Small moments

Some random happenings in June and July:

On, June 16th I came outside to find Cole had drawn this:

It's a train! And I could totally tell what it is! It even has a funnel, wheels and a bell.

I thought it was great for a 3 1/2 year old. Maybe I'm just not used to a child that actually enjoys drawing (Lance and Jude both have never been interested at all). Cole is my artist. He'll sit for hours and color, draw, and paint.


Bender continues to slowly steal our hearts. It's hard to be upset at him for chewing up every single pair of flip flops I own when he does things like this:

He loves his family and insists on being where we are at all times. Even when I'm working on a project and am up most of the night, Bender follows me around until I go to bed. We love our dog!

Scott sent me this picture one day in Jude. Lance found a huge black rat snake! Can you tell how excited he is?

I guess we have something to look forward to with Molty. Hard to believe Lance's little snake will look like this one day.

Lily is our biggest climber yet. On June 29th, I turned around to see this:

She wanted the candle on the mantle and figured out how to get it. While I'm impressed with her spunk and agility, I'll admit it makes me a bit nervous. I've found her on top of our piano, sitting in the sink in the bathrooms, and balancing on top of our dining room chairs (the top, top--not the seat). Slow down, little monkey! You're only 18 months old!

Our neighbor has a garden in their front yard and blackberry bushes planted between our properties. They were out of town for the first part of July and told us we were welcome to any berries we could find. The kids thought this was the best thing since discovering you could pee outside.

Lily especially liked eating them. She would sit on this green electrical box and devour every single berry she could find. I thought they were a bit tart, but that didn't seem to bother her as she plowed her way through bush after bush.

Cole just liked picking them and giving them to me to eat.

The kids may have enjoyed the berries a little too much. I was talking to my neighbor when she got back into town and she mentioned she was surprised that her bushes were not yielding their usual bounty. Oops. We stopped eating them after that.

Lily has developed a love of books. She begs us to read to her all day long. On July 23rd, I caught Lily and George reading before bed. She had her entire library on the floor and as soon as George was finished with one, she'd shove another into his hands. 

Love it!



Lance may have a hard time tolerating Jude and Cole's constant motion and noise, but he has a tender spot for Lily. I love coming into a room to scenes like this:

The last half of July was spent getting ready for our trip to California to visit Chad. We were planning on taking the kids to Disneyland while we were there, so of course I had to make shirts.

I wanted them to be unique, but something we could wear at home too. I finally decided to try out the bleach technique and was happy with the way they turned out. 

You start with a silhouette. The kids each picked out their favorite Disney character. Neither Lance nor Jude were that thrilled about the traditional Mickey and friends characters, so we settled for Iron Man. Not exactly a Disney character, but Disney does own the rights to Marvel, so good enough.

I cut the image out from freezer paper.

Iron the form onto a pre-washed shirt.

With half bleach, half water in a spray bottle, start spraying a fine mist onto the image, making sure to blot up any moisture that lands on the stencil. (Otherwise it gets soaked and will start to peel up.)

Continue spraying until you reached the desired effect. Peal off the stencil and admire your work.

This was for Lance and I wasn't that thrilled with the color fade, so I ended up doing it again with a black shirt that turned out much better.

Here are the finished shirts:

George wanted Gaston ("in real life he would have been the good guy, saving Bell from a monster that was keeping her captive and tried to kill her father..."), I had Mary Poppins, Lance and Jude had Iron Man, Cole wanted Mickey and Lily got Bambi.

They were totally easy to make and they turned out well!



One day we found Bender getting really worked up about one of our rain gutter downspout splash blocks. When we turned it over. we found a toad trying his hardest to hide. I caught the poor guy and let a very excited Cole hold him for a few minutes before we let him go outside our fence.

Before we flew out to California, we spent a few hours with Grandma and Grandpa. Cole found Grandma's newest dress-up outfit and insisted on trying it on.

Lily saw Cole rocking the costume and had to try it on herself, although she wanted nothing to do with the fake hair.

Now it's on to California!!