End of the week...daddy gets home

Matt got home on Thursday instead of Friday. That was a huge blessing because when he's gone all week, Thursday is when I tend to start yelling at the kids. You know how it goes: lets say Sammy sammy sticks a baby carrot up his nose at dinner and says "Hey Twaire (Claire) look at me!" On a good day, I'd take the carrot and say "Sammy that is e-nough. Now eat your dinner." But on THOSE Thursdays I take the carrot, start to tear up a little and say "Are you kidding me with this? What is wrong with your HEAD?" or something else calm and meaningful like that.

So, we were all happy to see him walk in the door. The kids have a tradition of making a "daddy's home chair" by piling pillows and blankets onto the couch to make it "extra comfortable" and putting a card on top of it all. It helps them burn energy in those last minutes while Matt is getting a taxi home from the airport.

Friday morning, I got a HUGE break because Sam's teacher said that Claire could come to school with him for costume day. Thanks to Aunt Laura ,who helps me be a responsible adult by doing things like buying my kids costumes, Claire is Alice in Wonderland and Sammy is a policeman. Cuties.

That night, Ms Cowen, (Claire's old teacher and Cecilia/Dixie's mom) watched the kids while we went to Breakthrough Urban Ministrie's annual benefit. The lady in red is my mother-in-law, Debbie, and her good friends "the Baxters". Matt's dad couldn't make it, as he is a high school football coach and they had their first playoff game of the season that night.

Here's us. Mental note: don't let someone take a picture of your husband straight on, while you, on the other hand, are turned to the side giving yourself a fat-face double chin. Don't.

The benefit was great. Arloa Sutter, who started Breakthrough, spoke for a while about the challenges they are facing...

...and then Bill Hybles, senior pastor from Willow Creek, gave a short talk as well. We used to go to Willow, so it was good to hear him speak again.

Babby Mason led the worship and she's like one of those great gospel singer ladies who has an amazing voice. She makes you want to give your money to Jesus, that's for sure.

And the Breakthrough kids choir performed. They were pretty cute.

Bill Curry, who is the chief operating officer at Breakthrough, and happens to be in our small group at church, also spoke (actually he was in a video they had made) and he made a lot of sense too. He talked about how you need to have more of a network to come around kids rather than one-on-one mentoring relationships with them, because then when people move or have to quit mentoring for whatever reason, the kid is still left with a network of people around him. That's how they do things at Breakthrough anyway, and I thought it made a lot of sense. 

So, if you have a few extra dollars and you need a worth cause to donate to, don't forget Breakthrough. They do good things with money there.