Slaughtering and butchering cattle

Last Saturday we slaughtered and quartered some cows they had here on campus. Anyhow, you can see some pictures below.

Here we are quartering the cow to put it in the cooler

Enjoying the snow while it lasted -- and hanging out

Hope you enjoy pictures from our time enjoying the snow this last weekend. Classes have been good this week. Jada might have something the matter with her eye, she has "eye buggers" galore.

On Friday we are going to get some allergy testing in St. Louis on our way to North Carolina for Christmas.

The local radio station, Spirit FM did a food drive for the Missionary Training Center so we have been blessed with literally tons of food.

On Saturday I helped butcher cows, what a gross experience. Anyhow, I will post pictures when I get some back. I did not take any with my camera...but others did. I have a request out for some of the pictures. All for now!

James and Jada Preparing for their first tubing run. :)

As you can see it doesn't take much snow here to impress :)

Emmanuel and Elena both enjoyed eating some snow off of the picnic table

Jada sitting in Uncle Grady's lap and taking his cards during a game of settlers

James and Jada on their own personal "ski lift" back up the hill in front of our house. Emmanuel was kind enough to run down the hill and carry the tube back up for me since my arms were occupied.
James and Jada enjoying the snow
Emmanuel and Elena posing for a picture with on of our neighbors

Updates to our other site

This is a picture of the twins at the Westbrook Summer campout in 2006

So, I took some time and posted a brief note about our last day of phonetics for the semester. You can check it out at Phonetics

I will also include a random picture that has nothing to do with this post. :)

What's going on in class?

Oh to be so warm again. This is James with one of our neighbors when we were playing in the leaves

All of the toys the kids have....and we had a large empty box for about a week. It was a HIT with the kids

We just wrapped up a section on Husband and Wife relationships. We went through a video series called love and Respect. It was a great class!

This part of the semester we have been studying phonetics as well. This has been kind of interspersed with our other classes. We start again tommorow. This is not an official definition of phonetics, but as I understand it. It is a tool for learning other languages and there is a phonetic alphabet where each symbol makes only one sound...unlike english for example where the same letter can make different sounds depending on what word it is used in, or where it is used in the word. There are many sounds and skills that are used in other languages that we DO NOT use in english. unaspirated consonants at the beginning and end of words and fund stuff like that. So, we are doing mouth and speech aparatus gymnastics to try to make sounds we don't make in english. So we regularly embarass ourselves trying to mimic the sound the teacher is making and explaining to us. I intend to post a video I took in class of us mimicing our teacher. Pretty funny stuff.

Thanksgiving in Wisconsin etc

I should always add an etc to the end of my post title since I generally jump subjects several times during one post.

I have recently added a news article about classes to our NTM website and updated the prayer request section of our NTM site as well. Click here and you can click on pray for prayer requests, and news to see the article Jenny wrote.

We really enjoyed our time in Wisconsin. We were able to see so many people it is almost unbelievable. We had a pizza get together and were able to see many of our friends from Wisconsin that night. Jenny's sister Misty was able to stay with us for the weekend which was GREAT to have time with her. Lee and Lisa allowed us to stay in their home while we were in Wisconsin. It is such a blessing to stay somewhere that you feel TOTALLY at home!

We were able to share thanksgiving with Chris and Rebecca. The kids had great times together playing and hanging out. I even got to chop some firewood with Chris for old times sake. :) We did not get much sleep, but it sure was awesome to be able to spend time with and catch up with so many people. Casey and Jenny came over and we played settlers until all hours of the night...and even made a late night pizza run.

Jenny and Misty got to spend some time together shopping. :)

We are in the final weeks of our semester and are excited about spending Christmas break with Jenny's parents in North Carolina.


Family Christmas Picture we took

We got a chance to hang out with Doug and Sonch and the family which was totally awesome!


Elena, Hannah and Elena