Steve and Jenny Valentine

Olivia Noël, like most third borns (trust me I know, I speak from experience...not that I'm bitter or anything mom and dad, haha!) has gotten the shaft in regard to keeping up with her many milestones on the blog as I did so well with the other two. So allow me to play catch up from the past (nearly) 6 months worth of fun facts and (LOTS of) pictures of our little love bug, "vivie", as she is so affectionately known around here! This is a major gush post (you're welcome grandparents) of this cutie pie and has nothing to do with work purposes...enjoy! 6 Months Old -Sold and Moved out of the house we brought her home to -Took her first real road trip (nearly three months long!) -Began sitting up on her own This is a dress I wore as a baby 7 Months Old -waving Hi -"singing" when you sing -flashing adorable smiles to everyone 8 Months Old -reaching for things while on her belly -rolling around -l...

This has been a hard week for our family. We have endured sickness (4 times over), financial pressure, the ongoing process of raising support and keeping up with many hours of online missionary training.  As if that wasn't an exhausting list already, I just spent the last several hours in the emergency room with our youngest who fell down a flight of stairs. And about that... She is OK!  But we are tired. We are weary. We are emotionally drained. We are in need of good rest (as that has not been happening with several sickies here, myself included!) But I can't go on without saying that  we are thankful that the Lord has  sustained us through this hard week.  We aren't promised a life here on Earth without trouble, fear, doubt, persecution, pain, weariness or strife. But we have a Strong Tower that we can run in to in order to endure the storms of life. This verse started going through my head this evening, along with one other as I walked out of th...

2015 has arrived. This is the year we have talked about for a while now, the year we have been telling people of when we will move to Poland (Lord willing!)  It is exciting, unknown and we are hopeful for what the Lord has in store. This first week of 2015 has been exciting...I got another year older (yay 31, my "golden" year!), we reached our 50% goal of financial support (now on to 100%!), we got passport pictures for the kids and Steve (to renew his), bought our carry on luggage and Steve is officially done with his role of Director of Mobilization with Converge. And we're only a week into 2015! In the midst of it all, I find myself seeing glimmers of hope in what could be deemed a busy time, I wanna soak it all in and take time to reflect. Just to highlight a few things... *We reached 50% financial support-this was all the work of the Lord, absolutely no way we could have done this in our own strength. I mean we began the month of December at 33%...end...