Today’s post will focus on my "Christy-bear", or Christina. That has been my nick-name for her ever since she was very little. I am not sure how that affectionate term for her came to be as it has always just seemed natural to think of her as my "Christy-bear"! Of course, we are proud of our other three children as well, and love them all equally great, but I think it is fun to look at individual pictures of each of them, especially around their birthday time.
I have searched back through our digital library of photos from the past year-and-a-half or so, and pulled out many that feature Christina. When our pictures were being taken, we were not necessarily thinking about being sure to get good individual pictures of each of the children. Thankfully, we have captured a good representation of scenes from each of our children’s lives over the past year plus, anyway.
The first one here is due to my brother. When they visited one time he thought it would be nice to get a picture of me with each of the children individually. I am glad that he did!
Here is Christina, when she was 8 years old, with her daddy (me) down on our river bank:
Here is Christina at work back when she was still 8 years old. She is building a pig lot in the first picture and feeding Rufus and Porky when they were still small pigs in the second one:
She also enjoyed many moments of play when she was 8 years old. Here she is doing a trick on her bike and monkey bars at the same time!
Pretty soon she had her 9th birthday. She wanted her cake decorated with flowers and a butterfly that year. Lisa did a great job on the cake as usual:
Even though Christina loves flowers and butterflys, she always enjoys snowy weather, also. I couldn’t find any real good snow pictures from last year, but here is one of her sledding down the hill in front of our school house. (I will have to try and take better pictures of the snow we get this year.)
Christina enjoyed the frozen pond along with her brothers and sister. The pond is still the same size this winter, so it should freeze easily again. I was hoping to have it enlarged greatly by now, but that project has been on hold for a while. When it does become much larger and deeper it probably won’t freeze so easily. When it is frozen good, Christina will likely be out on it!
February of her 9th year was also when we got our first goat, Little Joe. Here she is with our new goat when "Little Joe" really was "little"!
February also saw some more dogs come into our lives. We rescued a Great Pyrenees with two puppies that were being sent off to the pound. We named the mama dog Mamoo and the puppies Luna and Princess. Both the puppies had parvo when we got them. We were able to see them both recover, but sadly, Princess was hit in the road and killed.
Here is Christina with Luna, who was the sickest of the two puppies. Luna was a cute, docile puppy but has now grown up into a rather energetic, bouncing dog. (We still love Luna, of course, but would like her to calm down a bit sometimes, now.)
In March, Christina helped with building the goats a new goat house. She has been a very big help in feeding the goats and all the chores done at the barn. Here she is working on the goat house:
Christina has had many wonderful experiences working around the barn and she really enjoys being up there. Now that she has turned 10, she has started focusing more on learning the chores of the kitchen and cooking, but she still gets to work with the animals every chance she gets.
Here she is relaxing on a role of fence that was waiting to be put to use. That fence would give her goats some more room to move about once we get it in place:
One of her favorite places is the pond behind the barn. She does like to see the pond frozen in the winter, but I think she probably likes the pond even better in the spring when all sorts of creatures are being hatched and swimming around in it.
And of course warm weather allows for more bike riding and playing outside in short sleeves.
One of the marvelous things about Kentucky is the wide range of weather we get to enjoy, and none of the seasons last long enough for things to get really boring. We always can look forward to the next season change and all the new adventures it will bring back.
Here she is on her bike again:
I’m thankful Christina has a nice place to ride her bike at Pure Water Hollow. We don’t have much flat land, but here is a picture of the dirt road she likes to make use of. She likes to ride down the hill in front of the school house to get going very fast and zooms all the way to our drive way in front of the house. (It’s a multi-purpose hill as it is the same hill that she uses for sled riding in the winter.)
In July we took off to our Family Bible Conference at Camp Nathanael once again and Christina had much fun, as well as spiritual food.
She is the one on the right in the blue in this picture, jumping off the diving board the same time with her friend, Carolynn:
Christina especially enjoyed the horses. She was big enough and had good enough control of the horses this year to be able to ride unescorted.
Here she is riding with her friend, Carolynn:
Christina enjoyed the meals:
And playing with her friends:
After Family Camp we were off to the AIG Creation Museum, where we learned more about the authority of God’s Word.
Here’s Christina at the museum with her brother Simon, her cousin Mary, and a couple of dinosaurs which were created on Day 6 along with all the other land animals.
Here is a picture of Christina at the display of blood being shed to provide the clothing for Adam and Eve after their fall. We had a wonderful day looking at all the many exhibits:
This past summer also found Christina learning some serious animal science in the delivering of our first litter of piglets. The first night we waited up with Sally (one of our pregnant sows) until the wee hours of morning, but no piglets came until the next night! Here we are waiting, and Christina is still smiling even though it is after midnight when this one was taken:
The following evening was the real thing, and Sally gave birth to 8 baby pigs. Christina was very interested and helpful:
Here we have a couple shots of Christina holding the darling little piglets:
I think Christina really enjoyed our spontaneous morning trip up to the overlook to have breakfast and watch the fog disappear from the valley below. We captured her eating some dry cereal in this picture:
Christina loves growing gardens and harvesting nature’s food. Here she is with the first blackberries she picked this year:
She had her own personal garden that she planted, watered, and kept weeded pretty much all by herself. Here are some of the green-beans she grew:
And here she is peeking through the family patch of sweet corn. She was picking juicy ears of corn, but I think she also liked playing in the tall corn forest:
In November we had an old-fashion day at church and Christina was able to wear the bonnet she had gotten for Christmas last year. She sure was pretty. (She always is, though!)
And in December Christina reached double digits with her age! It is hard to believe that 10 years has already passed since the Lord gave her to us.
She was sort of our "Christmas Baby", being born in December, and this year she asked for her cake to be decorated with a picture of the baby Jesus in the manger. Lisa made up the beautiful cake and it was delicious!
Happy Birthday, Christina!
We love you!!
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1 comment
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mom2ahousefull on December 19, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Happy Belated Birthday Christina!!
As usual, I missed the actual day… congratulations on hitting those double digits!
Marcella
and the mob
