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.

Question of the week, "Mom, when you die, can I have that teddy bear that dad gave you when you first started dating?"

A Little Answer to Prayer

My husband has been sick and has not wanted any food that was on hand at the house. On Wednesday, we were about out of groceries anyway, and I wanted to buy a 10 pound bag of chicken. Typically I go to Wal-Mart for this which is about 5 miles away. Time was close for my husband to get off work which meant it was also getting close to time to leave for church. I was in a quandary as to go to Wal-Mart before church without the kids and not make it home in time to get Spencer something to eat, or to go after church with the kids. As I was trying to decide what to do, the Lord nudged me to go to Food Lion which is only a mile down the road. Typically, their prices are higher, but I thought I might try it out. When I got there, they had the chicken on sale cheaper than what Wal-Mart carries it for, I also got some little pizzas for Spencer to eat, AND I made it home before Spencer did. That would have never happened if I would have gone to Wal-Mart.

Catching Up

I don't know why I always think that summer time will be a break. In one sense it is. There is no school work to do, so I catch up on a whole lot of house work. There are so many church activities though, that we keep hopping almost all summer long. These last few weeks have been especially busy. We had our well pump go bad on us. A week after it was replaced, the new pump went bad as well. Needless to say, I'm very thankful to have water again even though there are all kinds of leaks coming from the pipes in the utility room under our carport. Those can get fixed another day. :) In between water problems, we had our annual church camp meeting with preaching in the morning from 9-12:30 am and again in the evening from 7:00 until we got done. During that week, lunch and supper are also prepared and served by people from our church. It is such a hectic week, but so good as well.

As part of some last minute fun before school starts back up, a friend and I took our kids to a nature center. The kids had a blast, and best of all it was free. We just might have to do it again sometime as a field trip. Here are some pictures of the kids having fun there.

A miniture version of a local hospital

Sierra, the miniture version of a local doctor.

Going down in the heart....crawling in a tube under the building.

...and coming up on the other side of the room

A large version of Operation

The beginning of the intestinal tract. The kids could crawl in and around in there.

Addison Singing

Addison's Mema taught her to sing "You Are My Sunshine." She was a little preoccupied with me and her chewing gum, but I still think it's a pretty cute video of her.

Savings

As of late, it is popular to find ways to save money. While it should always be popular to save money, I guess it's better late than never. That said, some people are really good at finding deals. There are many web-sites devoted to this, but here are three that have been created by people that I personally know, or are friends of people I know. Take a look at these.
The fist one is at First Lady of Free.
Another good blog is Spend Freely.
The last blog is at My Sweet Savings.

At It Again

Zach needs some batteries, and I told him he'd have to wait until next month. He decided that he could draw a picture and sell it for enough to get himself some batteries. Well, he did, and now he's inspired to make some more money. Here's the next picture he's drawn and is hitting the neighborhood with. We'll see if he comes back with the picture or the money. :D

Weekend Get Away

My in-laws invited us and my husband's brother and wife to an amusement park with them this last weekend. We all had a great time. Brittany thought it was especially for her since her birthday was the day we went up there. The kids favorite was the bumper cars.

Zach

Zach once again got to play baseball this year. At the very last game, his team got the privilege of taking the flag down from the flagpole and learning how to fold it up. When they got done with the flag, their coach got a kick out of telling them to roll in the dirt. Zach was the only one who didn't. He said it was because he didn't want to mess up the inside of our vehicle. (He's been trained well.) Whatever the reason, he reminded me of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednigo. When you see the last two pictures, you'll understand why.

Their coach showing then how to fold the flag.

Everyone except Zach rolling in the dirt.

Zach telling his coach "No thanks" to rolling in the dirt.

Zachary, Brittany, and Sierra went with us to Washington DC when we took the teenagers. This is a little video of him showing his redneck roots. I mean do you really act like this in a motel that has doorbells at every room? Haha! We got a kick out of his excitement, his torn shirt, and his love of racing.

DC

We took the teens from our church to Washington DC. Here's a few pictures of our trip.

About half way across the Potomic. We had to take a break. We walked from Arlington National Cemetary to the White House that day, with quite a few stops in between.

Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

Waiting for the Metro

Sitting at the WWII Memorial with the George Washington Memorial in the distance

WWII memorial...beautiful

The guy's nice motel suite.

This is the hallway to the guy's 3 bedroom suite. They had plenty of room.

The girl's room wasn't bad either.

While doing school the other day, this guy thought he'd join us. Eww!

Ladies' Banquet at our Church

Our theme this year was the bride of Christ. The thoughts that were brought out reminded us that we are to love our Lord and anticipate his return just as we loved our spouse and anticipated our wedding day.

The doll in the pictures was one that had been rescued from the trash and was quite filthy. She was cleaned up and a wedding dress was cut down to the doll's size. She turned out quite beautiful. As someone said, she is a wonderful illustration of a person who is filthy in sin and is found by Christ and cleaned up by Him.

My mom with some of the grandaughters.

My mother-in-law with the grandaughters.


This is me and my munchkins.