Mom's 70th guests

So nice that some of Mom's cousins could come to the family's celebration of Mom's birthday at Chris & Maurice's. We missed the others!

Adrie & Gerrit

Jack, Wim (Bill), Ralph

Mom's 70th Birthday!

“Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations….
Oh, satisfy (her) early with Your mercy, that (she) may rejoice and be glad all (her) days!
Make (her) glad according to the days in which You have afflicted (her)… let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon (her) and establish the work of her hands..”

Psalm 90:1, 14, 15

Our dear Mom, wife, Oma, friend has reached another milestone in her life: her 70th birthday!

To celebrate this milestone we had a number of parties throughout this month, and relatives from Edmonton! over

– and a bunch of church ladies (with kids in tow) came to make all the windows and kitchen squeaky clean the Monday before – what great birthday present!

Dad, Maria & I - and Daniel - tried to keep the kids occupied and out of the ladies’ way

– often unsuccessfully! haha!

- actually Matthew was quite happy most of the time - especially when Daniel was pulling him around in the wagon! Thanks Daniel!
Too bad I didn’t get more photos. Thanks Jo for coming & organizing this! Thanks also to Ann, Liz, Sharon, Andrea, Rachel for your help! And Tinie for trying! (her van broke down en route! :( ) and Heidi for the final cleaning after the cleaning crew :).

* * *
On Sat, Ralph & Sharon’s kids helped us tame the weeds and rediscover the flowers! So cute the way Bethany and Daniel worked together so diligently collecting the stuff and delilvering it to the compost pile.

* * *

On Mom's birthday, June 9, some senior lady friends (& not-so-senior) came over to help us make her special day more special.

Thanks Dad & Maria for your help! Maria was our pretty waitress and Dad wasted not the opportunity afforded being the only male.

Thanks ladies for coming – Mom quite enjoyed it (& so did we) - really nice to have Mrs VM there too -especially for the singing :) -she's still conducting!
Regrettably absent were: Ann, Gerda, Tinie, and the HCH ladies, and Kienie (came to the next one).

Looking young at 70!

Maria's Graduation

Last Friday evening, we celebrated Maria's Grade 8 graduation at our homeschool co-op's year-end program.  Thanks for all your hard work, Maria! :)  We praise God for bringing you to this point!

 

Graduates - June 3

Maria graduated from grade 8.

Mark & Elizabeth graduated from grade 12.

Congratulations, all 3 of you!

More from Easter Weekend

More from Easter with the P's

Some more photos taken by Dad & Mom:

O.Evert, Chris, Krista, T.Marian, Tony, Theresa

like mother, like daughter

Rachel whipped up an activity table-cloth for the kid's table - fun!

Looks like you all had a good time. I missed you all!

Easter Continues

Easter has come and gone but its glorious message remains!

God-in-the-flesh suffered & died a cursed death

to pay a debt we could not pay

and conquering death, He rose again

so that those who are united to Christ by faith

could die to sin and rise with Him

to new life now and forever!

What a plan! What amazing grace and wonderous love! Oh that all our loved ones would come to Him in humble repentance and faith to be united to Christ, made new and enjoy Him forever - for "worthy is the Lamb that was slain"!

There's some great Easter, Exodus, Gospel messages by Rev. Harry Zekveld from Luke 22 etc here.

A new book out for young people wondering what its all about: Is it really true? What does it matter? is called Jesus, Dead or Alive by Sean & Josh MacDowell. A great read!

Family dinner

Easter weekend we had our Brink/Posthumus Family dinner. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and it was so nice to see everyone there! (So sad that Marguerite couldn't make it for that either, and of course we missed Heidi & Mark too.) I'm hoping this post will inpsire others to post some of their nice pictures.

Storm!

We've had some very strange weather around here over the last few weeks. 2 Sundays ago, while the kittens were being born, we had a crazy drop in temperature with hail and blizzard-like snow, then some nice warm weather (including Saturday at our family dinner - which I hope to post on soon), hot weather up to at least 24 deg. yesterday and then today another drop with really strong winds. It was almost tornado-like the way it came whipping through our yard (probably remnants of the tornadoes down south).

The kids had a very hard time concentrating on school because of all the wind noises and seeing all the things the wind was doing around us, so we decided to stop and ended up reading The Hobbit for a while. We had the kittens in the house with us too because it was getting way too crazy out there. Tiger had taken one of the kittens from the cat house and put it in the blue box on our back porch, so I went and got the rest of them for her. A short time later, the cat house went whipping around the house and almost into the field. Then even the blue boxes were being threatened, so I took the whole box in the house with the kittens. Of course that helped distract the kids for a while.

We've finally come up with names for the rest of the kittens. (We are planning to try to sell them, so of course these are only temporary names, but you can't have kittens around without knowing what to call them).

Here is Joanna with Lewis (as in C.S. Lewis).

And Josiah with Tolkien (yes, as in J.R.R. Tolkien).

Sarah, with Bucephalus (as in Alexander the Great's great black stallion),

And Esther with Smudges (as in black with smudges).

And here is watchful Mamma Tiger.

Tired kittens, cozied up in the doll car seat. (11 days old)

At one point, the girls were going to go outside, going out through the back door by the playroom. Joanna realized she had forgotten her shoes and ran back to the mud room with Sarah to get them. Esther waited in the open doorway for them. As she stood there, the big pine just a little bit outside that door was torn out by the roots and fell across the yard. We praise God for protecting our girls from that tree! They could've been right in its path if they had gone out any earlier.

A little later, John was outside looking around and suddenly one side of the barn slowly tore off and crashed into the field right by the barn. Very soon after, half the roof collapsed in as well. Needless to say, our barn looks quite airy now, sporting a very open-concept design.

After the wind slowed down enough for us to go out without getting blown away, we inspected the damage together. Well, at least this makes a very pretty spot to take a picture.