Birthdays, Cookies, Tie Dying & Cows

Sean celebrated another birthday in December. He's such a sweet guy, I'm sure lucky to have him in my life. We celebrated with angel food cake and strawberries and a gluten free & egg free confetti cake. I got him a pellet rifle to target shoot with Wesley. Happy Birthday Sean!

They kids got to do their traditional gingerbread decorating before Christmas. It's funny to look back over the years and see how much I had to help them obviously when they were tiny and to fast forward to now and just set them up with stuff and let them go for it. They sure are growing up fast! Greta was sad that I couldn't find a gluten free gingerbread kit but I redeemed myself with a giant GF and egg free sugar cookie for her to decorate and eat.

Greta's new found love in life is tie dying. She watched several youtube videos and then started asking for die and white clothes. We found Goodwill to be a great resource for white clothing. Since she was still learning it's a lot easier on the checkbook to mess up on $1.50 shirts (not that she messed up!). She did great work, very unique colors and patterns. I was getting into it too. She even found white cotton shoes and tie dyed them! She's my crafty girl.

I saw a fun idea of facebook where a gal took an old piece of barn wood and painted a cow head on it. It had a very Christmas feel and I just loved it and wanted to try doing something similar. I searched and searched for old barn wood and couldn't find anything in the right size or without it costing a fortune. Then one day at Menards I found a prepackaged and cut piece of pine that was the correct size. I wondered if it could be made to look weathered without actually being weathered wood. I thought for $6 it was worth a try. I decided to do a Jersey cow head and give it to my friend Jessica (she loves Jerseys). I was pretty happy with it and I think Jessica liked it.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was quite nice this year. We had my parents in town which was nice. It's always a fun mix of different foods since we have people of different diets. Greta is adjusting ok to not having gluten or eggs, she gets pretty sad when there are baked goods she can't have (mainly cake). So we are working with that. But thankfully she can eat all the crab legs she wants (or I can afford).

After dinner my dad brought a project for the kids to help him with. He's an avid model train guy and thought it might be fun for the kids to learn how to make trees to go on a train layout. I think we all enjoyed it and made some pretty nice looking little trees.

Piercing

Greta decided she wanted to get her ears pierced so off to the mall we went. We invited Abby and Evie and they decided to watch Greta get hers done before they would decide whether they wanted to get pierced.



Greta did great! She didn't scare the other girls away and they both got their ears pierced too. They sure are growing up fast!

Halloween 2019

This year was the first year where I wasn't sure if Wesley would be too cool to trick-or-treat. He wasn't sure he was going to dress up but I talked him into a caveman wig and beard to hide his face. We decided he could either be the Geico caveman or Forrest Gump on his infamous run. Either way he was fully covered and not embarrassed (even though we saw several other classmates out trick-or-treating). Greta was my sweet butterfly.

Kid Achievements

The kids have been doing well in school and activities. Wesley has been playing the alto saxophone (my old sax) since 5th grade and started marching band this year. He has marched in two parades now and they sound great! I'm very proud of him.

Wesley & Alex

Every fall the elementary school has a race that is part of their fundraiser.  Greta decided she was really going to run this year and try and win it. There were 150 kids running and she came in 7th. She did great!

My 4th grader is now wearing my size shoes. Yikes!

Wesley has routinely done well in school with all A's. He's a very good student and was rewarded by being asked to be part of the "Students with Honors" program. They get to do fun things and help out with events. It's quite the honor. They had the induction and breakfast ceremony that was really well done. Good job Wesley!

Hot Tub

When we moved into this house there was a cement slab on the west side off the deck that we knew was used for a hot tub by the previous owners. It sat unused for a few years until we turned it into a giant sandbox for the kids. Here is a link to that post, you really should go look at it, the tiny children are adorable. Well fast forward nearly eight years and it's been sitting unused...except perhaps by the cats as a litter box. We decided it was time to clean it off and get a used hot tub to put on it.

We found one on Craigslist for $700. The hard part was trying to figure out how to move an empty 900 pound hot tub. Youtube had many good tutorials, so we loaded up the truck with all the possible tools we thought we would need and a tilting trailer my parents let us use. Sean and I have moved several 6000lb+ milling machines by hand so a 900lb hot tub seemed like childs play. It actually went smoothly. Sean knew what he was doing. We used pvc pipe and a winch and rolled it up onto the trailer (that had plywood attached to it). You'd have thought we knew what we were doing. It helped that the tub owner was a muscular guy that had his grown son there to help.

The hot tub was full and working when we went to pick it up from the previous owners. It had not been winterized and water blown out of the pipes so it was a race to get it home, placed, wired up and filled up before the next freezing night. Turns out we had about eight days to do everything. Sean rented a trencher and trenched a new line out to the pole (there was old wiring from the previous owners hot tub but it was old and questionable). Sean laid new wiring in pvc pipes and got it all wired up.

I'm sure I'm making this all sound easy but it was a ton of work for Sean. He did it all (except the loading and unloading). He's awesome and only complained a little bit. The wiring was time consuming, he spent three solid weekends finishing this project. I don't think either of us knew what was involved in getting a hot tub installed. I'm thinking paying someone might have been a better idea (at least the moving it part). But oh well, it's finished now and full of hot bubbly water which has been divine on these 25 degree days. The kids thoroughly enjoy it as well. We were in it the other night while it was snowing and Wesley said "I will remember this forever!" Which made me smile.

I wrapped the trunk of the tree in Christmas lights, adds a nice ambiance.

Goodbyes

When we first joined our church there was one lady in particular that made us feel welcome and really embraced my kids into the church. She made us want to return so we did. It became our church. Angela was in charge of the kids Sunday school classes and my kids were pretty small at the time and religion was something they hadn't been introduced to. She made it fun to learn.

I started helping her out on the Wednesday night classes they had for the kids. I enjoyed helping out and watching as she played games and did crafts with the kids.My kids really enjoyed it too.

Angela recently moved away and before she left she took all the kids to go bowling as a final fun activity. We are going to miss Angela!

She never lets people photograph her, so I'm grateful to get this shot.

This and That

I'd have to say we are car people. We like cars, both functional and fun. We found ourselves with five cars this summer and Sean decided he wanted to consolidate two cars into one daily driver so we sold our big Ford F-250 tow vehicle and his daily driver Land Rover and purchased a Toyota Tundra. It will be his daily driver which we were a little unsure about with the gas mileage on a truck but it does at least as well as the Rover did. It has a 10K pound tow capacity (the same as the F-250) so we should be fine hauling hay and machines. He's really enjoying it!

We were pretty late in the season to get our yearly load of hay but we finally got it home and unloaded. We went with the same hay guy as last year which has turned out to work well. He loads for us, all we have to do is pull the trailer out into the field. We tried something new this year (to save an entire trip) and put a round bale stacked two high. We've seen many people do it and the truck had no problems hauling it. We strapped it down well but nearly lost the entire load after a turn onto the dirt roads. It was so top heavy and unstable. Those bales are 1100 pounds each. We won't be doing that again.

 I've decided that chickens are not the brightest creatures on the planet. We have one particular hen that routinely jumps into large bodies of water that she then can't get herself out of. I keep a water bowl with fresh water out at all times so I don't know what makes her fly into the stock tank. Both times I've found her she was near death and shaking. I take her and dry her off with a towel and then blow dry her on the deck. She seems to enjoy the attention and heat (perhaps that's why she does it?). Silly chicken.

It can't be a random blog post without a picture of Greta eating sushi. She's still having problems with wheat and eggs causing stomach problems so she is still avoiding them. It leaves not many places to eat out successfully....except sushi! So when we have a girls day out it usually involves the local Japanese restaurant. She's got some mad skills in the chop stick using department. Love this girl and her expressions.

Our church does a painting party two or three times a year (I usually teach one of them) and this fall they did a new idea....wood signs for the front door. It was a nice break from the usual canvas paintings. The idea is to paint pumpkins on one side and then come back closer to Christmas, flip it over and paint a snowman for the Holidays. Two decorations in one. I thought it was a great idea! Greta and I had a lot of fun. Looking forward to painting Frosty on the other side.

Greta's Birthday

Miss Greta celebrated her 10th birthday today. She had Abby, Evie and Alex over to celebrate. She wanted a bug cake and dirt cupcakes for school. She's very into scrunchies, squishies, slime and metal straws (to save the turtles). She's my big kid and growing each day (I think she'll be taller than me).

Happy Birthday Greta and my Dad! I didn't get any pictures while my dad was over for his birthday but I did get a shot of Greta peeling apples for his birthday pie.

Playing the "raise your hand game". Last with arm in the air wins.

Carport Clearing

Our car situation has made it so that we needed to build a carport to house the vehicles that are left outside. Hail happens quite a lot and a carport is far cheaper than all the deductibles. The problem is that a large portion of our acreage is covered in a walnut grove. So we decided to clear one of the trees to make room. Sean bought an electric chainsaw and head gear and went to town. He did a great job, you'd think he'd have chopped down trees before.

First Day of School

I'm a little behind on blogging so I am going to play catch up over the next few weeks. I can't forget to post the first day of school pictures! Wesley is going into 7th grade this year and Greta is going into 4th grade. They are getting so big and I'm often hearing "Are they twins?".