Perry Family

Another visit from friends

Our evangelist friends, the Karpenko's, passed through our area yesterday. We haven't seen them in about a year, so we took the opportunity while they were here having a meeting in town to visit a bit.

Most of you already know the Karpenko's some of you don't so I'll take a moment to explain a little about their family. The Karpenko's have a desire to see families mended, restored, or serving the Lord more wherever they are. So they set about getting themselves a bus to travel their family around in. When they come to a church their family sings and Mr. Karpenko preaches, again messages that are geared toward the family. How big is the Karpeko family? Well there are ten kids and two adults crowded onto their bus.

While visiting with them yesterday I took a tour of their bus and knew that it could only be done because the Lord called them to do it. I would get clastrophobia myself, but none of them seemed to mind the tight spaces they had to live in.

If you would like to see more pictures of our cookout with them let me know and I'll send you an invitation to view our photo album.

For those of you familiar with the Karpenko family you won't believe how some of those boys have grown. Ken himself is taller than Pam and Dave now.

Denise

My Friends Request

At my friend's request I'm am writing about her and posting a picture of her. Ellen Harper spent 10 days at our house recently and we really enjoyed her company. She is such a blessing to our family. We feel blessed that God put us in a position to be able to fly her out here to visit with us for a while, and share with her the ins and outs of the area God has put us in for now.

Friends are few and far in between who will not only back your disciplining of your children but will also help to carry it out from time to time when it becomes necessary. Children develop a better respect for people they know hold to their parents guidelines, and woe to the parents who won't let other adults help them train their children in the way they should go. Having made that statement I do understand that there are some people out there who's ideas of training children certainly don't come from the Bible. A discerning parent will be able to see this and know where to set the boundaries for those people concerning their children.

Anyway I've gotten sidetracked from the purpose of this posting which was to announce how blessed I really am to have a friend like Ellen.

The picture posted with this blog is of Ellen standing next to a huge Yucca tree.

Denise

PS Ellen didn't really ask that I post all of this, she just warned me about what pictures I decided to put up of her.

Our Camping Trip

We've added to our fleet of two vans a camper. Our reasoning for purchasing a camper is for three reasons. First of all there is always the possibility that Mike will have to be stationed somewhere that we cannot go, if this happens at our current station this will allow myself and the kids to be able to visit with my family here in Texas without expensive hotel bills. Our second reason for purchasing camper is so that we can tour the area around us, wherever we may be stationed, again without the expensive hotel bills. Thirdly, we thought that whenever we can come back up north for a vacation, we can stay in our camper without imposing on anyone during the meantime. Wether any of our reasons hold good water or not we now have a camper.

   Since Mike had a three day weekend this weekend we decided to pick up the camper a little early and head out to one of the few lakes in the area. We initialy were going to go to Elephant Butte Lake in New Mexico, but based upon our salesman's advice we traveled the shorter distance to Caballo NM and stayed at a RV camp there. Caballo Lake and Elephant Butte Lake are both the results of damming up the Rio Grande, otherwise you wouldn't find much in the way of lakes at all. As it is we had to travel 1 1/2 hours just to get to this one.

  While there we had a great time biking, fishing, and figuring out how to move around in a camper with six little children. It takes organization, that's for sure. We didn't catch any fish, though one toyed with Mike for a while, and Mike had a hard time giving up trying to catch the little (I should say big) rascal. Biking was fun though Debbie, Becky, and Faith tired easily, so it was short.

It was really nice to be able to see water again. Since they dam the river upstream the Rio Grande isn't very grand in the El Paso area, certainly not anything you could fish in. And if you drive close to the river in Mexico it could make you quite ill to your stomach since they don't care to pass and carry out any laws prohibiting sewage and trash disposal in the river. No telling what you might catch if you fished in the Rio Grande in Mexico.

We all had fun and we hope to do it again real soon.

Denise