Hard at Work

 We are still hard at work on preparing the house. The weather was lovely this past Saturday, so we did a lot of outdoor work. David has been repairing the porch, you can see here that the floor is done, and he is just getting ready to put the bases back on the pillars (you can see the one on the left "floating"). Now the pillars are done, so the porch will pass back to me to do the painting.

The whole family was involved in our work day. Pip and Ben were taking old lattice work off the front of the porch:

 Tim got to use a drill for the first time! He put up three curtain rods inside the house, and then helped David and I take down the storm windows and put up a lot of the shutters.

Emily did work indoors as well as out. Here she is packing DVDs and listing on the computer which DVDs are in which box, so when we want to watch the Muppet Show (for example), we know which box to look in!

Moving - In Process

We are getting there! Parts of the house are in chaos (we like to think an organized chaos), but parts of it are starting to look really good. Things are getting checked off of the list of things to do before listing - so far we have:

- painting the shutters - check

- decluttering upstairs - check

- cleaning upstairs carpet - check

- painting upstairs hallways - check

Lots still to come! This week's focus is the downstairs - hopefully next Saturday I can take some more enticing pictures of our home!!

In between we are still celebrating birthdays, visiting friends, coaching mathletes (for a math contest), taking music lessons, eating, sleeping and making lots of laundy; and are trying to keep making time for one another and for God. Busy times, but good times.

Marshwiggles on the Move - Part One of Many

Well friends, we have decided it is time. After a lot of prayer, and talk, and thinking, and researching, and more prayer, we have decided that it is time for us to move. As many of you know, David's job moved out to Burlington, and then Oakville, about 2 years ago and since then we have been pondering a move.

I think the Lord held us back for the past couple of years for a number of reasons: David's health, our family needing some more time in Niagara, some really great friendships that have really blossomed in that time, and we just didn't know where to go. But now we feel the Lord is leading us to the Kitchener Waterloo area (by which we include Guelph and Cambridge), and we think we have some good reasons to back up that decision. We have family there, and the commute to Oakville is the same as it is from Port Robinson. Our other family members in Toronto will be no farther (alas, no closer!) but more accessible on public transit! And KW also offers a lot for the older child and young person, and we hope to have several of those in our home soon!

So to our Niagara friends, we love you and will miss you, but we hope to keep in touch and get together (Stratford anyone??), and to our KW friends, we look forward to being closer to you!

In Bible Study Fellowship this year I have been learning from the study of Acts that God leads one step at a time, and asks for our obedience one step at a time. So often I want the big picture, the 10 year plan, and I am sure that Peter and Paul and the other apostles would have appreciated that too - but that's not how God works. I can think of many practical reasons why He does this, one of which is to develop our trust in Him, and another is because quite frankly, a 10 year plan might scare us too much! I am quite sure that this is the next step of obedience that God is calling us to, and so even though sometimes I feel very overwhelmed, and frightened, we are obeying. And the first step right now is to get our house ready to put on the real estate market!

I thought I would include updates of what is going on, on this blog, so if you have a particular interest in what's going on you can get your news! A lot of you have generously offered to help with "whatever we need", so I've generated a list of what your duties will be... just kidding! (Monday: declutter Marsh house, Tuesday: list Marsh house, Wednesday: conclude sucessful purchase of Marsh house....) I will be posting "help needed" days here, and if you can come and give us a hand - great! And no pressure if you can't! And if you are too far away, we covet your prayers! In fact, we covet ALL of your prayers!

NRSEF Update

Emmi's cupcakes won an Honourable Mention, and  $50 prize! We are all very proud of her!

His Pen on My Heart

A good friend of ours has just launched a new blog, His Pen on My Heart. She's having some giveaways to celebrate, so it might be worth your while heading over to check it out!

Niagara Regional Science and Engineering Fair



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  Well it was a long weekend! This weekend was the 50th annual Niagara Regional Science and Engineering Fair, and we had the only homeschooled student who participated to ferry back and forth!

I heard about this science fair before Christmas, and when I told Emmi about it she got excited about doing a science fair project. My dad (Granddad) agreed to act as her "mentor" and he walked her through the process of designing and doing an experiement. After talking to him, she decided she would like to do an experiment with baking, and Granddad suggested taking out one ingredient from something and trying other substitutes in its place. They settled on eggs in cupcakes.

Granddad helping at the set up of the project at the fair.

In January Emmi baked 8 batches of cupcakes, one control group (with eggs) and then tried 7 substitutes that she discovered through internet research (with my help!). She then had to measure, weigh (ok take the mass for you science geeks out there!) and find the volume of each of these cupcakes. I helped with some, and Pip helped some. Then Daddy taught her basic skills on a spreadsheet and she spent one afternoon entering all her data. The science fair rules excluded any ingestion (eating!) by any subjects for the experiments so she had to judge how good her cupcakes were by measuring - she decided to try measuring density because in her opinion a cupcake should be light and fluffy. When all the data was sorted and collected, banana turned out to be the best substitute!

The NRSEF is for the winners of school science fairs, but they also accept other "top projects" from schools, so we were allowed to apply to the top projects group, and the NRSEF committee chooses some from that pool to come to the fair. The application deadline was early February, and Emmi did a small write up and sent in a summary (her abstract). In March we got the exciting news that her project was accepted, and so she had to do a full write-up, and also get her display board together.

Friends visiting Emily at the fair. Maybe they'll do a project next year!

This weekend she attended the fair all day on Saturday. Saturday morning was the judging, and then in the afternoon all the grade 7 and 8's participated in Brock's Youth University. Today (Sunday) was the public open house, and many people came to the fair to see the projects, including some of our friends and Grandpa!

Grandpa came to visit the fair!

 The whole experience was a lot of work but very worth while! I learned a lot about science fair projects as Emmi's teacher, and she learned a ton. She learned how to use some basic computer programs (like spreadsheets) that we hadn't taught her yet, and how to do library research, how to make footnotes and endnotes, how to structure an experiment, how to do simple data analysis, and the list goes on! She had to speak to a lot of people she didn't know, including the judges and other participants, and answer their questions. She is very tired from her weekend, but she is already thinking about next year's project! And Pip is fired up too - he thinks he would like to do a project when he is old enough and come to the science fair too!

At the Sugar Bush

Last week was March Break and we visited Agape Valley to tour their sugar bush and enjoy some pancakes! Our tour was led by a young gentleman, also named Ben, from our chapel (Thorold South Gospel Chapel) who did an excellent job! In the photo above he is explaining how you need 40 buckets of sap to make 1 bucket of syrup. He explained that right now the syrup content was weaker and they actually needed closer to 90 buckets of sap to make 1 bucket of syrup. The people at Agape Valley say they have made about 60% of what they made last year.

We got to see the old fashioned way of collecting sap in buckets, and then the modern system with tubes that feed into a pipe that runs right into the evaporator. We also saw a demonstration of how the pioneers made syrup by boiling sap in large cauldrons over a fire (below).

It was very warm while we were there! I saw people in tank tops and shorts, and they looked very comfortable! In fact, it was so warm we decided to eat our pancakes inside, so we could be in a shady place. Lots of people were enjoying the sunshine outside, but we hadn't brought our hats or sunscreen.

The syrup tasted great, and we also bought some honey to bring home (Agape Valley also has several hives), so we consider our outing a sweet sucess!