Old MacDonald

The girls, while skyping with my grandparents today, got out their guitars and started singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm. I had so much fun watching my girls and grandparents sing and interact! I decided to video some of it for your enjoyment as well. Nathan says the videos really aren't that exciting, so it's up to you, watch them or ignore them, your choice.

I love how Hannah is playing the guitars in this one! My grandfather left at the end to go retrieve the correct hat.

My grandfather is back with the hat for the song!

This is the best one of the girls singing.

Lyn's visit

Lyn and Zac came for lunch on Saturday. Zac had fun with all our toys and Lyn had fun playing with Hannah. Hannah always make sure to give Lyn a good workout. For example, you can take a look at this video:

Hannah also brought her outside to run and chase her, but Hannah ended up stepping in a fire ant hill....not so good. Last night was her first night without waking up since it happened. I'm very glad it's healing quickly!

Hannah enjoyed playing little people with Lyn, but wasn't being very nice with her people, for example she would invite Lyn's people in for water or tea and then kick them out before giving it to them.....not sure what was up with that, but we had a little talk about it.

Nathan and Zac worked on so cool marble works towers

And of course there were books read, this is actually Hannah showing Lyn her life book.

And this is a picture Hannah took, she's getting better!

Yummy Sandwiches

Saturday Lyn stopped by for a visit since she was in town. As a treat we made ice cream sandwiches, YUM! Brian and Janie gave us ice cream sandwich makers for Christmas and this was our first time to make them. Nathan is addicted.

the simple things

Evie asked "Mommy, can I turn on lights when I get bigger?" ah, the simple things in life like being able to turn on lights for yourself! She's not quite tall enough to reach the switch yet, but she will often pull things over to stand on and do it.

Did I say that?

Apparently Hannah has been listening a little too well.....this morning Evie said "Hannah, I have a dress" Hannah's response "That's good information" that is a response we often give Hannah when she wants something, but doesn't ask. For example, "I want water" instead of "May I have water please"

this ones for Grandma

We had friends over this morning and were outside while the girls were playing in the pool. Evie got cold, so she got out and got dressed. A couple minutes after this I realized I didn't know where she went, my friend confirmed she went inside, ok, no problem, she'll be fine inside. Really, you think I should have learned the lesson not to leave Evie inside alone when she did this, but apparently I didn't. I go in to check on her and after walking in the house, calling her name and having no clue where she is, I find her in our front room.......with a stick of butter in her hand....."I'm eating butter. I'm hungry"

I took the butter away before taking the picture.....

But she was very excited about the butter

lazy summer nights

On Monday I was thing about how low key the weekend was, we walked to a (small) festival the church down the road was having and that was pretty much it. We made cake for Nathan, as well as Jello and he made rice crispy treats with Hannah. This prompted me to count how many weekends in a row we had been booked for......ten. We had ten weekends straight with a commitment. Lots of those commitments were fun and things that were good to do, but that's a lot of weeks in a row. I'm trying not to repeat that. We've also been booked most morning during the week, again, I'm working on this, to slow down just a little. But, our evenings after dinner (before the rain this week) have been great! The girls have been enjoying the kiddy pool and I've enjoyed the coolish-almost evening since it's been slightly less humid than normal and our yard is shaded at that time of day. Here are some pictures from our lazy summer nights.

Before we had the pool set up Hannah saw the sprinkler on and wanted to run through it. Sure, why not? :-) You have to love that outfit, work bench goggles and all!

I really thought I had more pictures than this....I guess I was enjoying just relaxing and not doing anything! :-)

Vacation Bible School

I haven't posted on our week of VBS, but since the girls are still singing the songs and saying the Bible verses (YES!) I figured I should. Our church isn't huge, 75 people maybe, but we had 55-60 kids come every day and 65 different kids come through out the week. It was a huge success. We had lots of younger kids. 2s and 3s were together and that was only workers kids, Evie had fun, but by the end it was a long week away from Mommy every morning for three hours. She did super well and got to do some things with Hannah so I think that helped. Evie loved the songs, and each day they also a music class they went to, even though she'll sing them in the car (we have a CD of all the music from the week that is the only thing the girls want to listen to while in the car) she wouldn't sing them during that class. The other classes were 4s, 5s, K-1st and 2nd-5th grade. I was the Bible story teacher and had all the kids rotate through my room. Apparently at least my daughter was paying attention part of the time, as when Hannah randomly said Daniel 9:9 in the car yesterday she said it exactly as we were practicing it at VBS. This gives me some confidence that I'll be able to home school and she might learn something :-) The other thing that struck me while in the large group setting watching all the kids sing and dance is how young my kids are still! They were so small compared to most of the kids there.

In this picture you can see Hannah in the blue on the right in the back and can see how small she looks compared to the other kids!

Here's another shot of the large group the largest group (K-1st) is on the left and you can't see all of them, there were 15+ of them. When they came for the Bible story it was kind of crazy because we were in a really small room!

RAIN!

We've had rain the past two days, yesterday it only rained for maybe 15 minutes, but today we had several hours of rain. Yay! When Hannah first found it was raining she raced to get her rain boots on and go out it in. Evie on the other hand looked and said it's wet, if I go out I'll get wet. Hannah encouraged her and she finally came out, but it was pretty funny. Evie does not like getting wet, any drop of water on her clothes will cause her to strip and change. After being in the rain for a few minutes she got a little more used to it and had some fun. Of course right when she came in the clothes were off :-)

Hannah was excited!

Evie, a bit unsure

drought

For those of you who may not know we're in a drought....all of Texas is, and I think New Mexico too. It's pretty bad. Just how bad you ask? I just mowed my grass today for the first time in a month. Yes, four full weeks of no mowing! This is unheard of in Houston in the summer! In general you're mowing every week and if you don't you're not able to get through the grass because it's so long and thick! We've had 7 inches of rain since January 1st. We normally get 22 inches by now.....we've had half an inch in the past 3 1/2 months. Not so good. It's also been hot, record highs hot in June. We're supposed to get rain this week, we'll see if it really happens. It has been kind of nice because for Houston we had a relatively mild May and it's been less humid, so I really can't complain. But rain would be a good thing before the earth cracks and swallows us up.

lessons from today (so far)

Before noon today I had already learned two useful things, the first was yes, peanut butter really does work to get gum out of hair :-) Yesterday evening Evie said "where'd my gum go?" and we couldn't find it.....today as I was reading to her she asked "what's in my hair" it was the missing gum. I knew peanut butter was supposed to work to get gum out of things, but I don't remember having tried it before.
Second, I learned that urgent care facilities don't take kids under five. Good to know! Evie got a moderate cut in her big toe from Hannah attempting to close the door while Evie was in the way. I didn't think the cut needed stitches (and I was right!) but I couldn't figure out a good way to get it closed up because it was right on the joint of the big toe and the butterfly band aids we had wouldn't have worked. My doctors office said they could get me in at 1:50 this afternoon....this happened at 9:45 and I really didn't want to wait that long. After driving to the urgent care center I decided to walk into another pediatrics office that had been highly recommended to me and see if they'd look at the toe and they did! Evie did wonderful, the doctor was very impressed by the fact she wasn't crying or screaming, even when she was bending the toe to try and determine if it was broken. The doctor cleaned it out good (Evie was even laughing during part of the cleaning because she said it tickled) and then taped it and wrapped it up and said no swimming for 4-5 days. Oh no! They've been swimming at least once a day! And we were supposed to go to a splash park tomorrow :-(

Here's a picture of the foot

Mississippi Beach Pictures

Sorry it took forever for me to get this posted! Here are pictures from our weekend trip to the beach. We had a great time with Nathan's parents, we celebrated his Dad's birthday and got to see a little of what a dog show is like. I didn't get any pictures of the dog show :-( but Evie loved it, she got to pet lots of different dogs and was telling my grandparents over skype today about one of the dogs that had a face covered with fur. Evie actually got to go to the show twice and had a great time, the first time with Daddy and the second time we all stopped by on our way out of town.

This was the view from our porch

The girls at the beach with Grandma and Grandad

Some of the activities of the weekend included trying to catch a crab, we were unsuccessful in this venture.

However catching minnows was more successful. Here Evie is holding one

And here is Hannah holding one

And the girls gave one a boat ride :-)

Of course we ran and splashed in the water as well!

Hannah had fun jumping with Grandma and Daddy

And running with Daddy (I loved Hannah's face in this picture!)

Here's Evie jumping with Grandma and Grandad

Hanging out waiting for the next jump!

Evie jumping high with Grandad

Grandma and Grandad bought the girls a boat which they loved!

There was also digging in the sand, here the girls are in a huge hole Daddy dug.

And building of stand castles

And ice cream!!!!!

I know this is a random picture, but if you look at the gray on the left side of the picture you can see an E, Evie did it all by herself on a birthday card for Grandad!

swimming lessons

We've been doing swimming lessons twice a week for the last couple weeks (we started right before we went to MS) and the girls are enjoying it. Evie is quite the adventurous one in the water (surprise, surprise) and has attempted to swim several times by herself by stepping off the steps of the pool.....with no one there to catch her and giving no warning. She did this on Monday and went straight down, so Hannah seeing it stepped off to try and get her and went straight down. Evie is fine with it and just shakes it off, Hannah started wailing and saying "why can't I save Evie?" apparently she wasn't upset that she went under water, but was upset that her sister was under water and she couldn't help her. We had some a brief water safety lesson at that point about how they were all too small to try and save someone else. At least she cares about her sister :-)

the scent of a four year old

Last week we were given some new dress-up toys, some of the things included pretend make, hair drier etc. In with the make-up things was a bottle that looks like a perfume bottle. Hannah asked what it was and I told her. This morning she had the bottle and asked Evie if she wanted some perfume. This is what she said: Evie, want some perfume? It smells really good, like candy!

Who wouldn't want to smell like candy?

summer craziness!

I know I've totally been slacking at the blog thing the past month. I'm sorry, it's been busy and I've been trying to cut down my computer time and also been trying to pick up couponing, which is a crazy art, I'm not sure it's really worth the time involved, so computer time has been going to learning that....which has resulted in a lack of blogging. In the past week I've been to Mississippi and back, done four days of Vacation Bible School, been watching a 9 year old from church so she can do VBS too, taught swimming lessons to my kids and my friends kids on two days and saved a bunch of money on car insurance (no, not by switching to gieco, I switched homeowners and car insurance because our rates were increasing by over $400 this year, I saved the $400 plus a couple hundred more by switching!). There has been no down time to say the least. Right now I'm dumping pictures on my computer so I can have room to take more pictures tonight at the VBS open house. There will hopefully be lots more pictures and lots more blog posts coming in the next week or two.