Thursday, October 29, 2015

1 sentence per picture

I am at home right now (8:03) on a Thursday because Ribbit isn't feeling well. I'm going to try to take her in once her stomach stops hurting but I thoroughly enjoyed snuggling and sleeping with her for the past hour :).

While she is up and getting ready for school I thought I would post several pictures from our past few weeks but limit myself to descriptions so that I can make it to school and teach them younguns!!

9th graders made bowls out of their hands and created henna designs that told the gospel in relief on them

Reciting a poem with her class in chapel

Palette knife painting by one of my talented 9th graders

We needed two days at the fair!

Little Man loves being a "sharky"

I am such a creature of habit...egg whites, spinach cake and salsa for breakfast!

Roasted apples and sweet potatoes topped with turkey for lunch! YUM

Showing my students how to fire Raku pottery!

Open flames create beautiful effects on the pottery.

See the crackle...and the large dog?

They were a well oiled machine by the end of the day!

Acorn squash bowls with brown rice, grilled chicken and turkey bacon!

Pre K 3 went on a  field trip to the Pumpkin Patch

Feeding the cows hot dug buns

Petting the donkey

Driving the tractor

Me and my little pumpkin

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Garmin Forerunner 225 Review



I have been waiting to write a review for my new favorite toy for about 3 weeks now. I wanted to really break it in and live in it......... and do some troubleshooting before reviewing it. 

I had been wanting an activity tracker for sometime...something about carrying my phone during an entire 10 mile run makes you wish for something that is handsfree. 

I spent a lot of time talking to others, looking at others trackers and in the store. I finally went for the Garmin Forerunner 225 after I was given a coupon for 20% off at Lukes Locker for a tracker. I went for the Garmin 225 for several reasons. 

1-Its the newest of the forerunners, therefore more updates and a sleeker design.
2-It has a hinged wristband, where most other trackers are all one unit and that can cause wear down as you constantly bend it. 
3-It is so stinking easy to use, 4 buttons total and with one push I can start, pause and save a run. 
4-Garmin is known to be the 2nd best GPS system in the world, only behind the company that the US military uses. 
A Saturday run with some loops around a lake!

A Saturday run with 3 other ladies!

5-It syncs with my phone so gone are the days of having to input my workouts and letting my phone guess how many calories I had burned. It even syncs with MyFitnessPal, which is the calorie counter app I use and therefore I know how many calories a day I need to consume to maintain, lose or pack on weight. ITS WONDERFUL!!
6-It tracks my steps and if I don't move for more than 15 minutes it tells me to MOVE!! Most of the time I like this feature but I think its quite annoying that the minute I sit down to use the potty it BEEPS!!!!

I really try to hit my goal every day. My goal changes every day and is set by the Garmin based on my stats. A normal day for me is 15-18,000 steps. That includes a 5-7 mile run and a full day at work, circling students as they work...offering advice and grabbing supplies. Art is one of the most active subjects as its a constant lab!!! CREATIVE CHAOS!!

7-It tracks my sleep, .........deep and light sleep. I am always surprised to see that I only get 3-4 hours of deep sleep and the rest is pretty light and interrupted. 

Ha, this was on a Tuesday night after being awake since 3:40 (i drive to a friends house about 10 minutes away so I have to wake earlier on Tuesdays), a six mile run and a LLOONNGG day at school......Yup, out at 7:28 and back up at 4:10 to do it all over again.

8-The absolute best feature though is the blue tooth connection which allows me to read any incoming text messages or emails from the front face of the watch. I am always worried that Adam will need me during one of my longer runs and I wouldn't know without carrying my phone. This shows me who is messaging me and the first line of the message. I can choose to scroll and read the rest or ignore it. This also helps with my running group. If someone opts out due to a sick kid or bad weather I get it on my watch and I can go ahead and start my run. 

As great as the forerunner is there is one thing that annoys me. I recharge it probably 1 or 2 nights a week during dinner or when I am sitting down to watch TV. After I do that I have to restart the watch in order to get back all of my activity tracking. It doesn't loose my history but its just one thing I have to remember to do or else it will forget to track my sleep or steps the next day. 

I also waited to review the forerunner until I could compare it against my treadmill. They are up front with letting you know that the GPS isn't 100% accurate indoors and most of the time when I am running on the treadmill its because of bad weather which also affects GPS. So the last two times I have run on the treadmill there has been about .4 miles of a difference...Almost 1/2 a mile...even though it counts every step (hmmm?). I trust the treadmill more on those days because I like to do interval training..meaning I run for a steady pace for 3 minutes, then bust it for 2....repeat again and again until I hit 5 miles...that is probably hard to keep up with for the Garmin as I am indoors. 

The forerunner is waterproof up to 2 feet, keeps a history of my personal records and maps my runs so I can repeat them. All in all its a great watch/fitness tracker and I love that it syncs perfectly with my iPhone 6. 

Saturday, October 24, 2015

The Gate is Open

If you haven't read Jen Hatmaker's blog, THEN STOP AND go read it! Here is her most recent post "The Gate is Open". This speaks to me on so many levels and reminds me of people in my life who I know feel "trapped" and think they must clean up their act or become something they are not before they can fulfill all that life has for them.

The Gate is Open

I don’t know if you know this, but chickens are low-hanging fruit. My girlfriend Katie asked me yesterday: “Did you have trouble with animals digging to get to your chickens? Did you have anything around their coop to prevent it?” No, we basically provided a free chicken buffet for neighboring raccoons, dogs, and coyotes. We started with twelve chickens and now we have two (RIP) (#neverforget).

But let me tell you about our two. These girls, they are survivors. I am so serious. They are two tough broads. All their sisters fell one by one to poor wandering habits and a basic ignorance of their surroundings, but these two own the hood. They never leave each others side and I’m pretty sure they are never going to die.

Until about three months ago, we let the chickens free range all over our one-acre (and sometimes the neighbors’ yards which accounted for the untimely deaths of chickens #4, #7, and #10). We would shut them in their coop at night all roosted together, and in the morning we’d open the door and they’d all run out at top speed to begin their thrilling day of hunting and pecking. I mean, I’d open the gate four inches and they squeezed out and ran for freedom.

But because chickens actually crap all over everything including your patio furniture and new porch, we fenced in a large area around their coop and confined them to a normal-sized free-range zone so we would no longer constantly sit on/walk through/clean up their irrational amounts of poop. They’ve been in there for three months.

Yesterday after texting with Katie, I decided to let the two plucky chickens have a field trip around the yard. Won’t this be fun for the girls! I thought. They’ll run around their favorite old paths and scratch under the trees and have a merry time. We had some rain so everything is soft and bugs are plentiful and this will be their #bestlifenow.

So imagine my shock when I walked over to the coop, excitedly threw open the gate preparing for the chicken sprint…and they just stared at me. Come out, gals! Look! Run like the wind! The whole yard is your playground today! But they just turned away and walked back toward the coop. I left the gate wide open all day, and they never left. The adventurous, seize-the-day spirit of our two survivors was gone.

I can’t quit thinking about it.

I’m a big fan of freedom, of wide-open spaces, of not being confined and imprisoned and stuck. This is absolutely God’s craving for us too: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). That first sentence is everything. Why did Jesus set us free? So we would be free. That’s basically it. He emancipated us from everything that imprisons because freedom is its own reward. To hear the Bible tell it, Christians should be the freest, most unstuck, unrestricted, liberated people breathing air.

I woke up thinking how many of us are staying inside the tiny coop while the gate to the big yard is wide open. There it is! Right there! Freedom! We believe we are locked in, but the confinement is imaginary. We’ve been imprisoned for so long, we cannot even recognize what an open door looks like. The small space, the fence, the latch, the borders; it has become our whole world until there is nothing even visible outside anymore.

Who told you imprisonment was your only option? What narrative have you believed that keeps you trapped, forfeiting your own freedom? And how long have you chained yourself inside? The prisons, they are many: toxic relationships, abusive churches, soul-crushing jobs, addictions, sorrow, impossible expectations, deferred dreams, the lie of scarcity, fear, regret.

These are hurdles, not prisons.


“…through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:1). Somewhere along the way, the idea of misery became enmeshed with the notion of Christian sacrifice. God became this irrational, confusing abuser who kept his kids locked in poisonous or barren environments for the sake of…I’m not sure what…the kingdom? Longsuffering? Death to self? I’ve heard abused women say, “God has not released me yet…” and I want to scream YES HE SURE AS HECK HAS. I’ve seen folks shrivel and shrink under toxic church leadership, dreamers desert their gifts under the double lie of scarcity + fear. I’ve seen the emotional surrender to addictions, imagining freedom is for other people.

Why do we think we only deserve the coop when God gave us the whole yard?

I remember the day I realized Brandon and I could walk away from a toxic environment that had broken our spirits. It was like a revelation, the moment my eyes saw the open gate. We can leave?? There was no Protestant work ethic that demanded we forfeit our souls for “loyalty.” There was no requirement of emotional loss so someone else could gain. God never asked for our full erasure to serve a bottom line. We were free.

We always had been.

Dear one, I don’t know what prison you are in, but listen to me: the gate is open. We are loved by a God of freedom and liberation and adventure and meaning. Run like the wind! Look, right outside the fence, there it is! We are not a people of prisons. Perhaps your spirit has been broken, because small locked spaces can do that after awhile. But you are not a slave to those shackles. Jesus set you way too free for that nonsense. There is so much life out there, so much to see, so much to experience, so much to enjoy, so much space to heal and find your legs again and run.

I know those first few steps outside can be terrifying; prisons confine and restrict but at least they are familiar. But if Jesus is to be trusted, He opened the gate because evidently freedom is how to do this thing, this life. It is his plan and will and He believed so deeply in its power that He went all the way to the cross to secure it for us. You are pluckier than you think; it’s still in there down deep. I know it feels risky, even unchristian if you’ve been abusively programmed. But you can do this. You can sprint through that gate. The whole yard is yours.

Off you go.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

October Catch Up

My post frequency has been slacking since school started. Add in 4 days of the stomach bug and I was not in the mood to do anything but survive. I took one 1/2 sick day and the rest of the time I was encouraging my students to steer clear of me and hoping that I wouldn't pass out. I wasn't hungry at all but had to force feed myself small snacks so that I wouldn't get too dizzy when I stood up. It was awful and I just wanted to sleep..which I did a lot of. I took 2 solid days off from working out and the 3rd and 4th day I walked 2 miles, ran 2 miles...all on the treadmill so that I could take breaks..and I did :). To make matters even worse, I had a huge event at school to get prepared for and I felt like I was going to let down lots of people if I didn't get back to 100% before this weekend. The good news is that I watched a full season of Fixer Upper and have all sorts of new ideas for the rest of our kitchen remodel and our upcoming Master bath and closet remodel. I also watched a full season of the Food Truck Race...which may or may not have been the best choice as I had to turn it off several times due to the nausea the images of fried food gave me.

All that said, I am back and running all full cylinders, except being sore and tired from my great weight room workout on Sunday..thats the usual though and I love it.

Big Man (previously known as Baby Boy) earned a Daniel Sticker this past week for being reverent. We asked him what reverence was and he said " I don't know poophead" while he shook his head...he's basically a 16 year old trapped in a curly headed ninnymuggan's body. While it was funny, I had to discipline for the poophead thing and question his teacher's ability to spot reverence :).
He has been playing soccer like a pro...scoring 3-5 goals per game, some for his team, some for the other, hey who's keeping score at 3 years old? He won the medal for "paying attention" this past week which was stinking hilarious since his coach had to literally spin him around several times to get his hand unstuck from the soccer net. There was also the time I marched out onto the field and snapped at him several times to make sure he had not fallen asleep while standing up....turns out there was some rather interesting stain on his shirt that captured his full attention for a solid minute.

Sister is reading up a storm, which makes our shopping trips super fun. Ca Ca Ca aa aaa  aa Na Na Na...MOMMY IT SAYS CAN. 3 seconds later SSS ttttt ah ah ah Pa  pa...STOP mommy STOP! Yup, any 3 to 4 letter word is getting completely sounded out before we move onto any other aisle or product. She is still in her " i want to color everything for everybody stage" and spends hours coloring every night. She gave me a mothers day card and swears she meant to give it to me when she was 2 but couldn't fully execute it until she was 6. She is still the same momma's girl as always, having 3 meltdown episodes in the past 2 weeks when she either lost sight of me in a crowd ( a crowd of our friends) or missed me during school. It comes and goes. She had a doctors appt last week and she is growing taller and leaner but is still in the 20th percentile for both..little petite thing. She got the flu shot and she thought the world was going to end..she milked that sucker for all it was worth and showed off her bright pink band aid to anyone who had eyes. She is a very good listener at church and can tell you the ENTIRE story of Esau and Jacob..beginning with their dad Isaac and ending with Jacob returning and being embraced by Esau...and in depth too, its quite amazing. I wish she could remember to flush her poop every morning that she leaves in our toilet...but hey, gotta pick your battles.

Goober got his first real sport injury this past weekend. The pitcher nailed him in the inside of his foot when he was at bat and it left a nice bruise. He was actually pretty great about it and several bags of ice and some pain meds was all he needed to bounce back. He is still struggling with this thing called "sneakiness" and not telling us the truth. He really stinks at it though and we catch him every time...thats what I pray for, Lord let that child get caught while he is in my home so we can correct him before he gets out in the world. His grades are average, failing Latin right now..yup flat out failing but we have until Christmas to bring it up so he is sitting on the iPad taking Quizlets as we speak. Something about doing homework on a screen that makes it fun or hip or cool or wicked...whateves.

There was a day two weeks ago that all 3 kids got the belt from Adam...and to hear my friend (who was picking up her child that we watch after school) repeat it, is hysterical. Big Man had just poked her son in the eye with two fingers, very 3 stooges like, laughed at it and then had called someone poophead for the 50th time that day. Ribbit had given her whole class purple nurples and had refused to participate in Spanish, causing the whole class to cry along with her. Goober had hid a 22 on a test from us for 3 weeks and then blamed me for not checking his online report card. My friend said the whole house was a buzz, with whacks from the belt, kids holding their butt and screaming "No, No", crying, running, I was cooking dinner and packing up her kid while demanding apologies from my kids. She said she has just laughed and laughed at us but was glad her kid got to see that they aren't the only family who spanks and disciplines. I am glad it made someone laugh because those days are rough and we wonder if we will ever see the other side....or even just some good grades :).


Apparently my new phone and computer are syncing to share photos so I will post some of those later!

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Fitness Wednesday-Cheat Days

I had to share this article I recently read as it matches my personal philosophy for "cheat days". 

I tend to sprinkle in treats every other day....and treats being dark chocolate covered raisins, low fat no-sugar added frozen yogurt from Braums and Cinnamon Bread. I will choose one of them and save enough calories over the day to have it as my dessert and I SAVOR EVERY MOMENT OF IT. I won't even start to eat my treat until all 3 kiddos are down for the night and I am sitting in front of the television watching a cooking show. 

I also agree that anytime I have overdone it, even with healthy food, I pay for it the next day...thats why serving size matters and taking your time to eat so that you feel full is also important. Anyways, here is the article which articulates this philosophy a thousand times better than I ever could. 

The Argument for Cheat Days: Rewarding Yourself
Some say that giving yourself days of indulgence is giving yourself a needed break from your diet. These cheat days are a relief valve that help you stick to healthier foods.
The philosophy behind this basically goes something like this: Healthy eating requires some willpower—willpower you’ve used to keep yourself from forbidden foods—so to reward your constraint, it helps to have one scheduled day (or meal) per week where you’re allowed to eat some of the treats you’ve been avoiding. When you give yourself a window to enjoy these off-limit foods, it’ll satisfy your cravings, replenish your depleted willpower, and, some studies suggest, even increase your production of the hunger-dampening hormone leptin while boosting metabolism.
The Argument Against Cheat Days
So cheat days sound like a good thing, right? Not so fast. The the logic behind these days has more than a few flaws, and it’s due to the psychology and physiology behind them.
The Name Is to Blame
The trouble with cheat days starts with the wording.
“The very phrase ‘cheat day’ sets up enjoying a meal as something forbidden,” says Sondra Kronberg, R.D., executive director of the Eating Disorder Treatment Collaborative. “Separating foods into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories encourages you to associate eating with guilt and shame.” This means that instead of enjoying everything we eat, we feel bad about ourselves when we eat something we consider “bad.”
What’s more, when we deem certain foods “bad” or “cheating,” the negative name doesn’t help us pump the breaks.
“When a food is off-limits, it can develop a specific, emotional charge,” explains Melainie Rogers, RD, a nutritionist and eating disorder specialist. “You begin obsessing over it, fantasizing about, and looking forward to that ‘indulge day’ all week. Then, when you finally have access to it, you overeat.”
On the flipside, labeling foods as “good” or “healthy” can also backfire. Science shows when we think something is healthy, we’re not concerned with portion control and thus overdo it—whether it’s a “normal” day or a “cheat” day. Yes, there can be too much of a good thing.
Along these same lines, thinking of a meal or snack as “healthy” can have a surprising affect on our hunger. Studies show merely considering items we put in our mouth as “healthy” can literally make us feel hungrier—especially if we select a “good-for-you” item out of obligation over something we’re truly hungry for.
Attack of the Calories
Folks who assume they can compensate for giving into temptations—say, by holding themselves back on all days except their cheat days—are actually less likely to reach their dietary goals. This is because they’re more likely to consume a greater number of calories, not just on their cheat day but on the days following it.
Restricting ourselves throughout the week and then slamming our bodies with sugar and fat once our cheat day rolls around, can have “a massive impact on blood sugar and insulin levels,” Rogers says. “You’ll wake up the next day craving more sugars and simple carbs, and you’ll find yourself feeling pretty ragged. And if you repeatedly increase your caloric intake above baseline, you may inadvertently end up gaining more weight over time.”
Cravings serve as a sign that your nutritional approach isn’t sound. “Most cravings come from overly restricting your food intake, using food as a drug, or over exercising,” Kronberg says.
Binging Leads to Extra Cheat Days
There’s a very fine line between a cheat day and a free-fall into food binging, especially if you’re, “white-knuckling it during those other six days of sticking out a meal plan you don’t particularly like,” says Ryan Andrews, R.D., author of Drop The Fat Act and Live Lean and coach with Precision Nutrition. Once that day of indulgence comes, it’s not about enjoying the foods you haven’t had all week. Instead, you’re approaching it out of a need to consume all you can before the day goes away. “It feeds into a feast-and-famine cycle,” Andrews says.
We can thank our biology for cheat days turning into these all-out food fests. We’re wired to chase down food when we’re caught in the feast-and-famine cycle. “People will eat beyond satiety when they’re coming from a fear of scarcity,” Rogers explains.
Binging on a cheat day also makes it challenging to confine cheat-day foods only to that designated 24-hour window. “It’s very hard for people to compartmentalize their diets,” Rogers says. “‘I’m only going to have those cookies on Saturday’ can easily spill over into ‘I’ll only have a few cookies Sunday too.'”
The Solution: Stop Restricting, Start Enjoying—in Moderation
So if cheat days don’t work, are we all better off eating whatever we want, whenever we want?
Well, not quite, says Corby K. Martin, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and food intake researcher at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. “Following a healthy diet means including a number of foods—all of which are consumed in moderation,” he says. “If weight loss is the goal, this usually means three square meals a day with planned snacks, incorporating treats but in smaller portion sizes.”
Research suggests eating a balance of foods—with none of them off-limits or labeled “bad”—is the best way to reduce the kinds of cravings that can lead to a binge.
During the first week of a new diet, most people experience an increase in hankerings for coveted foods, but when people stick to a balanced weight loss diet, the tendency to occasionally overeat actually goes down over time, Martin says.
So what does a game plan for a healthy eating with no cheat days look like? Remember these three things:
1. Listen to your appetite.
“If you want to eat spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, have it!” Andrews says. “Don’t find the low-carb version with the fat-free sauce. If you actually eat what you want, you’ll likely end up eating a more reasonable amount of it.” Eating in tune with your hunger is a principle of intuitive eating, and it’s shown to have a positive effect on both your weight and your wellbeing.
2. Enjoy treats from time to time.
Research shows (and experts agree) that sprinkling reasonably sized desserts or treats into your daily diet encourages you to find pleasure in meal time again—and that pleasure will help ensure you don’t feel the need to go overboard.
So instead of confining your treats to one single day, drop them into places throughout the week. For example, enjoy: “a cookie or a few pieces of chocolate after dinner on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” Rogers says.
3. Savor every bite.
Once you place any item of food into your mouth, take a moment to: “taste, smell, and experience it as a whole,” Rogers says. “When you take the time to be mindful about what you’re eating, you tap into your satiety cues.”
The Takeaway
Forget about designating a cheat day to reward yourself. Denying yourself most of the week and then indulging like crazy on your one day “off,” just promotes guilt, anxiety, and shame around eating—which means you won’t likely get to the health outcome you’re looking for. Instead, make every day a great day by listening to your appetite, periodically adding in some of your favorite foods in small portions, and savoring each and every bite of everything you eat. This sustainable approach will help you think of all of your eating as enjoyable, and that’s what gets you down the road to where you want to be.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

I love the minivan

It seems funny how most people think that we HAD to get a mini van...but I was begging for one in all honesty. I told someone just yesterday that I may even keep it after I am done raising kids (whenever that is). Plus, with my fuzzy dice hanging in the  mirror, my carpet on the dashboard to keep it from cracking and my 26.2 sticker on the back I am super fly.

The weather has just been so pretty...in fact, as the kids are all napping I am in the playroom, lying on the day bed writing this just so I can look outside. I should probably go outside but I just spent 2 hours outside watching Baby Boy skip around a soccer field and get distracted my trains while fending off an army of ants....so the view is plenty for right now. Tonight we are heading to carve pumpkins with our church group and I think after that our home will be fully ready for Fall!!! I gained some serious cool points with my kiddos when they came home to find that I had made a pumpkin wreath for the front door and had bought a sign to hang on top of it that says "Beware of zombies". They love that it even has fake blood on it. We aren't into gore or anything but the way my kids talk about zombies and the new season of The Walking Dead has got me into the zombie mode.


His team voted for him to get the GAME BALL at their first game. He got all of the outs from pitching! GO E!!

Asleep on the bus ride home. We drove the cheerleaders to an away game and they had the best time dancing and getting to be the cool kids!

The Blue Crew let them hang out with them.


We tried to wait until Uncle Chris and Aunt Micah's next visit out here for some Sushi Sam's but we just couldn't...Ribbit learned how to use her chopsticks!

His first bento box...he was soon excited to order this!

Recently most of our days have been filled with baseball practice, baseball games, soccer practice, soccer games, adoption dinners, running (always running), birthday parties, football games and church. Baby Boy and Ribbit wake up every morning and ask "is today school day or church day"...it throws them off on Saturday when we say neither!!

Roasting a pan full of veggies every weekend helps us stay ahead during the busy weeknights!

I got this in from my race...it said " you can turn these into coffee mugs or other fantastic christmas presents.  So who wants a coaster with my "what is that smell?" face :).

Painting our teddy bear parade float in our undies..best day ever.

Yesterday I took the two youngest (Goober was too cool) with me to a Bikram Yoga class at my cryo clinic. It was free and the teachers were obsessed with them. They called them both the best "yogies" they had ever seen. They both were really into it, doing all the moves on their own mats and copying the instructor exactly. Baby Boy would throw his hands up and say "seriously" when she first did the move but he always got it in the end. Ribbit even did a full out bridge which apparently is harder than it looks, since her mama almost pulled her shoulder out of joint attempting one.

See the cute little cheerleader out there in the pink skirt? 

She ran up to make sure we still knew she was cheering :). Thats her teacher from last year in the background :).

We wore the same shirts as our best buds!

Everyone is doing fairly well in school still. Ribbit figured out what a "purple nurple" is and gave them to each and every child in her kindergarten class.....lovely. I swear her teacher is going to think we are the ungodliest parents ever after this year. She is reading site words and can recognize a lot of words quickly...those tough ones that don't follow the phonics rules are still hanging her up.

Baby Boy has been told how good his motor skills are so many times that when his teacher asked him what he was good at the other day he said "motor skilling". He gets in trouble for trying to "help", "teach", "parent" and for darting like a train across any field, parking lot or hallway to get to his mommy and daddy. It makes going to eat lunch with him difficult but we have managed to make departing a little easier with lots of air kisses and hugs.

Big Man is doing just fine, somewhat staying on top of things and learning how to use his tutorial wisely. He is learning a lot about being a humble team player. He has has two stellar games where he was responsible for most or all of the outs and then there was this last game where he thought he would show off and do push ups as he came up to bat. Yeah, that ended the way it should have ....with him striking out and not having a stellar pitching game. He said he did because he saw that one of our coaches (with big muscles) had just shown up. Its actually pretty hilarious looking back on it but he did cry and feel all the weight of the game on his shoulders.

Racing mom and Ribbit in the mini van up to the school.  The girls weren't being lazy, we had a lot of art supplies :).

Soccer for this little tyke. 4 goals in his first game...3 for his team and 1 for the other since we must share!!!

Roasted veggies and beef...YUMMY!

We all got to eat lunch together one day at school! Well all minus Daddy. 


We are looking forward to having grandparents out soon, the Texas State Fair, Reformation Day Parties at school, dressing up and trick o treating with friends and Cougar Pride Weekend at school.....and all of this will be made so much easier with my fantastic MINIVAN!!