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Little Laina's Birthday

On her birthday (as I previously wrote ON her birthday), we went out to eat with Grandpa and Grandma (Brown) and then to their hotel to go swimming. Laina had been asking to go to a hotel forever so we could go swimming. :) I don't have any digital pictures of swimming because I forgot my camera, of course. I have some printed pics from the terrific Grandparents but I'm too lazy to scan them. hehe

So, anyway, the next day my fam came up to have a birthday party.

(My kids were looking at the pictures while I was writing this post so they have some commentary. Sutton didn't say much. He just laughed. Laina, as usual, said the most.)

She might be a little excited....

Grandma and Grandpa Brown were so "sweet" to bring a cake!!! (Sooo punny. hehe)

He's excited, too.

Laina: "Why is he smiling like that?"

Tried this picture three times....

not quite right....

still not quite right....

K, I give up. I'll just put all three on.

Our little 5-year-old princess. :D

And our Prince....???

Ewwww....Close your mouth!!!

Of course, my kids thought that this was hilarious. 

Every time Laina read the caption she just laughed. It's nice they have my sense of humor.

The Men

Awwww

Bodie: "Aunt Wiiiiiizzzzzz!!!"

See where Laina gets it!?! He was posing this way.

Laina: "Gets what?"

Me: "Your silly faces."

Laina: hahahahahaha

Laina: "You need a period [by the haha's]."

So I put the period and then deleted it because I didn't think that it would make sense with what she said. And Laina would read what I was typing and laugh.
Then she said, "Type more."
Me: "No, we have to stop somewhere."
Laina laughing.

The Women

Laina: "They got to see each other!?"
Me: "Yes" *scrolls up to other picture* "Just like Bapa and Grandpa got to see each other."
Laina: "Then they can talk to each other!"

Poor Dick just wants to take a nice picture with his son....

Laina: "He's not poor."

Bodie: "He's not Dick, he's Grandpa."

Awwwww

 Present time!

Laina: "Open that one." Pointing to one of the presents.

Me: "I can't open them. They're just pictures, silly."

She loved all of her presents (this wasn't all of them) and was sooooo excited to have her family at her birthday party. It was what she asked for after all - my family and Grandpa and Grandma to be at our house for her birthday. :)

Thank you for making her birthday soooo special!!!


(Sorry if the extra commentary was disruptive...we were in goofy moods.)

On to October!!!!

(Laina yelled this last sentence. I asked, "Why are you yelling?" Then I realized it was because she has learned so far that exclamation points add emphasis but in a yelling way such as "Yay!!" lol)

Encouragement

Found this video.

 God knows what He's doing in our lives.

Life isn't supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be about Him.

 

As he says at the end of the video, "Look at the cross....Let it be the evidence...that our God is a God that can bring beauty out of pain."

With a couple more people, he wrote this song.

What do you do on a snowy day in March?

Why make paper dolls, of course!

  I was looking for things for school on the internet and came across this awesome website.

There are a ton of things on there, but I thought that "The Cone Girls" were adorable.

 I knew that my kids would like them.

 When I showed them to Laina after I had cut them out (before I had glued them), she was sooo excited.

But, of course, this was right before bed, so I said that we'd glue them together in the morning. She didn't forget about it. :)

Olive from the website says at the bottom in the comments that she's trying to get time to work on a boy set and other costumes and things.

  Until then all my kids like these ones just fine.

I just love that my superhero-playing, sword-fighting, cars-vrooming, horse-riding cowboys will sit down and play paper dolls with their big sister.
It just warms my heart.

Thank you, MrPrintables.com, for the fun, snowed-in memories!

P.S. I did go back to the said website and there was a new set (or at least one I hadn't seen). This one is of winter clothes.
We printed those also. :)

So two months later....

Hey, everyone!

Well, sorry for not posting for two months. What happened was I had used up my blog space and was expected to pay for more space which I did NOT want to do. Then I found out I could resize all my pictures to below 800x800 pixels then they wouldn't use up space. That sounded like good news, which it was. But it also became a daunting task. One that I was dreading to undertake...for two months. :D Then today I decided that my blog was haunting me and I needed to start working on this. So as I was trying to figure out the size that the pics had to be to not take up space (I couldn't remember), I came across this post which talked about a free program called PhotoScape (her blog post tells you where to download it, also). Now I can do a bunch in one chunk!!! And it saves the new sized pics to a different folder when you're doing a batch group so I don't have to worry about it messing up all my originals!!!! I was so excited!!!! I know that this may not really matter much to any of you, but to me it takes off hours of work. Anyway, now that I know all this, I will be posting much more regularly again. AND maybe SOME day I will be caught up to current time. I'm still back in September and Laina's birthday. hehe

Well, just for fun, here's pictures of today's Superhero lunch. :)
They were all running around being the "Shield" Superheroes (the names they've given themselves) and then it was time to eat.

L to R: Two Shield, Twister Shield, and Ice Shield. :D

 

Check out Laina's "on purpose" faces in the first 3.
Do you think that Laina is Mark's daughter, or what?!?

I'm happy to be back!
I should get something posted soon. :)

Love you all!

We have a 4 year old!!!

Today is Sutton's birthday!!!

He was soooo excited it's his birthday.

It's hard to tell but he was. 

I failed to get all the jumping up and down pictures and the pushing me pictures and just all the super excited pictures. I kept trying to talk him out of turning 4 but he would have nothing to do with it. He just kept saying, "I can't help it!" hehe

I'll post later of our adventure but for now, 

SUTTON IS FOUR!!!

Caterpillars and Butterflies

In August, my parents had come up and my dad pulled a milkweed plant (the only one around our yard) from out of our bushes. I went out the next day and saw it a monarch caterpillar next to it the milkweed plant. I was so excited! I showed the kids. (They had gotten some from my sister but the car was too hot and they died.)

I googled how to keep them alive because I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. And I found this website. So that's what we did.

 The website had said to put a stick in with the plant so that the caterpillar could climb on that and make its cocoon but ours didn't do that. :)

Our caterpillar only got away once to start looking for a place to shed it's final skin and "hang" out. It wasn't too far away from the milkweed plant and we found him just fine.

 It was just amazing to see that that huge caterpillar can fit in that tiny cocoon (or chrysalis, as it's really called).

 The plant was dying, so I had to prop it up.

It was an awesome experience. God is definitely creative!

 We can't wait to do it again next year!

Our little family Christmas

I just realized that I never posted Christmas last year! So I don't make that mistake again, I thought I'd share it right now. :)

This last weekend, we had a snowstorm. This prevented us from going to church (we go into the Cities about 40 minutes away), so we decided to celebrate Christmas. We are never home ON Christmas since we are either at the ranch with Mark's family or in Wabasha with my family. Sooo we decided this year to make a new tradition: after December 10th if we get a significant amount of snow, we'll celebrate our Christmas. Well, to do this, I "quick" trip to the store to get some of our normal "Christmasy" food and pick up the stocking stuffers as that was the only shopping I had left. :)

Here's my trip to the store:

The Lake

 

 

On the way home was worse. I didn't take too many pictures because it had gotten a little slipperier and I couldn't see as far ahead of me. Craziness.

Opening presents

Figured I should take a picture to prove I was there, too :)

 Playing in the snow

The flash kept bouncing off the snow... it wasn't as dark as it looks in these pictures.

 I turned off the flash but it was having a hard time focusing, but this is a better picture of how it was out.

Aw my cute family. Bodie was really crabby so he went back inside and played leapster. :)

 

It was just so pretty.

toward the lake

Bodie with his new cowboy hat or "cowboy" as he calls it.

 New jammies

We watched a couple Christmas movies "How the Grinch stole Christmas," "Frosty the Snowman," and "Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer" throughout the day intermingled with playing with our new stuff. As a family, we bought each of us a nerf gun, so after we came in and ate supper, we opened that last present (they were all in a big box). Then we ran around "nerfed" it up. It was soooo much fun. And out of 105 bullets, we are only missing four! 

We plan on having another war tonight. :)

We have two more Christmases and Sutton's birthday, so it's nice to spread them out. :)

Merry Christmas everyone!!!