A Few Reasons I Love My Husband Lately

Josh has been on nights all month and I think the kids and I definitely got the good end of the deal.  He works 13 hour nights, sleeps a few hours between pages hopefully, comes home and takes a little nap in the morning, and then wakes up ready to hang with us in the afternoon.  I know this sleep-dependent woman couldn't do that!  It has been fun having him around in the day to play with instead of just at night when the kids are cleaning up and going to bed.  I am grateful we have a husband/dad who loves spending time with us.

He is ever the optimist.   He found a free upright piano on freecycle and insisted that we should get it. I was a bit skeptical but he persisted and after a little adventure in getting it I found myself laughing to myself and realizing yet again that some of his qualities that annoy me the most are also the things that I love about him:) He is enjoying his little project of refinishing it and I am learning some things along with him, and I think it is going to turn out nicely.

And he has really honed his charcoal grilling skills, and even told me the other day that he really likes grilling.  Win win for me- he does the cooking outside while watching the kids run around and then I get to eat delicious food!

The Temple

Josh and I were really happy to be at the temple last weekend since we hadn't been in over a year!  I think the lapse may have had something to do with the schedule of that tall guy and the refusal of the baby he's holding to take a bottle!   We watched our friend's little girl and drove out to Columbus with her while they did a session and then when we got there they watched all the kids in the church building next door.  It was really good to be there again and remember the peace it brings to our lives.  Hopefully it won't take us so long to get there again!  We are really looking forward to the Indianapolis Temple being finished to make trips a lot easier.

Prime Age for a Scaredy Cat

Up until just recently, Shane has been a scaredy cat about a lot of things.  It has been fun to watch lately as he has grown out of a lot of them and realizes how fun things can be.  One of the hospitals Josh works for had a big company picnic last week with rides and bounce houses and the whole shebang and he wanted to do it all, and loved it!     

 He is just leaving the scaredy cat years, and this little girl is just entering them.  She is old enough now to realize there could be a potential risk hiding behind that fun and would rather not try her luck (and scream if we try to convince her to ).  She somehow even became afraid of the song she used to love singing in nursery, "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" and conveniently manages to need to use the potty right around that time when she's never had to go during nursery before (she may be a scaredy cat but she's no dummy!)

And then there's this little cutie.  Ignorance is bliss at her age, and so she is still unafraid of a lot of things and quite frankly could stand to have more fear at the pool and park! 

Mission Accomplished

One of my goals every summer is to give the kids lots of opportunities to be outside and explore nature.  We took them to pick strawberries at a field nearby and had a lot of fun.  They are always wanting to pick things in our yard and I think this helped satisfy a lot of those urges.  Nevermind that only 1 out of 3 children really likes to eat strawberries, but another goal of mine is always to get the other 2 to eat more fruit, and freshly picked strawberries on top of pancakes (okay with whipped cream too) worked this night.

 Here is our area in the back that they love to pick things off, which I don't really care about, except when I noticed that yeah, we definitely have some poison ivy in there.

And this afternoon Shane brought something to Josh in the yard and asked, "What's this?"  Oh, just a dead vole.  Yeah, I think we can safely say that the kids are getting their share of "nature exploration."  And vigorous hand washing.  

Vacation Extras

We can't visit a new city without checking out their zoo, so we made a trip to the zoo one morning,

 poor Marissa was still pretty weak so she pretty much just sat in the stroller the whole time

 And we got free tickets to the aquarium for listening to a time share schpiel

After our time at the beach, we drove to my sister Shannon's house in North Carolina.  The kids hadn't seen their cousins in almost a year and I wanted to make sure they got to spend some time with them so they wouldn't forget them!  Kate and Lizzie were so cute and good with them and the kids had a lot of fun.

 And I had a lot of fun watching my cute nieces and how grown up they are!  We even got a little violin concert from Kate and a little dance number from Lizzie, and I got to listen to Lizzie read.  I love these girls, and their mom and dad!

And of course there was some Chic-Fil-A involved:)

Thanks for letting us crash your place Shannon and Kevin!  We had a lot of fun!

The 11th and 12th Plagues

I was teaching my class of 8 year olds on Sunday about Moses delivering the Israelites out of Egypt.  To kind of set it up, I had them write down a couple things they thought would be really annoying to compare to some of the plagues.  I had a good laugh as I read what one of the boys had written:

-make a mess at their house
-say why all the time

Why yes, those are EXCELLENT ways to annoy someone.  Who would have thought my life could be so perfectly summed up by an 8 year old?  But man these little pestilences sure are cute, I think I'll keep them around:)

 

The Beach!!

The kids were so excited to finally be at the beach (me too).  The afternoon we got there we thought maybe we would need jackets but ended up ditching them.

They had been eagerly anticipating playing with these sand toys we got from Costco and this ginormous sandbox did not disappoint!

The water was somewhat cold but not too cold to wade to our knees in.  Shane and Sadie loved it,

but this little miss was afraid of the ocean and thought the waves would get her from 10 feet away.  The poor girl was pretty sapped from not digesting anything for 2 days either, at least that's why I'm hoping she didn't love the beach as much as the other two!

But Shane was in sensory heaven and could've stayed forever.

Another picture to show we did wear our swimsuits the rest of the days.

We really liked  Virginia Beach, it had a nice long "boardwalk" (paved not wooden like I am used to at Bethany but great for riding bikes etc.),

clean sand, and a bunch of playgrounds like this for when the kids needed to mix things up a little bit.

That is the hotel we stayed at to the left of the crane, we got a sweet deal on it because I booked through Choice Hotels and it was the week before Memorial Day.  We stayed for 4 nights and while the gastrointestinal issues lasted the first 2 I decided the beach was a good place to be because it didn't take much energy, you didn't have to really be around anyone, and if they threw up I could just bury it;)  (they didn't by the way but once one gets sick you start envisioning all the places you do or don't want them vomiting)

Overall we had a great time and definitely made some good memories!