Proof!

Hannah actually can ride a two wheeler now. Okay, so it's only a picture, not a video, but close enough.

 Coming

 And going!

making a seesaw

Hannah and Evie were playing outside one day and found a very long stick....what do you do with a very long stick? Put it over another piece of wood to make a seesaw of course! And they even found nails in the garage and a hammer to try and put it together.

Evie helping to stabilize as they try and get the nail in.

Vermont Pictures!

Here are some pictures from our overnight to Vermont two weeks ago.

 These ladies are amazing!

Snuggle time with Uncle Lucas!

All smiles with Aunt Becca!

Hanging out at the pond.

Hannah and Evie having a ride with Daddy and Uncle Lucas

 Enjoying the sun. One of the boys came over and laid down with them, I think it was Green Machine, but he didn't like the sun in his eyes. It was super cute. 

Giant caterpillar! 

Frisbee! Nice throw Hannah!

So close...

Do you see that view?

The retreat center had a huge bell that everyone enjoyed ringing!

swing set fun

Look how many things I can hold at once Mom.....now wait a sec...

Okay, got it...

Now I can swing!

Okay, now I'd like you to image both girls sitting on the swings like Evie is in the above picture. Now imagine them holding a ring and holding hands. It makes them go up and down, they love doing this and pretending they are are riding a carousel. Maybe I'll get a picture of them actually doing it so you don't have to use your imagination, but what fun would that be?

pictures from the last day of swimming lessons

I remembered to bring my camera to the last day of swimming lessons and Evie ended up being cold, so she enjoyed using it!
Evie's selfies!

 

Aren't you proud Aunt Debbie?

Not a bad streamline huh? 

And Hannah. 

Back floating!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

playground play date

On Wednesday we met up with a mom who has twins a year younger than my boys. I had clothes to give her, but we decided to meet at a park and let the kids play some too. We got there a little early and the girls were excited to be there, as we hadn't been to a park in you know...two weeks or so, and we hadn't been to this specific one for awhile. Well, Hannah has definitely been getting stronger and more adventurous.

One of the first things she did was go all the way across these monkey bars! I've never seen her go more than four or five rungs before! 

And now she's excited with the park has a firemen's poll! 

The four boys had a great time playing together too, and it was super cute to watch them. :-)

Play-doh

Yesterday Evie asked if she could play with play-doh, she had asked a day or two ago but it was not a good time, so I took the opportunity yesterday to say yes. She and Hannah started out playing with it. Hannah made this amazing cake for one of their stuffed animals named David because it was his birthday.

Evie made the brownies on the left side (the brown rectangles with spots on top, that's the frosting). She then proceeded to play with the play-doh for three hours! I was impressed. And then the girls got cleaned up with minimal help. I told Hannah she had to help Evie clear the table if she wanted dinner, Hannah was hungry and very motivated to get dinner :-) I think I may let them play with play-doh more....

potty training take 2, Day 3

I'm sure you wanted a day three update on potty training. Because it's so exciting you know. I'm working on uploading pictures so I can post on something more exciting. I just dumped the pictures on to my computer...197 pictures on the camera....oops, I just have uploaded those sooner. Anyway, back to potty training :-) Today was successful as well, it's all going so well I'm waiting for it all to come crashing down. Today we added underwear to the mix. Because the boys asked for it, I guess they didn't really like running around with no clothes? Little Boy Blue had no accidents and did great. Three days of potty only for everything! Green Machine had one accident, this was an actual accident, or testing of the underwear....he realized that the pee was going all over the floor said "Uh oh" and stopped and we got him to the potty where he finished peeing, which is good. Tomorrow is church...we'll see how that goes......

potty training take 2, Day 2

It was day two of no clothes little boys running around our house. Although if you ask my grandparents and Debbie they might say otherwise, as they did see one of the boys as a bee. They had fun dressing up with the girls today. Anyway, day two went even better than day one. We had two boys poop in the potty and we had zero accidents! What more can you ask for? I think that's a pretty good record so far. Our calendar is pretty clear for the next week, so hopefully we'll be able to finish what we've started and have them in underwear soon!

potty training take 2

Yesterday I got very frustrated with Green Machine after having put him on the potty and then having him refuse to go and drench his diaper, so the only logical solution was to take away the diapers. Right? Well, that's what I did. I decided to run both boys with no diapers. They know how to use the potty, they just choose not to, so I didn't give them the choice of a diaper anymore. They both did great the rest of the evening yesterday and today Little Boy Blue didn't have any accidents. He even pooped on the potty, it was all good. Green Machine was doing great until after dinner...I put him on the potty because I knew he needed to go, he sat there for a minute and then said he was all done. Fine, I thought, I'll let him go for a minute and then maybe he'll be more willing to sit on the potty. So I went to get Little Boy Blue out of his seat, as he was now finished eating and of course as I'm getting the cloth to wipe up Little Boy Blue I hear "uh oh messy" from Green Machine. REALLY!? I know he could have held it another minute. It's really frustrating when he's just not going to defy you. But, the next two days I have nothing planned out of the house, originally it was a visit week, but since we don't have those anymore the whole day tomorrow is free! We will continue to work at it and see how things go. Today we went to the dentist, the library and to pick up hand me downs for the boys, and they stayed dry through all that, I think that's pretty good. But I did have them in diapers just encase. I'm hoping by Sunday at least Little Boy Blue will be in underwear, I mean if he can make it one day he can make it everyday right?

summer is ending....

Labor day is the "unofficial" end of summer, at least that's what everybody says and it will be here Monday. Apparently our weather knows that too. Don't believe me?

The highs are in the 80s through Monday, see? Okay, so you can't see all of this week, but it's been in the 80s all week, but you can see that on Tuesday it turns to 70s and lows in the 50s. Perfect fall weather! Houston weather never got that memo, because Houston doesn't have seasons. Today was our last swimming lesson of the summer. The water actually felt really nice because it was sunny and warm, not nearly as cold as it had felt. I even took the boys in, which I hadn't been doing a lot of. Everyone had a good time!

A good day with good news

Today we read a book about worms, and looked at a couple more to get more information on worms. Then we got a container, filled it with dirt and found worms. I then had Hannah draw a picture of a worm and label the parts of the worm.. But we haven't started school yet ;-)
We also got a call from the boys social worker today. Their birth-mom is no longer requesting visits!!!! This is very exciting because it means our Fridays will be free! At least most of them, apparently birth-dad has reappeared and the social worker is meeting with him on Wednesday. That might result in visits once a month...if he confirms. But that's a lot better than weekly! It also sounds like their birth-mom is not going to fight and will sign her rights away. Now if we can just get their birth-dad to do that as well. There is a big meeting Sept. 19th where all parties involved with their lawyer get together and discuss what they're going to do and pick a court date, if any party wants to contest the termination. Please pray that both parents would do what's in the best interest of the boys!
We also had our last swimming lessons take one today. We were doing lessons with two different groups, so we're now down with the first group. The pool was rather cold in August, so lessons ended up being pretty short, but I think all the girls improved at least they got some practice in. After swimming there was leftover birthday cake which everyone enjoyed :-)

school starts tomorrow...

But I wasn't planning to start until Sept. 9th, because the next two weeks are kind of busy for us. Apparently my children are too eager to learn.....or have pets :-) One of the two. Nathan and I went hiking for a few hours today and when we came back the girls had a bucket full of warms. They wanted to go fishing...we have no fishing rods...."we can use sticks" yeah...okay. Put the worms back. "but mom...." I finally conceded to making a worm habitat tomorrow. We got books out of the library on worms and bees. Those were going to be our first subject matter for school. So it's now like it wasn't in the plan...I just wanted to wait, but really, I should take the opportunity while it's still presenting itself. Which means tomorrow we will be starting school....at least some what...but the girls won't know it :-) Which might be the best part of all!

Fall is in the air (again!)

I just went back a looked at when fall started last year. The post was 8/27/12......this year our first tree started turning last week, that's two weeks earlier than last year! And super early when you think about it, normally August is the dog days of summer. I am not going to complain, I'm loving it! Seasons are a wonderful thing! I still haven't gotten my pictures upload to the computer, so you'll be lacking pictures again.....that and the fact that I didn't run into the house to get my camera today to take pictures might be part of the lack of pictures :-) We had a long and eventful day that started out with swimming lessons, had a doctors appointment in Hartford in the middle and had a co-op from Nathan's work over for dinner. The co-op goes to RIT and is on leadership for InterVarsity Christian Fellow (IV) something that Nathan and I both were involved in. After getting back from Hartford and picking the girls up from where they stayed while I did the driving around the state we spent an hour or so outside playing in our yard. The girls were collecting leaves. They had "bouquet" of leave. There are some trees that are already turning here and the colors are magnificent. Pink, red, orange, yellows. They are really beautiful. Hannah is calling all the colored leaves "love leaves" and gives them to me as gifts. It is super sweet.

Permission Granted

We got a call last Monday with an invitation to Vermont for the weekend. It was an invitation we couldn't refuse, my good friends from high school all getting together for the weekend, something we had done at the end of high school beginning of college, but hadn't all been in the same place at the same time for the past 12 years! And we were all going to be there if I made it. We decided we'd leave Friday night, so I had to get permission quickly to be allowed to leave the state. Before an adoption is finalized you have to get a form signed to travel out of state and tell them exactly where you are going and what time you are leaving. The boys social worker is amazing, and got the form together and signed super quick......DCF technology is not so amazing, and on Friday I was emailing someone to find out where exactly the form was that was supposed to be emailed to be.The boys social worker is not able to scan in the documents. Who is in charge of this? So she has to give it to someone else to scan in and then email to her to email to me, or in this case because she was out of the office, she just had the person email me directly, but it was quite ridiculous. But it all came together and we arrived in VT late Friday night and stayed until Saturday at 7:30 pm. We had to be home for church on Sunday. But we had a wonderful time. I'll upload the pictures and post on it soon!

Winners

The kids all did the summer reading program at the library this summer. The girls completed the base 40 books for all the general prizes in about a week. After completing 40 books and getting all sorts of fun prizes like free curly fries at Arby's and two free books and a bunch of other stuff you get a raffle ticket to attempt to win bigger prizes. You can earn more raffle tickets by reading more books, up to ten tickets. The girls both got their extra ten tickets. Last year they did as well, but they didn't win anything. This year they both won something, along with Green Machine. The boys I gave up keeping track of books read after they heard their 40, so they only had one raffle ticket apiece. I entered both the boys into the sand toys, as that was definitely the best choice for them. Because Green Machine won, the librarian felt it necessary to get some sand toys for Little Boy Blue as well because they're twins. aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh :-p I have a feeling I'm going to be dealing with that their whole life. My kids are not they same, they do not need equal treatment, they need to learn about real life and they all know how to share! Anyway, Hannah won a soccer ball and is super excited about that and Evie won a my little pony unicorn and loves it. It made for a fun and exciting end to the day.

recovery....

Today Green Machine had surgery to repair a hernia. It went really well and he's doing wonderful. So good in fact that I'm not sure how to keep him from doing the things he's not supposed to do for the next several days. They said he'd probably be a little out of it the rest of the day because of the anesthesia and epidural. He was having issues walking right after surgery but by the time we got home he was completely fine. Fine as in he was jumping better than I had ever seen him jump. He actually jumped forward about six inches....he wasn't really getting of the ground a week ago. Better as in he was running, climbing pushing everything he in sight......how do you keep a two year old calm? Please tell me.

The weekend

This past weekend was a great low key weekend which involved things like worms, frogs, spiders and butterflies. The girls really like to catch these things and then they want to keep them as pets. We don't currently have a good setup for this, so I haven't been allowing them to do so. But they decided to "play with" all the worms that came out as I was wedding around our shrubs out front. There were way more worms in there than anyone should play with...we found a tree frog on the girls bike, tree frogs are so cool. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of any of the random creatures the girls played with this weekend. But I did take a picture of the highlight of the weekend..........a continuous flow water table!!! It's good having an engineer as a husband :-)

 Isn't it beautiful? It has four spouts, one for each child. 

The kids have been loving it, but really what kid wouldn't? What's not to love about playing with running water all the time? Lots of bath toys have been added to the buckets. And you can see in the picture our water table next to the new one which has been added for bath toy storage and additional play space. 

The girls enjoy playing in the upper bucket, which they can do freely without worrying about the boys, because they can't reach it yet. 

Last night I had fun helping Hannah work on riding a two wheeler, she's very determined to do it, which is great, and she actually has the balance down pretty well.......she doesn't like to break or steer though, which is causing some issues. But both girls had fun riding bikes and spending time with me after the boys had gone to bed :-)

A Day in the Life

Wondering what a day is like around here and why I'm not blogging as much as I'd hope to? I'm sure you are, so we'll use today. It was a "quiet" day, we didn't go anywhere and only had two things on the schedule. The day started with the boys waking up at 7 am, which is a fairly typical wake up time for them. The girls slept in, Hannah didn't get up until 8:40 am and Evie slept until 9:10! After getting everyone up and at least started on breakfast we skyped with my Grandparents, at least attempted to, our internet didn't like us very much this morning. After skyping we headed outside to play and decided to watch done the street to the cul-de-sac. When we got there we saw our neighbors out, the ones with kids near the girls (6 and 8) so we went to their house to see if they wanted to play and hung out there for awhile. While there Evie got hit on the head with a hammock pole. And the boys fought over a ride on car toy they had. We came home we got the mail, which didn't have something from the doctor that was supposed to be there so I had to call the doctor to find out where it was. After that I almost stepped on a snake that was on the driveway and Hannah freaked out. We then all went in for lunch, which for the boys was basically BRATS diet (Little Boy Blue has been having issues the past two days, but the good part is today he went in the potty every time he needed to go!) and then I tried to nap the boys, but neither of them fell asleep before their lawyer came. He was here for about 20 minutes, and loved the play room and was excited I was homeschooled and am homeschooling. They homeschooled their three children as well. After he left we headed back outside (it's been BEAUTIFUL weather, highs in the 70s!), where I pushed the boys on the glider for awhile while the girls swung. Then I decided I was going to fill up the sand box and Little Boy Blue got so excited about it he got off the glider and ran to the sandbox, but on the way got the wind knocked out of him by Evie who he ran in front of. He also ended up with a bloody nose from that and was pretty dazed for several minutes. Then I went and decide today was a pull something out of the freezer for dinner today, which ended up being great, because as I started to get that out Evie started not feeling while. She ended up throwing up, and had a shower before going to bed at 5:30 pm. We got everyone else through dinner and got the boys in bed. Then Nathan and I had ice cream with Hannah and spent sometime with her on the swings. After that we put Hannah to bed, I exercised and we watched some star trek enterprise. To summarize, my day involved vomit, diarrhea, blood, doctors, lawyers, engineers (Nathan said it, not me!), bike repair (I put a chain back on a bike) and beautiful weather! Now it's late and I need to get to bed!

Bonfire!!!!!

Last Sunday we had the privilege of having the youth over to our house for a bonfire! We had a good group show up, despite the rain and were able to get the fire started.

 Nathan supervising the building of the fire

Nathan told them they could build it as big as they wanted, as long as it didn't burn the one branch above the fire pit :-) 

It didn't take too long to get it started, but just after starting it it began to rain. 

Some of the kids taking cover under a tarp. 

The fire is going! 

Hanging out watching the fire with an umbrella.

The fire right after it collapsed in on itself.

After this point all the boys went inside and I hung out with a few of the girls who were willing to brave the rain outside :-) There were some marshmallows roasted and 'smores eaten and a good time was had by all!

The Woods

Have I mentioned we live in rural America in the woods? You know, rural as in where turkey flocks come walking through your yard? After we got home from Village Fair days (because we hadn't spent enough time outside yet, obviously, in the two hours we were there) we were hanging out and Hannah says "birds! what kind are they Mommy?" and I look and a flock of turkeys is walking across our driveway. There were at least seven of them. Nathan once saw a flock of about 30 in a neighbors yard. It's kind of crazy. I got the camera and tried to take a picture..but it didn't come out too well.

There are at least three, I think four turkeys in this picture.....but I didn't have the camera when they were crossing our driveway and there were no woods......

Villiage Fair Days

Friday after VBS ended not wanting the kids to be bored or anything (or maybe just because I'm crazy!) I decided to take them to the village fair days. I put the boys in the stroller and told the girls we were not going to buy anything, but they could take all the free stuff they could get....within reason. I did limit them to one piece of candy or free item per booth and they had to go up and get it, I wouldn't help them. We ended up with a bunch of firemen hats, some candy, a few free reuseble bags, some coloring books and the library was giving away actual books, which was definitely Hannah's favorite freebie!

This is Little Boy Blue with his hat, he was so excited about it! I figured I can post this picture, as you can't see his face.....they never did get back to me on if I could post pictures on the blog, and I did has about it a couple times. Legal never got back to the boys social worker :-( 

Oh yes, and we got balloons, Evie and Hannah's were the only ones that made it home. The boys popped before that. 

We probably ended up staying a little longer than we should have, especially since no one had napped, but we did walk the whole thing. I didn't let the girls go in the bounce houses because I wasn't going to let the boys go in them, they were pretty disappointed about that, but we all made it and had a pretty good time. It accomplished the goal of not napping the boys to get them to go to bed earlier, so that was good :-)

VBS pictures

I went to write this post five days ago, but my computer was not liking me and hanging up so I couldn't get the pictures in, which was the whole point of the post, so after 15 minutes of trying I gave up, because I didn't have more time to fight with the computer. Here we are, five days later we'll see if it works any better.
The only day I had my camera at VBS was at the ice cream social, but I did take pictures of some of the girls crafts before throwing them away :-)

Here's Evie enjoying her ice cream in the shirt she made at VBS one day. I did not throw the shirts away, don't worry! 

 Hannah enjoying her ice cream in her shirt...sorry, I don't have a better front shot of her shirt.

Here's Hannah being Hannah :-) I love that girl, but it sometimes drives me crazy how she won't even pretend to sing when up in front of people.....maybe I should teach here the peanut butter trick (Becca do you remember that?).

Here's Evie having fun singing and doing the motions. Hannah did do the motions at home for me!

This is from their mission section one day, they learned how to write China in Chinese. I don't know if this is right side up or not....Rachel? 

The theme this year was Colossal Coaster, so they made roller coasters one day. They had rolos on them, but those all got eaten very quickly. This was Hannah's.

This was Evie's. Again, missing the candy. :-) 

There you have it. Some pictures from VBS!