Summer faces

Know what little faces look like after a whole weekend in the sunshine???

Take a look.........

Don't ya just want to kiss all over them?

Too sweet!

New Blog

I just wanted to throw this out there. I have created a new blog. It is all about dinner and menus. I have been asked by many friends to show them how I do my dinners through out the week. So I created a blog showing what I do. Please check it out and maybe get some good dinner ideas. Or send me some good dinner ideas. I'm really excited about the blog and hope that I will be able to keep up with it every day.I will be putting reicipes on daily as well as pictures. I think it will be a fun blog.
The address is http://ourdinnermenu.blogspot.com/ Enjoy!

Summer time

Since school is out for the summer, I didn't want to have the kids get bored, so I went through a lot of my books and picked out things that we can do to keep them occupied. One of the things that I wanted to do was make ice cream. You know the kind that you put cream into a baggie and mush around until it turns into ice cream. Well, we did this Monday and the kids LOVED it! We put in our cream, sugar, and vanilla into a small baggie and that baggie into another small baggie (so it didn't leak). Then put those baggies into a large baggie filled with ice and rock salt. Then started shaking and shaking! The ice cream turned out great!

Here are the kids shaking their baggies. They got really cold, so I put hot pads on their hands to keep them warm. It worked really well!

Enjoying their finished product! YUM!!! Caution though, when I took the baggies out and opened the ice cream, I got some ice cream on my fingers and licked them. BIG mistake! I had salt on my fingers from the big baggies along with the ice cream. It was AWFUL! Don't do that!!!

This was so much fun and tasted sooo good!

The next day we made homemade strawberry ice cream in the ice cream maker. WOW! It was so yummy too.

I am looking forward to all of the fun we are going to have this summer. I love that both of the kids are old enough to do pretty much whatever we want to do now. And naps are optional for a couple of days...at least until they haven't had one for a couple of days and are so crankey that I insist that they take one :)

What are your summer plans?

Mr. Man graduates Preschool

Yeah, I'm soooo behind updating this. As I was looking through my pictures, I realized that I never put these pictures up. My little man graduated Preschool in May! I can't believe that he is a Kindergardner now! It seems like just yesterday I was holding him at home in my arms giving him a bottle and being amazed that I had just had a baby. And now my baby is going to big kid school! I look at him and am just amazed at how big he has gotten.

Here he is walking to the front of the church. Ready for graduation to commence.

The entire class sang a few songs to entertain us and they had hand movements as well. It was so cute.

Ms. Trishia. C's wonderful teacher. We've been really blessed to have had such great teachers in Mr. Man's life so far. He had a great teacher in Houston, an awsome teacher in Ohio, and Ms. Trishia lived up to our expectations and really pushed our little man further along. She got him reading, counting up to 50, writing so well, and just giving him some great information that he shares with us anytime a subject come up that he knows anything about, which is usually all of them :)

Each class member spoke as they recieved their "diploma" and tell us what they learned during the school year. Our little man told us that he learned about fire trucks this year. This was one of the great "field trips" that they took when our kids first got to the school. They were able to climb through a real fire truck.

And here is his whole graduating class. They were a great group of kids and I know Mr. Man has really enjoyed meeting new friends. He also learned so much from his teachers and really apprecited their kindness.

We will miss this class, but know that we have so much to look forward to. Kindergarten here we come!

On a personal note, Mr. Man, I just wanted to let you know that I am so proud of you. You amaze me every day with something else that you know! I love when you bust out with something that I didn't know you knew. I love talking to you and seeing you grow. I am looking forward to seeing what you learn in kindergarden next year and helping you grow further. I am looking forward to you reading more fluently, adding, subtracting, and many many other things that you will be working on. I love you little bear!

The Great Flood of 2010

Yesterday it started to rain, and I mean RAIN around noon, and it didn't stop until this morning around 7:30! This is the most rain I think that I've ever seen in my life at one time. I heard that we were getting somewhere around 3 1/2 inches per hour! It stormed ALL night last night. There was thunder and lightening, I now understand where they get the term "rolling thunder." I knew there was a lot going on out there because I NEVER wake up at night to storms, but I was up all night last night due to all of the storms going on. It didn't help that Chase was on the bed shaking it all night.

So, when R called me right after he left and told me to get out and drive around the neighborhood and take pictures, I couldn't wait to get out and see what was going on. Of course I first had to wait for Mr. Man to wake up. But as soon as he was up, we were out the door. Oh how I do love a good piece of "gossip" if that is what you can call this!

Let me preface this with, we are in, what I consider the high ground. I mean, we do live in the hill country. The weather radio kept going off last night for flash flood warnings, but I never thought that meant our neighborhood. Well, it did! Not our house, because in our neighborhood, we do live up on the hill. Our neighborhood is very natural and has lots of "valleys" that are dry and full of grass. Take a look at what they look like now!

Our neighborhood is made up of a bunch of smaller neighborhoods. When you are coming out of our part (at the very back of the whole thing), there is an option to turn left. This is a dead end and it's a good thing today! I guess we are working on making a lake there with rapids and all!

Here is one of the "valleys" that runs the length of the neighborhood. Like I said, this is usually bone dry and just grassy. Now it's probably at least 4 feet deep and gushing along.

Can you see the small white caps?!

Then you get to the retention pond at the front of the neighborhood. Yeah, well, not so much now. We have a full blown lake in our neighborhood now!

Ok, this one really got me. One of the front streets has this wall built of rocks (there are a lot of them around here) and this wall turned into a beautiful waterfall. The kids asked me if that waterfall has always been there! No, but it is pretty. Except that it has brought a lot of the large rocks down into the road.

I soon realized that I was meeting cars that had turned around to go back home and that noone was turning right out of the neighborhood. I went back to the retention pond where I found about 20 cars parked and everyone out of their cars looking at our new lake. I realized that the major road that runs right by our house was closed because our lake had flooded it. Not just flooded it, it was raging across the road and was pretty deep.

Just past the tractor in this picture is where the water was running across the road.

We are supposed to get rain all day long today which means more flooding. It's neat to look at beacuse it's not affecting me and my family, but I'm sure there are some people being affected, so please say a prayer for them that everything is ok and that the rain stops before doing any real damage, assuming it hasn't already.

I hope you have a great day and STAY DRY!