First Day of School!

It was an exciting day around here, the much anticipated, by Meghan, and the not so anticipate, by Trevor, 1st day of school! I can't believe that my baby started kindergarten today, and she LOVED it!
Meghan did great, she loved it, waved good bye to us with a big smile on her face, made it very easy to leave her without getting to emotional!

Mimi even came out bright and early so she could go with us, and she brought with her "that girl", (wasn't that a TV show a long time ago?) as Meghan refers to her as, for some reason she can't remember that her name is Jennifer. Jennifer is Greg's niece, I think that makes us cousins and maybe Meghan a 2nd cousin? I'm not for sure, but she and her mom and dad are here visiting for 2 weeks and Meghan took to her immediately, she loves being with the big girls and it made her day that she came with Mimi this morning! I think that she even got more hugs than Mimi and I combined!!!


Daryl took Trev to school, without all of the hoopla, that just isn't cool anymore, I was lucky to get him to let me take his picture this morning!

Trevor's favorite thing today was having PE everyday, and Meghan's was recess, hummm, I'm seeing a trend here. But Meghan came out talking about how much she love school and that she wanted to go to kindergarten everyday for the rest of her life! I guess I can't complain.

100th Blog Post!

Not to bad for about 7 months of blogging, that's an average of 3.2 posts per week or 14.3 posts per month, I'm pretty sure that I didn't get to 100 in a year and half with the first blog I started. But this year, after realizing that I could actually print my blog into a coffee table book, I took on a new perspective of blogging, capturing our "everyday life". I would love to post daily, but for now I'm happy that I have a pretty well-rounded view of what our life is day to day.

And today, somehow I have ended up with no children home with me ~ not sure how I got so lucky, but I'm enjoying a little quiet. Trevor spent the night with his friend and they invited him to go with them to his grandfathers for a BBQ and swimming this afternoon. Meghans best friend from pre-school invited her to her dance recital and then to play at her house this afternoon, I took her over there about noon and am waiting for a call to go pick her up anytime. I had a nice afternoon running a few errands to Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Wal-Greens x 2 and Rite-Aide to get in on a few sales. Came home and have been doing a little cleaning up and trying to figure out why ACDSEE has decided not to work on my desktop computer, that program drives me NUTS sometimes. So, I'm on the laptop so that I can work on my 365 layouts before tomorrow.

The other day I made some carmel corn, it is soo sooooooo yummy, I took some to work and we pretty much finished the rest of it, so I just popped up some more popcorn, the old fashioned way on the stove!, to make another batch, well, as soon as I pick up Meg, the second part of the recipe requires putting the carmel corn in the oven for an hour, but flipping it every 15 minutes.
ok, off to enjoy my last few minutes of quiet!

New clothes, a new do and a wasps nest!

It was a busy week, good thing I took a few days off work! On Tuesday we went out school shopping, that was fun! The kids actually did really good shopping together. Trevor is old enough now to go find things he wants and then bring them to me, which makes it easier for me to get what I need for Meghan. I also gave him a budget, I figure now that he wants $50 pairs of shoes and $45 pairs of skinny jeans, a budget was in order. He then he wanted to add that if he stayed under budget I would give him that amount in cash! yea, whatever!!! But, it really did help us stay on track and I told him that we would be getting ready for fall/winter as we go along. It's so nice that I can still shop on the clearance rack for Meghan and she doesn't care! I think we were pretty successful, I spent almost the exact same amount on both of them, but Meghan got a whole lot more for the buck!

We also went to Wal-Mart and stocked up on some school supplies, I LOVE the school supply isle, I'm sure it will take us a year to go through all of this, Meghan also picked out a new backpack and lunch box, I can't believe that my baby is going to kindergarten! Trev is using his backpack from last year and had decided he doesn't want a lunch box, he wants to use paper bags!

On Wednesday Mimi wanted to get the kids a new outfit for school, so we all went to lunch, went and got Meghan a new, big girl hair cut and then they went shopping.

Meghan got a dress, a pair of pants and a cute shirt, all of which I haven't taken a picture of yet, and these shoesTrevor on the other hand opted out of actual clothing and just wanted shoes! R.E.D. shoes! And I don't know if you can see in the clothing picture above, the jeans he picked out are PURPLE!!! We told him that he couldn't wear them together! Thank you Mimi & Grampie!!!

I am actually afraid that he doesn't realize the brightness of these! He is a bit "color blind" although that is not what they call it, but he can't see a lot of colors, Mom and I were laughing wondering how he sees the jeans and shoes and if he were seeing the colors as they really were, would he still pick them out? Guess we'll never know, and as long as he likes it, that is all that matters!

And then we have this living in the eaves above the little door going out to the backyard

that is Daryls project tomorrow, to get rid of them!!!

Camping in Columbia - Part 2 - Pinecrest

We got up Sunday, had breakfast, yummy breakfast burritos that Steph made, seems to be our traditional camping breakfast, I love them, don't know why I don't make them at home? Daryl walked with the boys over to Columbia, they really wanted to go

see the town I mean, buy candy at the candy store, so they took a quick trip while I packed up a few things so we could head up to Pinecrest.

Looks just like I remember it from when we used to go when I was a kid. Last time we were there was in 2004, Trevor and Hayden were 7 1/2, Meghan was only 8 months old, Levi was about 17 months old, Cayden was in Gina's belly, and Aida . . . well she was still a few years away from making her appearance! I was looking for a picture to post and Meghan came over and said "who is that sitting next to Aida?" Too funny, it was Meghan sitting next to Levi, my what 5 years will do!

We packed a picnic lunch and ate real quick when we got there, Meghan was very excited to get in the water! She has been a fish since day 1 ~

Have I mentioned how much I love my kids feet?

Meghan and Daryl made a few sandcastles, we were very unprepared with the water and sand toys

So Daryl went to the little store to see what he could find, he came back with an air mattress (hummm . . . to bad we didn't have this the night before for the boys to sleep on!)

so they all took turnes floating around on it.

I think we packed up around 4:30 so we could get back to camp and celebrate Cole's birthday with a yummy dinner and a little more swimming, of which I have no pictures of the swimming, but it looked just the same as the ones from the night before!

Monday we tried to get packed up and out early, I think we made it by 11:30, wanted to get home to see my dad who was in town for a few days.

Camping in Columbia - Part 1

(Warning: Long post and lots of pictures)

We had a great, HOT weekend camping in Columbia at Marbel Quarry with our camping buddies. Things started out great, we stopped and had dinner in Tracy, we arrived at the campsite before dark, the kids were happily hanging out while the dads figured things out.

The new truck did great pulling the trailer

Daryl is deep in thought about the best way to set up camp and getting the perfect positioning of the trailers, we usually try and turn the trailers door to door, but due to the positioning of several large rocks, it wasn't happening this time.

Then it was time for the tents to be popped up ~ and that is where the trouble began!

Something made a really loud, bad sound as Scott was trying to crank up his trailer

It ended up not being repairable on Friday night, they did figure out that one of the cables on the lift pulley system broke, but since it was dark they did not even attempt to try and fix it.

Since trying to get 7 people in our "sleeps 4 comfortably" trailer, the dads built a make shift tent over the top of Scott's truck for Trev & Cole to sleep in, unfortunately it came down before I got to get a picture of it Saturday morning. We thought that they would love sleeping outside, but they said it wasn't very comfortable. Since when did 12 year old boys worry about being comfortable?

So that left 5 of us to sleep in our little trailer, which was cozy for Scott & Steph! But it worked and was better than any other option we could figure out!

After unsuccessfully trying to get someone to look at and hopefully fix the trailer on Saturday morning, Scott and Daryl headed to the hardware store for some supplies, and after a few hours of looking at them like this


we were very happy to see this!


While the boys were trying to fix the trailer, the girls and kids spent most of the morning hanging out in our trailer with the air conditioner on high.

Sunday was Cole's 13th birthday, Trevor talked us into letting Cole open his present on Saturday, so that they "would have something to do"!

and Meghan fixed us some snacks!

whew, if they couldn't get the trailer fixed we were going to pack up and head home. So glad we didn't because we had a great weekend after all of that was taken care of.

Daryl, Scott and the boys headed up to the basketball camp where Kaitlyn was so Meghan, Steph and I headed on the dirt trail to the little city of Columbia, we took Rio with us for protection!

You can only imagine how excited Meghan was to see this on the main street as we were walking into town.

She was sooooo happy when I said we would take a ride


Did I mention that it was probably 105 degrees? I thought for a minute that I was Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie!


and who would have thought that there would have even been a hold-up?


It was pretty funny, the horses stopped and out of nowhere came this "bandit" asking the driver for gold. Meghan looked at me with a very serious look and said "he isn't going to shoot us, is he?" I assured her that he would not shoot us. But the closer that he got to us the farther and farther back she was trying to sink into her seat. Then he asked her if she had any gold or silver, she said she had nothing, just like the other passengers had said. Then he said that her earrings were very pretty, but we told him that since they were pink butterflies we didn't think he would really want them! It was pretty funny.

After all of that excitement, we decided that an ice cream was needed to cool us down a bit. And to make it even cooler, she added ice cubes from Steph's drink to her ice cream cone!


After cooling down a bit we headed back to camp for dinner and a quick swim before dark.

The boys had canon ball contests

Meghan has turned into quite the little fish this summer, and she has no fear at all, at least she wears her life jacket without any hassles at all.