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!