Another birthday

Our third daughter was thrilled to celebrate her fifth birthday. This is her last big one for a while, and she has been looking forward to it for months. Celebrations were complete with a bouncy house (thanks to my in-laws), games, a craft, and great presents.

My parents and the birthday girl.


All the kids after a dress up relay race.

Paint!

I made the cake out of miniature cupcakes.

Yesterday was the last nice weather day for a while. I decided that I'd clean up the yard some and burn a few leaves. I easily started a fire in the yard clippings from the whole year/leaf pile.
I quickly realized that this was going to be quite a time consuming endeavor, so I put out the fire and headed in the house. I later went back outside and noticed that the pile was still smoldering in spots, so I carefully "watered" the hot spots, and once again made sure that everything was okay. I sure didn't want to be the next person to almost burn the neighborhood down.
Rain left over from tropical storm Ida began pouring down and has been pouring ever since. So, imagine my surprise when I looked out our bedroom window this morning and saw this sight through the rain.

The pile has smoldered all day even though we've received around 6 inches of rain. My husband (as far as he and I know) put the fire out again before we headed to church tonight. Hopefully it'll still be out when we get up in the morning.

I had been told that Wal-Mart now sells caskets and urns online. When I looked it up, there is was. Here's a link. WoW! Shocking!
My husband found it humorous that there was a "Be the first to review this product" button for each funeral item.

State Fair

Pumpkins grown by little kids

Zach reading the sign


Here's what the sign said, but where's the sod?

Family

Today was a fun day. Spencer had mentioned that he'd be taking the day off, so yesterday we did a little extra school work. Late last night, we decided that the State Fair would be a fun family trip. On the way to the fair, we were able to complete the school work for the day that we had not been able to get done the day before. Here are some pictures of our day.

This and That

This has been an eventful week. Zach's Cub Scout group went on a camping trip this past weekend. It was abnormally cool for this time of year, but Zach had a great time running around and experiencing different activities.

Tie Dye

Putting up targets.

Shooting BB guns. A favorite past time.

Well, Brittany has finally reached her mile stone. Her hair grew long enough to donate to Locks of Love. She was so excited to cut her hair, and I was too. No more stringy hair that gets messed up two seconds after it's been brushed.

School is Now in Session

We finally started back to school. This year three of the kids are in the school routine. The baby is making things easier on me by thinking she's in the school routine too. She thinks that I must let her count and sound out letters. I must say that she can count to ten pretty well, and she has learned what the letter A says.
Zach and Brittany are especially loving science. They can tell you the parts of the ear and eye. (Well, at least they could when they took their first test.) I think they've taken the love for science a little too far. Their new pursuit is slugs. They all think it's neat to push their eyes in. Ewww! Brittany is especially in love with the slugs. She collected 12 of them the other day and put them all over her desk. After I demanded that she remove them, I found her sitting on our den floor with them on her legs. So disgusting!!!! I did take a picture which will be good blackmail when she gets older, and I would put it up here, but I can't download any pictures to my computer at the moment. Why, you say?? That's because I have 10,000 pictures on my computer and I don't know how many videos which have taken up all my computer's memory. When I get all of it transfered to CD's like I should have long ago, I'll be able to entertain you with pictures again.

Outing

We got to go to a nature center, science museum. Here are some pics of the kids playing doctor in the miniature hospital, as well as a pic of the my mom with the kids.

School

School has officially started. It was not a pretty day. The way the kids were acting, you would have thought that we were at the end of the school year instead of the beginning. Well, our third child was the exception. She got upset because I didn't do enough school with her. Today went much more smoothly. We got done around 1:30. I had enough time in the day to mow the grass. Woo hoo.