Santa Bread

The other day I received an email from my mother in-law with a picture of Santa Bread in it. I found the recipe and did it with the girls yesterday.

Evie took pictures during some of the process. 

The girls did a great job cutting the beard and twisting it up! (well Kaleb was aparently playing with the pizza cutter)

Here it is before it went into the oven.

Here's the after, it turned out pretty good I thought. It also tasted good, it got devoured!

things the boys love

The other week in Sunday school the boys were learning how they should love God above everything else. One of the things they did were talk about the things they love.

This is Damen's, it says he loves, Daddy, Ice Cream and Chocolate Cake

I at least made Kaleb's list :-) It says, Mommy and Daddy, Spaghetti and Bacon

Apparently we feed them too much :-)

sling

After Nathan ended up with a sling, Hannah decided she needed one too.

Here's the one she made!

Swimming

Well Nathan was sleeping the day after he hurt his shoulder I was pretty tired too, so I kind of let the kids go wild. It was warm in the house, you know, like 65 degrees. So the kids decided to put on their swim suits, make a beach out of blankets, a diving board.

Hannah just jumped off the diving board, she's on the sand there

Damen jumping in

Evie diving in!

Kaleb brought the diving board down

Here you can see, the yellow pillow is the sand, the red towels are the towels they brought to the beach with them. :-)

The Adventures of the Day

The good news of the day was that the MRI Nathan had on Wednesday showed no additional issues. Which means he only dislocated his shoulder and nothing else, so he's good to use his shoulder again in two weeks. The doctor also said he could take it out of the sling when not doing much, for example he can use two hands at work.
After his doctors appointment we proceeded to take apart the dishwasher. It's been having problems with the top sprayer getting clogged with food debris and not spinning. Which results in our cups not getting clean because the water from below is not spraying. It's easy enough to clean out, but we've cleaned it out WAY too many times in the past few months. Today I took the entire bottom area a part, cleaned out the disposal blades and everything else and put it back together. We'll see how long it lasts for. If it doesn't last more than a month I think I might be in the market for a new dishwasher. It used to work great, but we can't figure out what happened that's allowing debris to feed into the upper sprayer.
The next excitement for the day was the hot water heater. It stopped working on us the other day, we hit the reset switch and it worked again...sort of. Then today it was running super hot, we had turned up the temperature a little when we had reset it, but not that much. We gave the boys a bath and then went to bath the girls and there was no hot water again. Nathan went and bought a "plumber's repair kit" for it which included the two thermostats and the two heater elements. I swapped out the top thermostat and then Nathan tested the bottom element and couldn't get a resistance reading. Not good. So I swapped out both elements and both thermostats since Nathan couldn't really do much with one hand. He did help a little and supervised, but I've decided plumbers and appliance repair people get paid way too much.
That was my Saturday, how was yours?

dress like a Bible character

The Thursday before Halloween was dress like a Bible character at AWANA.

Evie was Queen Ester, Hannah was Elijah

Kaleb was Salomon and Damen was David as a shepherd. He wanted a harp, but the best we had was xylophone.

my wonderful almost eight year old

Last night Nathan slipped on the stairs (he says "don't put that because that's embarrassing)  and dislocated his shoulder. He ended up in the ER (his second time in the ER in the two months) and didn't get home until 3 am. The person who brought him home brought me back to the hospital to get our car back. Anyway, needless to say we didn't get much sleep. When the boys work up just before seven I did not want to get up. Hannah got up right after I took the boys potty. I asked if she'd get the boys breakfast. Fortunately, I had made these yesterday.

So getting breakfast for them was pretty simple. She did get them milk as well and cleaned them up when she was done and played with them. Between everything I got almost another hour of sleep, it was wonderful! Not that I'm saying I got enough sleep, but you know, when you've only have three hours, another hour makes a big difference!

Park!

Tuesday was absolutely beautiful here! And all the public school kids had the day off because of elections. Yes, we still did school. But after the girls finished their school work very efficiently we headed to vote and then to a park about half an hour from our house. It was definitely worth the drive. The park had a zip line! And lots of other cool stuff.

 Evie chillin' out at a cool water table thing that didn't have the water on because it's off season

A very large sand pit right near the water table

Fake rock structures to climb. Hannah is climbing while her friend Elliet is sitting at the top

The boys attempting to climb, they had a hard time on this one, but there was another one they were able to do, but I didn't get a picture of it. 

Cool hammock type swing, the boys had a blast. Damen is in the red with the huge grin on his face and Kaleb is next to him in the blue.

Kaleb sitting on a stump that had been craved into a chair.

Crazy kids near the creek about to get wet....

Hannah did not fall in, but our friend did, then all the kids took their socks and shoes off and went wading....not sure why the boys took their shoes off, as they had both stepped in the water with their shoes on :-) 

See, it really is wood! This is Kaleb climbing the wall.

The zip line is on the left, and the cool climbing thing is in the middle behind the blue ladder, it was an after thought to take pictures of these things :-)

This is what our house has come to...

Apparently Hannah feels she needs to claim her food in the fridge:

The sign on top of the container says "This is my food" and then there is a picture of a pear, which is what is in the container. :-)

A ride to the creek

On Wednesday I let the girls take their bikes to the creek. This is the first time I let them go on their own, they had gone with our neighbor who is 11 all summer, but she's in school now. Anyway, they made sure to bring supplies since it's oh to far away, about three tenths of a mile. They brought a backpack with bananas (ask them about the bananas in the backpack song if you talk to them), band-aids, tissues and my camera.  The story goes a big dump truck came down the road while they were riding up the big hill past the creek and scared them so they (Evie) dropped my camera and when they got back to the creek they realized it was gone! Evie went back and found it. Good thing it's drop proof :-) Anyway, they did get some pictures while on the adventure!

I liked this one with the leaves and reflections in the water

Of course Evie likes her selfies :-) 

Pretty leaves

The creek

More pretty leaves

The road.

Windy

Today was super windy here. It was windy when we woke up, we heard it howling around the house. When we came back from church the large dead tree in front of our house was down. This was a tree that was dead when we moved in, near the house and leaning toward it. We were very thankful that it landed on our front lawn and not our house. It took out most of our weeping cherry tree, but that was the worst of the damage. Nathan took down the rest of it and cut up what had fallen.

Here's the tree

Here's where the majority of it fell.

Here's what's left of our weeping cherry tree

Here's where the rest fell

Nathan taking the rest of the tree down

Nathan tried pushing it down after cutting it (this picture is actually of him cutting around it, but I thought it looked like him pushing and would work for that since I didn't take any of him actually pushing the tree) and it didn't go, we ended up roping it and were able to pull it down.