Thursday, August 26, 2010

IT'S READY!!

Check it out!!!  www.aarsethfamily.com

We will no longer be posting on this website so please make the switch over! We would really love to have your support on our journey to Ethiopia!

PLEASE PRAY!!!!

Someone put an offer on our house today!!!!!! Please pray for everything to work out smoothly! I am so excited and a bit impatient:)  YAY!!!

Also, I think our new blog/website should be ready to reveal tonight! Sorry that we are having to switch you over to something new but apparently Blogger doesnt work too well in Ethiopia.  We are pretty excited about this new site though because it caters to everything we need it to do!  So yeah....tonight hopefully!!  And prayer letters are coming! I am still waiting on SIM to send the brochures....hopefully soon.  You'll be able to download both the brochure and prayer letter through our new site if you are still working on being patient like me:)

Friday, August 13, 2010

at the lake!

We decided to take an impromptu trip down to Austin to visit our friends who just moved there by the lake. Just the kids and I went for a couple of nights since Paul had to work but we had a great time! Jackson and Olivia really enjoyed the boat:)

















Monday, August 9, 2010

Cowboy Up!

While you are patiently waiting for our new ministry website and blog I thought I would give you a glimpse into our lives here in Texas. Last week we went to the rodeo with the youth ministry and Jackson has been asking to go back every. single. day. since. Oh and I have misplaced my favorite camera ( don't worry, grandma and Josies, we will find it!) so you will have to forgive me for the sometimes blurry and red eye that my backup camera produces.


this is Olivia's new pose for everything.


checkin out our boots






We signed Jackson up for the drawing for mutton racing but his name didn't get picked so he got to ride the mechanical bull. Oh mutton racing is where a small child puts a huge helmet on and sits on top of a sheep holding on for dear life as the sheep runs around the arena....they usually only hold on for a few seconds before landing in the dirt. And it was his idea to sign up....I just prayed he wouldn't get picked and God listened.

It wasn't ever going fast enough for him to fall off so at the end of the ride he threw himself off:)



oh and some actual rodeo things happened too:)

Thursday, August 5, 2010

We are Home!!

We are home but I am BUSY working on our new website, prayer letters, prayer cards, and everything else needed to start raising support!!! We are already in the "under one year time frame" so I better get to work! I know that the Lord will bring in what we need and I always pray like everything relies on Him but I work like it all relies on me! So stay tuned.......the new website should be up and running in the next 2 weeks and a prayer letter will be hitting a mailbox near you! If you know that I probably don't have your address and would like our letter you can send me an email at deedee.aarseth@sim.org I can send it to you through email as well:) I will also try and update here with a few kiddo pictures before the new site gets up!

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Hello from Charlotte!

We are currently having missionary training in Charlotte, NC and having a fabulous time reconnecting with all of our friends here. It has been an amazing week and it is only half way over! We are so excited to be able to share all the things we have learned this week with you very soon! Be on the look out because we will soon be changing this blog over to our ministry blog to Ethiopia! (Anyone have any creative titles?) I can not believe this time next year we will be on our way!

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Family Day!!!

Ok so I know I said that I would post yesterday but the connection at Great Wolf Lodge was oh. so. slow. We were very blessed to be given this great weekend trip to Great Wolf to spend our very first family day and we really had a blast! (Most people call it Gotcha Day, as in the day we "got you" and while we like that, we really wanted to focus on how God has made our family special. We decided to celebrate on the 17th, the day we came home to Jackson rather than the 13th which was her 'Gotcha Day.' Got all that? Good.) So get ready for a ton of pictures:)




Our room was a Wolf Den suite which meant it had this cute little area for this kids to sleep on bunk beds and there own TV:)





Great Wolf Lodge has an enormous indoor water park which was so fun. These are just some of the pools...I was too busy dodging water spray guns to get pictures of all the slides and things......that and the humidity inside are probably why my photos are all a bit fuzzy now:(


no fear





Jackson went on some much bigger slides but I could not take any pictures because 1 parent had to escort him to the top to make sure he didn't cut in line and the other parent had to rescue him at the bottom all while holding on to Livi and trying to avoid the massive amount of water that fell from the giant bucket every five minutes.

Great Wolf also has this game called MagiQuest where you get special wands and run all over the hotel on different quests and challenges. The bigger kids seemed to love this but we felt it would be too hard for our kids. But the staff just programmed their wands to light up everything they waved it at so we didn't actually have to play the game, we just ran around opening chests, lighting up pictures on the walls, and making animals talk. They absolutely loved it.

"Abra Cadabra I wish for this chest to be full of candy!"





We also explored the Cub Club which had lots of fun games and crafts.







The arcade

Livi was insistent on us trying the Dance game.....we were terrible at it but it was fun:)



I have to say that the one thing I really didn't like about Great Wolf was the food. It was pretty bad and VERY expensive. I mean I wouldn't mind paying that much if it were actually good but nope. So instead we went out on the town for a yummy Italian dinner.






Every night they have bed time stories in front of the big clock tower.

Meeting Violet the mascot. Livi was excited to meet her until we got close but she didn't cry so we are improving since Disney.....although I think Violet's purple crocs really helped.


We had a little cake in our room to celebrate our Family Day!





Our first Family Day!