You can't make this stuff up...

Seriously, it's crazy!

A week and a half ago on Sunday night, Emma Kate was up all night throwing up.  She felt fine the next day so we were like OK, weird.

Tuesday afternoon I take the kids to the library.  We all go to the restroom and Emma Kate gets her finger slammed in the door compliments of my sweet little boy blue--AKA Ryan.  It looked terrible.  The librarians really thought I needed to take her to the doctor so I did.  We weren't sure if it was fractured or what.  The doc said it was probably ok, and they cleaned it and sent us on our way.

That  night, we ate at Moe's.  We all ate the same thing except Jon and the kids got chicken, I did not.  They all got sick at the same time about 6 hours after they ate the meal.  Kids were mostly throwing up, Jon felt super nauseated, and terrible.  They were sick all day Wednesday.  I mean seriously, I cleaned up more throw up that day than I have the whole 5 years.  Everyone had their own personal puke bucket.  I assumed it was food poisoining.  Made sense to me.

Friday, I wake up in wee hours of the morning, SOOO sick.  It was awful.  I got dehydrated and weak very quickly.  At 6:00AM Jon says he is going to get a sub.  I say NO, you can't stay home from school AGAIN!  I told Jon I would figure it out.  By 7AM I could not even get out of bed except to go do my "business."  I am not being dramatic, it was so awful.  Jon had to stay home.  I was as sick about that as I was sick!

So now I"m thinking ok, maybe the kids had a stomach virus and I caught it.  NOPE!!  The kids got sick again with a stomach thing Sunday/Monday.  This time it was the other end if you know what I mean.  No throw up buckets but wow…ok, I won't go into detail.

To add to the confusion, on Saturday I smelt a horrible smell in our house.  I discovered that our gas line to our grill (that is not hooked up) had been turned on.  Gas was pouring out of it.  So I turned that off and the smell went away.  Well Sunday night when I went to bake a coffee cake for the garbage men, there was no more gas for my oven.  OK, I started freaking out!!  Like panic attacke mode.  At this point, Jon and I are questioning how long the gas would have had to leak out to empty our tank that wasn't even due for a fill up for 8 more months!  My big question was, how long have my children been inhaling gas fumes?  Of course when I look up on line inhaling gas, symptoms include flu-like and gastrointestinal issues.  We have been sick since January 24th!  I decided to call the local fire department.  At 11PM, 4 fireman come out in their brand new huge fire truck to check out our house.  There was no detection of gases in our house and they did confirm that the gas valve being opened could have emptied the tank within hours.  That definitely made me sleep easier.

So basically, Jon and I have concluded that he and the kids did have food poisoning.  Then I picked up a stomach virus, and the kids picked that up from me.  All but a day or two here or there, the Strebe's have been sick since January 24th.  We have now gone 2 whole days this week well!!  Please continue to pray for us to stay well!!  We are staying outside all day everyday we can!  We even got to go to the beach this week.

We anticipate our trip to Indy at the end of March for Jon's 2 month check up.

Thanks for praying for the Strebe's to continue to be…

GODSTRONG!

Get your tissues out…A message from Luke

   



    So this is Jon finally writing a post.  I know, I know, you probably thought I have fallen off of the face of the planet, but I am still here.  I wanted to share a story with you about something that happened with our 5 year old son Luke this week.  It was one of those moments that you will remember for the rest of your life.
     I have been putting him down at night, as I am in between basketball and soccer officiating seasons.  It has really been a sweet time for me to be able to spend this kind of quality time with him at night.  For the past few nights, he and I had been talking about salvation, and what it meant for Christ to die on the cross for us, to wipe away our sins.  Equally important we have been talking about how important the resurrection was in the whole process.
     Thursday night, we were reading a Bible story, that happened to be the resurrection story, and of how Jesus died on the cross.  After reading the story, I rocked him for a song, and then was sitting in his bed for a song, when we continued to talk about "believing in Jesus".  We talked about going to heaven, and how when we ask Jesus to come into our hearts, that we would then some day join Jesus in heaven.  We talked about the importance of believing in Jesus, that he came down on this earth to die on the cross for our sins, only to rise three days later.  I asked Luke if he believed everything that we had talked about, and he answered yes.  I then said, Luke do you want to ask Jesus into your heart, and he said yes I want to ask Jesus to come into my heart.
     Well, I knew where this was headed, so I went and got Donna to come into Luke's room.  All three of us were in the bottom bunk bed, and I reviewed with Donna everything that we had been talking about.  I told Luke that I, momma, grammy and gramps, Nanny, and Aunt Sara had all asked Jesus to come into our hearts, and that we all had made the decision to commit our lives to living a Christ like life.  I then asked him if he wanted to pray that prayer.  He said yes, he would like to ask Jesus to come into his heart.  He then told me, why don't you pray, and then I'll repeat what you say.  How he knew to say that, I will never know.  He is a very insightful young man.  So we all bowed our heads, and prayed.  Luke ended up asking Jesus to come into his heart.  One of the proudest, and happiest moments of our lives.  To be there when our son commited his life to follow Christ, is a moment we will never ever forget!  I am confident that everything that we have been through this past year played a part in our son giving his life to Jesus.  God has been at work in his heart for a long time, and this was the culmination of that hard work.  Since then, we have had Luke call many of his family members and tell them of his exciting news.  He has such a heart for God, and is so spiritually deep, that I am certianly not adequate to cultivate that spiritual deepness.  I am confident that God is going to use his life for His glory and am very excited to see what exactly that looks like!  Pray for him.  I am certain that Satan is working overtime to discourage and deceive him since he made the decision.  Pray that his heart will continue to love God more everyday.  Pray that God will prepare him to be used for His Glory in the future!  Cannot wait to see what God has in store for our little Luke.  He is so very special.

Luke is:

GODSTRONG!