because she's 14~

Anna and I in the airport on our DC trip to do the historical thing 

as well as help out with a rally for 

Hope Again International.

In case anyone wanted proof that my oldest daughter is not an unsocialized homeschooler a very normal teenager, well here you go.  Unless of course you think these actually prove the first point, then nevermind.  

merry christmas~

Merry Christmas from our family to yours!

I know the photo is blurry; but as is the story of my entire year 

I don't really have time to try and figure out how to fix it

so it's just going to have to be the thought that counts  :)

Feel free to click through to see a better version!

(and thank you to the amazing lillian b photography for our first ever family photos...we love them!)

in which i confess to weenie camping~

I used to be a camping snob.  In kind of a backwards way.  I thought unless you tent camped, you weren't really camping.  You know, you were just weenie camping.  That was back when I only had six children  ;)

Then, I got pregnant with Grace, and had a pretty serious hemhorrage while I was pregnant.  I was released back to "light to normal" activity right as fall was beginning, but somehow tent camping with six kids and being pregnant didn't sound quite like something I should be doing.  

Enter the pop up.  It was great.  Not super weenie like those mini-condo RVs.  It still fell under the category of "roughing it."  Sort of.  I still suffered minor twinges of guilt when I would tell people we liked to camp.  But gee, traveling in general with a pile of kids is not exceptionally easy, add to that preparing meals, dealing with laundry, etc. in an outdoor setting and I still felt that we qualified.  At least a bit.

So for the past year and a half we camped in the pop up.  And the best part was that while we used to only camp twice a year, we suddenly started camping almost once a month except for during the winter.  Camping is super great for family time, and probably the best part for me is that I don't feel like I should be doing something.  I can be lazy  relax.

So when this Spring began we started looking ahead.  We really enjoyed going somewhere every month, but we really wanted to go further.  As in the mountains.  I've never been West.  (Unless you count that layover in Texas when I went on a mission trip to Mexico.  I guess technically I've been West, but an airport in Dallas doesn't really count.  In my opinion, anyway.)  But the pop up takes awhile to set up and even longer to pack back down, so it wasn't really a viable option for a multiple stop trip.  So we sold it.  For a lot more money than we bought it for, actually, which was definitely a bonus.  And then we started watching craigslist for (gasp) a camper.  After some waiting we found one that just happened to be listed by a guy Glen has done some work for.  So he gave us a great deal.  

So now we have a travel trailer.  As in one with a kitchen, and two sets of bunk beds, and a pull out sofa, and a separate "room" for Glen and me.  And the table makes into a bed too!  But guess what!  It's big enough that we don't even have to take down the table at bedtime, we can leave it up the entire time!  Trust me, when you've been trying to get 9 people to bed in a space where you can hardly squeeze past each other this is a Very Big Deal.  We even have enough room to just hang out and play games if it's rainy.  I can wash dishes, cook an actual meal, and we can even leave the pack and play set up.  And it has a bathroom with a shower.  This is also a Very Big Deal when you have lots of little people needing to potty.  Trust me.

Since it's so big, we wanted to take it somewhere close by the first time to make sure we didn't get stuck  didn't crash into anyone  weren't going to end up in a ditch  Glen could handle it easily.  So this past weekend we went to a campground about an hour away that's right on a lake.  My sister even stopped by one night.  It was lovely.  Beautiful weather, and we were right by the playground and swimming area.  I lost track of how many Scrabble Slap, Chess, and Uno games I played.  Grace and I even took a nap on the beach by the lake.  And we didn't even crash into anything.

So there.  I confess.  We are now full fledged weenie campers.  And I don't care one little bit.  You can make fun of me.  I can take it.  :)

What are you doing this summer?

the big snow of 2010~

I thought I may as well do a little catching up on what's been going on; other than my internal wrestlings, that is  :)   After all, I did intend for this to be a record of our life to look back on.

In January we had a big snow.  Or maybe February.  I can't actually remember.  All my days tend to run together.  Anyway, it was rare for where we live.  We only get a snow like this every five years or so.  It was perfect.  The first day it was nice and fluffy.  Great for throwing and making snow angels.  That night it iced over and so the next day it was super hard and crunchy.  Awesome for sledding (and for letting Glen be stuck at home!)   As it melted over the following days it was perfect for building snowmen.  It was absolutely wonderful.  Where we live is kind of up on a hill, so when it snows we are often stuck for several days, even after the rest of the world goes back to normal.  I will freely admit the highlight for me of snow days is Glen being home.  It's so nice feeling like all you can do is be lazy and spend time together.   Ahh....forget work, forget school....

We have an incredible place for sledding.  From this view you go down a fairly steep hill and the snow was packed just right so that you picked up plenty of speed to continue back up the other side.  It was great.

Glen and I even took a few turns. 

 Yes, I  know I look stupid, but I hate being cold.  :)

Grace thought she'd participate too   :)

Glen got the next to last sled from the hardware store, and then he came home and the kids started trying to sled before the snow even started!  A couple of days later he built a seven person sled, but he was the only one strong enough to drag it back up the hill.

I'm sure all you folks that live further north find this somewhat amusing, but for us it was a big deal.  I could use a couple of big snows every winter  :)  

pretending to be farmers~

Once upon a time, when I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, I used to say I wanted to marry a farmer. I think this came from loving to be at my grandparents' house who even still to this day live and work their farm. They were so happy, life was so peaceful and it seemed like that was just the way people were supposed to live. There's still a part of me that believes if we could just return to simpler times a lot of the world's problems could be solved. But I digress...

Anyway, as I grew older I realized that I did not, in fact, want to be a farmer's wife. I wanted to be a contractor's wife :o) (well, I wanted to be Glen's wife, and he's a contractor, so, you know.) Running an entire farm entails work I can't even really imagine. It makes me tired just thinking about it.

So when Glen and I moved to the country, we had no aspirations of farming or growing anything (other than babies, heh heh.) As time has passed, we've wanted to learn some gardening, we have some fruit trees, and this year we got some chickens right before Grace was born. And remember when I said Glen was oddly attached to them? Well, the feeling is mutual, because they follow him around everwhere. It is hilarious. He's like a mother hen. They are completely free range (which means we are now tick free - hooray!) except we do put them up at night. But as soon as they're out, if Glen's out, they're following him around.

So even though our first year gardening attempt was a dismal failure, unless you count the chickens eating the tomatos successful, which I guess you could, sort of, at least the chickens are doing well. Thankfully, we haven't even lost one. And to prove it, last night Moriah discovered the first eggs.


They're tiny, but I'm told they'll get bigger in about a week or so. Depending on how many we get, we're hoping to be able to sell some. Now we're thinking about round two and possibly adding a rooster to the mix so we can actually get our own chicks instead of having to buy them.

So gardening, not so much, though we called this a practice year anyway, but chickens...they've been so much easier than I ever expected.

And chickens are about all that's going on in my world this week, unless you want to talk about the throwing up four year old, but I'd rather talk about the chickens.

my life in cars(otherwise known as "i deal with pride")~

You know where this is going, right? Ten points to anyone who can make an accurate prediction before reading the post. Leave me a comment if you do, I'll trust you :o) No fair to anyone who is a facebook friend. And if you're reading this on facebook, you may have to go over to the blog to see the photos. Not sure.

As long as I can remember I've had this weird obsession with cars. They've always been a big deal for whatever reason. As early as preschool I remember my Dad driving us around in his huge brown jeep with roll bars. Sometimes he'd let us ride in the back and I distinctly remember him taking me to preschool and driving up on the sidewalk saying "Look! No hands!" Because my Dad was always fun like that :o)

I remember being horribly embarassed when my parents would pick us up in this ridiculously long white car from The Private School we went to. It might have been a perfectly normal car for all I know, I just remember being embarassed.

I remember my friend Heather's family had a super cool minivan, complete with the wood paneling down the side. You know, back when minivans were fairly new. It was the old boxy style and I actually got to Ride. In. It. when I went to Gulf Shores with their family.

Around this same time, my Dad bought what I thought was a pretty cool blue Station Wagon. Even if he did get it from his work and it had previously been used to haul raw fish around. Don't ask me how we could tell that's what it had been used for. But pretty much anyone who had the privilege to ride around with us could figure it out. I remember traveling all the way to the Florida keys in it with my middle sister and cousin. We had a whole cabbage patch land set up, and I read the entire book of Esther all the way through in the back corner. I was five, and I was surely impressed with myself.

When I was in Junior High, at the same Private School, I was ecstatic when my parents bought a white Chevy Lumina, you know, the ones that looked like a spaceship. It didn't matter at all that the girl I absolutely couldn't stand also had one. That only meant that I was on par with the Private School Kids.

It was a great van. Until I totalled it in the Very Big Accident. After that my parents bought a gigantic customized Astro that I literally had to sit on phonebooks to drive.






My very first car that I purchased was a 78(?) Ford Fairmont I bought from a friend for $300. I was ecstatic. The school I went to my junior year was very alternative, very grunge. I was coming out of my rebellious phase having picked up quite a few telltale signs of having gone through it such as kool-aid dyed red hair and confiscating all my formerly hippy parents' old clothing. I was pretty cool, or so I thought, and this car was the icing on the cake. Nevermind that I let the engine burn up after only driving it a handful of times. But I thought I was cool.




After my Fairmont mishap, my loving Dad had it towed to a nearby dealership and somehow managed to convince them it was worth something (or maybe he actually paid them to take it, who knows) and bought me a slightly used Corsica. It was lovely and dependable. It was also now my job to cart my sisters around town and myself to work, school, and everywhere else. And believe me, I went everywhere else. The Corsica is what I drove the entire time Glen and I were dating. Good times. Upon my engagement at the ripe old age of 16 and a half, he offered to give it to us as a wedding gift if we would consider getting involved with Amway.




Hence my next car, a 94ish gold Honda Accord. Be not deceived by the photo. I was so eager to find a car that Glen and I could call our very own, that I overlooked one minor flaw when buying it from the barely-speaking- English guy who "had at least six other interested buyers." We test drove it at night during the cooler days of Spring and upon Glen inquiring of me if the air worked, I assured him it most definitely did. *sigh*
Isn't it fun remembering those early days of marriage when all you really needed was love? Oh, and I should have mentioned that it was a stick which was truly an experience learning to drive. And great fun to drive on our honeymoon, during a really hot weekend in June, and all through the sweltering summer. In traffic. To work. Forty-five minutes away.





Fast forward eight months. In a move to pacify his newly pregnant (read: hormonal) seventeen year old wife, Glen graciously agrees to buy me a fabulous Infiniti G20 that a friend of my Dad's was selling. This was after I nagged begged him relentlessly, finally in tears because the girl I worked with drove a Lexus. I mean seriously, I couldn't really be expected to drive around a baby in the sweltering summer in the "sure the air works" Honda. Feel free to roll your eyes now.





I'm not sure what possessed me to think I didn't want the Infiniti anymore. It was a fabulous car. All I can claim is SUV fever. Anna was a baby, maybe I thought it was safer, but probably I just thought it was cool. The only thing in our price range was a 94 Ford Explorer that was teal with pretty significant hail damage. But hey, it had the Eddie Bauer package.. I did love that car, though. Hail damage and all. Even after I was rear ended and instead of having it repaired used the money to pay for Ethan's birth. I had always wanted an SUV. But trading the Infiniti? What was I thinking???? And thankfully, my Dad didn't disown us for buying a Ford.




For some reason, after Caleb was born. We decided we needed to have a minivan. So we bought a green Chevy Venture that we kept for all of three months before we decided our paid for Explorer was a perfectly good vehicle. We paid a stupid tax of $1000, a 'la Dave Ramsey, to sell it, though.





We kept the Explorer for a long time. Selling it during The Great Sickness that found our entire family on the living room floor puking our guts out and watching The Iron Giant and The Fox and the Hound over and over and over and over. But we'd been trying to sell it for awhile, and seeing as how there wasn't a huge market for teal cars with hail damge, even though it was an SUV, we dragged ourselves out of the house and sold it to someone in an Exxon parking lot. We had grown into a Three Children In Car Seats family, so the switch to a minivan was justified this time around. We found a good deal on a Town & Country. Soon after getting it, I was rear ended yet again, and seeing as how this time we used the repair money to pay for Moriah's birth, I drove around with a dented in rear bumper for awhile. Funny how in my quest to drive something that I deemed "cool" at the time, I was willing to put up with less than perfection. So at least I'm not a total snob.




Soon after we moved to The Country, the Town & Country began having some serious problems. I don't even remember what we did with it, but we bought a Ford Expedition. Because I had always wanted an Expedition. It was super cool, but we soon discovered that getting Four Kids In Car Seats and having storage room for All Their Stuff, didn't go so well with the very backseat being needed for carseats, but leaving zero storage space. So we traded it. For a Honda Odyssey.



(read this next section with your voice dripping with sarcasm) A Honda Odyssey was next on the list of cars I thought were cool (not yet being able to justify a Suburban which had always been my ultimate dream car.) But once again, budget constraints prevented me from getting one that was as nice as I really wanted, so I had to settle for cloth seats and (gasp!) black handles that told the world I, in fact, did not have The Really Nice Odyssey.





We kept the Odyssey, which I grew to love, black handles and all, until close to Noah's birth. Five Kids In Car Seats made a minivan a pretty tight squeeze, so we found a good deal on finally, a Suburban. With leather. And heated seats. And a TV. *sigh* This was the stage of life in which I remember having several conversations with friends about if we would, in fact, have enough children to outgrow it. A seventh child was The Line. What would we do? Obviously, the car I drove shouldn't (and wasn't) the deciding factor for if we had more children. But oh, how I loved my Suburban.

I tried to keep it. I really did. I could fit All The Kids in it as long as Glen wasn't with us, and when we needed to go somewhere together we could use his 15 passenger work van. But like I said. It's his work van, he really needs the space for work. And is has over two hundred thousand miles which is fine for around town, but not so much for long trips. Like camping when pregnant as soon as I'm off bedrest, camping while pregnant and due in a month, camping with a five week old, camping with a two month old, camping with a three month old. You get the picture.

So yes. I crossed The Line. Why not a simple 12 passenger you ask? Well, because when you take out the very back seat to allow for storage space, the seating is the same as the Suburban. Hence, I am now a 15 Passenger Van Mom. Doesn't quite have the same ring as minivan mom or Suburban mom or soccer mom, does it? Ahem.

Happy Saturday :o)

buddies~

snuggle buddies

camping buddies



no, that's not a tv in our pop-up buddies



how many kids can you fit around a camper table buddies

cool buddies



rock climbing buddies



reading buddies



sleeping in the car buddies



3-D buddies



even though we're cousins don't we look alike buddies



happy buddies





pretending to be puppy dog buddies

smiling buddies

my sister thinks it's fun to dress me up buddies

singing and sleeping buddies

vegging buddies

the super-buddy

diaper changing buddies

sweet sleeping buddies