Happy Thanksgiving

I am thankful for so much! I am blessed to have four healthy children. I have a husband that loves me and is such a great dad! I have a Savior who died for me and loves me even though i am undeserving! I have a cozy little home, vehicles that run, my kids go to a great school and have great teachers. (amazing how many Christian teachers they have had along the way) I go to a pretty awesome church that digs deep into the Word. I have some pretty cool friends if i do say so myself. I have a supportive and loving family on both sides. I live in a free country!

I am very grateful, though many times it is easy to become ungrateful and wish for more. i remind myself often just how good we have it in comparison to so much of the world...we have so much, so much to be grateful for!

I asked my kids each to come in and tell me 5 things that they are grateful for. This is what they said: in no particular order of course

Trey- Cheta my cat, food (of which he eats a lot!), family, God and being able to do better in math

Avery- she wrote down 10 things for me and i told her we were just doing 5 so had her circle her top 5 but as i sit here and type i think, why limit her to 5 so here are her top 10- food, water, family, church, school, Bible, Cheta, house, friends, JESUS (she put that in all capitals so i thought i would too)

Ethan- Ethan had a hard time at first because he had just wiped out on his scooter and skinned his knee pretty bad so in his 6 yr old mind at the time he really didn't have anything to be grateful for but after he thought for a little bit here is what he said- for my school, our house, for the world, for my family, for my mommy (what can i say he is a momma's boy), our city.

Raegan- Grandma, i like how God made us, Max and Sadie (dogs) , your purse (it happened to be hanging on my chair) , for you getting me my Dora book.

Have a very Happy Thanksgiving!!

Things that make mom's heart skip a beat

While i was away a couple of weeks ago on a girl's weekend Daddy took the kids and headed to Hutch to see my sister's husband and my dad. He had a real manly weekend planned that included guns...

For some reason i am having trouble uploading the picture of him shooting the pistol. Daddy took a little video of it and then had Ethan turn to the camera and say "hi mommy!" I will admit i got tense just watching the video! Seeing my 6 year old with a real gun in his hand...yikes, even though my husband is extremely safety cautious! Ethan loved going shooting. I am sure he will get in on the action any chance he gets!

Another this and that post

* Raegan finally stopped puking after keeping not much of anything down for a couple of days! She is a trooper and mid vomit said "i guess i don't get any applesauce now!" (she had been begging for something to eat so we were going to try applesauce when we got home-we were on the way home from taking kids to school)

*She shared with daddy and mommy and we both were feeling pretty crummy for a couple of days. Thankfully we just got the aches and fever part of it and not the other!

*Avery had her annual hearing screen with the audiologist and everything remains the same again this year. Her left ear is compensating nicely for her right ear that has the significant loss. We are thankful that it remains unchanged. She still has a tube in her left ear because of build up of fluid, when that comes out we will have to see what happens.

*Trey has been working on basketball. He is going to go out for his middle school team. If he doesn't make it he is going to try to play with some friends on a league through the ymca...they have a backup plan.

*Avery had a follow-up with her allergist. They always say she is a bit deceiving, she looks like she is doing great on the outside but her lungs always tell a bit of a different story. We are back to doing peak flows and back on all asthma medicine for a month and then they will try to take her off one and see how she does. She also has been once again bumped to every three weeks allergy shots! Hooray! Hopefully we will be able to do that through the winter. Every spring we usually have to go right back to weekly but i will take every three weeks during the winter!

*John has been spending every last extra hour at a side job that he is helping a friend out with. We will all be glad when that project is completed!

*We have decided to wait to put our house on the market till at least spring for numerous reasons.

*I have been keeping busy with marathon training which will take place Dec 3rd.

*Ethan and Raegan rarely nap this year (i have been a nap nazi up till this year. They play so well together especially when they can head outside. When i do lay them down which is about once a week if that, they still sleep for several hours. With no naps and getting up early for school they are both pretty crabby by bedtime. Raegan fights it and stays up talking and doing pretty much anything to keep herself awake. Ethan on the other hand is asleep withing 5 minutes and if we leave him up too long will just go put himself to bed.

*Avery decided after a month that she no longer wants to play the flute. She has a terrible time getting any sound out and is just not enjoying it. She is in the process of switching to strings and is going to play the violen. Since she will probably be playing for the next several years at least we would like her to enjoy what she plays so letting her make this change.

*I did have to get a couple of pictures of her with her flute so that she could remember back when she played the flute for that month in fifth grade...

Kindergarten

I love watching Ethan concentrate when doing his homework. We are finding out he is a bit of a perfectionist. His teacher said he get's upset if he can't do something on his paper just right and has gone and erased the entire paper and started over instead of just correcting the word that needs to be corrected. Most of his homework is just being read to but every now and then he has something to complete.

He is doing well in school. He is learning his sight words one by one and get's excited when he sees a word he can read! He is doing well writing all his letters and is pretty proud of saying his abc's with ease. At the beginning of the year he would get a little mixed up in the middle and at the end.

He loves kindergarten. He has a behavior sheet that he brings home everyday. They start with 5 cubes and get a cube taken away if need be. He has consistent 5's every day so am very proud of him for behaving himself. There was one day at the beginning of the year he got a four and one day in the past few weeks that he came home with a four and his perfectionist little self was not too happy about losing a cube!

He recently got to be a part of his school's lipdub. The high school came and filmed it. I was pretty impressed with how it turned out, it took a lot of organization on the part of teachers and staff. Love seeing the kids school spirit! Look for Ethan and two other cute kindergartners at the very beginning. To watch, just click on the title of this post.

Fall walks

I love the mild, actually warm fall that we have had. It was a little chillier today but me and the munchkin headed out for a walk today. She walked for a little while but then was happy to ride the rest of the way.
she likes to chat about everything while we walk from the leaves on the trees to going over the sidewalk bumps making it sound like she's "tooting" and then she would say..."i think i'll take a nap now" Her little mind zips from one thing to the next just like how she does. There is never too much sitting still with this little sweetie!

Trick or treat

Little Red Riding Hood, two Lord of the Rings faceless guys and a fat little bumblebee set out to get some candy once upon a time...

we met at some of our friend's house for some dinner and then off we went. everyone loved the little bumblebee's stinger!

she would make us nervous when she would take off running down the driveways because i think she was a little off balance with that big tummy but at least she had a lot of padding when she did tumble

just like every other year the kids love to unload all their loot and this year since they were with friends there was some trading going on

the girls did their own trading away from the boys but it cracked me up how the girls had theirs all sorted so nicely and in neat little piles

And now thanks to those bags of candy i will put on an extra 5 pounds probably as i sneak in at night and raid their bags when they are asleep...that's right kids mommy admitted it. I steal your candy!

Party party

The kids were out of school on halloween so the parties were held on Friday. Avery had been complaining of tooth pain. Her tooth was a little loose so i thought maybe the permanent one was trying to push through. I put some orajel on her tooth on Thurs night and Friday morning she woke up with a big abscess on her gums. She didn't want to miss her party so i sent her to school and called the dentist hoping we could get her in around both the kids parties that were in the morning (ethan) and afternoon (avery). Her dentist told me to bring her in and they would work her in but it may be a lengthy wait as they had a very full schedule and lots of emergencies being worked in.

I went to Ethan's parade and party and then took her straight to the dentist thinking we more than likely would not make it back. Avery was very upset but we had a back up plan of getting her nails done in case she wasn't able to make it back for the party.

They got her in within a half hour and her tooth needed to be pulled (it was abcessed under the tooth). They knew she was trying not to miss a party and the dentist was so nice and said...we will get you to that party! :) They gave her some happy gas and numbed her up real good and yanked her tooth. They sent us on our way and told her to save all of her treats from the party till she could feel her mouth again :)

We only missed the first 15 minutes of the party so she was super happy.

Here are some pictures of Ethan's parade and party earlier that morning. Half day kindergarten paraded through all the classrooms...

party craft...

pumpkin bowling...

parading around for all the big kids...(and us mommies)

Ethan and Will aka:cowboy Joe and Bubo Phet (have no idea if i spelled that right, i'm only the wife and mom of star wars fanatics)

and then here are some pictures of Avery's fifth grade party. She missed the parade. The oldest grade always gets to have their party in the gym. These five girls are pretty good buds this year...

wrapping up like a mummy...

they even got to wrap up the principal...

this one got way out of order and quite honestly i don't feel like messing with moving it. Raegan got in on some of Ethan's games...

Landscaping

We had our back patio area landscaped a few weeks ago. One of the guys that John coached when he coached high school basketball does this for his career, i don't know what that degree is called but i loved what he did. He came over while i was at work and went to work. He even rearranged our patio area...our love seat cushions need to be replaced desperately but are going to wait till next year so don't look at those. We also still have to build the porch (we...like i'm gonna have anything to do with that...ha) but for now our makeshift steps are working...

we are still minus the mulch but hopefully will get that taken care of soon...our plush new green grass is soo soft!

We have been doing lot's and lot's of watering! Everyone has gotten involved. It saves me some time and they love doing it! Occasionally (like yesterday) it ends with two individuals sitting on their beds cause they fight over which bushes or parts of the grass they get to water.

The heater does a great job unless it's too windy and then you can't feel it quite as much but it kept us pretty warm the other night when it was a little chillier

Cheta got into a fight (at least we assume) and got bit pretty bad. She was not doing so good last week and we were getting pretty worried about her. She would just lay around all day long which isn't like her...she was limping around really bad so we finally decided we needed to get her checked out. The vet said it was really infected, they got a lot of nasty stuff out of it and gave her an antibiotic injection that would stay in her for 3 weeks. It did the trick and she is healing nicely and back to her normal self! The vet said she may not have been able to heal that on her own, so we were glad that we took her in. I took this picture while she was still sick. She would just lay here all day.

Hope your having a good week!