Gronseth Family Reunion 2008

Here's the whole Gronseth clan-minus Shane who is in SC. Dave and his family came from NE, Gail and her family came from Grand Rapids, Dan and his family came from AZ, Eva came all the way from down the street in Byron Center and we traveled an hour from Grand Ledge. Oh, and Mom came from AZ as well. We met Weds. night at the hotel, swam and chatted.
We went to Michigan Adventures the next day and had tons of fun riding rides and water rides. Even Grandma got on some rides after being dragged on by Jenny. A few got to ride the new roller coaster and Dave G., Shay and Amanda rode the rip cord. It was a fun day and everyone was tired out at the end of the day. We relaxed a little on Friday and did movies or mini golf and then did pictures at night.

Saturday we spent the morning and afternoon at Dumont Lake--Grandma took a ride on the tube with Shawn and Jake! A few skiers, lots of tube rides and a few knee board rides and we had another exhausted group! Dinner at Eva's finished our day. The kids had a great time getting to know each other and playing and the adults had fun catching up on each other's lives.

Hopefully, we'll get together sooner than 10 years!

Done with one adventure, off to another

I had an incredible weekend at SheSpeaks conference in NC. 560 Godly women who were learning to be better speakers, writers, women's ministry leaders and children of God. It was awesome and awe inspiring! More later...

Because now we are packing up the car to go to my family reunion in GR. All of my brothers and sisters and families will be there along with my mom! I'm excited to see everyone! We've got big plans and lots of talking planned!

More on that later, too!

54 Years of Selling Asparagus in their garage

Dave's grandparents were featured in the GR Press for selling asparagus out of their garage for 54 years. We've been there several times buying asparagus from them. I remember putting Kelly on their scale when she was about 5 months old to see how much she weighed--14 lbs! It's a pretty cool article.

http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/06/after_selling_aparagus_out_of.html#more

Check it out...not sure this will work from the blog but I'll try!

58 hours of NO power!

This is a picture of the tree that went down in the street during the first storm Friday night. We lost power around 3p.m. for some reason. I ran out to get some fast food for dinner since we couldn't cook and the storm hit while I was coming home. I turned down the street to find this tree down in the road. I could see our house but couldn't get to it. We went a different way home and had some dinner. Still no power at that time so Dave hooked up the generator and got the sump-pump running and the refrigerator--it was about 85 degrees and humid. The girls slept downstairs in the dark where it was cool and Dave and I tried to sleep while we heard the trucks trying to clear the tree off the road. Another storm hit during the night and knocked down the top part of the neighbor's tree. As we drove around town, we saw a ton of trees down blocking roads.

We had a cook-out with the neighbors Sat night because still no one had power. We all went home to dark houses and went to bed again with nothing. It was a little like camping in your own house. We had flashlights and laterns that we carried everywhere. We flushed using the neighbor's pool water. No showers for anyone.

That night, our neighbors got their power on. We were still out. We went to our friend's, the Riekse's, to shower and enjoy the electricity. We could use the toaster and the microwave and even cook on the stove. What a luxury! The best was being able to use the bathroom and flush without pouring water in!!!

Another storm went through that night and the Riekse's lost power. We went home to a dark house again and got everyone settled in bed when the power finally came on around 10! We all screamed and yelled and did the "we have power" dance.

The girls were supposed to start their summer programs at the high school but they couldn't because of more rain and power outages. Hopefully we be starting tomorrow.

What an adventure...one we don't wish to repeat!

But you can see God's glory in the cloud below. We ride by the downed trees and see how powerful God is.

Picnics

No picture today but we had Abbey's class picnic today and Jenny's class picnic yesterday. Today I hung out and helped the kids do crafts--I didn't even have to bring anything! Yesterday, I ran all the games for the day...about 45 minutes of relays and then water balloon toss in the afternoon.

The relay games we had were fun. We did the spaghetti drop where we dropped 5 pieces of cooked spaghetti into a bottle. I tried it with the neighbor kids the night before and the spaghetti was too sticky and the water bottle top was too hard so I added water to the spaghetti and Dave cut a bigger opening in a 2-liter. The kids thought it was fun.

We also did a broken car relay where the first person had a stuck horn so they had to run to the middle saying "Beep, Beep", the second had windshield wipers that were stuck, the third had a flat tire so they had to hop on one foot, the fourth had a broken steering wheel so they had to zig zag down, another had a broken transmission so the had to take 3 steps forward, 2 steps back! The kids liked that one.

My favorite was the q-tip game. Everyone got a straw and each team had a different color q-tip and they had one minute to see how many q-tips they could get into their bucket.

We had a lot of fun.

Today, Abbey had a ranger from the park take her class on a tour of the Ledges and we heard about the history of the park and about the ledges. That was cool!

Thursday is the last day of school for everyone! Kelly's class is going to Michigan Adventure! It's going to be a perfect day since it might get to about 85 degrees! Everyone is excited to be done with school!