1st Day of School

Today was the first day of school so, of course, I had to take my yearly pictures at the end of our sidewalk. There's a little bug going through our home so Benji was sick earlier this week but feeling better now, Jacob woke up with a headache, Clara has a sore throat, Debra is begging for medicine even thought there's nothing wrong with her, and Chris felt just plain lousy this morning. Everybody was well enough to go to school.......except for poor Chris. He got dressed, took our annual pictures, got in the van........and then lost steam and thought he was going to throw up. By the time we got to school all he wanted to do was lay down in the back seat. He ended up sleeping from 10:00 until 2:00. Now he's jumping around and I'm sure will be raring to go to school tomorrow.

Here are the grades for this year:
Jacob - 5th
Clara - 4th
Chris - 2nd
Benji - 2nd
Debra - Preschool

Here's the crew from last year.

2008 Here they are in 2007.
They look so little and cute here!!!! Chris and Benji were in preschool.

2006

My Baby

Debra is now four years old. She is growing so fast. Yesterday the two of us had a little photo shoot.......she loves doing that! Here are a few of my favorites.

The kitty is a new addition to our farm.

Here's an extra picture that I thought I would throw in here.........the other day Jacob and Debra were arguing and picking on each other. Finally, I had had enough!!!!! I had her sit on his lap and they had to hold hands. And I made them sit there for about 10 minutes. You know what......it kind of worked! After that we talked, they hugged, told each other "I love you"........and then got along for awhile.

My #1 Tip For Taking Kids to WDW

I got this idea somewhere, although I can't really remember where, and thought I should try it out. Here it is:

Write your cell # on your children's arm in permanent marker.

Does this really work, you may ask. YES!!!!! IT DOES!!!!! I made sure to do this and.......sure enough...........in the middle of a downpour while at Hollywood Studios............one of my kiddos was no longer with us. Panic!!!! It was pouring and I was missing a kid. I frantically made my way back to the last place we had seen him. On my way there..........my cell phone rang........and it was a number I didn't recognize. Chris.....my little lost one....had stopped to put the hood up on his poncho and when he looked up, we were gone. He right away looked around for somebody who worked there, went to them and showed them his arm. I had him back within 5 minutes. I shudder to think how long it would have taken us to find him if he would not have had my # on his arm.

Here are a couple pictures of the whole bunch of us at Magic Kingdom. This was so cool!

The Highlight of Disney World

I figured it was about time I posted some about our trip to Orlando. We spent 9 days there and had a very awesome time. About 1/2 of the time was spent at the Church of the Nazarene General Assembly. This was a wonderful thing to go to. I'm thinking I'm going to write a separate post about that. The other 1/2 of our time was spent at Walt Disney World. We spent a day at Blizzard Beach Water Park, Hollywood Studios, and, of course, Magic Kingdom! It was fun.....expensive....but very fun! So......here is the highlight of what we did there.....the kids all got to get a "makeover". The boys got to become pirates and the girls turned into princesses.

The boys went to the Pirates League and were made over as pirates. They had a great time with this! Everybody in the place talked like pirates and each of the boys got their own pirate name. Here are some of the pictures from this..........................

Here is Joseph Gunskull, previously know as Benji........

Each of the boys got to pick what pirate face they wanted and I was SOOO hoping that none of them picked the skeleton one because I was dreading having to deal with the white makeup all day long. But.......of course.............Chris picked it. He looked great and was so excited to be a skeleton that I happily dealt with the smudged white makeup all day.

Roger Raidrage........or Chris

Here's Jacob.....I mean Thomas Wavewrecker.......

And here are my 3 fierce pirates all together.

Now for the girls.......they had been looking forward to this for months!!!! I had purchased their dresses months before at disneyoutlet.com and they had been hanging in the closet....taunting my poor little girls. Then the day finally came...........

Here are the girls.....sitting perfectly still as they are transformed into beautiful princesses.....

And here's the picture of Clara seeing what she looks like for the first time. Needless to say.....she was pleased.......

And here's my Little Debbie when she first saw herself all beautified......

And here they are together..............

And here are a couple of my whole crew all together. This was so fun!!!!!

Last week a bunch of my family went to Rapid City and had a fun time checking out Mount Rushmore and some of the other things in the area. One of the things we did was get some old time photos taken. They were fun to take and came out great! Here are some of them........

Here's my sister, my dad and me.

Here are my three boys, along with their cousin, shooting up the place.
This turned out to be pretty hilarious of my dad and stepmom. We were all laughing while this was being taken.

Ryan has his mom just where he wants her!

Here's the whole group of us.

Here are the three piano men of the group. My dad is a piano tuner, but laughed when I asked if her could tune up that piano!

Another one of the bunch of us.

Ha! Funny! My dad is liking this way too much!

I LOVE, Love, love how this picture came out! This was a fun one to take!

Chris and the Camera

The other day we were all outside riding a couple of our horses. I had my camera with me and while I was brushing down one of the horses I gave the camera to Chris to hold on to. Later that night I put my card in the computer to check out the pictures I had taken..........and.............there was about 100 extra pictures of that Chris had taken. Most of them were of his face. LOL! Here are a few of them...........please ignore the ucky crusty nose he has..........there's no stopping that with him............

Chris also took some pictures that weren't too bad. Here are a few of these ones......

Easter 2009 Pictures

Like every Easter morning.........sometime between scrambling to get ready for church and actually leaving for church I remembered to grab my camera and line the kids up for our yearly Easter picture. I love dressing all the kids up in new clothes for Easter. I always look for cute dresses for the girls and shirts for the boys late in the summer when all that kind of stuff is on clearance. Then I put them all together in a closet and hope I don't forget where I put them. By doing this I can actually afford to have everybody wear new clothes at the same time. The girls' dresses I bought for $6 a piece and the boys' shirts were.......get this.........$1 each!!!! So the grand total for the kids' Easter clothes cost me $15 dollars! Can't beat that! The day before Easter the girls couldn't wait any longer to put on their new dresses. So I let them put them on for a little while. Then they wanted me to take pictures with the dresses on. So we had a good time playing "photo shoot". Here are some of the pictures I got..........

I think this one is probably my favorite. There's just something about it that I think is so cute.