Accidental Anniversary Celebration…

Yesterday was our 12th wedding anniversary. Hard to believe we’ve been together that long, but it’s also hard to believe there was life before “us”. 

It was a great day! It started with separating for activities… Eric and Chandler went golfing, and the girls and I went to a cute “chick flick”. Then, we met up for lunch and some back to school shopping. We spent the afternoon just being lazy and hanging around the house with the kiddos.

Then, last night we thought we had a babysitter lined up so we could celebrate our anniversary with a quiet evening out together. So Eric dropped me off at the restaurant to get our names in, and went to drop off the kiddos to the babysitter. When he got there, he realized there’d been a miscommunication, and we weren’t really going to have a babysitter. At first everyone was a little bummed, until dad said, “Everyone go in and get dressed! We’re still going out to dinner!”

So, we took the whole family out for what was planned to be our quiet anniversary dinner, and it ended up being one of the greatest anniversary celebrations we could’ve had. What better way to celebrate the last 12 years together, than with those we’ve loved together for the last 12 years.

I think we’ve discovered a new family tradition… celebrating the family’s birthday… our wedding day… the day it all began!

Summer fun…

We’ve been having a whirlwind of a Summer. School starts next week. We’ve only had 7 short weeks. :( But, it’s been a GREAT few weeks. We’ve gone to a cabin, had swim lessons, played with cousins, gone to movies, gone shopping, and just had a fun time being together. One of the things we did was tie-dye t-shirts. The kids LOVED it, and they turned out SO cute! We’ll probably doing more in the future. It’s just too much fun!

Chandler’s 11th B-day

Our little Chan Man turned 11 on July 9th. With that, it’s hard to believe 2 things…

#1--That I could possibly be old enough to have an 11 year old. I mean, didn’t I just graduate from high school a couple months ago? I guess it’s been a little longer than that. :(

#2--That he could possibly be that old! It seems like just the other day that he was born. Yet, it seems like he’s been here FOREVER! He is such a great young man. We are SO proud of him!

For his 11th B-day, he requested a trip to visit his Great Uncle Tom in Sierra Vista, AZ to go shooting and out to lunch. So we made arrangements for the girls to go to Grandma & Grandpa’s for the day, and headed down there. It was a great little trip, as always. We sure enjoy our time with Uncle Tom.

Here are some pics of the shooting range…

Uncle Tom brought a couple of pistols for Chandler to shoot. His favorite was the Walther P22. He probably shot 200 rounds through it, and told us as we left, that he was gonna save his money to buy one.

 

Grandpa Stewart had us take his Winchester .45 long rifle to test out some reloads for him. We ALL enjoyed shooting it. Can you tell by the look on my face? :)

 

 

I also took my dad’s 22. He let us use it while he’s on his mission. I LOVE shooting that thing. It takes me back to when my dad would take us out to shoot cans when we went on the Father/Daughter campouts. Good times!

That night, it was out night to watch all the munchkins involved in our babysitting co-op. So we did a mini party for Chan Man. His sisters bought him a HALO encyclopedia that they’d found WEEKS before his b-day. It sat in my closet for weeks, waiting for his b-day to come around. They were so excited to give it to him! And, he LOVED it!

Here’s the b-day crew…

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Chan!

(He’ll have a b-day party with his friends in a week or so. Stay tuned…)

July 4th weekend…

I’m running behind on my blogging… ‘cuz Summer’s keeping us hopping! But we had a GREAT 4th of July weekend in the pines with some GREAT friends, the Buchanans (also know around here as the “Puke cannons”. I know, we’re gross!) They were nice enough to invite us to their family’s cabin for the weekend. I was a little laid up with my recent knee injury (more to come about that later)…

But the rest of the fam had a BLAST here…

The cabin was right on the creek, so the kids spent most of their time building a dam, and chasing down crawdads. Here are some pics from the weekend…

They even got the dads involved in the dam building and crawdad hunting…

Here are all the kiddos standing on their dam…

Eventually, they cooked up the crawdads. The boys were so proud of their catches.

Chandler dug right in, and seemed to think it was kind of alot of work to get just a little bit of meat. But he was still happy to do it…

A few kids wouldn’t try them. I don’t really blame them, cuz I thought it was pretty nasty, too.

 

Tatum’s looks were the funniest. She was pretty grossed out by the whole thing.

 

She finally got brave enough and picked one up, and after trying some, she really liked them.

During the weekend, we also took a trip to the local fish hatchery.

I was a little freaked out, and kept my distance since fish are SO not my thing, unless they’re cooked and swimming in lemon pepper and butter. ;)

But, the rest of the kids loved all of it.

 

The boys also spent alot of time fishing during the weekend. They eventually caught a little one that they gutted and bbq’d for dinner. Those little boys are too cute! (That’s as close as Shelby would get to any living thing they spent the weekend looking for. She’s my girl!)

 

Thanks again, “Puke Cannons” for a GREAT weekend!

Everything?!?!

Mom: Harley, Can you help fold this basket of clothes?

Harley: Do I have to do EVERYTHING around here?!?!?

Oh, my dear Harley! I can’t wait for you to be a mom so you can find out what it really means to “do EVERYTHING around here”!

But for now…

FOLD THE DANG CLOTHES! ;)

Graduating to bigger things

Tater graduated from Preschool in May.

This brings very mixed emotions for me. I am THRILLED for her to start Kindergarten because she is SO excited she can hardly contain herself. However, she and I have grown SO close over the last year. Spending everyday with her has been such a joy. I’ll miss having her around everyday. I mean… who am I going to go to the store with? I try not to think about this part, because it makes me SO sad. So I just keep talking to her about how exciting it’s going to be!

Here are the pics from our preschool graduation this year…

Getting ready for the big program…

Performing our preschool songs for our family members…

Saying what our favorite thing was about preschool, and receiving our graduation certificates…

Next year, I’m going to be able to spend a little more time in the kids’ classrooms, and on their field trips. I’ve decided not to continue teaching preschool. It was a great experience for me to be able to teach Harley and Tatum. But, now I need to focus more of my time and attention on being a mom. It’s my #1 job, and I’m excited to be able to give it all the attention it deserves. I hope I’ll be able to survive being in a quiet house, by myself all day. I’m told that I’ll get used to it really quickly. :)

We’ll see…

Homework? Seriously?

I thought I finished doing homework when I finished with school. But, NO!!! The last few weeks of school the kids were all given projects to do, which meant that mom was given school projects, too.

Chandler’s assignment: A book report. He read one of the Harry Potter books and did a great book report. Then, his idea for the project was to make a magic potion. He made a “Smarty-Tarty Potion”. It was dragon’s blood (pink lemonade with blue food coloring) and juice from the cotton-berry flower (green food coloring). If you drank the potion, it made you super smart for 4 hours. However, when your 4 hours were up, you forgot who you were for 3 hours. So, there was an antidote… a teardrop from a silver unicorn (Hershey's kiss). I thought this was a really fun idea, and it was ALL his. So I got all the stuff together, and helped him practice for when he presented it to his class. He said his class LOVED it because it was so original. So fun!

Shelby’s project: The class was having a rainforest cafe. They’d been studying the rainforest, and were each given an animal to research. Shelby’s animal was the Scarlet Macaw. So we made one out of clay and covered it with colored feathers to make it look like the real thing.

Then, the class had huge celebration complete with parent visitors to celebrate all they’d accomplished in researching and writing their rainforest animal reports. It was so fun to share that with Shelbs. You did a great job, Shelbs!

Shelby asked me to make Macaw nest cupcakes for the celebration. We used chow mein noodles that we’d covered in chocolate and jelly beans. It was really simple, but looked really fun, and the kids loved them.

Harley’s assignment: Research and do a project about a Triceratops. I admit that I was a little tired by the time we got to her project. So we went with the good ol’ fall back… a poster. She was excited to make it, and I figure we’ll have lots of years ahead for more interesting projects. :) She worked really hard, and did a great job of coloring all the fact papers we printed up. Good job, Harletta!

Thankfully, school is over for this year. So we have 7 weeks to rest up before the teachers ask me them to do another project. :)

Great job on completing another successful year!