No heat in our house means you need to bundle up for bed.

Reminded of the line from "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"

"... And I in my cap..."

Birthday Boys

Aside from the losing of a tooth, we've had a couple birthdays also to remind me that everybody keeps getting older. Here's a few pictures of our celebrations. Joe turned 12.

Joseph's birthday meal was hamburgers and french fries. He had chocolate cake with vanilla icing in the shape of a castle.


His present was a bicycle and helmet.




Sam turned 7 years old.

Sam's birthday meal was pizza. (John and I let the kids eat pizza and we made calzones and used up some leftovers from fridge... pork, blue cheese, pimento, mushrooms, black olives, pepperoni. They were so good. It's a shame that a lot of the yummy stuff John and I make can't be replicated because we are always just using what we have in the fridge and the chance that we ever have all the same stuff in the same amounts again is pretty much zero).

Sam had chocolate cake with chocolate icing.
These are not flowers... they're supposed to be gears.


For Sam's birthday we kept the gifts pretty simple. He got Silly Putty, a balloon helicopter, a Where's Waldo book, a bicycle helmet, a Wallace and Gromit movie, a color-changing Hotwheel car, and one more book called the Eleventh Hour where you use clues in the illustrations to solve a mystery. It was fun to see the kids get so excited over such low-tech and inexpensive presents. I kept wanting to buy him a big science kit or something and John kept telling me we didn't need to. I felt as though there would be disappointment when he opened his presents. There wasn't really. Sam is blessed with contentment. I'm blessed to be his mom.

My baby...

lost his first tooth. Actually he didn't lose it so much as he asked John to pull it. And the other kids have been calling him "toothless tiger".

Does that mean I need to quit calling him my baby?

Happy Halloween

Me-Sick lady (the kids thought this was perfect since "your nose is always red and you blow your nose all the time")
Our friend H- a bride
Taryn- Laura Ingalls
Tina- a baby
Rebekah- a physical trainer
David- "cheese-man"
Our friend E- a cowgirl
Sam- a knight
John- a tourist
Joseph- a wizard

Stone Mountain

I'm all pictures and no words. Sorry about that... or maybe that's a good thing?! We had a wonderful time at Stone Mountain this past Saturday and the weather was just perfect!

First break on the way to the top.

Atlanta... we could just make it out through the haze.

Everybody at the top

Starting back down. I liked this one because it looks like they are just going to walk right off the edge.

The old mill

The covered bridge

Jump roping...

and dancing before the laser show

(If you look close at that last one, you can see Sam pointing up. He was avidly watching the planes which kept flying over... he was not so much into the dancing.)

The great clothes switch

My friends and I were recently discussing that it was time to get out the winter clothes again. And we all sighed and commiserated with one another. And then I chose not to do this task over the weekend, so I still have it hanging over my head. Probably not my wisest decision. But that's what hoodies are for, right? Reposting one of my first blog entries which addressed this most dreaded of tasks for moms of many.

I love the changing of the seasons. But the task that comes with it? I could do without it. What's that? The changing of the clothes. That dreaded task of putting away the past seasons clothes and getting out clothes for the new season. I really don't know why I dislike this job so much, but I do. Admittedly, it is getting easier because the older kids can do so much of it on their own now. But somehow I don't learn to like it more. Probably because it involves making lots of decisions (small though they may be) and I'm not a good decision maker. Anyway, we started this task last night... actually John started it Tuesday night. It usually takes us several days before we are completely finished.

The task begins when I sweetly ask my husband to please get down all the clothes boxes from the attic. He does so and piles them in the hallway. We walk around them and the kids climb on them for a few days. We threaten the kids and plead with them to stay out of the boxes.

When I finally decide we can begin to go through the boxes, there is great excitement and shouting. Strangely, the kids do not dislike this task like I do. They are thrilled to see what's inside those boxes... it's like a great big surprise. They find stuff they've forgotten about and stuff they loved. And they just like to play in the boxes:

Then as I try to help the little boys, the older kids come to me one after the other asking, "Does this fit, Mommy?" This one clearly didn't (yea for easy decisions).
We start getting piles everywhere of fits/doesn't fit/give away/trash (why did we pack that up anyway?) ... times 6 kids.

Eventually we'll pull summer stuff out of drawers and put winter stuff away. Everything will go back into the boxes and boxes will go in the attic. Aaah. And I won't have to do that again for at least a few months. But in the meantime, if it's late and your bed looks like this:

Well, you'll just have to adapt:

Ten~

In the last post, I looked back at Rebekah as she grew up. Here's just a few pictures we took on her birthday.

In our family, 10 is the age when girls get their ears pierced. She's been waiting for this day for at least 3 years. No tears, only smiles! (The Piercing Pagoda... got my ears pierced at one in a different location almost 30 many years ago)

Here you can see the gold, flower earrings reflecting the sunlight.

Rebekah with her cake. It was tricky... a very, very lemon cake with pink icing. Kind of messed with the brain. But super yummy.

We decorated by making this fun birthday wall. The words in the colored cut-out paper were things like "sweet", "child of God", "compassionate", "creative".

Happy 10th birthday, sweetie!