Be Still, My Soul

Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change, He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul: thy God doth undertake
To guide the future, as He has the past.
Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake;
All now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know
His voice Who ruled them while He dwelt below.

What a thought.

You can listen to the melody and read more verses here at CyberHymnal.org.

My smiley guy turned two yesterday.

Caleb’s blue chocolate ant cake. His favorite part was the licorice legs. :O)

After wondering if I’d ever have children, I am so very thankful for these three.

Stephen’s dad is a huge Tarheels fan. Imagine my delight when I found this little cheerleading dress at the thrift store for only $1.50! Even though you can’t see him, Anna is watching the Tarheels game with Grandpa in this picture.

To close out our science unit on water, we took Samuel to the pet store. This one only sells fish and other aquarium-related pets. We went after Stephen was done with work, so our whole family was able to go.

These giant fish were called pacu. There was a sign up that said that the oldest one was discovered in 1974. Samuel wasn’t sure he liked them at first, but later loosened up around them. They were huge.

He did like looking in the goldfish pond.

We discovered that the giant catfish had a cut on its lip.

They also had a couple of sand sharks there. They were pretty feisty. I wish I would’ve thought to take a picture of them, but I didn’t. We also saw some poisonous Lion Fish and some eels, a ton of frogs, some coral and sea sponges, and other interesting fish. Samuel also enjoyed asking the staff questions (like, “How do fish sleep?”).

We bought some guppies to bring home to our own tank. Stephen and I have talked about getting fish again, and figured that this was the time to do it. I’d like to go back and get a small frog too, but that can wait. Maybe we’ll go buy it when we reach our frog unit.

It was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to planning our next field trip.

This has been a long week trying to get everything switched over (in spare time – who has that?). It looks like everything is just about done though, and for that, I am very thankful!

I’m switching my sites over to a new webhost this weekend. There’s more room for the sites to grow there and the host is familiar with the shopping cart software I use. Hopefully things won’t be down for long, but if the sites disappear for a while, that’s why.

It’s the time of year for jewelry inventory again. That’s a rather tedious task, but this year I had a few helpers. A friend from church came over today, and a little later two of our teen girls came over as well. It was wonderful – three of us were counting beads while one of the girls played with my kids. It was a real blessing to me to not have to do it all myself. To do all of it alone after the kids are in bed would have taken me a couple of weeks. The counting was the hardest part – and that should be pretty much done by tonight.

Later I’ll go and put all the current reorder numbers and prices into the spreadsheet, making next year much easier. I did all this last year, but that document was on my drive that was destroyed a few months ago so it needed to be redone (now it’s on my hard drive, on a usb drive, AND on my Carbonite drive. It’s not getting lost again). It’s a bit of a hassle having to reinvent the wheel. On the other hand though, it was an amazing blessing having help today!