Grass mowing

We have over two and a half acres, which takes a bit to care for. There is one person who is always eager and willing to mow.

Hannah has thoroughly enjoyed getting to use the zero turn. She does a great job. I don't have her edging yet, but considering I may have gotten stuck in the mud pretty much every time I've mowed around the pond I think that might be safer for now. :-) 

Our new house

I included a link to the video walk through I did of the house, but here are some pictures. The kids have been absolutely loving the pool and ponds! They have played baseball, basketball and soccer in the yard. They go fishing regularly and we finally got our trampoline setup as well. Here are some pictures from the last couple months.

While the movers were unloading our stuff the kids enjoyed the pool!

Fishing in the small pond, this pond is entirely in our yard!

More swimming

This is a great blue heron footprint. It stops by our ponds every once in awhile. 

More fishing

The kids catch crickets and grasshoppers for bait. They have gotten very proficient at taking fish off the hook. 

With a fish! One day they caught 30 plus fish

And a tiny one

And when you get bored with swimming in the pool? Well, you just go swimming in the pond of course!

They have fun in the mud!

And then back to the pool? Thankfully they didn't do that!

I think this is a pretty sweet picture!

They've had fun with the waterproof camera too :-)

There have been a few rainbows as well!

4th of July vacation

The week of July 4th we headed to Rochester, NY to visit friends and family! Rachel, Magnus, Becca and family and my parents joined us there. We rented a house with my parents and Becca and Lucas and kids. The cousins had such a good time together! We enjoyed the opportunity to see everyone, even though it was a little crazy with trying to work through mortgage stuff for the house.

Hanging out with Nana and Grandad eating ice cream!

The boys got hats from my parents from Spain

There was also some hiking and Hannah found a salamander!

There were lots of parties. Here they are playing a water balloon game

And my kids loved hanging out in the pool as well

This is the group of girls I hung out with in high school!

We went through Canada to get to and from Rochester, as it is supposed to take less time. On the way home we stopped at Niagara Falls (US side).

The kids were super whiney about stopping, but really enjoyed it once we got out and walked around. We didn't stay long because we had a long drive ahead but it was neat to see. 

They thought the rainbows were pretty neat!

We stopped at a Canadian rest stop :-) 

And as we waiting for almost three hours to cross the border back into the US Evie entertained herself and other cars by blowing bubbles out the window. The delay at the border made for a very, very long day.

We got to see a beautiful sun set and made it home again safely super late/early. I calculated it out and we spent over eighty hours traveling between Oklahoma, Fort Wayne two and a half times and Rochester. The kids did really well with all of it, but I think we're done driving for awhile. 

Fort Wayne - Take 2

Shortly after returning from our first trip to Fort Wayne, Nathan officially accepted an the offer for an engineering position there. He accepted the position Tuesday evening June 18th, we told the kids Wednesday morning, Nathan called a realtor office and spoke with a realtor who said he could take us house hunting the next two days, so we packed up and headed down to Fort Wayne again. We looked at 15 houses in two days with the kids in tow. The realtor was great about it, he is a retired postal worker and did a wonderful job with the kids. He even cleaned up the blood at the last house we saw on Thursday, as Kaleb had cut his hand on Tuesday (right before his soccer game, debatably needing stitches, but we were in Alpena and there's no easy way to get stitches....) and reopened it running around the driveway at the house and then dripped blood on the porch as he came to tell us what he had done. Again, we were tempted to take him to an urgent care to get stitches, but it seemed to be healing some and figured he'd be okay, so we just headed back to the hotel. That was day number one of house hunting, day number two went much more smoothly and we found a house we liked! We came home early Saturday morning (I think we got in around 1 am? this was the theme of our travel getting in super late/early depending how you look at it) praising God we again did not hit any of the wild life we saw, and thankful for the opportunity to see it! We processed through the houses that weekend and put an offer on the one we liked on Monday the 24th. Fort Wayne is currently a pretty hot market, but the house we liked had been on the market all last summer and for over a month with no offers this year, so we offered below asking price by a bit. We worked back and forth for a few days with the offer and closed and had it accepted June 28th. We closed on the house July 19th. From the time Nathan accepted the position until the day we moved we were in Alpena for 18 days. Between the house hunting trip and a trip to Rochester, NY for vacation it was slightly crazy. If you take out the days the movers were packing us up you can subtract another three days. Our friends were disappointed how fast we left, and our realtor found it crazy how fast we could close on a house and move (we closed 21 days after having our offer accepted). Here's a link to a video walk I did through of our new house!

Fort Wayne - Take 1

On June 8th, after a funeral in Alpena for a man who was only 24 with three young kids, we headed down to Fort Wayne, IN, for a few days. Nathan had done an interview a week earlier there and I had hoped to go with him to see the area, but the kids were sick, so we stayed in Alpena. Since it's only a five and a half hour drive we decided to go check it out when Nathan had an offer on the table from the company he interviewed with. We went to the zoo and the main library downtown. The kids were very impressed with the size of the library. The kids section was probably almost as big as our entire library here. And they had fun pods to read in. The girls and I spent about four hours there and they would have stayed longer. Nathan took the boys shoe shopping after about an hour as all three of them were in need of shoes. The kids enjoyed the zoo as well, but it was kind of cold and rainy when we went, so they weren't thrilled with that. They were also hoping to swim or do a splash park, but since it wasn't nice the entire time we were there they did not get to do that. Here are some pictures from the zoo.

Hanging out with a peacock

How close can you get?

This guy was pretty cool too...

Wait what? Who is that peacock? 

And who wouldn't want to ride a giant turtle?

Too bad you couldn't ride the real ones! But they were fun to see!

Lion!

The giraffes were pretty cool too, you could even feed them, so they came nice and close even if you didn't have food. 

The kids liked the stuff you could play in/on like these eggs, they are pretending to hatch

And go on a safari

Drums!

And tents

Hanging out by the tiger

Time to fly! 

The kids had a good first impression of Fort Wayne. Little did they realize they'd be back just over a week later.....

Vole!

June 25th when Evie went down stairs to cleanup she saw something in the window sill. We thought it was a mouse, but after a little more research I'm pretty sure it was a vole. It got stuck as the window sill was too deep for it to get out. The kids managed to catch it and Hannah fed it and kept it clean until we left for vacation on the 29th, then she let it go. It was kept outside.

Here it is when the kids first caught it. 

Curled in the corner of the cage. 

Isn't it cute?

Wild flowers

Evie took the camera and went around our neighborhood in June and came back with some pretty cool pictures of flowers!

Not bad for a point and shoot camera!