Birthday Party...

This year has been a rather "unique" time for me as Christmas seems to have suddenly "appeared". I feel completely caught off guard with the fact that it is tomorrow.

Tonight we will have a communion service at church and after that, a birthday party at home. Maybe this will get my thoughts on the season together.

Merry Christmas to all.

Teamwork!

Jayden was reading and Zeke was put the velcro animals where they go.

Favorite Pictures

These are some of my favorite photos from the last few months.

A baby bird in our front yard tree early in the summer

a baby garter in our front yard

a bee walking out of Stacey's flowers in the front yard

a spider web in a tree in our back yard... with a spider in the middle

Favorite Pictures...continued

mom Nack took this photo... I made a few adjustments

me and Stacey at Maramec State Park

a squirrel eating some dropped bread at the park

Zeke hanging out on the monkey bars

Favorite Pictures...completed!

Jayden sliding

the boys checking out the trout at Maramec State Park

A caterpillar on a post at the park

A typical day in the living room at the Sisk home

she's so stinkin' cute i can't hardly stand it!!!!!

Do NOT Let Your Child Get Flu Vaccine -- 9 Reasons Why

Do NOT Let Your Child Get Flu Vaccine -- 9 Reasons Why

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the end of the warm era

sooo, i have given up hope that i could withstand the frigid temperatures. translation: i wore my winter coat today. so sad.

does any one relate with how tedious it is to go places with children in cold weather? i mean, in warm weather its bad to get 3 little bodies all going the same direction, buckled, and stay moderately composed for wherever you're supposed to be going. NOW, not only do we have to do that, but we add in getting 3 pairs of arms into coats, then jamming said coats into car seats that are set for previously slender children. i gotta say, in all this...Praise God for a (relatively) climate controlled garage attached to our house in which to have our circus...now, to get our destinations to build covered parking garages...

the sabbath was made for man...

not man for the sabbath. referring to our family policy of enjoying technology-free Mondays as a way to focus on the family for Chris' day off. Today is a day of enjoying relationships including doing fun stuff on our computers. Chris is still working on our "1-day project" of burning our 2008 family video to DVD. And I have enjoyed a leisurely morning of coffee, email, and internet time. after of course, we capitalized on the opportunity God gave us to clean up the backyard. a dry (albeit cold) morning let us get the jungle/backyard cleaned up. now, moving on to real-world play time =D Enjoy your day too!

Saturday - Here and Gone!

Today seemed REALLY short! We had a fun day relaxing and getting a few things done around the house. The boys were wound up. Little Violet was as sweet as always. She is quite the explorer.

In the way of productivity, we are really close to compiling all of our 2008 videos on DVD. Also, a new toilet (from Habitat for Humanity) now stands proudly in our basement and functions perfectly!

We also got to meet "Cam" tonight. He is a week old and was just a precious as he could be. What a miracle!

Days off seem way too short!

no there is too much, let me sum up

we've been so busy living the last few months that i'm afraid there is too much for one measley article. besides, i know you're too busy to spend 4 hours reading a detailed update. soo...here's an overview of what's been happening since i last posted at the end of april:

MAY

we said good bye to the old house


we visited our ainley friends in potosi


jayden sang in the children's choir performance

we moved into our new (scary) house and began fixing it up

in the process of taming the backyard, i reacted to the forest of poison ivy we now call home


JUNE

more home improvements: pouring a patio in the backyard and tearing out the scary kitchen




which was then replaced with the newer version


we attended a Sisk family reunion


Violet had her first birthday



JULY


me and the kids went to youth camp for a week.


it was a treat to get a chunk of praise team back together for camp, but i really missed chris not being able to be there

Chris found a pet snake in our flowers not long after i had trimmed the leaves back...creepy!


we enjoyed a visit from our costephens friends and their babies


this was just too cute of a smile to not include!


the boys enjoy time in the sandbox we put under our deck


well, enjoy might be an over statement for zeke. i think he was in a funk.


and poor baby girl had a REALLY good time in the pool after the boys dumped dirt clods in it. she snuck in before i could catch her...her shoes took 2 days to dry out and they will never be the same!


Chris was camp director at VBS at the end of July


by the end of the week every goal set for the mission offering had been achieved. The kids brought shoes/shoelaces/socks/money for the "shoes for orphans" project. as a result every kid got to "slime" him. and yes, that's Jayden getting daddy in the photo.


then we got to meet my brother Andy's girlfriend Leslie when they came to town to visit


Violet figured out how to climb the slide...the big slide...kinda makes a momma nervous. the really scary thing is how skilled she is- she didn't fall at all while i let her repeat it over and over so i could capture it on video.

Real-life tetris

as a kid, my favorite game was Tetris (this was back when i had time to indulge in video games) That version was slightly more pleasant than the version i've been playing for the last week or so. packing our household has begun to feel like one giant game of fitting the pieces together into a defined space (moving boxes). Tetris is so much more fun when its virtual!

part of me would rather just pitch it all (a sale is only slightly less effort than packing) and put the money for the moving van toward new stuff...i know its not realistic though. but i am starting to understand why people go through 'moving sales'.

plus, i'm having to come face-to-face with my OCD...i don't like putting unlike things together in boxes. like things just go together. that's how it works. except when i find a package of sewing needles and some stickers after i've already filled the boxes with craft supplies. AHH! personal growth is uncomfortable! still, the reward at the end is a new house closer to the new job, sigh!

toddler art time and greenfootitis

i realized as i scrolled through my latest posts that i haven't updated on the boys in a while...so before i get to my latest picture of Violet, i'll tell a recent example of "boys are different then girls"...

last week we got out the big roll of white paper, laid it on the floor and cut lengths of it to draw outlines of each boy. i drew around Jayden pretty easily. Zeke was a little more difficult, but i managed. then came the time for them to color in their "person". as a kid i loved this activity...getting to color in the clothes i had on, so i told the boys to draw in their clothes and i gave them some crayons to use. what happened next was totally unexpected. they started with their faces. Jayden being more adept with a crayon actually did most of the work on both his and zeke's outline. i sat and watched in disbelief as my boys proceeded to draw claws and weapons. dangerous things! any little girl would have drawn jewelry and flowers, but boys...weapons. the papers actually looked more like monsters when they lost interest and moved on to something else (nothing ever really gets "done" around our house, they just move on). so the papers were as done as they were going to get and THEN the boys started calling them by name: "scaryZeke" and "scaryJayden" hung around our house for a few days before disappearing into the recycling bin...shh don't tell the boys where they are- they haven't missed them. boys are so different from girls!

now for the princess. one of the crayons used in the above story made its way into violet's footy sleeper. i had quite a shock when i pulled her foot out of her pajamas and it was green! my best guess is zeke put a piece of crayon in there before it went through the wash. he likes to carry things around inside his own footy pajamas. so when her foot hung out in her pajamas all night, the crayon color transfered to her skin. just in time for her well check at the pediatrician's office...maybe he didn't notice. he has probably seen crazier things anyway. so, here's a photo of her greenfootitis!

umm, sold?

technically, "under contract"

when i took this photo, i wanted to write about how we had just put the house on the market and yada yada...but between the photo Wednesday after lunch and me posting it Thursday after the kids are in bed, we got an offer...it was way too fast for me to have time to emotionally detach from the house. Good job to our realty company, though! now we can fully immerse ourselves in "new-job-land" and save ourselves a lot of gas money in the process. now, i guess we need to find a new place to live. Let the search begin!

two-ooth

not quite visible in the picture is baby girl's prize new tooth. that brings us up to two and now, back to our regularly scheduled sleep cycle. whew! what a relief! this tooth took some work to get through. the ordeal has made me apprehensive about the stage where she's gonna have to grow teeth that are flat...after all, this tooth was sharp and it didn't even come easy. how much worse is it gonna be for her and molars?!? yikes!

one-toothed-wonder

If you look very closely, you'll be able to see Violet's prize tooth. singular. one tooth. This photo was taken (march 16) shortly after it came in. Now, two weeks later, it's still her only tooth. I continue to let her off the hook when she fusses with the excuse that "she must be about to get the other tooth". so far i've been wrong. hopefully her jovial disposition (and good sleeping schedule) will return with the arrival of tooth #2.

Violet's laugh

I love the sound of this! I have a photo frame with a record button and keep trying to catch her laughing with it. She gets really distracted by the black thing i'm holding in front of her face and stops laughing. a few times, i've actually gotten a really good recording then along comes one of the boys and they try to listen to it, but accidentally (at least i think accidentally) press the record button and thus erase all my hard work! so, here it is recorded for all of posterity...away from the boys' reach!

family-fun-fishing day

Since Chris' day off is Monday, that day has become a "focus on our family" day. We recover from being expended the day before by avoiding electronics and coming up with a fun activity. This week, we ran errands (greatly helping with my workload for the rest of the week as well as doing something together) all over Jefferson City.

















Then, after naptime, we grabbed the poles and headed to a local conservation pond. It was a huge success! The weather was beautiful and the fish were hungry. Both the boys caught several fish. At one point, they both had one on the line at the same time. The sign said the pond was stocked with big mouth bass, but we didn't see any of those. Just some little pan fish, but the boys were excited just the same. Well, not at first. Jayden had already had his rookie fishing trip, so he knew alittle, but Zeke started crying as soon as Chris baited his hook and helped him cast the first time. Between sobs we figured out he was scared of catching a shark! How innocently cute! Once we explained that sharks did not live in the pond he was better.