Monopoly

The menfolk in my house had board game night last night.

Here's what I learned by watching them:

• The real estate bubble has not made its way to Justice League Monopoly.
  


• Tim Barnette is a Monopoly slumlord. He was charging $2,000 to land on one property!
  


• As in real life with real money, John has an insatiable desire to give away his Monopoly money to people he loves.
  


• It is possible for one single game of Monopoly to take 4 hours and 40 minutes.
  


• As much as he wants to win, a loving daddy will give out personal loans to his sons when they begin crying about not wanting to go bankrupt. :)

Wednesday Night Lights

Forget Friday Night Lights: the place to be is at church on Wednesday nights! Here are a few shots I snapped last night at Clough... (ab0ve) John's younger elementary class.

Christopher and a few of his friends rocked-out to some worship music Wednesday night. Check out that awesome air guitar and air drums!

Fusion Student Ministries Staff, below.

Sanctity of Human Life

Yesterday was a very special day in the Southern Baptist Convention: Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. Always a sobering day, Sanctity of Human Life Day reminds us that each life is valuable in the eyes of God, and should be in ours, as well. Lifeway's Sunday School curriculums usually surround that theme, and Tim always makes a big deal about it from the pulpit.

One of CPBC's favorite ministries is supporting A Caring Place, which is a crisis pregnancy center here in Eastern Cincinnati. We praised the Lord yesterday with the statistics that 48 women came to the center abortion-minded in 2011, but only 4 of those women had abortions performed in the end! We would obviously love to have zero of the women follow through with those abortions; however, kudos to the great work that the volunteers and staff do over at A Caring Place, for talking so many women into carrying their babies full-term! Special honor goes to my friends Wanda Field and Jennifer Schott, who regularly work there.
As a support for ACP, our church gives out baby bottles every January that people take home for a month, collect money in, and then return. The money collected is used to support A Caring Place - including its ultrasound machine to show women the life that is within them; diapers, clothes, and baby goods to help those moms support their babies; classes to instruct moms on how to take care of those babies, etc.

I was thrown back when both John and Anna wanted to take a baby bottle home. (Infact, I was honestly a little embarassed that people would think we were letting our kids waste the bottles that others could be using to collect money.) But God showed me that I should let Him work. Both kids ran home from church, went straight to their piggy banks, got out their own money (pictured above), and stuffed their bottles with as much cash and change as they could get in them. Without prompting. I could have cried. Neither child fully understands the horror of abortion, but they understand that they are helping babies whom Jesus loves, and whom He does not want to die. John even wrote a note and put in his bottle, thinking that the money would go straight to a needy mom, asking the mom who gets his bottle to come to church with us.

It's a good day to be a mom...

Thanks

Special thanks to Daryl and Kay Gilliland for inviting some of their deacon families over to start off the year together over lunch after church. (If you're on Daryl's deacon list and didn't get invited yet, don't worry...they're inviting all of their families over during comming weeks! Good idea, huh?)

The picture below is neither here nor there. I just love a good pie bird! Kay's made a yummy apple one.

Beyblades. If you have an elementary-aged boy, you need no explanation. If you don't have an elementary-aged boy, they're competitive spinning tops. All the rage.

Fourteen years ago, I was on my honeymoon in Key West, Florida. It was a glorious week, and someday Tim and I hope to travel there again to re-live that vacation. The morning after our wedding was the first time either of us had ever flown...can you believe that?! And when we stepped off that plane in January and felt the warm, tropical sunshine, we really believed we were in Heaven!

But as wonderful as that time was during my first days as a bride, though, there were a few things I had yet to learn about marriage...

• I didn't know that the moments when I would love Tim the most would NOT be when he was standing infront of the church in his tuxedo, or when he proposed to me. It would be when he stayed-up all night with a sick one year old while I slept; when he rubbed my swollen feet for an hour when I was 9 months pregnant, or when he would get up half an hour earlier than the rest of us every single morning to pray for our family.

• I didn't know that the funnest times in my life would not be when I was young and stayed out late with my friends. It would be Friday nights, cuddled up on our couch, in our humble little apartment or house, watching a movie together that we rented form the library.

• I didn't know that I was about to leave that honeymoon and come home to feed Tim some of the worst cooking that has ever touched human tastebuds! Or that he would smile and suffer through many really bad dinners until I learned to be - if I may say so myself - a pretty good cook.

• I didn't know that Tim would be such an amazing father.

• I didn't know how gruelingly hard it would be to be a preacher's wife. Or joyful. Or rewarding. Or worth it.

• I didn't know that you would know someone so well that you could finish each other's sentences, or know each other's thoughts without them ever being uttered.

• I didn't know how easy it would be to joyfully follow someone anywhere in the whole world, because you have such trust and faith in them after watching them prove themselves year after year. And to know that even if you picked up and moved to the other end of the Earth, you would still feel just as at home because of who was with you.

• I didn't know that after fourteen years, I still would never tire of having my husband with me as long as he could be there.

• I didn't know that the 10,000th kiss would be even better than the first one.

14th Wedding Anniversary

Happy Anniversary to us! We had a great one. God gave us another out-of-the norm warm day (52 degrees), full of sunshine. Mike and Kathy Geers watched the kids while we headed for The Precinct, one of Jeff Ruby's and Chris Collinsworth's steakhouses in Cincinnati.

Before we went, though, Tim gave me these beautiful flowers, and he also had another gift: one of his best gifts ever... Anyone who follows my blog read that my #1 New Year's resolution was to get all my VHS home videos transfered over to DVD. Well, my honey did exactly that, as a surprise. And he didn't stop there. He transfered those videos over to an external hard drive, and bought me a fire safe to keep my hard drive and my DVD's in so that - theoretically - nothing bad can happen to them. You would have to know what an absolute family home video zealot I am to know what a special gift that was to me. THANK YOU, TIM!!!

The Precinct is named such because it used to be an old police station in the early days of Cincinnati. This is a wall mural made from an actual picture of some of those officers. Cool.

Special thanks to The Precinct for treating us to dessert...on the house...a piece of decadent chocolate cream cake from The Bonbonnerie, Cincinnati's most famous bakery. And my favorite bakery. Yummo.

I will ditto the lyrics of Edwin McCain, who wrote...

I could not ask for more than this time together

I could not ask for more than this time with you

And every prayer has been answered

And every dream I’ve had has come true

Marriage rocks. Anniversaries rock. And being Mrs. Timothy Barnette ROCKS.

Happy Anniversary!

Goodnight, little friends

Our family loves living in the woods. Although we sometimes miss our mountains from West Virginia, we almost get the same experience by living on the twelve wooded acres that surround our church and parsonage. We especially enjoy watching the wildlife who lives with us. Last night, this was the last thing I saw when I looked out my bedroom window before bed. These guys were beautiful, but I'm still trying to get a picture of the elusive 10-point buck who also comes to our yard. He's huge, and very, very old.

Let me just add that if Jeff Mahaffey lived in this house, he would have grabbed his rifle instead of his camera!

Crazy Warm

Cincinnati, Ohio. January. 60 degrees....

Seriously????

Tim's day off. Withrow Nature Preserve in Cincinnati.

Desperate to Sled???

This has been an oddly un-snowy winter for Cincinnati. So when we got our first "dusting" of snow a few days ago, John and Christopher couldn't help themselves but to hit the hill with their sleds. Too funny not to blog my boys sliding down the - basically - wet grass!

Happy New Year!

2012 is upon us, and I have a feeling that it's going to be the best year yet. God has big plans for me this year... I just know it! I'm so excited to see what He has planned for me and my family over the next twelve months...

So in tradition of New Year's Day, I have compiled a list of 2012 resolutions (in no particular order). Here goes!

• Transfer all my old VHS home videos over to DVD.




• Fit comfortably into my favorite new Levi's 512's.




• Catch-up on all my scrapbooks.




• Finish the stack of books which I have begun but not finished.




• Begin learning to play the violin, which I have been aspiring to do for years.




• Re-finish my bedroom furniture.




• Learn to talk inteligably about Star Wars with my sons. And sound somewhat interested about it.




• Learn to make the perfect souffle. Chocolate or cheese. I haven't decided.




• Strive to be a more patient mother to my children, a more loving wife to my husband.




• Finish the napping blanket that I have been crochetting for my husband for two years. It's going to be extra long so that it covers his 6'3" frame, and his little feet don't have to stick out and be cold like they do in blankets now.




• Get to know Jesus better.

May 2012 be a blessed year for you, too!