A Trip to the Zoo

A year and a half ago my friend Beth and I went to the zoo. Here are all the kids in our quad strollers. We got a lot of looks that day and a lot of questions.

Beth has twins that are a few months younger than Isaac and then she also has another son that is less than 2 years younger than her twins.

We went to the zoo again last week. I have since traded in my quad stroller for a wagon but she still has hers. I gave her one of my kids. Now she gets the crazy looks and people think I'm normal. That sure was a nice switch!

Music to my Ears

It is not an understatement when I say that Isaac loves music. Any type of music comes on and his toes start tapping, head starts nodding, hips start moving. I love that he loves music because I do also, unfortunately I just don't have the talent for it that I wish I had.

In the beginning of August the kids went for a sleepover by their grandparents house and were going to a parade that next morning. I guess there were some older kids that had taken some of their toys and were having a little garage sale close to where my kids were sitting. Isaac eyed this guitar and kept asking grandpa if he could have it. Finally grandpa gave in and told him it could be part of his birthday present. He came up the driveway that day just beaming because of his new guitar. He walked in the door and told me that he was going to use this guitar to praise God. He loves to sing and you can often find him strumming his guitar and doing just that, singing praises to God.

Unfortunately, he also loves the drums and had asked me for them for his birthday. I told him that it wasn't going to happen this birthday, so now he is asking for them for Christmas. He must know that his mom played the drums in the grade school band and secretly wants to be like me.

Now the kids have assembled their own band. The other day I walked into to the living room to find this.

Since I won't buy him drums, Isaac has made his own drum set using Lincoln Logs for sticks, two plastic baskets upside down and his big bouncing ball. Him and Joshua take turns on the drums and the guitar, Amanda sings and Alex plays the piano.

Time Spent Together

The last couple weeks it seems our family has been able to do a lot of activities together. I am always so thankful for these times. It's good to just forget about the house, it doesn't need to be clean, we don't have to have fancy meals. Many days I do get frustrated because it seems I didn't accomplish much or the house is a mess but it's the time that we were able to spend together that I cherish.

I continue to count these blessings and all the other little things in life.

110~ that I am able to stay home with my kids and do my work on the computer in my pjs

111~ doing a puzzle with Joshua

112~ our camper and all the memories that will be made in it

113~ sitting around the campfire

114~ roasting marshmallows

115~ hot dogs cooked over the fire

116~ a day at the beach

117~ kids who are filthy but having fun!

118~ sand dunes to climb and of course running down them which is way more fun!

119~ smooth set up of camper and smooth take down of the camper (I don't think we even fought once!)

120~ a child's imagination

121~ a special treat of lunch at McDonald's (a treat for them) with well behaved kids (a treat for me)

122~ a fun day at the zoo

123~ seeing all the animals God created

124~ kids running through the water on a hot day in their clothes

125~ 6 kids in a kangaroo

126~ drying off on the rocks

127~ enjoying a great steak dinner with the family

Join the Gratitude Community and start counting your blessings.

The Blue Thunder

Here it is, just as promised......soccer pictures. I'm sure you've all been waiting all day for me to post these. (note sarcasm)

Here is Joshua ready to throw the ball in. Alex looks really ready doesn't she?

Time to take a break. I think the girls were more interested in telling their coach about their life. I'm not really sure where they get their love for talking from. (note more sarcasm)

This is what most of the game looks like, everyone just in a big huddle following the ball around.

I was very proud of Joshua (well I was proud of them all) but he played last year and he has improved so much since then. He scored 2 goals today!
Of course it does help that there is no goalie, but considering most the time they are in a big clump it does make it a little hard to score.

Randomvis

I haven't done a random post in awhile, thought it was about time.

Not sure if you all remember this post about my closet back in June. But it finally got fixed a couple weeks ago. My husband finally said something about it so I figured it was about time. Besides that, it was cool one night and I had to dig to the bottom to find a coat.

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The kids also started AWANA this past Wednesday. For those of you not familiar with AWANA it is a program at church for kids to go listen to Bible stories, memorize scripture, sing songs and have fun. They had a lot of fun and Isaac was already asking when he could go back. Their age group is the Cubbies. Since we live near Chicago and are White Sox fans, I am not particularly fond of the name but I guess I don't get to choose. I am helping out with a group of Kindergartners while the kids are in their class.

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My kids have always loved doing puzzles but they tend to be a little easy for them. So for Joshua's birthday my dad gave him a 300 piece puzzle to challenge him a little. Last week he took it out and wanted me to do it with him. At first he was a little frustrated by it but I sat down and we finished it together. He did it another time with Brad and now he sits down and will put it together twice a day all by himself. He's gotten so good he doesn't even look at the box to figure out where the pieces go.

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The kids also had their first soccer practice yesterday and their first game is tomorrow. They are all on the same team - Blue Thunder. I'm sure you will all be on the edge of your seat just waiting for those pictures!

Wash, Wash and more Wash!

As much fun as camping can be, it brings one thing that is not very fun. Laundry! I spent a big majority of yesterday afternoon and today washing, folding and putting away clothes. This is a picture of most of the clean clothes, towels, etc. before I folded it. The sad thing is, I still had a load in the dryer at this point and it also doesn't include half a load that had some of the kids blankets in it and pillow cases. I also had about half a load left downstairs to wash.

Looking at all of this reminded me of this Bible verse:

And my God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:19

God will supply all my "need" and by this picture you can tell he has supplied our family with much more than our need! And so this big pile of laundry reminded me that we have a lot to be thankful for!

The Great Outdoors

I haven't blogged in a week and I could tell that everyone missed me by all the emails I received no one noticed, oh well, I'm back! Mondays are usually Multitude Monday but instead I'm going to share our camping trip with you. It's not that I haven't been counting my blessings, I have and next week there will be a much longer list because I will be doing 2 weeks worth.

Friday afternoon we left for the Indiana Dunes State Park. As a child, every year we would go with a whole group from church for Labor Day Weekend and I have a lot of great memories from that and I hope my kids will too because this year we were able to start that tradition with our family. Some friends of ours have a whole group from their church that they go with every year and they happen to have an extra site so we were able to glom onto them. We had a total of 10 sites and I think there were around 50 people and 30 of them were kids. There were a lot of kids running around!

We spent a lot of time at the beach on Lake Michigan. The kids had a ton of fun just running around from camper to camper with the other kids, getting dirty, playing baseball, climbing sand dunes, playing in the water, digging huge holes at the beach and playing in them and sitting by the fire and eating smores. Feet were black, clothes were filthy, the camper was a mess but we had a lot of fun! It was great to see friends that we don't get to see all that often and the kids loved making new friends.

I'm not going to share too many photos this time, since I was told I put up too many from our last camping trip and I also shared one that had some people in the background that should not have been in the background. Hopefully no more mishaps this time. There were a couple instances that I wished I had a my camera with me but I didn't and both times were in the bathroom.

Both my girls are a little short for the hand dryers, so often when they would dry their hands they would have to have them up in the air and the air from the dryer would be blowing in their hair. Once Alex was drying her hands and was in her own little world. Wind was blowing in her hair, her eyes were closed, arms started waving everywhere then "BAM!" Clobbered the lady walking by. She did not miss a beat just continued on with her arms waving all over.

Sunday morning I went to take a shower and noticed there was a little friend in the shower for me. A small little orange frog, he was about an inch long. As I showered I kept my eye on the little bugger as he climbed the wall, I was just waiting for him to jump on my head. All of I sudden I saw this flash in front of me. That thing had flown from the wall on one side of me to the wall on the other side of me and started climbing up that one. Thankfully he stayed there until I was done. I wish I could have shared with you all how cute this little guy was, it was just not real cute that he was in the shower with me!