SixSibs

By Adam E. Heironimus
“The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis is a series of fictional letters sent to an inexperienced younger demon named Wormwood by his “Dear Uncle Screwtape”. In the letters Screwtape is instructing his young pupil how to keep his “patient” (a young christian) from staying on the straight and narrow path and instead tries to instruct Wormwood on ways of keeping his “patient” from church, christian fellowship and all other kinds of godly things, but Screwtape was always sure to tell Wormwood to never hurry his “patient” into anything evil, in fact he said “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”- That’s so true! It’s very easy to slowly, slowly slip backwards without knowing it- and the devil can wait an entire lifetime for us to complete our slide! We need to be constantly be setting “signposts” on our paths and getting other Christians to help us by gauging where we are in our spiritual lives. Another section of the book that I really liked was the part in which Screwtape was instructing his pupil on his “patient’s” involvement in the church, He said “Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches… The search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil.”- It’s often much, much easier to find a church’s, person’s or family’s troubles than to find all of their many good qualities- and anyway, if you find a perfect church, don’t join because you’ll mess it up!
I was really encouraged by reading “The Screwtape Letters”, as it gave me somewhat of a better idea of how the devil often tries to tempt and trick us into sin. I would highly recommend “The Screwtape Letters” to anyone who would like to learn more about resisting temptation, and would give it 5 out of 5 stars.
“The Screwtape Letters” is available at Amazon.com and at many other physical and online bookstores worldwide.

Like I said, I took a lot of pictures, so this is going to be the first third of the pictures that I took in Columbia

Woodcut by Fred Geary at the Ellis Library’s Art Museum

Another Fred Geary Woodcut (there were over 50 on special exhibit)

Steel plate used to print copies of George Caleb Bingham’s painting “Order No.11″ -the plate alone took over 3 years to complete!

A very nice worker at the Missouri State University archives showed us some interesting artifacts from the Civil War

A “cross-hatched” letter- the writing went both vertical and horizontal- this didn’t make for the easiest reading experience!

An 1864 Confederate $50 bill

The archives had a mind-boggling array of just about anything old that’s made of paper that you could possibly want- letters, wills, title deeds, books, newspapers and so much more! We only spent 30 inside and it almost felt like you could easily spend 30 years!
Adam

The six sibs recently had the privilege of taking a 2-day trip to Columbia and our State’s capitol: Jefferson City. We had a very good time and I took a lot of pictures (too many to fit in one post) so you’ll probably be seeing some pictures of us enjoying, learning and just having fun on our trip very soon!
Adam

An amazingly eloquent quote that we saw while on a trip to the Missouri State Capital:

As I mentioned in last night’s post, John and I were going to grill chicken for dinner, we did it and I figured I would share a few pictures of the process (Rachel was only able to take pictures of us putting the chicken on, so you’ll just have to use your imagination to make a mental picture of how delicious and wonderful it looked when we took it off!)
First I demonstrated the “proper technique” for putting chicken on the grill

Then John did all of the rest of the chicken breasts by himself!
(I had to have my tongue just right in order for it to work!)


The chicken tasted great and everyone (at least said they) enjoyed it!
Have a good week!
Adam

This Sunday John and I worked on blessing the family with sausages, John put all but one of the sausages on the grill and did everything else by himself (under the watchful eye of his older brother) I wasn’t grilling until I was almost 13, and here’s my younger brother who gets to start before he turns 8! Pretty soon I’ll be out of a job if I don’t watch out!
Brotherly advice:

Taking a sausage off:

To the plate!

Who said grilling can’t be fun!

Good bye for now, John and I need to grill some chicken for our dinner!

Last Saturday I sent my family off on a treasure hunt for a couple of hours so I could transform our kitchen into a “Diner” (my mom and dad knew what I was up to) I made French-fries, Hamburgers and Banana splits! Everyone enjoyed it, including me! It was a lot of work, since I kept the whole thing secret until I had everyone sit down to eat, so I had a somewhat limited time frame to work on making everything while they were away working on figuring out the treasure hunt. (I made the chocolate sauce,Ice cream, and whipped cream from scratch).
Mom enjoyed the food!

Waiting for burgers and working an activity sheet.

Banana Splits!

The master waiter in action!

Have a good day!

As you all probably know, I (Adam) have written all of the SixSibs book reviews so far, but I am now pleased to announce that my dear sister Rachel will be joining the ranks of the elite squadron of book reviewers that we keep on staff here at SixSibs! She has been writing book reviews since February 25, so I’ll have a LOT of book reviews to publish!
So keep reading and enjoy some of the book reviews (and some of the books we’ve reviewed)!
Thanks,
Adam

Yesterday night, right after we had finished eating Luke told everyone to come out and see what the dogs had discovered: a 3 1/2 foot long black snake! I was able to distract it momentarily with a stick and grab it behind it’s head (I’ve always wanted to do that!) I carried it around for about 5 minutes and we then put it in an old 5 gallon bucket, where it stayed for about 15 minutes until it got bored, climbed out and climbed a nearby tree! (I didn’t know snakes could climb so well!)
The snake charmer:

Would you call these people “snake charmed”?

Bye,bye snake!

Have a good day and keep waiting for more eloquent, amazing and stupendous blog posts!

Yesterday afternoon we were all getting kind of bored so someone suggested that we make the entire alphabet with nothing but our bodies! Rachel, John and Isaac were the ones who did the actual letter forming and I (the camera guy) took their pictures and served as their “birds eye view”- telling them where to move and how to lay. It took us 40 minutes but we finally got it done!
P.S. If you weren’t able to figure it out, the 7 pictures are supposed to spell “SIXSIBS” (all of the letters we did were capitals)

By Adam E. Heironimus
For the past year our mom has been reading us a devotional called “Voices of the Faithful” by Beth Moore and the International Mission Board
“Voices of the Faithful” is a collection of 365 daily stories that are written by missionaries serving with the IMB. They are all arranged into monthly categories such as Prayer, Contentment, Compassion or Persecution. Each day has a verse that goes along with the story and a short prayer at the end that often has a blank space that you can fill in with someone that you are praying for currently (or as is more often the case, need to be praying for currently). The whole book is very humbling, we complain about our internet going down for a few hours, where there are many people in the jungles that would be extremely glad to have more than 4 hours of uninterrupted electricity. We complain when we run out of something and “only” have 2 or 3 choices, where many missionaries eat the same thing 3 meals a day 7 days a week! It helps put all of our little “troubles” in a little more realistic light. It was very sobering reading all of the stories of people who were beaten, disowned and sometimes even killed for spreading the gospel. But the amazing thing, even in these stories of pain and suffering, is the fact that many of the people who are being persecuted could just keep quiet about their faith and avoid any problems- but the love of Jesus cannot stay welled up inside them, so they share the Gospel with everyone that they come in contact with, regardless of the risks. It’s humbling to me- how many times have I felt led to share my faith with someone and not done it because I didn’t have the courage- even though I wouldn’t be whipped or disowned or jailed for doing it? The stories of the people in this book are inspiring. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read about current missions around the world, or to someone who just wants their faith strengthened by reading the testimonies of many godly, dedicated christian men and women. Using the 5 star ranking system, I would give “Voices of the Faithful” 5 solid gold stars.
“Voices of the Faithful” is available at Amazon.com and at many other physical and online bookstores worldwide.

By Adam E. Heironimus
Yesterday I finished reading “The Hole In Our Gospel” By Richard Stearns
The main purpose of “The Hole In Our Gospel” is to help American Christians see- and then fix what he called the “hole” that exists in our gospel by not just “talking the talk”, going to church on Sunday and occasionally giving a check to a charity- we should be “walking the walk” and, to quote World Vision’s founder Bob Pierce “Let our hearts be broken by the things that break the heart of God”. Richard Stearns pointed out over and over again the vast resources of the church in America and how little we were actually using them. For instance, there are 155 million people in the US who regularly attend church and call themselves “Christians”, if all of those people would tithe, there would be an extra 168 billion dollar excess that could be donated to missions. I know that sounds like a lot, but that’s 11 billion dollars less teenagers ages 12-17 spend in an average year and 537 billion less than the population of America spends on entertainment and recreation! Suddenly that $168,000,000,000 doesn’t seem quite as large. But it is- that would be enough to completely eliminate extreme poverty for over 1 billion people around the world! Richard Stearns called our lack of compassion, generosity and care for others the “hole” in our gospel that needs to be filled- and it will only be filled when we lay aside our own (often selfish) desires and fully devote ourselves to hearing (and obeying) God’s will for our lives. Now has never been a better time to “wake up” and help others, every single day 25,000 people die of hunger- that means 4 people will have died by the time you finish reading this book review, or more than 3/4 of a million people will die this month, 9 million this year- we all need to be doing something to help RIGHT NOW! No matter how comparatively little our contribution is, it makes a difference: one of the quotes in “The Hole In Our Gospel” was an old African proverb: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try spending the night in a closed room with a mosquito” if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, Jesus said we will be able move mountains and I think poverty is a mountain that needs to be moved as soon as possible- and who knows what wouldn’t be possible if there was a group of people that fully dedicated themselves to sharing God’s love and helping the needy? The world was changed by 11 often cowardly, imperfect men once, so what would stop another group of 50,100 or even 1000 people completely dedicated to the Gospel from doing it again? To quote the last few sentences in the book “You,Me, let’s go. We have work to do, and it’s urgent. Join Me…”
I enjoyed reading “The Hole In Our Gospel” very much and would highly recommend it to anyone. I would give it 5 out of 5 stars.

“The Hole In Our Gospel” is available at Amazon.com and at many other physical and online bookstores worldwide.

By Adam E. Heironimus
Today I read “When the Darkness Will Not Lift” by John Piper
The main purpose of the book is to help you find joy- especially if you are going through depressing times, although I’m not going through hard times at the moment I was really encouraged by reading this book- we could always use more of God’s joy in our lives! One of my favorite parts of the book was a part where Mr. Piper was talking about the kind of darkness that exists in our hearts and thrives whenever we become introverted and self absorbed. He likened our lives to a spring of water: if we keep to ourselves and never reach out to others our lives soon become stagnant and tepid. But if we live for others and share the joy that is in us, our lives will turn into a spring that gushes refreshing water out to everyone that we come in contact with. He quoted Isaiah 58:10-11 to further explain his point:

“And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
11 The LORD will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.”

I was very encouraged by reading “When the Darkness Will Not Lift”, and would recommend it to anyone, especially people going through struggles or depression. Using the 5 star rating system I would give “When the Darkness Will Not Lift” 5 stars.

“When the Darkness Will Not Lift” is available at Amazon.com and at many other physical and online bookstores worldwide.

As we were running some errands on Saturday we saw a sale at a Catholic church, we stopped and my dad and I got out to scope the place out and see if there was anything worth getting. They were working on tearing the tables down and boxing up all of the items that hadn’t been purchased, so they gave us some paper bags and told us that we could have whatever fit in a bag for 50 cents! I got a typewriter, a scanner, a cordless phone, a car stereo and a bunch of wallwarts, cables and connectors all for $1! When we got home Luke and I started tearing apart the typewriter which resulted in these pictures being taken:

I’m planning on using some of the parts I scrounged to help build a security system for our room.
(Special thanks to our dad for taking the pictures)

Yesterday Luke and I had the privilege of making homemade pizza for our family. I totally forgot about taking a picture of it until it was too late, and even then I put it off until this morning. So I guess I have to confess that I staged the photo- I got out a plate,took the pizza from it’s container in the refrigerator, took the picture and then immediately put the pizza and plate back (after I washed the plate of course).
Here is all of the pizza that was left after last night’s dinner:

(The picture isn’t staged all that well but that was kind of the “look” that I was going for- just a few pieces of lonely, leftover pizza sitting on a plate).

I hope you enjoy these sketches that I did (they aren’t all that recent- I did them before we left for our vacation). I have really enjoyed reading and learning about dinosaurs since before I could read (ask my mom- she knows!) and since we were going to go to the creation museum I decided to do some research which motivated me to do some sketches.

Allosaurus

Diplodocus

Icthyosaurus

Plesiosaurus (and two unfortunate fish)

Triceratops

Spinosaurus

(click on any of the photos to enlarge)

I know that the 4th of July was actually 4 days ago but I just finished a new animation of fireworks that I’ve been working on and thought that you might like to see it. (It would be a long wait until the next 4th of July!) I hope you enjoy it!

Yesterday morning as I was running my daily 5k I saw a bunch of “treasures” piled up besides several people’s trash cans; several people had just had a yard sale and the things that they didn’t sell they just threw away- which meant a bunch of free goodies for an enterprising young man such as myself! When I got back home from my run I immediately grabbed a wagon and headed back up the street to do a little bit of “dumpster diving”. By the time I got back I had collected a wagon load of treasures that included a suitcase, an old carpet steamer, a nice piece of telescoping rod and a half dozen or more containers of varying sizes and shapes (John really enjoys doing experiments so he uses a lot of jugs, bins and bottles). I stowed all of my collection in our storage shed until 9:15 when it started to look stormy and we all had to come inside, seeing that everyone had nothing to do I offered to let them take apart the carpet steamer I got and they all enthusiastically agreed to help. It took us about 50 minutes to go from a fully assembled carpet steamer to a heap of parts and trash.
We had everyone from Isaac on up photographing the process so we got a lot of good (and some not so good) pictures, here are some of the highlights:

First Isaac and John took the bottom off.

Then John and I took out the actual steamer hardware

Then Luke took apart the “guts” of the steamer and we all split up the remaining parts.

My share of the “haul”: A high voltage power switch, 4 casters and a 5 foot section of double-strand wire.

After it stopped raining I put together an 18 clue treasure hunt to tell my younger sibs where the rest of the loot I had collected was hidden. They found it and John has already done an experiment with some of the jugs: see how long you can bang them before everyone else goes crazy!

As we were driving home from church on Wednesday we saw this amazing cloud formation; it reminded me of Psalms 19:1-4:

¹ The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
² Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
³ They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
⁴ Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.

We do truly have an amazing god.

I was able to bake several batches of flatbread yesterday morning. My mom found the recipe in a cookbook called  ”The Ultimate Guide to the Daniel Fast” by Kristen Feola . The  entire book is wrapped around a 21 day “fast” from all types of meat, dairy,eggs,yeast,and sweeteners  so it not only has lots of good recipes in it but it also includes 21 daily devotionals that you can read every day that you do the fast. We (my mom, Rachel and I) have done the fast twice but we use the recipes from the cookbook almost daily. The cookbook is named after the fast that Daniel and his three friends went on in Daniel 1:11-16. (I didn’t really mean this to be a book review but while I’m at it I’ll say that “The Ultimate Guide to the Daniel Fast” deserves 5 out of 5 stars in my opinion). We were also able to have some leftover hummus to go with our flatbread (another Daniel fast recipe!) It was all very good (in my opinion) and the recipes are both available at UltimateDanielFast.com under appetizers and the entire cookbook is available at Amazon.com.  I included a picture of my Hummus and Flatbread to show you just how delicious and wonderful they look together:
I multiplied her recipe by 3 and it made exactly 12 pans of flatbread (rolled very,very thin).

Enjoy!
(The recipe and the picture).

This morning our John Deere Gator (which made a brief appearance as Rachel’s Jeep in Spy Movie 2) wasn’t responding. Around here when something isn’t working people call in the six sibs repair team to fix it. We have fixed mowers, stuck doors, locks, and all sorts of other things with help from our dad (and sometimes by ourselves). It took John, Isaac and I about 10 minutes to take off the Gator seat, the speed control lever and the “gas pedal”  and to figure out what was wrong.  The trouble spot was a little switch that was attached to a little plastic “gas pedal” and was used to make the gator go.

After we got the switch fixed we snapped all of the floor board parts back together and  flipped it over and re-screwed the seat that we had taken off to get to the floor board.

We then tested it out and it worked perfectly!

So our Gator is now back in active duty, ready to haul little boys wherever they might want to go!

By Adam E. Heironimus
I recently read a book by Zach Hunter called “Be the Change” it is as the subtitle reads “Your guide to freeing slaves and changing the world” but it is also much more: every chapter has a main character quality that is focused on in that chapter such as  courage, compassion or leadership and then several stories of people who put that certain quality to good use in their lives; in the chapter titled  ”Compassion” he profiled  the orphanage builder George Muller and the Nobel prize winning Mother Teresa. The main purpose of this book is of course to help free modern day slavery but I found that it was helpful to me just as a teenager looking for ways that I could try to make a difference. That’s the second part of the subtitle “Changing the world” and as Zach mentioned earlier in his book it’s kind of hard to help free slaves without changing the world and if you help change the world by telling people about the only person who can bring true freedom, pretty soon you will find that many of the world’s problems (including slavery) will be solved. Probably one of my favorite quotes from the book (and there were many good ones) was by Martin Niemoller, a German leader of the Confessing Church who was held in a Nazi concentration camp from 1937 to 1945. After he was released he wrote this poem about the need to stand against evil:
“First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time
there was no one left to speak up for me.”

I thought that that summed up the reasons of why we should take a stand for what is right and fight against what we know to be evil.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to make a difference in their life,family,community or even the world. One of the really cool things about this book was the fact that it was written by a 15 year old- and I kept forgetting it because it was so well written!  Using the 5 star ranking system I would give this book a solid 5 out of 5

“Be the Change” is available at Amazon.com and at many other physical and online bookstores worldwide.

I hope you all are continuing to enjoy your 4th of July, we are having a very good time shoveling manure (actually I was the only one who was able to do that) reading books, visiting with friends and just vegging around the house. We all are wearing our matching patriotic t-shirts that our mom bought for us to wear on our trip. We always wore matching clothes on our trip so that (hopefully) no one would get lost and if they did for some reason become separated from the “pack” whoever was lost would be able to get connected with the group a lot easier. It was nice to be able to quickly spot where you were in our “caravan” and where the majority of the group was heading but it also drew even more attention to us (I say more attention, 8 people hiking through Boston or Washington DC already draws a good bit attention without matching shirts) and produced comments such as “1,2,3,4,5 boys- Holy Smokes!”, “Isn’t that cute” and just your average breed of wows, yikes’s and other interjections. Anyway I say all of that to say that we were able to get a new picture of all of the six sibs (our current picture is over a year old) and I thought you might enjoy it. The only usable picture that our dad took is from a different angle than the “classic” SixSibs picture because we had already done a entire family portrait and Paul decided that he was tired and lay down on the floor instead of sitting on the couch and waiting until we had a perfect seating arrangement and camera angle (I actually think that it looks pretty good considering the fact that there are little people in it). So here it is:

I hope you have a blessed 4th of July
Adam

P.S. I guess I spoke too soon about people who swim in ice water being crazy- I swam in it myself for 10 minutes in the evening!

All of the six sibs (especially Paul and Isaac whose duties usually start and end at the taste testing phase) like to cook, I’m not talking about pasta and sandwiches (which can be fun) I’m talking about real cooking: Homemade pizza (crust and all),bread,cookies (Rachel’s specialty) and all sorts of other things (Isaac and I enjoy making dips such as Guacamole, Hummus and Bean dip). For our 4th of July dinner (that we ended up eating on Wednesday)  we had a special treat that we haven’t had in a long time: Portobello mushroom burgers! (I personally love fresh cooked mushrooms)

The “burgers” were a group effort and as you can see in the picture they turned out very well.

(We found the recipe in “The Ultimate Guide to the Daniel Fast” by Kristen Feola)

I hope you all have had a good first couple hours of this glorious Independence Day! We have had a rather exciting few hours, since we are filling up a pool that our Mom and Dad got us several days ago, and the 4 middle sibs have already tried it out! I think that that is rather crazy considering that it’s only 71 degrees out and the water that we’re filling the pool with is about 15 or 20 degrees colder than that! Today I also read  the last 120 pages of “Be the Change” a book that I heard about from Alex and Brett Harris of TheRebelution.com and was able to check out at our library yesterday. It was an excellent book about ending modern- day slavery (a very fitting book to read today considering that today is a day that we celebrate the freedom that we enjoy in America  and this book is about freedom for everyone- not just the people of one certain country or people group). I’ll probably write a more complete book review in a few days but I just wanted to post a little snippet about it right now. So again stay cool, be safe, have fun and read “Be the Change” if you are looking for a good edifying thing to do.
Thanks,
Adam