best from our crew as they came in second place.

Family Photo Scavenger Hunt

Twice a year we go to Tanalian Bible Camp at Port Alsworth for Family Camp. It is always a great time of fellowship with believers from villages all over the area. Just before the fall camp, Arctic Barnabas hosts a Ministry Family Retreat where they bring families together who are working in cultures different than their own for the purpose of leading people to Christ. Our kids look forward to having fun with friends they've met over the years and making new friends. This year they organized a family photo scavenger hunt. They gave us a list of things to take pictures of and if we had the entire family in the picture we got 200 bonus points. We had a blast running around taking pictures of ourselves.

In the back of a pickup with a sign saying Nondalton or Bust...

In a canoe, 400 bonus points if no one gets wet... (We should have gotten "large family" bonus points for this one.)

Heads together in a circle...

Family Photo

Picture with an "A" in it...

With a pig...

Looking up at the sky...

An aircraft made out of family members... (having a large family really helped on this one)

Family name written with rocks...

Turning cartwheels... (Anna can actually do one.)

Posing as trees...

An old vehicle...

Mom and Dad kissing...

Wearing clothes inside out...

Clothes with no one in them...

Directive sign...

A contradiction... (It took us a while to think of what to do for this one.)

Something more than 200 years old... (We found the oldest looking tree around.)

Shoes lined up on the dock...

Another photo with an "A" in it...

Posing as Mannequins...

(I told Caleb that mannequins look like people only they're not alive. I don't think I gave him a good picture of how to look like one...)

Reflection...

Eyes close up...

Pocket contents...

(We were running out of time here... They gave us an hour time limit and there were a lot of other activities going on. So, when we could get the whole family together for an hour we went and took as many pictures as we could.)

Levi, our photographer.

Did you notice anyone missing in any of the pictures?

We didn't either until we met up with one of our kids who was looking for us. He had turned left when we went right and was playing on the swing set when he realized that none of us were there with him and we were supposed to be together taking pictures...