My kids say the darnedest things

On Nate's birthday, after dinner we had a special cake and ice cream. Ellie decided at dinner that she didn't like her dinner (a fairly common occurence) and she refused to eat it. We finally had to resort to telling her that if she didn't eat her dinner she wouldn't get any cake and ice cream for Nate's birthday. She didn't eat and as a result she didn't get dessert. For the next few days she kept asking me, "Mom, on Nate's next birthday can we have mac and cheese for dinner?" She wanted to make sure she would have no problem eating it and that she would get cake and ice cream.

Michael:"Dad, these baby prayers are SOOOO long." Said after a baby blessing in sacrament.

When we were driving out to visit my parents, we were in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico and we saw a few houses and a power plant. We pointed out the power plant to the kids. Michael looks at it and says, kind of laughing, " I can see it, and it is definitely NOT a plant." We explained to him that sometimes they call power factories power plants. "Hmmm, that's wierd," he said.

Ellie: " This is not my lucky day!"
(an echo of what I tell them frequently when they whine about having to do something or complain about something being "not fair.").

Happy Father's Day

I had constructed this great post in my head about what a wonderful father Joe is and then when Joe was changing the oil in my car I went out and saw this...and this picture exactly typifies what I love about him as a father:

Joe is VERY good at letting the kids work next to him as he does his 101 work projects. He has the patience to let them watch and he tells them what he is doing as he does it. He makes sure to keep everyone involved. I LOVE that about him, and the kids...especially Adam love to be with him as he works. Over the years the kids will learn so many valuable things through doing this with their father.

Joe's also really good at sensing when the children need some extra attention and paying attention to them:

Joe's also the fun parent...he is always buying cool toys for the boys to play with....go kart, 4-wheelers, r/c cars, rockets....

Here they are after church today....aren't they all so beautiful?
For fun I included some old pics...here is Joe and Michael in the hill country. Michael is about 4 1/2 months old.
This is Adam already enjoying time with his Daddy in the garage...he is about 2 here:

Thanks Joe, for being such a great daddy to our kids!

I wanted to add a little bit about my father. He has always been so generous and giving as a father. He had high expectations for us kids and he wasn't afraid to hold us to them, which a few times drove me crazy, but overall helped me to acheive more than I would have normally done. He had a health scare this year that resolved itself fairly quickly, and as I contemplated the possibilities, I was very saddened to think that he might not live forever. He is definitely the fun grandpa now...he loves to spend time with the grand kids...and I love that! I love you dad!
This is my dad with Nate last summer, he has been great about holding all the babies when they were tired and needed someone to sleep on.

Ellie's Swim Lessons

Ellie just finished her first class at "Miss Lori's" swim classes. She did great. The first day when we arrived, she started crying and clinging to my leg. This is very unusual for my Ellie, and finally I convinced her to sit down on her kickboard and listen to Miss Lori teach swim safety....and then after that she wasn't afraid to go to class anymore.



There were 4 kids in her class: Ellie, Kalani, Sydney and Audree (not shown). Ellie was so glad to have Sydney in her class, it made her much more comfortable and eager to try new things.
Every day they had a quick safety lesson at the beginning of class where they learned this (very) catchy song to the tune of the farmer in the dell....if I'm not careful I find myself singing it at off times.

Ellie did really well. She started out not wanting to put her face in the water at all and really timid in the water. She ended up much more comfortable with the water....willing to jump in to someone, and to swim several feet (use swim lightly here....more like dog paddle). She is just like her mommy and HATES to get her face wet. She will swim pretty independently with her face sticking out of the water. Well, we have another swim lesson coming up in August, maybe we'll conquer that then.

I can't believe how fast this little girl is growing up!

Our Bounties

One night when we were having family prayer, Joe thanked Heavenly Father for "our bounties." After the prayer was over, Adam asked Joe what "bounties" meant. Joe explained that bounties were gifts from God that we didn't do anything for and yet were blessings to us, and explained things like the blackberries that we pick on the side of the road or that randomly come up at our property are bounties of the Lord. A few weeks later, we were out at our property and Joe showed Adam some blackberries that had come up on their own and explained to Adam how those were bounties of the Lord. That night, when Adam said the family prayer, he thanked Heavenly Father for our bounties. Since that time, there have been several time that he has mentioned how many bounties we have and how we need to thank Heavenly Father for the bounties we have.

I think I tend to define bounties a little more loosely- to include any of the many blessings that we receive on almost a daily basis. We have definitely had a lot of bounties out of our garden this year:

We have gotten a ton of green beans, some lettuce, tomatoes, onions, zucchini and yellow squash out of our garden. We have been busy with cooking the vegetables, but we have also had fried zucchini and fried green tomatoes, and pico de gallo. I am planning to try zucchini bread and squash casserole this week...doesn't that sound yummy? Nate will eat the tomatoes like they are candy...they really do taste great!

Here is our garden as it currently is: The plants are HUGE! The wheelbarrow got left next to the garden one day, and then one of the tomato plants grew so large it knocked over its cage and came to rest on the wheelbarrow. Its now too big to stake with a tomato cage so the wheelbarrow is semi-permanent.

This year, we tried the upside down tomato plants. We planted plants that were the same size as the ones in the ground. They haven't done as well...so if you see the infomercial, don't buy it!

Who do I look most like?

When people see Nate, they think he is a mini-Joe...and he really does resemble Joe a lot...

But this next one is me as a kid...maybe he looks a lot like me too!

And this last one is Joe...he does for sure look like his dad!

What do you think?

Berries!

We love berry season! Last Saturday we went to Moorhead blueberry farm and picked blueberries. Adam was very serious about it, eating very little so that he could have more in his bucket. Michael ate as he went, but still came out with a fair amount. Ellie would pick and eat, but she spilled her bucket about 3 times so who knows how much she really got. Nate was pretty content to crawl through the dirt, eating sticks, leaves and an occasional stray blueberry.
We ended up with 9.5 pounds, which we have since eaten, frozen, and canned!
We also have gone a couple of time blackberry picking. They are easy to find along the nature areas of our subdivision. They are not as enjoyable to pick however, as they are full of thorns which stick to your arms and clothing. You also have to sometimes forge paths into the nature areas to get to the best blackberries. Joe made a few paths at our favorite one. We canned these the other day!

Boy Toys

Sometimes I think that he comes up with "projects" just so he can have an excuse to buy new tools!

A book from my Blog

One of the purposes I had for making this blog was to alleviate the amount of scrapbooking I did. I thought that if I could blog the day to day events of our lives and then print them in a book, that I could then scrapbook only the professional pictures and "scraps" (programs, artwork and certificates). I used to scrapbook almost all that you see on this blog for each kid, in their own scrapbook. As you can see, that was getting a little out of hand. Not only was it expensive and time consuming, it was going to end up taking up too much space. So I recently made my first book of my blog and received the finished product the other day. I used Blurb. I am very happy with the book that I received.

You start by downloading some software from their website to your computer. You can then put in that you are uploading from a blog and you give them your blog address and password, and they upload your blog to their software. You pick which posts you want to include and it puts them into book format int their software, which you use to edit offline. You can print it just like that, or you can go back and edit the format of the pages. They have many different sizes of books and qualities of covers to pick from. I picked 8X8 and the wraparound hardcover...the most expensive cover they offered. I ended up editing many pages so that I could make my pictures bigger as compared to the text. They let you pick a background for the book and a theme. Blurb does not limit the number of pictures that you can include, unlike other blog publishing companies. It was a little bit of work to format it how I wanted, but way less than making a picture book at snapfish. Overall, I felt like it was a good value. I paid $32 for the book and $8 to ship it. They are running a promotion now for free shipping, I don't know how often they run promotions. It is more than I would pay for a photobook, but way cheaper than scrapbooking and extremely convenient to upload your blog. It arrived after about 1 1/2 weeks.

If you are interested, you are welcome to come take a look at my book!

Thank-you Miss Sylvia

Ellie's last day of preschool was yesterday. She went to school 2 days a week from 9-12 at a friends house...Miss Sylvia. Miss Sylvia was a great teacher, she really showed love to these girls. Ellie would wake up every morning and ask if if was a school day. Then if it wasn't she would ask when it would be a school day! For Ellie, it was like a play date 2 times a week.

Here are the 4 members of the class: Sydney, Ellie, Brenna and Teia:
Miss Sylvia did a good combination of structure, they had themes for their days and learned about different things: bugs, the country, the different holidays, etc. She also was good at doing fun art and cooking projects with them. Miss Sylvia is not going to be teaching next year, and we will miss her very much! Thank-you for all of the time and energy you put into the school this year, it was definitely above and beyond!

The End of Preschool

Michael spent this year going to Spring Baptist church preschool. It met two days a week from 9:15-2:30. He absolutely loved it. Yesterday, they had a special program to celebrate the end of the year. The children came in to a funny song....walk, walk, walk, STOP. Jump, jump, jump, stop...etc. Then they sang some cute songs. My favorite had to be the one about the B-I-B-L-E.

There were many cute songs, however, I had Nate with me to view it. For the first 5 minutes he was quite content to sit on my lap and look at the things around him. Then he decided to try crawling around. This was fine while he was crawling in the back between the empty pews where he was not disrupting anyone. The problem came when the children arrived and were singing so cutely from the stage. Nate quickly figured out that there was much more interesting stuff at the front of the room and tried desperately to make his way up there. Then I was able to distract him for another 5 minutes while we practiced walking...me holding his fingers as he walked. Then that was boring, so we sat down again and tried to be distract by eating a bagel. That worked well for about 2 minutes but then Nate put too big a piece in...he couldn't get it out, and so he started gagging. The next thing I know, I am trying to hold Nate and catch all his vomit in my other hand while I try to quickly escape the room so that I don't disrupt the people watching the cute program. It was a disaster. The only good thing about it was that Ellie was at a friend's house, so I didn't have to try to keep her quiet too.

The rest of the program I tried to stand near the back and hold Nate. It was crazy!

Michael is just above the big head, a little to the right. He loved his school and had a lot of fun. He was constantly coming home and telling us bible stories. In fact, he probably learned more bible stories at school than at church.

This is him with his teacher, Mrs. Lowry.

A couple of weeks ago, I met with his teacher to talk about his progress over the year. She pulled out an evaluation that she had done at the beginning of the year to show how much improved he was by the end of the year. He had done everything perfect at the end of the year. So when she pulled out the evaluation from the end of the year, it pretty much looked the same. He is very ready for kindergarten, I'm just not sure what novel thing he is going to be learning there.

Atta-boy Adam

With school wrapping up for the year, we had many year end awards and activities that Adam was a part of. First of all, he made the Hall of Fame for his school. His school are the Broadway Stars, and so anytime a child is found to be exceptionally well-behaved, above and beyond the normal, they are given a "star." When they get 10 stars accumulated, they are inducted into the Hall of Fame. They get their picture up on the wall in a star and they get a t-shirt that says they are a hall of famer. Then at the end of each quarter, they have the "Walk of Fame." All of the inductees line up and the students line the halls and clap as the inductees parade around and they play obnoxious loud music on the intercom. It is great fun for the kids!

Second, Adam got straight A's for the fourth nine weeks. They have a special breakfast to celebrate and so the day before I asked Adam if he had made it. He said he hadn't heard anything and was really sad about it. The morning of the breakfast he REALLY didn't want to go to school because he was sad. Then come to find out, he did make it! Good job! (We were supportive either way, he is way too young to get hung up on grades).

Lastly, they had an awards ceremony for the first graders. They gave out medals for the children that achieved certain things. Adam got 4 medals: Presidential Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, Straight A's all year, Principal's award (only about 4 kids per class got that one) and special achievement in writing. It was so cute, when he was walking down off of the stage, he had this modest look on his face like he was shocked that he got so many awards, but he was pretty proud of himself. I was really proud of him too!

Standing up with his class.

On the last day, they had a party. Here Adam is with his teacher, Mrs. Adams. She was really an exceptional teacher!

A Big Project

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we recently purchased a home on an adjacent lot at our property north of here. Here are some pictures of the house that we purchased. Every time I go there I alternate between this is a huge mess and will be so much work, and its not so bad. Last time I was there I was fully on the huge project side. You can see some of the needs from these pictures.

Here is the house from the road. The lot is mostly cleared. It has two very large beautiful magnolia trees on it, one right in front of the house, and one near the road. (And we still have some junk to clear out as you can see).

Here is the kitchen. We have counters from when they replaced them in our last house, so we will do that. We will probably do something with the cupboards (plus a thorough cleaning) and we probably need to put a dishwasher in.
Here's the bathroom. I scrubbed for an hour and a half a couple of weeks ago with bleach and as you can see it still looks pretty dirty. We probably will replace the counter, do some work on the shower and replace the flooring, in fact, we have to replace all of the flooring in the house as the house stinks horribly like smoke. As you are walking up to it you can smell it through the walls.
The living room/ "dining" looking from the front door to the kitchen. The living area is L shaped.
The other side of the L. This is one of the 7 broken TVs left behind. There is a cute under the stairs closet to the right that the kids like to play in.

The stairs. Old, narrow and steep.

The only real deed restriction states that you can only build up to a 1 1/2 story house. The upstairs fully works under the 1/2 story restriction. You can stand in the tall part, but not on the sides. This is the L side, as you come up the stairs you take a quick right.

This is the other side of the room. You can see the opening to the stairwell to the left. Ellie is there so you can see how tall everything is.

To the left of where Ellie is standing is a partition that works as a closet. It has a poorly placed water heater.

That is the whole of the inside. We definitely have to repaint (and possible more) all of the walls. We plan to replace all of the carpet (if anyone is replacing their carpet with wood, we'll take your old carpet off your hands).

The outside of the house on the lot is gorgeous. In front where there was the kitchen and a sliding glass door, there is a large wooden deck.

The deck is also L shaped. It runs along the front of the house and then is longer on the far side.Looking out from the deck back to the house. There is also a little shed next to the house. You can see the bottom branches of the magnolia tree.

This is the first lot in the subdivision. Next to the lot is a stream/ water drainoff area. It runs along the boundary line and empties into the lake. Down a ways you see a bridge to the neighbor (in a different subdivision) house.

This is from about half way between the house and the lake. There is a picturesque lawn bordered on the right by an inlet of the lake full of lilies.

This is a view from the edge of the lake. (Isn't it so pretty? I'm not that great at photography, so you can imagine it is MUCH prettier in real life) What you see is an island. Our other lots owned half of the island, and with this lot, now we own the whole island. Joe has great paintball plans for that when the boys are older. You have to swim or canoe to the little island, but Adam swam it last year by himself so its not that far.

So the lot itself is in great shape. Except for some occasional mowing and more trash disposal (and two abandoned cars not pictured) there isn't much to do there. The house is a project...good thing Joe is such a handyman. I am excited for when it is done, we can all go up and the women (and the babies) can stay in the house while the men and the kids camp. I look forward to that! Plus my folks can come stay for long periods of time and the kids can really enjoy having them around! Now if we can just get my Dad to retire!