Peyton can count!

I have reserved mentioning this until she got it right, but Peyton can finally, and most importantly, correctly count to ten...well, actually 13.

This is no huge breakthrough because she has been counting for awhile, but for whatever reason, Peyton has been protesting the number 5 for quite some time. I don't know why, but she would say one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

No matter what we did she would not say 5...until last night. She finally said it and I couldn't be happier.

The ABCs are our next obvious step. She can rattle off 50-60% of the alphabet by skipping large chunks of letters periodically. She is getting there though.

I never post any pictures because I never have the camera with me, but here is one, albeit bad, that I took at the college Bible study last night.

Zito Strikes Again!!

Meet Zito, our nearly 4 year old black lab.

So, as I mentioned in my last post, I got an inkling for a smoker recently and decided to go buy one. I was really excited and still am to be honest because smoked meat is about as good as it gets...amen?!

We decided that it would be fun to smoke a brisket for the college group that comes over to our house on Sunday nights, you know? We wanted to give em a little taste of Oklahoma and they were really excited. A couple students went in on a brisket together that was like $18.00.

Earlier on the week I decided to try practicing on a small tri-tip and that came out quite nice if I can say so. So anyways, I started smoking this brisket at 9:45pm on Saturday night and then I had to tend to this thing every three hours on the nose all throughout the night to make sure there was still water, charcoal and wood burning...so I did.

I got up at 1:00, 4:00, and woke up at 7:00am to finish it off. It reached its peak internal temp of 200 degrees at 7:45am which was great because I was getting ready for worship. So to sum it all up, I smoked this 10 lb. brisket for 10 hours.

After worship, we came and Tiff took a nap so I made a run to the store and got some stuff for some beans and homemade bbq sauce and came home and prepared it. All was well, I was really excited to eat this and truth be told, I nibbled on the brisket a bit and It was pretty stinking good. You could cut it with a fork; I just wish it had been a little more moist, but I was eating off the end, not the middle.

So I don't want to refrigerate it because I have to reheat it so I leave it on the counter and go to evening worship. Writing suspensfully is not my strong point, but when we came home, Zito must have decided that any sort of punishment was absolutley worth it because he actually had the guts to jump up on the counter and devour my entire brisket. After cooking, that thing was probably somewhere between 8 and 9 lbs. and that retarded dog just ate every last ounce of it.

Words cannot explain just how infuriated I was. It wasn't losing the meat that bothered me, it was that I cooked it for that long and he ate it. Now keep in mind that he iz only maybe 70 lbs himself soaking wet. That means he ate roughly 1/8 of his body weight.

To put that in perspective, I weigh 250 lbs. or so; I would have to eat over 30 lbs. of dense meat to come close to matching what that dog did last night. That's a 480 oz. steak.

So that was our eventful evening last night. I am over it now; we ended up ordering chinese food to replace it and I know that someday I will laugh; I kinda laugh now, but I think I am more in shock than anything.

Zito slept outside last night and I don't know when I will let him back in because his bowels are going to be a piece of work very shortly.

Give it a couple of weeks and I will probably try it again, but right now I am just comically frustrated.

Still no pictures

Hopefully that will change very soon. I really need to get some stuff up here.

Tiffany is still plugging away at school and doing a very good job. She has to volunteer a total of 48 hours in a preschool for two of her classes this semester so she is going to be working really hard at getting as much of that done before Andrew comes. He was so nice; he decided to come right smack dab in the middle of the semester. How awesome.

Speaking of the baby, all is going well. He is an active little fella. Peyton kinda just rolled around, but Andrew is a hitting and kicking machine or something. Tiffany is 32 weeks now...I believe. It has gone by so fast, but we really excited for the new addition into our family.

As for Peyton, and this is the real reason that I decided to blog right now is we just put Peyton into her first pair of pull-ups. She isn't really doing much in the way of potty training besides sitting on her little toilet that we got her from time to time, but she definitely has an interest in it and we're hoping this makes it easier.

We've been holding off full-fledged potty training because Tiff thinks that Peyton will only revert back once the baby is born so she felt it best to wait until after the baby was born to really start. I don't know either way so I concede to her on this point.

In the mean time, I am super stoked. I had a gift card from my mom still for Christmas that I hadn't used yet and I got on this bbq kick the other day and decided I wanted to get a smoker...so I did. I can't wait for an excuse to go to the store and pick up a nice brisket and smoke it for a good 12 hours or so.

That will be awesome. In the meantime, I need to find a recipe for a good Oklahoma/Texas style bbq sauce.

Well, that's all for now. Be blessed everyone!

The Parrish Fam

Wow! What a 2 months!

Well, here I was in my last blog post takling about how we finally have a camera, except I don't have it with me so it will be pictureless. Stay tuned. I hope to change that.

It has been a hectic and busy couple of months and I could choose to write a novel detailing it all or I can sum it all up and say that the holidays were good to us. I took a week of vacation and we drove home and spent several days with the family.

As I write this, I must acknowledge that this has been quite the historic day. Regardless of how you feel about the incoming President, I think most people can rejoice that we, as a society, have managed to accomplish great things in a relatively short period of time with regard to race.

It makes me realize that the is, indeed, hope for the church after all. It makes me wonder just how much we can do in ministry to reach people all throughout the world with the Truth of God's grace and the gift of His Son. In a time where the world is increasingly turned off by God, religion, and absolute morality, we have watched that many difficult things can change and for that I rejoice because at times it seems that I have a job that is hopeless.

This past week has been, undoubtedly, our best in ministry. Tim and I each preached a segment on Sunday morning as a result of what we were calling "Encouragement Sunday." Our goal was to try to talk about all the things we would like to do and see happen during the coming year.

We preached on segments of the Great Commission in Matt. 28:16 and following. I talked about making disciples and Tim followed later with baptizing into the reality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We had a number of visitors this weeks, but one young couple came and I spoke with them at length before worship; she had a lot of questions. And Just to demonstrate the power of God, I didn't have a chance to answer them all before worship started, but wouldn't you know it? They actually responded to the call at the end of Tim's sermon. I have never witnessed a first time visitor make that commitment, but it was so moving to watch and I am thrilled that I got to be a part of it.

And it funny how things are contagious because we all came back to church Sunday night, only to find out that a teen, actually my next door neighbor, wanted to join them. Doing 3 baptisms in one day for a church our size is amazing. It would be like Quail Springs doing 30 in one day. We did 3 all of last year and that was a good year. So far, since we have been here, we have baptized 6 people into God and it overjoys me to say that.

As a result, we also have a number of peripheral visitors/regular attendees that have made mention to me about baptism yesterday. This could really be a great time of growth for our church and I want to give the glory to God.

For the first time, we actually have what could be a nice little core group of young families to try to grow with. Seeing God work is awesome.

Keep praying for us. God is listening. I also ask that you pray for my Aunt Ellen who is recovering from a heart transplant. I was pretty close to her growing up and she is having some complications as I understand it.

With that said, I will close, but I hope to be back soon....with pictures!

Ok. So we finally have a camera

I thought I would finally throw some pics of Peyton up since so many haven't seen much of her in awhile. We finally got a new camera like I said we would.

I am sorry, but I have good news...

Sorry its been so long since I last updated. Its hard because we still don't have internet at home so I have to do this while I am at work.

We will be buying a new camera this week so I hope that the picture content will greatly improve. After all, Peyton turns two on the day after Thanksgiving and people want to see her.

Peyton has grown so much lately and she has a really big vocabulary now. She can stream together simple two and three word sentences and has gotten so much better coordinated. It has been so fun to watch! Every day I feel like she is soaking up new information as we can communicate now. I can even give her simple chores to do and she will do them for us which is really cool. She can still be a brat sometimes, but she is my brat and I love her to death.

Now for the good news...we now know what we are having. Anyone on facebook already knows, but I will regurgitate it on here so act surprised! We found out on Friday that Tiffany is having a boy. She is sooo happy and I am too, obviously, although I do like the whole daddy's little girl thing I have with Peyton. My mom started crying and my dad was really excited. He's been wanting hi heir to the Parrish throne, haha.

So, on roughly April 1, 2009, Tiffany will be popping out the newest member of the Parrish family, Andrew Charles Parrish. His name is inspired by our dad's middle names. My dad's is Andrew, and Tiffany's dad's is Charles. We thought it would be a nice touch like three years ago and we still do.

Well, that's all for now. I will try to get ultrasound pics up soon. Be blessed!

The Parrish Family

Scary Monsters

It is good to be home. Tiffany and I spent this past weekend down in the SF Bay Area in Martinez at the Scary Monsters Youth Rally. It's probably NorCal's largest youth rally for CoCers. There were probably 300+ kids there from all over Northern California.

Tiffany and I and and elder and his wife took 11 kids down there. One more joined us later because he had a football game on Friday night. Tiffany, Wendy, and seven girls stayed in a 2 Bed/1 ba. apartment while Lyle, myself, and 4 guys stayed in someone's home from the church.

All was well except our host family had roosters and they lived up to their calling. I woke up at 6:00am or so both mornings.

We took Peyton down to my Dad and Elaine's house in Livermore, which is about 30 minutes from Martinez, and "PopPop" and Grandma Lainey took her all over the place and spoiled her rotten I am sure. She had a good time and kept saying "PopPop" on the way home.

Davis Park, our home congregation from Modesto, brought 60+ people to the youth rally and we had a good time catching up with all of them. It had been a while since we had seen many of them.

Larry Nunley, from the Airport Freeway COC in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, was the guest speaker and he really did a nice job. He is a great entertainer and comedian so the kids enjoyed him a lot, but on Sunday morning, he got real with them and punched them in the mouth pretty good and, praise God, two girls responded and were baptized. For some reason I was really emotional about it all and just thrilled that these girls decided to surrender their lives to Jesus Christ.

One another note, this friday is our annual FallFestival and Trunk or Treat. I have no idea how many people might show up for that so I do ask that you be praying for success in that regard. Right now the weather says it is supposed to rain which would put a real damper on the festival...haha.

Well, that's all for now. Be Blessed!

The Parrish Family

P.S. We have our next baby appointment on Friday as well so pray that all continues to go well.