When one does not post on a blog in 9 months, events tend to be unreported. When events are unreported, our faithful readers are disappointed. When our faithful readers are disappointed, depression ensues and they become reclusive hermits. Well now is the time to leave your holes and caves, faithful readers! At last, you can be heartened by the appearance of a new blog post detailing the events of the past 9 months, and, along with that, you can be rewarded with a considerable decrease in depression and thoughts of hiding in holes.

9 months in the Walker household means 9 months of event after event after event after birthday after event (most of which we work at). Sometimes, however, we get a moment of respite and get to do a few fun things :) You will find, oh reclusive hermetical faithful readers, that we have been busy for the last 9 months.

Our first picture was taken in March. It is a picture of a transition between winter (white flowers) and spring (green shoots).

This is one of my favorite orchard pictures from this year.

A skip ahead 2 months to Corey's birthday. Corey is extremely happy with his new Kindle. Hope wonders what the fuss is all about.

Corey's perennial cake choice: it makes him feel light and fluffy.

Caleb LOVES birthdays; they make him very hyper (and he gets to eat cake!).

The next event (at least the next event that we took pictures of) was Independence day.

Hey hey! The gang's all here!

After the Fourth was the Brown side of the family's reunion (and a real, live, genuine owl's). Look at them all!

This summer we, as a family, hosted nearly weekly movie nights in our front yard. We would put up a screen, fire up the projector, then watch cool movies like The Adventures of Tintin and Amazing Grace. Also included in these events is late evening swimming.....

....and late night volleyball.

Eve and Rach prepare for the movie.

The biggest news of the year! If you can't tell what's happening here, it has to do with sparkly diamonds and rhodium-plated gold.

Let them eat cake!

No year would be complete without Family Camp! Our speaker this year was Pastor Lovett from Heritage Church in Centerville, Tennessee. Their family stayed at our house for the duration of the trip (except, of course, the period where we, and their family, were gone at Family Camp). Pictured above is the game called "Try to get your Opponent into the Big Blue Barrel and Roll them down the Hill". Unfortunately, nobody won.

Next in the line of Family Camp activities is the famed Steal the Bacon: Men's Style. Can you say "Bumps and bruises?" I feel that this picture so adequately captures the spirit of Steal the Bacon that it almost makes me cry.

Nope, this one portrays Steal the Bacon so much more accurately than the above picture that it makes me weep. Corey stole the bacon and ate it, but he choked on it and Mr. Heyne had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.

Almost got him, Isaac! Keep those fists swinging, and you might get him sometime!

Relaxation after Steal the Bacon is much needed.

TACKLE!!!!

GET THE BACON!!!

Hannah watches on.

As does Isabella...

...and Kaliste.

Walking the gauntlet. Don't smile, Sean!

During camp, the first UFO in years was sighted above Camp Chinquapin. Reports say that it was egg-shaped and had multiple colorful noodle-like appendages.

Dad reacts in disbelief to the fact that a UFO flew overhead just moments before.

Volleyball is a popular activity at Family Camp.

Caleb loves pointy sticks.

Skits! Natasha fills the role of shelf admirably well.

BARREL!

After Family Camp comes school. We take first day of school pictures every year. This is Caleb's.

Hope.

Your's Truly.

Corey Mo-Fori.

Kevin.

The whole gang.

Now to very recent events. Last week was Fall Homeschool Camp 2012. The Harders came to have some fun.

A lively game of Chain Tag.

With house prices as they are right now, these kiddos were actually able to afford one! It is about 6 square feet in area, 4 feet tall, and has a leaky roof! What a steal!

For some odd reason, Ultimate is a ton more fun when it is cold and dreary outside.

The Ladies' Tea. No, I was not there (whew!). Apparently, they served tea, of all things.

Well, that was a look at our life the last 9 months. Hopefully this blog will be posted on more often (blogging is always easier if you keep up with it!)

Hasta la Vista!

Casey for the Walkers

Trip to the Iles de la Madeliene: Part two

Bonjour everyone!

Thursday morning heralded the beginning of another windy day. It was snowing most of the day, but because of the wind, the snow was often traveling horizontally and at times even slightly upwards.

Yet despite the cold and wind, inside it was nice and warm. Austin and Isaac were still on Christmas break, so they were trying to get some position papers done on topics such as music, boundaries, the Church, and marriage. During the morning I sat with them at the kitchen table and we talked about many different aspects of music. As we quickly saw, it is much easier to come up with questions than to answer them!

At lunch time, I had the treat of getting to meet some friends of the Adams. Though not official missionaries, the couple carries on what many would consider missionary outreach. Over lunch, they gave me advice on what steps to take as I prepare for a future in missions and also gave us all a hearty laugh through stories (accompanied by many humorous facial expressions) about some of their recent experiences.

Later in the day, we again headed down to the beach for another attempt at reaching the furthest point on the beach.

Unfortunately, we were only able to get past the second of four points due to the size of the waves, but it was still a challenge to keep our footing on the frozen rocks.

We also had fun scaling some of the cliff walls, though we were only able to get up a short way.

After returning to the house, we did one of the Adam’s favorite inside activities: puzzled over some puzzles. In one day we did almost five puzzles.

Friday morning, Austin and Isaac let me help them with a project they’ve been working on: a recumbent bike. It’s very interesting and I was glad I was able to help out a little bit on it.

The afternoon activity was a hike through a nearby forest and the weather had cleared up so much that we were sweating by the time we got back to the house.

Though there wasn’t much snow on the ground, we still managed to scrape together enough for a small snowball war.

On Saturday, Austin, Isaac, and I all headed back to where we had hiked the day before and rode bikes down the trails. Curtis unfortunately had some schoolwork to do, so he had to stay home.

When we returned, we sat down to a wonderful lunch that the girls had prepared.

Once justice was done to the goodies, Mr. Adams led the whole group of us out on a special New Year’s Eve hike. Here there was more snow so we had a lot of fun throwing snowballs, though Ibby seemed to take a lot of hits since she was often in the middle of the pack. Emily had to stop several times to fix her shoes because they were hurting her feet, so even though we all felt sorry for her, I have to admit, a still target is easier than a running one.

Throughout the week, Austin and I had camera wars.

Mealtimes are times of bustling activity in the kitchen and the meals are always delicious.

Sometimes, however, we had leftovers, so someone had the brilliant idea of tying a biscuit to a string and seeing if any of the nearby crows would attempt to grab it. Though no crows did, a cat that is often around the house took a go at it and succeeded in pulling the biscuit to pieces.

Sunday was spent in prayer, discussions, puzzles, Scripture recitation, and a hike. We headed towards the beach once again and headed towards what is fondly called the monkey head.

Some of the favorite activities on these hikes were skipping rocks, jumping on rocks, and cracking icicles.

The Adams are all excellent musicians and so I’ll leave you with these last pictures and video.

Well hopefully you were able to wade through that long post! I’ll try to get the next up sooner than I did this one.

In Christ,

Corey

Trip to Iles de la Madeliene: Part one

Howdy to all you folks!

Thanks to the Lord’s mercy, I made it safely to Iles de la Madeleine yesterday after a long night of flying. The trip began in San Francisco where my mom and Kevin dropped me off.

After a quick pass through check-in and security, I hopped onboard a plane to Toronto. As you can see, the sunset was beautiful:

My face, on the other hand, is not:

(As a forewarning, throughout the first leg of the trip I amused myself by taking pictures while making faces. So beware! Also, I apologize for the blurriness of some of the pictures. Due to either wind or low lighting, some pictures ended up blurred.)

I must have made several people chuckle to themselves at the Toronto airport. I had an 8 hour layover, so to pass the time and try and make up for a lost night of sleep, I made my own bed on the airport floor, curled up, and tried to sleep.

Luckily, it was pretty empty in the airport at that time. :)

After checking in my baggage, I headed through security again and waited out the last little while until my next flight took off.

This next flight was about an hour long, but in that hour the sun came up and I was able to see the change in landscape. On all of my flights, I wish I was allowed to take pictures during take-off and landing. Despite the ability of the camera to capture landscapes, it can’t fully do it justice. In San Francisco, there was a low fog, barely reaching higher than the top of the skyscrapers. Coming out of it and looking down as the sun was beginning to descend was truly a wonderful sight. Flying over Toronto and seeing a maze of lights, laid out in rows and curves, soaring over mountains and iced over rivers, watching people venture cautiously out onto frozen streams, seeing the landscape change from coast to desert to mountains to snowy tundra, all was breathtaking and wonderful to behold. God is truly an artist.

After reaching Montreal, I got on one last plane for the final leg of the trip.I was now in the middle of a country of French speakers, so the only people who spoke English were the flight attendant and a few other people scattered over the plane. With each successive stop for fuel and other passengers (there was one in Quebec and another in Gaspe), the plane only seemed to get more and more full. For most of the flight, I was sitting next to a friendly older man who tried several times to talk to me, though, of course, in French. I, of course, could not speak French and was left with no choice but to shrug apologetically. He eventually realized that I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, though at one point he did turn to me (forgetting that I couldn’t understand), said something, and then seeing my blank expression, turned around and said the exact same thing to someone else. After that, I was chuckling to myself and hoping that I'd be able to understand at least a little on the way back.

The Lord continued to bless my journey and provided clear skies and sunny weather. Touching down in the Magdalene Islands, the Adams gave me a hearty welcome and introduced me to the rigors of a walk on the beach.

After scrambling over rocks and getting slightly wet from accidentally slipping into the shallows, we all hurried back to the house to get warm. The next morning, another beautiful sunrise greeted me.

After breakfast, Mr. Adams let me ride along as he ran a couple errands and stopped at a house to try and get contact information for some old friends of theirs. The Magdalene Islands are basically several islands joined by sand bars on which roads have been built. We traveled to the end of one of these where Mr. Adams showed me one of the oldest settlements on the island.

At one point, we saw a cross on a hill and so we stopped to hike up to it. The wind at that point was pretty strong, though not as strong as it is right now. It was only about 40 mph then.



Most of the islanders here are Catholic and so it was no surprise to see a shrine at the top of the hill.


After we got back, we had lunch and then went for a hike up a hill right by the house. One neat thing about this mountain is that there is a path through the trees on the side, almost like a tunnel that you can go down holding a rope for support.

I'll end with a picture of the house.


There is more to come soon!

~Corey