New York!

This past Saturday Nathan took the girls into New York City for a Berenstain Bears Live show. They left early, before 8 am and came back around 6 pm. They had a great time taking the train in, seeing the show and stopping at some of the shops in the Time Square area.

Excited to be on the train and going into the city with Dad!

At Grand Central station

Sitting waiting for the show to begin

Can you tell Hannah is having a good time?

Here's the set from the show. Nathan said it was well done, and aimed at the girls age level. They were all singing a song from it when they got back :-)

After the show they headed over to central park and had lunch there. 

They enjoyed them M&M store

And hung out with the blue M&M

They also went to the Disney Store, the Hershey's store, where they were given a kiss upon arrival and Toys 'R Us.

  Here are the girls at Time Square

And why not stop at the library while you're there? 

And here are my silly girls with the Empire State building in the background. 

I asked Nathan why there weren't any selfies...he said he didn't think to take one or some lame excuse like that :-) But over all it was a good trip and everyone had a great time. Hopefully we'll be heading into the city a little more often in the future, since we really aren't that far away.
And what was Mom doing with the boys while Dad and the girls were out you ask? We had a little key day at home, while I was looking over my Sunday school lesson for Saturday, the boys were playing on a small slide (which they were using upside down) and Kaleb managed to fall down the front hill into the raspberry bush and get a pretty good cut on his ear and head from the thorns but really that was all our excitement for the day.  No stitches needed, so we were good.

clothes?

Yesterday morning, in the car down the street from our house on our way to Hannah's orthodontist appointment, Hannah looks over at Evie and says "why is Evie still in her pajamas?" Fortunately we hadn't even turned off our street yet, so I was able to turn around and get her clothes. We managed to get to the appointment right on time, I like to be a couple minutes early, but at least we weren't late! This is not the first time something like this has happened this summer. We went to a library program early this summer and Evie forgot her shoes. We made it all the way there and she got out before I knew this. I just brought her without the shoes......no one noticed, or at least no one asked/commented. A lot of kids had flip flops and had them off anyway, so I think that helped. :-) I guess along with asking if everyone is buckled I need to start doing a clothes check too!

cheap entertainment

The electric company is adding new conduit on our street. The electric lines go through our yard. Which means we've had an excavator in our yard for the past several days. And what is more thrilling than an excavator digging up your yard for two three year olds and a five year old? Nothing really.

It's a mini-excavator

On Friday they dug up our driveway and re-asphalted it.

Here is Kaleb (I think) and Evie watching

We made them cookies on Friday. Yesterday, we brought out blueberry muffins and zucchini bread. Friday was a bigger crew because of the asphalt, in general it's just two guys. The boys and Evie have spent quite awhile watching them.

sleepy kid

Friday around 10:20 pm Evie came out of her room. Stood in the middle of the living room where we were and said in a very sleepy only half awake state "my underwear is breaking apart" we gave her a funny look, she unzips her PJs takes her arms out and drops them down (they were footed PJs) and there were two strings coming off her underwear. One on each side. Nathan and I were both like "yep, they are" I at that point broke down in laughter, Nathan helped cut the strings off the underwear. Saturday night in the middle of the night we hear Evie start crying. Nathan went into her room and then called me in. She had some how made it over all the stuff on her floor and got herself stuck in her closet. We put her back in bed and asked her about it on Sunday. She had no recollection of it at all.

water fun

This summer has been cool, we haven't hit 90 yet, and have had a lot of days in the 70s, so we haven't done much water stuff besides swimming lessons. Well, last week I finally got out our swimming pool and slide and let the kids have fun. It wasn't exactly warm, and the water was freezing. But the kids had fun.

 The girls wanted me to take this picture of them all jumping in together. 

Evie back floating

I love the face on Damen in this picture

Hannah was super smilely the whole time, she was so happy to be playing in the water, even though it was a little cold. She'd sit on the edge, plop her bottom in the water and then jump up out of the water and laugh. It was great.

You can see from this picture that they may not have quite been using the slide properly. They decided it was more fun to slide most of the way and then jump :-)

Frogs!

The girls have been enjoying catching frogs this year. Pretty much everyday they play in the yard they catch at least one a day. Last week (the week before VBS) the girls were waking up and going out frog hunting before they even ate breakfast!

Here are the girls with their bucket and frogs

Here's the frog they caught

Here's another toad they caught

They like to play with the frogs for a few hours, but they have been really good about letting them go at the end of the day.

Gypsy Moth

The girl caught a gypsy moth caterpillar  at the end of June we fed it and watched it turn into a beautiful moth. Here are some pictures (I did a way better job taking pictures on this one).

 The caterpillar

Spinning her web

The cocoon

I thought it was totally cool how she shed her skin before going into the cocoon, here you can see the skin and the cocoon

And the moth

We know it's female because of the coloring on it. The mans are brown and have much bigger antenna. 

I read somewhere at some point that female gypsy moths can't fly. Well, when we brought her outside and figured out she was female we brought her down to a tree. Within minutes of bringing her out we had a crazy male flying around looking for her, with a crazy bird chasing after him! It was so neat to watch, the bird did not get the male. And the male finally made it to the general area of the female (it was after the cocoon, so we brought that down to where we had put her) but it was late and we had to get the girls to bed, so we didn't stick around to see if the male found her or not and the next day she was gone. But it was all very cool to watch.  

Driving

Yesterday I got a glimpse into what it will be like when Kaleb is driving in 13 years. Kaleb was in his little tikes car and Damen was behind him. Kaleb turns and says, "Damen, watch out there is a car coming!" and them promptly starts backing his car into him. Such brotherly love! :-)

Lyme - Take one

We live in the woods, we have lots of ticks. We do tick checks every night. Lyme disease is pretty much inevitable at some point. Hence the take one, I'm sure we'll deal with it again at some point. This was our first encounter with lyme with the kids. Nathan and I were just talking about a week before it happened, how one of our best clues that it was lyme would be only one child is sick. Well, starting while my parents were here Hannah wasn't acting her normal self. She was very chill (okay, okay, I know she's a chill girl, but she's normally super excited to see her grandparents and she wasn't) and then on Friday she got a super bad headache and threw up. A headache and fatigue are the primary signs of lyme in kids. Saturday she still had the headache and she had gone to bed at 6 pm Friday night. Our pediatrician has Saturday hours, so we took her in and the doctor agreed with my assessment of lyme. Oh, and did I mention she had a tick on her the week before? She's doing much better now and half way through her course of antibiotics.

What's lost shall be found

The boys found my missing library book today.....it was in their room. I had looked in their room. I had lifted up their mattresses, I had changed the sheets on their bed......It was between the bottom bunk and the wall, I really thought I had looked there when looking under the mattress and such, but maybe I only looked under the bed and under the mattress. It only ended up being a 30 cent fine....I'm trying to figure out what I learned through this, because I spent hours looking for that book. I really should learn something from this...shouldn't I? But what? I don't know. Anyway, the lost book saga is over and that is good.

VBS

We started Vacation Bible School today. I spent four hours after church preparing my room and some packets for the kids. I'm in charge of telling the Bible story. We're doing a spy agency theme and are investigating things about Jesus. Today went well, I learned how short 25 minutes is. I guess I'm used to teaching Sunday school where I have at least 45 minutes in general, 25 minutes seem to fly by. All my kids enjoyed their time there and can't wait to go again tomorrow! Oh, I forgot to mention, they were so excited about it they were all up at 6:50 am, we had to pick someone up on our way there, other we would have been at church super early. Instead the kids played outside before we went, because, really, what else do you do at 7 am? :-)

woodpecker

After my parents left on Thursday the 10th, we looked out on our back deck and there was a dead bird. I gave the girls some gloves and told them they could examine it. I think they liked that. It was a juvenile red-bellied woodpecker and part of the top beak was broken off, I don't know if that's why it died, or if it flew into our sliding glass door or what. The girls really enjoyed the opportunity to get to look at and touch it.

This is how we found it laying only a foot or two from our door. 

In this one you can see the beak damage a little bit.

And here's what it looked like when we flipped it over.

After looking at it I had Hannah throw it deep in the woods. I'm glad with have lots of woods around :-)

A lost book

The library says I've lost a book. I've been looking for it for the last four weeks, since I returned all the other books that I got out the same day and that one didn't show up as returned. I have looked every where. I've lifted up mattresses, couches, couch cushions, car seats, behind our book shelves, I've look through our hundreds of books four times. I've looked every where multiple times. I've never lost a library book before, whenever I've had a book that I couldn't find in the past it's been at the library, not checked in properly. I don't understand. It's not on the shelf at the library and it's not in my house. I've dumped out bins of toys, looked behind the girls dressers and in all their drawers. When I was talking to one of the librarians about it, she asked if I looked under the couch cushions and under the car seats, I couldn't even begin to explain how I have torn my house and car apart looking for this book! It's driving me crazy! Now I'm "accruing" fines, which they wouldn't let me pay until they're at the book replacement price, encase they find it. What? Such is my life.

swimming update

Today Hannah swam the width of the pool on her back! Wahoo!!!!! This is super exciting because Hannah has struggled with back floats and being on her back in general in the pool. Making it even just the width on her back is huge! She's been practicing on a lot on her own and was very determined today, she kept telling me she didn't want my help. I'm so proud of her!

mustaches

Last Wednesday my parents stopped by for the night on the way to go visit my sister Becca and her new baby. The kids were excited to see them and had a great time. For breakfast on Thursday my parents had a smoothie, and I gave some to the boys. I normally give them straws when they drink smoothies, but I didn't. So the boys ended up with mustaches.

Damen and his mustache

Kaleb's with a little more flare on the edges.

The boys think mustaches are great and keep talking about how they'll have one like Daddy when they get older. Regularly I'll here "I'll have a mustache when I get older" or "when I'm older I'll have a mustache" which is pretty funny coming from them because they have no idea what "older" really means, so they act as if it's going to happen tomorrow.  :-)

appliance issues take two

I had mentioned things had been crazy around here, hence the lack of blogging for awhile, well, it started July 2nd when a suspension spring on our side load washer broke. We ordered the part and had it in by Saturday. We put two new springs in and not thinking through everything I just threw a load of clothes in and started it, assuming it would work. Well, it didn't work. Something else broke when the drum dropped. Nathan decided the best course of action was to spend four plus hours trying to figure out what that was. This resulted in a long not so pleasant discussion late on Saturday night regarding what should be done with the ten year old washing that was not working and had a previously never fixed leak anyway. Well, after the "discussion" on the fact that the washing machine was leaking, ten years old and really small for our family, we decided it was best to buy a new one instead of putting more money into the old one. Sunday morning after having gone to bed way too late, we were up early due to the kids, which ended up being a good thing, because we noticed the fridge had stopped cooling again.  AHH! Fortunately we knew the drill, put everything in the freezer and load up the cooler, so we did this before leaving for church and still made it on time! So Sunday, after church while Nathan was at a youth leaders meeting I took the kids washer shopping in the two hours I had before a pool party we were going to that afternoon. After the appliance shopping I stopped at home to pick up stuff for the pool party (I hadn't gone home after church) and the fridge was working again. We bought the circuit board for the fridge and ordered a new washer Sunday night. The new washer came last Thursday it is 4.1 cu. ft. our old one was 2.65 cu. ft. Do you know how many more clothes you can fit in a 4.1 cu. ft washer? It is amazing! And our old washer still works because it was way over sized for our washer because we got it used from some people at church. That is part of the craziness. I'll leave the rest for another post another day.

Bringing our kids to the dark side

Nathan has been recruiting our kids for the dark side recently. I thought you might enjoy seeing the processes.

Library summer fun

Our library has lots of fun programs during the summer. The girls have been participating in a 4-H fun on Tuesday mornings and we've done three special programs as well. One was a concert, the boys loved it. Anything with a "real" guitar the boys love. They have pretend guitars they use every day. I wasn't sure how'd they do, as last year they didn't last more than 15 minutes through any of the programs. Well, at the concert they did amazing! They were engaged and following instructions and having fun and made it through the entire 50 minute program. This gave me confidence in bring them to the next ones and made be smile. They've come so far in the past year! It gives me hope for the future. The next was a magic show.

 It was with a magician and his dog. Here he is pulling a shovel out of a suitcase. 

He was great, there was lots of laughter and fun during the magic show. All the kids loved it.

 And the third was a drum program.

 The kids did okay, but this performer definitely wasn't as good with the kids as the other two were. And the show was over an hour long, the others were closer to 45 minutes. But we made it through, I was thinking we might have to leave towards the end, but I was able to help Damen keep it together and stick with it. 

On Sunday we went to the annual used book sale to help support the "Friends" of the library who sponsor all these programs, it was the last day of the sale and we went in the last couple of hours, so the selection wasn't huge, but we were still able to get some books, and the price was definitely right. The children's books were $3 a box, we had more than 60 books in our box. Not bad for three dollars!

4th of July

Okay, so I'm a little behind in posting...maybe really behind, hopefully I'll catch up soon and you'll have a better understanding of what happened....I have a lot of posts I want to do, it's just finding the time to do them all!
We decided to celebrate the 4th of July with fry day. Because really, what's more American than fried food? :-) It was raining here most of the day anyway, so it worked out well. We started the day by making chocolate donuts with chocolate glaze. Yum!

 Here's a donut being cut for frying

Here's a heart shaped one ready for the frier.

Evie helping to cut them out.

Hot out of the frier! 

Getting frosted and sprinkled!

And ready to be eaten!

Yum!

Here are the leftovers that were eaten the next day for breakfast.

Next up was corn dogs for lunch. They were a hit with the kids.

Hannah helped flour all the hotdogs

Then they were dipped in batter

And fried to golden brown goodness!

Now it's time to enjoy! We added some blueberries to lunch as well to be pretend we were a little healthy :-) 

For dinner we had homemade chicken nuggets and fries. We made over 10 pounds of fries and froze a bunch of them. The kids had fun helping make some of the food and everyone definitely enjoyed eating it. Maybe not the healthiest, but if you only do it once a year it can only kill you so fast! I didn't end up getting any pictures of the chicken and fries. It was a late dinner, but with all the food no one minded.

Swinging in the rain

A couple weeks ago I was doing laundry in my room, and the kids were outside playing on the swing set. I heard lots of laughing. I looked out and it was raining and the kids were having an absolute blast. The girls were swinging and pushing the boys on the glider and they were all laughing and talking. I just stood and watched for a while. I took some pictures and this video.

They are laughing, and discussing how wet they are :-) 

None of the pictures really came out well because it was raining, they were moving and I was taking them through the window screen. But you can kind of see the smiles through the blur.

I love it when they play together and have such joy!