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.

For family fun, we went to a Tob's baseball game. Zach was asked to race against the mascot "Slugger." If he won, he would win a free t-shirt. Let's just say that there was a little boy proudly wearing a t-shirt saying something about winning a race.

Sorry the video is a bit unfocused. My camera was trying to focus on the safety netting rather than the event taking place. Also, the ladies yelling, we some ladies next to us that the kids had befriended....just making that clear. :)

Family Fun a Couple of Weeks Ago

We had a bonfire and roasted marshmallows and hotdogs. The kids thought it was awesome.

Sierra's prayer last night: "Dear Lord, Thank you for me." Hmmmm

Church Picnic

The whole gang

Sack races!

Bounce House..the kids loved it.

Rag Curls

When we were little girls, our mother would curl our hair in rag strips. It was much easier to sleep on than rollers. I thought that I would do that with Brittany's hair. People then started asking me how I did it, so here's a demonstration video.

She wasn't really happy about having her picture taken like this.

We live in a neighborhood just outside the city limits. Sometimes we have unique experiences in our neighborhood such as foxes and deer in our yard, or the privilege to hear policemen practice at their shooting range at 2:00 in the morning. One particular uniqueness about our neighborhood is this farm pasture smell that sometimes permeates the air.

We finally received an explanation from a sweet potato plant nearby when we received this bag underneath our mailbox earlier in April shortly after Easter.

"Please enjoy an Easter holiday meal on us.

We appreciate your patience while we expand our plant and perfect our odor reduction system"

Well, thank you, people. We hope the "odor reduction system" works well. We haven't tried the "Easter meal" yet.

Anniversary Adventures in Food

For our special meal, we ate at the Melting Pot...a fondue restaurant. It was expensive, but I had found a $25.oo gift certificate online which helped out a lot. One day we're going to go back for dessert.
Some of our appetizers to be dipped in cheese sauce.

We chose a spinach cheese sauce

Ghirardelli's ice cream we split. Very rich, but good.

To die for pizza from Giordano's. We ate there twice and almost ordered a pizza to take home with us.


Free appetizer due to a coupon we found in a tourist book. It was good, but the pizza was the best.

Anniversary Adventures part 2

Spencer and I visited downtown Disney one day while we were in Orlando. We had always wanted to visit, but never had the time while we were at Disney World. We had a relaxing time wandering through stores and tasting some great ice cream from Ghirardelli's. After a time we decided to go rest on a bench near the water. While we were sitting there, we got the bright idea to take pictures of ourselves holding the hot air balloon. It was difficult to pose correctly, and I'm sure people were wondering what in the world we were doing.

An older couple walked past while we were doing our artful photography, and the man commented, "Oh, I see what y'all are doing. Do you want me to take a picture of both of you holding the ball?" Sure! We were happy to comply. I had to show him how to work the camera and change the display setting so he could look through the eye piece instead of the display screen of my camera. After he took the picture, he said, " I think that is really good. Y'all should like that." As you can see in the last picture, we aren't holding a thing.

That picture actually made our day. It may be our wacky sense of humor, but we got a kick out of it.

\ Picture of us taken by the gentleman.

Spencer with our rich, but yummy ice cream.

Anniversary Adventures part 1

Spencer and I went to Orlando for our anniversary this year. It seemed like something "interesting" or funny happened every day. I think I'll start with the biggest and most interesting one first although it happened last.


We were happily heading back to NC when we realized that the Daytona Speedway was right off of I-95. Spencer thought it would be a great place to see, so we took the little detour.


There is a $24 charge for an Imax show, a guided tour of the place, plus a few other things, but we were ready to get home. All Spencer wanted to do was see the track. A lady emp

loyee there kindly told us that we could go up into the grandstand for free, so we happily headed out there. We climbed all the way to the top, and looked out over the horizon. It's a huge track. As we were gazing over the horizon, Spencer noticed that a big gate (in the middle of the grandstands) was open. It looked like it would take us to the infield. Thinking that would be pretty neat, we we decided to head over that way. After discussing whether the route under or on the bleachers would be best we took the cooler route, the one down under. We climbed back out onto the grandstand right next to where the gate was when a golf cart came flying around the corner, and screeched to a halt. It sure made me jump. When the security guard jumped out, Spencer said, "I guess we're not supposed to be here, huh?"

"You're right about that, and I'm going to throw you out!" replied the security guard.
"We didn't know that we are not allowed to be here. No one told us that we couldn't be," was our reply. (Let me mention that we were always respectful although we were definitely spoken to otherwise.)
The security guard pointed to a group in the first section that we had been in originally. "Do you see those people over there? Do you see them over here? NO! They are where they are supposed to be! You don't see THEM trying to come over here, do you? Didn't you see that sign that said no spectators beyond this point?"
"No sir, I didn't." I replied respectfully.
"YOU didn't see that sign?
"No, sir."
Spencer said, "I saw it, but I thought it was for when the races were going on because it said spectators."
"NO! Spectator means you. We have that sign to keep you safe. YOU are a spectator, and I'm going to throw you out."
(I'm not exactly sure what we were spectating since there was absolutely nothing going on. I guess if we were waiting for the track to melt from the heat, that would have made us spectators.)
"OK, I guess we'll leave then," I replied.
"NO! I'm going to throw you out!" was the retort. "You can come back tomorrow," He said as he let us through the unlocked gate. Spencer all the while was taking pictures. I guess we made his day. It must have been boring around there, or something.
My recommendation to Daytona would be to look up the definition of spectator and change their sign to say, "Authorized personnel only beyond this point." Oh, and maybe they could let their employees inside tell people that they are only allowed in the very first section of the grandstands. That would have been nice to know.
That was definitely a first for me, and hopefully a last. Spencer kept teasing me about stopping at all the race tracks that we passed on the way home. I've never really had the desire to go to one, and now that this happened, I don't have the desire to go to another one.

These were evidently the original bleachers from the first section that was built. I got a kick out them.

I guess this is what getting thrown out of somewhere looks like.

"You can come back tomorrow."