Birthday Gift

Savannah attended a birthday party for one of her girlfriends last week.  Many of you know that a gift from us almost always has some vinyl lettering on it!  Savannah helped with this and I think what we came up with turned out very cute.  The birthday girl loved it and now Savannah wants one in her room, too!!

Six Random Things About Me

(Note: This post was originally called "I'm 'It'". I was tagged by a friend to write six random things about myself with several rules about linking to the person who tagged me and then naming others to participate as well. I'm reposting this because the random things I chose were fun and weird, but I won't bore you with all the rules and specifics that I included in the original post.)

Six Random Things about Me…

1.  Once I ate a big, fat, juicy ant.  On purpose.  It tasted like a lemon drop.

2.  I like to read magazines from back to front.

3.  I think about head lice every day.  Every time my head itches I wonder if that’s why.  My head itches a lot.  Head lice is my mental illness.  I’ve never had head lice.  (If your head is itching right now, don’t blame me!)

4.  When I read books to my kids that were written by a British author (Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia), I read with an English accent.

5.  I’m crazy about “Lime and Chili” Blue Diamond almonds.

6.  I have a sleep number bed, but don’t know my sleep number.  It cost $200 more to get the remote that shows you your number and I’m an official cheapskate.  So Jeff and I adjusted our individual sides of the bed to exactly where we want them then unplugged the blower.  I was so worried the kids would play with the remote and I wouldn’t be able to get it just right again.  By the way, mine is squishy soft, like sleeping on a cloud.  The kids and I agree that Jeff’s side is too hard.  He loves it!  I suppose this is the very reason we love our sleep number.  If only we knew what that number actually was….

Rain

It rained a lot last week.  I heard on the radio this morning that we had 10.5″ of rain from Monday through Saturday.  We have had more of our impressive thunder and lightning storms than usual this Summer.  There is nothing like a good Midwest thunderstorm.  Usually by now the grass is starting to turn brown from lack of water.  It just costs too much to water your lawn so no one does.  But our lawn is still a lush green and our flowers are beautiful.  I love rain!

Sadie-Bug

Happy Birthday to our sweet little Sadie-Bug! It's hard to believe my baby girl is three years old, but what a fun three years it's been.

Sadie is very smart and knows exactly how to get what she wants. For example, she always needs to go potty during Sacrament meeting. It's a rare Sunday when we don't have to leave during the meeting to take her to the bathroom. One Sunday, Jeff decided to solve the problem by taking her to the bathroom right before the meeting started. She can go hours without needing to go so we were confident this would work. But then we were in that longish stretch of meeting about the time of the intermediate hymn and Sadie says, not very quietly, "I'm wetting!" Certain that she was faking, we tried to convince her that she didn't really need to go potty and that we'd take her after the meeting was over. But then a little louder she announced, "I'm wetting! I'm wetting in my underwear!" So now everyone around us thinks that Sadie is going to have an accident right on the bench or the floor and her parents are sitting there letting it happen. Needless to say, Sadie won and we made our weekly potty run during the meeting.

She definitely keeps us on our toes around here. We can't imagine life without our little bug and are so blessed to have her in our family! We love you, Sadie!!

 

Another Week - Another Project

Jeff has been busy this week. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

MONDAY (in case you’re wondering what you’re looking at, these are the before pictures):

TUESDAY:

WEDNESDAY:

Not bad for 3 days work. And still three days left this week. I can’t wait to see what our yard looks like by Saturday! (No pressure, Jeff.)

The City guys came by on Tuesday for the final inspection on the garage. Needless to say, everything was fine and they were impressed with Jeff’s work. One of them said to me, “This guy does great work!” I told him that one thing I love about Jeff is that he finishes the projects he starts. He then jokingly said to Jeff, “You are out of the guy’s club!” I can’t say I blame them for that. What if their wives knew there were men like Jeff around? He’s giving them all a bad name. Hooray for me!

Independence Day - Small Town Style

In the heart of the midwest, July 4th usually means hot and muggy.  Yesterday was anything but.  If you ask the kids, they’ll say it was COLD!!  Jeff and I say it was perfect.  It got into the low 70’s, but there was a chill in the air for the morning and evening activities.  Because I’m stingy with the A/C, I try to avoid using the oven in the summer, but yesterday I baked!  Jeff took the kids to the annual airshow at our small county airport and I stayed home to bake four loaves of bread and a double batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies.  This is my kind of weather!

Here are some pictures of Jeff and the kids at the airshow:

The National Guard was giving out free t-shirts to anyone who could do 5 pull-ups.  Go Jeff!  The kids were impressed!

When they got home, we had a small flag ceremony, complete with the Pledge of Allegiance, in our yard.

Then we ate a quick lunch and walked to the County Courthouse for the parade.  In our small town parade there is always tons of candy and several interesting parade entries.  My favorites this year were all the old fashioned tractors.  In this picture you can see one of the tractors as well as a glimpse of our beautiful County Courthouse:

Just in case you missed it, here’s a close-up of the sign on the tractor:

I love it!  After the parade, we played in the yard:  Sam and I threw a football around and some of us played frisbee and Bocce ball.   We had a yummy BBQ with the missionaries (Sisters and Elders) that evening.  Here’s a picture of Jeff and Elder Whiteley riding “Maggie”.

After dinner we headed back to the airport for the fireworks show.  We threw the football and frisbee around some more (my arms and back are killing me today!)  There was music playing and Sadie seemed oblivious to the thousands of people around us as she danced her little heart out.  Play the video below to see her dancing.  Towards the end of the video, you’ll also see Sterling and Soren in the background, sword fighting with glow sticks…  

There were a couple of fun airshow displays before the fireworks.  In one of them there was a car (it looked like the General Lee) out on the landing strip.  The announcer was calling for security saying that someone broke past the barricades to get onto the runway.  This all happened just as a plane was supposed to take off for a flight display.  So the guy in the car pulls up right next to the plane which was waiting on the runway, gets out of his car, hops in the plane and takes off.  He was doing all kinds of crazy flying and it looked like he’d crash a couple of times.  He finally landed it and they announced that it was all a planned stunt.   I knew it was, but the plane looked out of control at times and was still a little unnerving to watch!  When it was completely dark, there was another airshow with a plane doing several acrobatic stunts with his lights on and the smoke coming out the back.  It was all choreographed to music and was pretty impressive!  The fireworks display was impressive as well.  Soren and Sadie wore Jeff’s sound-cancelling earphones so they wouldn’t be afraid of the booms.  That worked great and we all enjoyed the show.

It was a perfect day!