"Labor of Love"

This is my Christmas wish to each and everyone of you. That this song and scene would replay over and over again in our hearts this Christmas season.

Merry Christmas!

Before Christmas Get's Here...

So I realized we are way too close to Christmas and I haven't even let you all know how our Thanksgiving was. As some of you may know Randy & I have every Thursday & Friday off, those are our two days a week in which we don't work. Well as you all know Thanksgiving fell on a Thursday a couple weeks ago. We requested to work Thanksgiving so that we could spend the day with our girls. We were so blessed to have this time with them.




We had a writer from the International Moose Lodge request to spend the day at our home. He wanted to write an article in next months Moose magazine as to what Thanksgiving meant to us and what traditions we had. I would encourage you all to read about it on Moosehearts web site, http://www.mooseheart.org/news/2008-Oregon.asp.








One of our girls building a tower of cheese before it melts away in our home made Mac 'n Cheese.

The girls suggested we create a chain of links. We wrote on each link things that we are thankful for. A few things listed were.... Make up, Family, Hot Water, Friends, Mooseheart, Food, TV, Beds, Thanksgiving Meal and on.

Sara & Randy getting ready to cut Tom the Turkey.










Another one of our girls cuddling up for an afternoon nap after a full tummy of Thanksgiving food. Oh let me mentioned she crocheted this blanket all herself, it's so pretty!












This past Tuesday, December 8th Randy & I had our first ultrasound. It was such a beautiful miracle to see, it was hard to hold back the tears. Here is baby Riggs debut.



10 weeks and 4 days











Baby Riggs due date has been changed to July 3rd. After they measured the baby out it was measuring smaller then 11 weeks. So it looks like we'll be having a July 4th ish baby! Good news is you all should have time off work around then to come up and see us and our new little one. *smile* We expect and hope for visitors.

Merry Christmas to you all!

Baby Riggs

October 23, 2008: 10:08pm

Randy & I had just come home from Target after I carefully selected "the right" pregnancy test. I carefully read all the instructions and rushed myself to the bathroom. The next 3 minutes Randy & I were leaning over the bathroom sink waiting for that life changing moment. Would it read, "Pregnant" or "Not Pregnant? Before we knew it our 3 minutes were up and the test read, "PREGNANT"! I couldn't believe it, we are actually pregnant! I quickly responded as I did when Randy proposed. I backed up into the hallway away from the test and started flailing my arms and squealing... quickly followed by tears as Randy continued to stare at the test over the sink. We quickly hugged and praised the Lord for blessing us with such a beautiful gift.

November 13, 2008: Thursday

We finally get to go home and tell our friends and family! We kept quiet for 3 weeks until we could tell our parents in person. In the 3 weeks of silence we made a quick trip to the Carter's Outlet store where we purchased our first baby item(s). Two sets of bibs that read, "I love Grandpa" and "If mom says no ask Grandma". We put these in gift bags that we presented to our parents as we shared with them our exciting news. Our families were so very supportive and excited for us as were our siblings. Our friends were rather shocked but also responded with great excitement and support. This weekend I caught a cold and started to experience a little bit of nausea for the first time in 8 weeks of pregnancy. Thankfully the Lord has been good to me as the nausea has stopped and the cold is passing with little unpleasantness.

November 16, 2008: Sunday

Tonight we tell our girls. We shared our news with our co-worker and shortly after called a "family meeting." We all sat together in our sitting room as Randy breaks the news to our girls that, "we are getting another kid in our house." The girls eyes widen in concern as our house is at full capacity right now. Randy follows up with, "yes, Hannah & I are expecting." Still at this moment the girls are thinking, "You guys are expecting.... WHO? Who is moving in?" Randy responds, "Girls, Hannah is pregnant!" Quickly the girls respond with, "Are you guys joking, you've joked before... you better not be joking!!!" Once we assured the girls this was not a joke they were all very excited. We assured them this didn't mean that we were leaving but that they would get to share in this process with us.

Tuesday 18, 2008: TODAY

Well, we have found an OB/GYN and will be scheduling our first doctors appointment today. Again, we suspect that I'm in my 8th week and possibly due June 27th - 29th. We will be sure

keep you all posted on our progress and post photos of baby Riggs as we get them. We appreciate you sharing in this exciting time with us and ask that you would pray for continual health and safety over myself and the baby. Would you also pray that the Lord would prepair our girls for this time of adjustment and for us to be as aware as possible of any of their anxieties, that we may calm them in any way we can.

stay posted.....

Autumn Is Here!

So I absolutely love Autumn! It's safe to say Autumn is my favorite season. I love how it's kicked off with all the back to school items in August, yes I realize August isn't fall, it just simbolizes to me that Autumn is around the corner. Then slowly we start having some cooler weather. The sweatshirt and shorts weather, the jeans and t-shirt weather and you bring a jacket or sweater with cause you know by the time the sun goes down it'll be chilly.

Slowly the leaves start changing color and out of no where you start craving Apple Cider. You start looking in the paper and around the serounding towns to see what Fall Festivals are happening. I love that we have a fire place and can wind down our evenings with Randy working diligantly to make us a nice, soothing and relaxing fire. I love the sound of leaves crunching under our shoes as we take the girls for a walk every afternoon around campus.

Here are some pictures of Mooseheart in the Fall.

I also love that this Autumn brings the end of this election year. Inspite of the excitement that this election year has brought I must say I'm ready for this to be over. I love that I've been able to follow this election year of firsts; Hillary Clinton as the first female to have a legitimate chance to win the Presidency, Obama as the first black person to hold a major parties nomination for President and Sarah Palin as the first female running as the Republican parties Vice President.

Here are a few pictures from the first McCain/Palin rally the Republican National Convention held in Cedarburge, WI.

We woke up at 5am on our day off and drove 2 in a half hours to this little town of Cedarburg, WI with a population of 11,298. The town was not expecting more then around 3,000 to come out and support the McCain/Palin rally that day. This charming town had over 6,000 more then they expected that people were miles down the street just hoping to catch a glimps of McCain and Palin. It was such a site and I'm so glad Randy drug me out of bed for it.

So Autumn may not be your favorite season but what things do you look forward to in the Fall?

Blessings from God

We continue to find ourselves blessed here at Mooseheart. We are working with these 10 girls and among the daily frustrations of balancing school, home work, athletics, outings, house hold chores and relationship building among all 10 girls we can't help but count our blessings.

• Randy & I have the blessing of spending our days together.
• Daily we see these girls changing their family tree for the better because of their success here at Mooseheart.
• We have down time in which we can fellowship with other Family Teachers/believers here on campus.
• God conintues to develop us in new and exciting ways.
• We don't drive often so we are protected from dealing directly with the crisis in our economy at this time in the way of gas.
• The Lord provides for us a balanced meal 3 times a day and then some.
• One day Mooseheart will provide a way for me to work and be a stay at home mom.
• The Lord has been good to us and allowed us time off to be with family and friends for important events in life.
• We continue to see God bringing believers to Mooseheart and I are so excited to see what the Lord does with all of us here.
• We have been so blessed to have many visitors from home, that we miss dearly, come up to campus and visit us.

What things are you thankful for? In what ways is God blessing you in your life that all too often get over looked?

Randy has new blog!

Just a note to let everyone know that I am starting a new blog at rariggs.wordpress.com. Hannah and I will continue to use this blog to keep everyone updated on our life at Mooseheart and general news in our lives. My new blog will be focused on the discussion of fighting the injustices of the world. I'm just getting it started but feel free to check it out!
Randy

My First Half Marathon

Many of you know that I've been training for the Chicago Half Marathon. Over the last few months I have run a few 5k races in the Chicago area and have been doing as much running, biking, and strength training as possible to train for it. I was doing really well at first but then the last few weeks of training I kind of slacked off a little bit so I wasn't sure how it was going to go. The half marathon (13.1 miles) was this past Sunday in downtown Chicago. It also happened to be the rainiest weekend on record in Chicago with 10 inches of rainfall. It rained the entire race so it was somewhat miserable, but I finished and beat my goal time. I had hoped to run it in 2 hours and 10 minutes and my actual time was 2 hrs. 4 mins. and 31 secs. so I was really happy with that. Unfortunately because the weather was so bad Hannah wasn't able to get pictures so I am going to be ordering some that were taken by a company at different points along the race. I will put those up when we get them. I hope to run the Indy Mini-marathon in May and my long term goal is to train for the Chicago Marathon (26.2 miles) next October!
Randy