Summer Catch Up - Dream Mile

May 2009

At the end of the school year the school has a race called the dream mile. In the boy's division it is for any of the boys who throughout the school year during p.e. ran the mile under 7 minutes. Trevor qualified for this race and was so excited to participate. He is built like his daddy and is a very good and fast runner.

It is pretty cool to go and watch. The entire school comes out and stands around the track and watches the kids participate and cheer them on.

My memory isn't the greatest with times and things like that, so I am not quite sure what his final time for running the dream mile but I think it was like 6 minutes and 43 seconds. Or something like that. He is such a fast runner. Good Job Trevor!!

Jenessa was really bummed because she missed qualifying for the girls division by 6 seconds. Maybe next year Jenessa!

Summer Catch Up - Zoo with Cousins

2009 at the Boise Zoo

We went to the zoo with Mom and Janae's kids while Matt and Janae were at the hospital with poor Layton after he fell out of a tree.

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The kids had fun sharing a nest together and we were even able to get Grandma to get in there as well. :)

My what big ears you have!! Maybe if my kids had ears this big they would actually hear the things that I say to them. Think that would help?

Summer Catch up - Memorial Day Bike Ride

This is the second year in a row where we have gone for a bike ride on Memorial Day with my family. I think this is a fun tradition! We started at Veteran's Park and rode along the greenbelt and the Boise River. We stopped and ate a picnic dinner at one of the parks. It was a good little ride and the kids were able to keep up and go the whole way. At least this year we didn't get poured on like last year. Last year we were soaked and very cold by the end of the bike ride.

Summer Catch up -- Trevor's Birthday!

May 22, 2009

Trevor's 10th Birthday! It is so weird to think that my baby is 10. I can still remember the day/night that he was born. It does not even seem like it was 10 years ago. We are so lucky to have Trevor in our family!

Trevor is such a nice big brother. He shared his breakfast in bed with all of his sisters! They had so much fun eating together!

Summer Catch up-Pinewood Derby

We survived our second pinewood derby race. Trevor got second place this year!!

May 2009

I love this picture because look at all of the dads. The dads get way into the race as well as the boys and so this year the men made their own cars and after the pack meeting was over the adults got to race their cars. :) Boys will be boys!

Summer Catchup-Ryan's Birthday!

I have been such a slacker at posting...it is ridiculous. I was looking through all of my pictures and realized that I have missed a lot of things. I feel like I was so busy this summer that I didn't ever find time to sit down and post. So I am going to try to do some quick posts to highlight some stuff.

Ryan turned 34 this year!! Ryan came home to find the traveling birthday bee taking a ride on Ryan's bike thanks to some good friends of ours. :)

Good-bye Kittens

I have been really bad about posting lately...it seems like there is just never enough minutes in the day. Here is a picture of all of the kittens. They all have left and gone to their new homes. The poor momma cat has been very sad the past couple of days and has been meowing and searching everywhere for them. It is very sad to watch. It has been a lot of fun having the babies around! The kids enjoyed playing with them and watching them grow!

Youngest Grandma Ever

Yesterday I became a 29 year old grandma or so my dad tells me. So that would make him a very young great grandpa. Our cat had her kittens yesterday. She had 5 all white babies. Maybe someone out there with really good eyes can help me tell the kittens apart. As of right now they all look the exact same.

I can't imagine nursing more than one baby at a time. Poor mommy! She just lays there as she gets mauled. They climb all over her!

It is funny to watch the kittens just climb all over, under and around each other, completely oblivious to everything around them.

I took a picture of one next to my phone to show how small/big they are. And here is the proud Papa. He has been doing so good. I am very impressed with how he has been through all of this.

Baby season

No, we are not announcing anything. :) I love springtime and all of the cute little baby animals. We went to the duck park for FHE this week to feed the geese and ducks. It is so much fun this time of year because of all the little babies. Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate very well (Ryan says I need to plan things better---like actually check the weather and stuff like that). It was poring rain and cold but it was still fun to see the babies.

First Reupholstering Job

My grandparents had this little couch and chair in their house for as long as I remember. They were a bright red velvet type material. When my grandparents were moving out of their home and getting rid of a lot of stuff, this couch and chair were going to go to the DI. I decided to recover them and put them in my house. My original idea was to pay someone to reupholster these but after almost a year of not being able to find someone (I didn't try very hard :) ) I decided to try to do it myself ( well with A LOT of help from my mom). This project ended up being very frustrating, very time consuming and needless to say probably my first and last attempt to reupholster something. The first part of the process was taking off all of the old fabric and padding as well as the thousands of staples there were there. Yikes!!

Alyse even jumped into the fun and "helped" pull out some padding and stuff.

Maybe the project wouldn't have been so overwhelming if we just did one of the pieces instead of both of them!?!

It is a good thing that my mom is good at projects and stuff otherwise if I had been doing this by myself I would have just given up and put them on the curb for the garbage men to take. My mom gave up quite many days to cover over to my house and help me with this project.

Here are the finished projects! Thank you Mom for all of your help!! Even though it was a nightmare project it was fun to do together!

Out with the old in with the newer...

We have been working on redoing the master bedroom. It is a very slow going process but things are starting to come together. We have had this dresser since we got married...it came from Ryan's parents who had it even before Ryan was born. So it is very old. :) Ryan sanded it down and painted it and changed out all of the handles. It looks like a totally different dresser now. It is amazing at what painting something does can change the look so much.

I will put the finished room on here when it is all said and done! Thank you Ryan for all of your hard work and doing these projects for me. :)

Mom's spring

This flower/bush is my mom's favorite! It is a forsythia. She taught all of us kids the name of this bush and how to identify it. It is pretty much the first color to show up in spring. Everytime I see these bushes they remind me of my mom. I love you mom!

Locks of ...... Change

I have been wanting to do something different with my hair for quite awhile now but have been unable to get up my nerve and didn't know what to do. My mom and sister-in-law, Amy, convinced me to try this hairstyle and so I finally got frustrated enough with my hair, got up the nerve and just took the plunge. Here is the before picture....

They cut off 11 or so inches to donate to Locks of Love. I wasn't sure that I would have enough hair to donate but I ended up having plenty. The stylist said that I probably could have even donated 13-14 inches because that is about what was cut off anyway.

This is a huge change for me!! Yikes!

The only bummer so far is that it makes my face look fat! I guess the good thing about that is now I have a visual reminder to help keep me motivated about that. :)

Through the eyes of a child

The other day Jenessa brought home this paper from school. They were given the assignment to draw a picture of themselves and to write a little something describing themselves. This is what Jenessa thinks about herself.

I got a good laugh out of it. I thought it was funny all of the different body parts that she thought to describe. I think my favorite part was about her short neck. Makes you wonder where and when they start to get certain complexes about themselves.

Grossology

For school the kids have to read 20 minutes a day. Each day we put aside this window of time for them to read their books. Sometimes one of them will read out loud to me for practice but the majority of the time they are reading to themselves. Which is why I didn't notice Trevor's school library book that has been his choice reading material for the past couple of days. So tonight I caught a glimpse of his library book and this is what I saw.

The entire NON-Fiction book is all about Poop. It even has many illistrations of many different kinds, sizes, reasons, etc. Anything and everything that you could ever want (or not want) to know about this subject matter. The only thing going through my mind is why on earth would my son pick out that book???? The only thing I could come up with is boys will be boys. I could never picture a girl checking that book out.

Jenessa's New Do

One thing that Jenessa was really wanting for her birthday was a haircut. So she spent the afternoon with Grandma Barnes "Mama" and Mama took her to get her hair cut. Jenessa had a lot of fun and is super excited about her new hair do.

Weekend in McCall

January 9th, 10th and 11th our family went to McCall for the weekend. We spent the weekend at a condo with some friends of ours (The Hansens). On Saturday we went tubing. It was a great place to go with kids because there was a tow rope that the tube got hooked to and it was pulled up the hill. So little kids didn't get tired from having to walk up the hill and we didn't get tired from having to carry them up the hill as well. You got to just sit in your tube and ride to the top of the hill.

Lexi was not a fan of riding in the tube down the hill. So after the first trip down the hill she was done. She just stayed at the bottom keeping Lisa company and played in the snow and she was happy doing that. We wish we had known that Lexi would have been content just watching everybody...would have saved us some money. :)

Surprisingly enough, Alyse was our little dare devil. She is usually afraid of most things and so we weren't sure how she would do at this. While going down the hill she looked terrified but the minute her tube got to the bottom she wanted to go again. We had a two hour limit to tube and she is the only kid that wanted to go to the very end. All of the other kids wore out with about 15 minutes left except for Alyse. We had to drag her off of the hill in order to leave.

Jenessa and Trevor spent the majority of their time with their friends Sarah and Amber. They were like energizer bunnies and kept running to the tow rope and flying down the hill just to repeat it again. I think they lapped us parents and little kids a couple of times. They were trying all kinds of fun ways to tube down the hill. They were racing each other, going on their backs, on their stomachs, going down while spinning, etc.

Sunday morning we woke up to our van buried under a bunch of snow. Ryan was very nice to go out and try to find our car.

January 2009