Kindergarten Choir Performance

Last weekend, Zachary had his Christmas Children's Choir performance. This huge group on stage is only the Kindergarten Choir. I know of churches that are smaller than this! They have been working hard all fall on their songs and it really showed in their performances.

One of the songs they sang was about the Fruits of the Spirit. (Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self Control) It was very appropriate that Zachary was the Fruit of Gentleness. He has such a gentle heart!

The children also sang a tearjerker song just for the parents. It was called, "You Knit Me in my Mother's Womb." They showed a slideshow on the screens of each child's baby picture as the children sang. I hardly remember this little baby. It seems like so long ago. Long gone are the days of jet black hair and olive skin. Now, we have a beautiful blonde haired, blue eyed, fair skinned boy. I still wouldn't trade him for anything!

Wheeling, West Virginia

For the last 8 or 9 years, I has been quite the Collin Raye fan. Every time he comes to Atlanta, I have found a way to see him in concert. Fan club? yep! Own all his cds? yep! Tshirts? yep! I even went so far as to name my son after him! Zachary Collin Elkins. Total groupie.

It has been about 4 years since I've had the chance to see him in concert. Mainly because he isn't traveling as much and doesn't come to the southeast all that much either. So, I searched for a concert venue that worked for our schedule and found a way to make a road trip out of it. The problem is that we are perhaps the busiest family I know. It is hard to find a free weekend when you have family, baseball, and football to work around. Lucky for me, I found a concert in Wheeling, WV on a weekend that we had absolutely nothing planned. Perfect road trip!

I drove 22 hours out of our 38 hour trip and put over 1350 miles on the car. It was so worth it. We got to sit second row, center. Awesome!

Zooma!

About 4 months ago, Allison and a few of her friends decided it would be fun to run a half marathon on November 8. It was a lot of hard work to train for, but totally worth it. All 5 of us had a great time and we are currently trying to make plans for a road trip for the next one!

From left to right: Kelly Strunk, Angela Lawson, Jennie Persinger, Kim Cox and Allison. We are all stills smiles - you can tell it was before the race! Little did we know what we had to look forward to.Our dear friend Robin joined our husbands to be part of our cheerleader squad for the morning. Here we are in a pre-race prayer. This is about the 4 mile point. Coming down the hill to the finish line. The back of the shirt reads: "Dear God, please let there be someone behind me to read this."

Luckily, there were a few folks back there. The shirt was quite the conversation piece throughout the morning.

Halloween Weekend

We are way behind on the blog posts, so here goes a quick marathon of the last month or so...
For Halloween, Zachary chose to be Spider Man. He was so excited about his costume that he still wears it around the house six weeks later. Here are a few pictures of him playing in the living room with Pookie.During the 5 minute photo shoot in the living room, I only got webbed once. Miracle, huh?

Over the Halloween weekend, Zachary got to spend the weekend with his Grandma and go to the Fall Festival at church to get lots of good candy. While he was with his Grandma, Marty and Allison went to Nashville for the weekend to see the GT/Vanderbilt game. Here are a few highlights of the touristy things we also did over the weekend:
Touring the Jack Daniels plant was a little out of the way, but a very interesting tour. That took about two hours. Well worth it!

We had to get a picture of the stadium. Amazing that the stadium is situated right in the middle of town and traffice getting out of the game was easier than leaving the mall on a Saturday afternoon.

The Ryman Auditorium. A beautiful building in the middle of historic Nashville.

This is the inside of the Opryland Hotel. We wandered through the gardens of the hotel for a few hours. Got lots of gardening ideas. Unfortunately, we are not full time gardeners, so they will probably remain ideas.

The Parthenon is almost across the street from the football stadium. This is a replica of the real Parthenon and is a big tourist attraction in town. Not really worth the price of admission, but we can now say we've been there and done that.

Just Another Day at the Rock Quarry

LaFarge Rock Quarry had an open house this afternoon and we were able to carve out a little time to stop in. They had tours of the quarry and the kids could climb up onto and inside some of the huge tractors and excavators they use daily. Some of the tires on the tractors were almost 7 feet in diameter. They were HUGE!These tanks fill up a dump truck with 10 tons of gravel in less than 10 seconds.

Some of the conveyors the rock travels along as it gets crushed into smaller and smaller pieces.

This is the hole where the rock is retrieved. The pond was probably 500 or so feet below where we were standing. We were standing on the lookout deck when we took this picture. During the week, you can stop by the deck and watch the quarry in action with the tractors and dump trucks traveling up and down the roads with loads of rock. They look so tiny when they are at the bottom of the hole. They make Zachary's matchbox cars look small. Then when you see them up close like we did today, it puts the enormity of the hole into perspective.

It's Baseball Time! Go Red Sox!

This is Zachary's 5th season playing t-ball. He is now one of the oldest kids on the team, so he thinks he is big man. Here is a few pictures from tonight's game.Zachary is playing second base this season.He hit a triple in tonight's game. The team lost the game, but they are currently 3-1 on the season. We are very proud of these boys.

Saturday (Part 3)

Last, but certainly not least, we made a stop at Bert's Pumpkin Farm in Dawsonville. This is the 5th or 6th time we've gone to this farm over the years. Our family loves making this trek and the fall colors are absolutely beautiful.

The day did not end there. When we left Bert's, we headed to Oakwood to Smokehouse BBQ for a delicious pork plate dinner. What a long and exhausing day. We wouldn't have had it any other way. We spent nearly 13 hours playing together on Saturday before we collapsed on the couch at bedtime. Such fun!

Saturday (Part 2)

After the race Saturday morning, we went to visit with Allison's sister, Liz, and take advantage of her shower to clean up before the rest of our day's adventures began. Here is the one picture of Allison and Liz we were able to get before we headed out the door.

From there, we headed up to the North Georgia Mountains and had a picnic lunch at Amicalola Falls State Park. After lunch, we began our hike. Zachary led the entire hike. It was a beautiful day. You couldn't have asked for better weather. Here's a few pics of our climb.It's nice to see the falls pouring this much water. Last time we make this climb, the falls weren't near as impressive.
The view from the top.Zachary was still going strong after our climb. We climbed the trail plus 600 steps to reach the top of the falls and back down. When we got to the end, Zachary was more than ready for our next stop, Burt's Pumpkin Farm.

Dinosaurs

This post is slightly out of order, but wanted to post a few pics of the trip Zachary took with Allison's Mom to go see Dinosaurs at the Gwinnett Arena a week or so ago. They had a great time and Zachary has talked about it over and over since their evening together. All of these dinosaurs are being driven or walked by someone inside them and are being controlled by remote control within as well. The T-Rex is over 50 feet long! The pictures don't even begin to do it justice, however, Zachary highly recommends you make every attempt to see this show next time it comes to town.

Ted's Montana Grill Bison Stampede 5k

We had a very busy day this past Saturday. The day began with Marty and Allison heading to Atlanta to run a 5k. The course ran from near the Georgia Dome and Olympic Park through some shady streets of Atlanta and through Georgia State University's campus before heading back to the start/finish line. It was tough. When we arrived at the registration tables to get our race numbers, the volunteers handed each of us a hat to wear during the race. We managed to get one for Zachary as well.

Too funny! We look just like bison, don't we?

The race atmosphere was tons of fun with almost 1,000 folks wearing their bison hats. I'm sure we got lots of strange looks as we ran through downtown.

Afterwards, we scored an excellent loot bag with lots of goodies. Here's a picture of all the freebies we snagged.

The bags included race shirts, bison caps, a cd, lara bars, straws, $10 gift certs to Ted's, about 8 aluminum bottles of Sprite, lots of water/Powerade, fruit, an extra tshirt, an extra cap and we also got to eat some Key Lime Pie and had a few Ted's bison sliders to complete the morning. Chuck Strunk would be so jealous!