Another Great Book, and Going to the Dogs

(Please pardon the picture quality in this post and several of the next ones, I'm sure. My camera completely died, so all my pictures are from my phone, which surprisingly does a fairly decent job. I'm hoping to get a really fancy camera, so it might be awhile. I may have to buy a cheap one for the mean time though. We'll see.)

Since the beginning of the year, our family has been enjoying evening reading aloud together. We used to do this when our older kids (now 18 and 20) were young, but had gotten away from it. We try to pick books that will be spiritually encouraging, and we found a treasure in this book. The book is called Ten P's in a Pod, by Arnold Pent III, and we purchased it from Vision Forum.

The story is about a family that had 8 children and traveled around the country in evangelism. The impressive thing was the amount of time they spent in reading the Bible. They would all have personal devotions for 30-60 minutes before breakfast (depending on age). Then after each meal, they would read the Bible aloud for about 30 minutes, with each person reading or quoting a chapter of the Bible. This happened after EVERY meal. Very impressive. The father believed the spirit needed to be fed as much as the body, and made sure that his family lived according to that belief. Because of this practice, most of the kids could quote whole chapters or books of the Bible, and one even was able to quote the entire New Testament. They used that skill in their evangelistic meetings as a way to teach people how important constant Bible reading in the home is. The book is full of anecdotes about family life and adventures in their travels. It is a wonderful, very well written book, and I highly recommend it.

Today was also the big sled dog race that comes through here every year. We drove out to watch the dogs in action, but didn't bother with going to the starting line. This year they started the race next to the new elementary school, so I'm sure it was flooded with people, and would have been difficult to see anything anyway. Besides, most of my daycare kids are too little to care, and would have been difficult to hang onto if we had unloaded everyone in a crowd of people. Since I knew we would have to stay in the car anyway, we waited until all the sleds were on the trail, then drove up the road that followed the race path so the kids could see the dogs. They seemed to enjoy it just as much as they would have if we had stood out in the wind, and I didn't have to freeze or chase little people ;) I call that no-stress dog sled watching!