Enjoy:

I get to sit through a lot of chapel speakers during my weeks at school. Oftentimes people come through with some pretty amazing things to say, stories to share, organizations to tell us about. Many times I will come home to em and tell her about this stuff and I am really excited to share it. SOoo, I wanted to share these things with you guys who may never get to know about them.

The first is one that you most likely have heard about: Operation Christmas Child. This ministry run by Samariatan's Purse and since 1993 61 million boxes have been packed and sent oversees to children in impoverished countries. I don't know how I missed this - perhaps we didn't do it at BBC - em said she always did it at Liberty - but it is amazing. Individuals pack these boxes with all sorts of items ranging from fun to helpful, our kids for exampled did a piece for our broadcasting class where they took a day and went to the dollar store and bought a bunch of stuff for boxes. Along with these boxes - tracks are passed out, local churches are partnered with, and kid's lives are changed.

The second one is an organization that I just heard about today - and I am guessing you have never heard of them. They are called Mercy Ships and they are amazing. This organization actually ownes 2 ships that are fully equipped with 3 operation stations, blood labs, ct scans and living quarters. They take these ships and dock them in the ports of impoverished nations and they go in to these towns and help with surgical needs. Things like tumours, cleft pallets, and other malformations, things that we easily take care of in the US go untreated in these countries. In addition to the surgeries the mercy ship crews will also go on land to help educate about and provide clean water for local villages. This is an ingenious idea and I thought I'd share! Hope it blesses you guys.

Sophia wanted to make cookies today. And so mom obliged. It is amazing to watch her get these ideas in her head and then refuse to let go of them. Right now as I type this, she is just finishing up one of her chores which is putting away the silverware. Some water dripped onto the chair that she uses to stand on and so she asked em for a rag. She just worked feverishly to wipe it down and just now proclaimed "I'm done". She is now back to work and just stated: "Everybody likes knives".

Does the acrostic: NKOTB mean anything to you in computer land? Well, to the laymen - this stands for New Kids on the Block...one of the greatest (if not the first american) boybands of all time. Well - these guys are back, new album and new tour. A couple of months ago - Emily instant messaged me and was out of breath over the instant message telling me that the New Kids were doing a concert on the Today show and that it was "Freaking awesome". She then committed to seeing their tour - until we found out the cost of tickets.

We forgot all about the concert until yesterday when our talk radio favorites Matt and Ramona held a trivia contest to win tickets. I was miffed b/c I wanted to call in and win them but missed the opportunity. Then, low and behold today right when Emily switched on the whole house radio - they asked for callers 10-12 to play the game again! I ran and found the phone and dialed Matt and Ramona's number. It rang and rang and then I handed off to Emily and they answered it. The long and short - Em was caller 12 and got to play the game - and won second place - TWO TICKETS TO THE SHOW!!!!

Here's the kicker - you can listen to Emily's straight up domination on the radio show here for a limited time.
CLICK HERE OR RIGHT CLICK AND SAVE AS

We have heard many people talk about going to a pumpkin patch in order to pick out a very special holiday gourd. Not so much for the Fair family who saw that pumpkins were marked down to a very reasonable 3.50 this week. So we went to our local retailer and worked our way through the mess that was left overs. After much scrutiny by our resident quality control expert - we escaped with what we deemed to be a steal. Below are the pictures.

With the good has come the bad. Piper slept very well last night - she got up at 12:45 to eat but then slept until 9am. This is way different from usual (if we can say 'usual' with her yet) as she mostly gets up from 7:30-8. She took some long naps, longer than normal and then turned up with a 102+ fever. Em took her to the doctor and they said all of her other vitals were fine but that we should keep an eye on her. As I write this, she is asleep on Em's chest. Poor thing. By the by - Piper also has successfully cracked her 2 bottom teeth. This too was a trying time. Pray for the popcorn.

We made this visit about the 3 year (next month) and 6th month (last month) for the girls. Everything went well - Sophia was great for the first time in several visits and didn't freak out, in fact she got a chance to strike some of her poses for the camera that she and daddy have so diligently been working on. Before we get to the photos (which will of course have Zazzle on them b/c they are copyrighted) I would like to give a spider bite to you: I asked Sophia this question: "What brings us here to the photo place Soph?" and she said, "the car dad...(laugh)"

Before we had kids, when we were still living in our first apartment in Oviedo, we started a Saturday morning tradition of doing either pancakes or waffles and bacon. Many frequenters of this blog can attest to this fact as they have participated in this tradition.

We have continued to do this most every Saturday morning using our favorite Krusteaz pancake mix from Sam's wholesale club and pretty much any lower sodium bacon we can find (our favorite is Hormel Black label, but for a while we were using Gwaltney...pretty much we go where the deals are so we have tried many different brands). Sophia is now old enough to help stir the batter (not unattended mind you - I left her once and...let's just say we had to restart the process) and enjoys participating very much. She is also in charge of the chocolate chips.

First of all - Emily redesigned the blog and I think it looks Great!
Second: our Church spent 5 weeks on a series known as (and you can see this from the picture) Visionary Love, Dream Sex. It was a fast and furious romp through the book of Song of Solomon (Songs). The sermons took us from Attraction, to Dating, to Marriage and then the first fight. Pastor Furtick covered in great detail the "wedding night" for one sermon and then he and his wife finished up the series talking about the first fight.

This is all a precursor to the title of this blog. Week 4 saw our church putting it's money where its mouth is by offering all married couples a night out on the church's tab. They got together with several local restaurants (look at the card below for the list) and set up a 30 dollar gift card for us at the dining place of our choosing. We had two weeks to use it and so we capitalized tonight with the aid of one of our friends Susan and her daughter Brewington. We headed out to P.F. Changs! Emily had never been there and I had only been there once - we started with Chang's Chinese Lettuce Wraps, and then moved to Mongolian Beef and Sweet and Sour Pork with a side of White and Brown rice. We had a great waiter and he surprised us by having a side of noodles prepared to complement the sweetness of the Beef and Pork dishes. This was an AMAZING night - thank you Elevation for our Date Night!

This weekend was a bit windy so daddy and Sophia got out the Spiderman kite and had some fun. The kite did not exactly fly ... but they both had a lot of fun.

So this picture came to us from our friend Samantha. She is the only one who sent us one. So sad. I'll go ahead and add this one from Gaffney SC for good measure:

It's good to be back. I'm sure that we lost some of our "faithful" - but have faith! The lack of blogging up until Em's recent post was simply a blip on our radar! We are now back in the saddle. We left the interwebs for two things - one was the trip to Detroit to celebrate Grandma's 90th - the other was my trip to Windy Gap with our school. This year, my fourth at the school, I went for the entire week rather than just a partial week. This was a wonderful time as I was able to hear two great speakers instead of one - our first speaker was Bruce Marcey - who is lead pastor of a church here in town called Warehouse 242 and Nathan Smith who is a youth evangelist. I missed my girls (all 3!) and am glad to be back.

Today we celebrate Em's birthday! We headed out to Salsa's which is a wonderful Mexican restaurant near our house. Afterwards we came home and partook of the Carvel Icecream Cake. Below are some pictures from tonight of the girls and as a special added bonus a video of the Birthday song...

Em and I have been using Google's free picture sorting system Picasa for about 3-4 years now. If you have never checked it out you should - especially for all of our fellow parents out there. Not only does Picasa sort all of your pictures and make them really navigable - now with Picasa 3 you have more features than ever. I've only been playing with this program for about an hour and have already been blown away. I want to list a couple of them out below:

1. The ability to create a collage like the one above. There are SO many ways to change these up as well...different styles of collage, backgrounds, shifting the photos, etc.
2. This ability to retouch images and remove blemishes! 
3. Creating "movies" with your images and adding music to them.
4. Uploading your videos directly to youtube.
5. Searching and labeling your pictures.
6. Directly sync your pictures to a private web album that you can share with friends and family.
7. Order prints from a variety of outlets like Snapfish or Walgreens directly through Picasa.

We got this e-mail from Veronica this morning:

You'll be excited to know that last night in discussing with out community group the new evening service our church has started, we discovered 3 of the 4 couples TiVo CBS Sunday Morning! Who knew there were 12 people in this country (including yourselves) under the age of 65 that liked that show! We are forever grateful to you for introducing us to it. Love & miss you both!

 Ironically enough - the e-mail arrived in my inbox at 9:52am and I was indeed partaking of the Charles Osgood led craziness that is the CBS Sunday Morning Show. The girls were both down with colds today so we had to skip the first installment of Gospel at our church (more on that in a second) but that meant we were able to watch the Sunday Morning show. This show never lets you down - whether a piece of history, art, or random bit of Americana - you are always enlightened. Today's standout piece was one on a sport known as "Chessboxing". There are youtube videos, including a piece from ESPN - but due to comments, I will leave the links out - check it out though.

As to the beginning of our new series "The Gospel" - head over to Pastor Furtick's blog to see what has happened in our church today. Absolutely amazing - PRAISE GOD!

School started back up today! What a bitter-sweet occasion this is seeing as we have had such a great summer together. Every summer I feel blessed that I am able to spend such significant chunks of time with my family. That being said, I am very excited about my year and my schedule. I wanted to capture it here so we could look back and see what I was teaching in a couple of years (hopefully this internet thing sticks).

    1. Broadcasting: Knights Knews is back for a third year. This class has been a pet project of mine for two years now and any teacher worth his/her salt will tell you that it takes three years for any class that you are writing/developing to take off. This has been true for Knights Knews - and I look forward to this year's crop (and will miss the previous year's production team - I know you are reading!)

    2. Acting Improv: Appearing for the second time - this class culminates in a free evening of improv for our student body. The first incarnation, called "No Sheep Allowed" drew an audience of 75 people on a Friday night for some improv goodness. I look forward to this section's potential.

    3. Studio Honors (ACT 1): I am team-teaching this one with my boss and will be directing the students in an original play (again by my boss) called So Help Me God. I am really excited about this new component of my work life. We are prepping this show for the CCS stage in the middle of October and for competition at NCTC in November. This class will do much more but this is the gist of it.

    4. Introduction to Film Studies: This class has been with me since 2006 and I am doing my best to change it little by little. It is a fun little jaunt through the history of film, roles in film-making, and the film-making process. I get paid to introduce the students to movies that they should see in order to make them more rounded students. E-mail me if you'd like the list.

    5. A.C.T. 2 (Authentic Christian Theatre): The middle school version of class number three up there. We are doing a ton in there. Two shows: Drop Dead, Juliet and Mill Girls for competition in March and a 15 minute cutting of Godspell for a trip to Atlanta in January. Mixed in there is the Shakespeare recitation festival and a couple of other things.

    6. Directing You Can't Take it With You: This show goes up in May and I am excited to be doing my first ever dinner theater. It should be a really fun process but I can't really think about it right now.

Believe it or not, this is actually the least amount of stuff that I have been assigned in 3 years at the school. I am really excited about this schedule and look forward to what God is going to do in and among my students and myself.

  

This happened:

Piper has officially graduated to solid food! After a ton of work on Em's part - Piper finally ate a whole container of Gerber Sweet Potatoes. I had a whole video of it - of her chomping down and grabbing Emily's hands and pulling them to her face. It was a sight to behold. So the cereal was a no-go, but the sweet potatoes are looking good. Piper is finally beginning to sleep better at night as well. We worked on this the same time that we were transitioning Sophia from the passy last week - so you can imagine it was a fun night in our house.
I don't know if any of you have a Trader Joe's grocery store around you. We ran across this place on recommendation of our friend Kelly and have loved it. Trader Joe's is a hard place to explain - everything there (or most everything) is their own brand and packaged stuff. They have lots of gourmet stuff, organic stuff, health stuff - but there is lots of unhealthy stuff there too. As is evidenced by the picture to the left. This item, the Mandarin Orange Chicken was something that was talked up every time we went to the store and so we naturally didn't buy it. Finally we caved...and man - is this stuff delicious.



Speaking of current food obsessions. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago we were taken out to a Japanese-French Fusion Restaurant here in town. When we went there - one of the appetizers that we got was edamame. If you have never had edamame - it is baby soy bean pods that are boiled. You just pop them out into your mouth and chew. Sophia has LOVED these from the word go. You can see her chowing down on them on the left here.