Honey, dearest...

About that drill to install the child safety locks? Ummm...will a sharp knife work just ask well? It won't hurt the cabinet THAT bad will it?

Also, don't tell me an 11month old does not have a conscience!

Notice she has that "Oh no, I've been caught!" look on her face? Lol She quickly fired the mascara from her mouth and took off crawling.

This is not the same picture as 6/19.

Scrapbooking

IS NOT FOR ME. I honor those of you who scrapbook. I envy you. I want to be like you. BUT I have NO creative juices. My husband picks out the paint for our walls, the furniture, the decor. I tried scrapbooking but I was terrible at it. It looked like a 10 year old girl was given a glue stick and lots of sparklies and stickers. I know there are how-to books with all kinds of hootenanny tools, but that doesn't help me.

I also have never developed a single digital picture from my cameras over the years...catch that? Never. I love my trusty 35mm camera. However, I still have hundreds of pictures that were taken from 1999 and on and I sigh with disgust that these pictures sit on a DVD!

Remember a while back I mentioned I discovered Snapfish? This morning I finally ordered every digital picture I have ever wanted to print. It took me weeks to upload and sort through over a thousand pic's but I DID IT!!

I clicked the order button this morning for over 600 pictures. They will all be going into albums(at least I buy the kind where I can journal for each picture)....plain old albums and I will be happy!

Never a dull day...

Western Washington has this problem. American Bullfrogs. They are not supposed to be here, but they are and they are killing off native animals. They eat everything from other bullfrogs to rats, birds and ducklings. They are never full. Even the Dept of Wildlife tells us to kill as many as we find! Now that says something!

Guess what was visiting our pond?

This is gross...Emma, Emma, Emma.

All 15 oz of frog.

BTW the Dept of Wildlife encouraged the killing of these frogs by saying they have *choice* froglegs. Ewe. Hmmm...really? We ARE a homeschooling family after all.

Puppies!

Buttercup had her puppies last night and throughout the night. She had 5 of the tiniest, most delicate things we have ever had born here. Our puppies are usually between 6.5 and 8 oz at birth, but these guys were 2.5 - 3.5 oz! Teeny! All very healthy.

I got some GREAT pictures of the little ones!

Finally!

Blogspot will not import the pictures properly and for some reason the occasional picture comes in sideways. This is such a cute picture but you need to turn your head!


I LOVE this one!! Paul said they look like mice, lol.

Here you can see them next to a teaspoon...they ave 3oz ea.

They may only be 2.5 - 3.5 oz, but they are still chunky

Always listen to your Mamma...

We have this teeny tiny pond out back. The kids have a boat and nets and all the fun stuff that comes with owning a pond. All 12x30 feet of it. It is full of life! Tadpoles, salamander larvae, water striders, water beetles, frogs AND Ugly Bugs.

Yes, Ugly Bugs. We have observed many a tadpole missing a tail or injured due to the Ugly Bugs. Our Ugly Bugs are 2" long, quick, and have large mandibles that are like a pair of sharp grapple hooks and they kill everything from the goldfish we put in there to the tadpoles. They inject poison that turns the insides of their prey to *mush* then they um...drain them dry...kinda like a spider does. Everyone is scared of the Ugly Bugs and we kill them as often as we catch them.

I have always told the children they mustn't swim in the pond, it is disgusting, muddy and full of Ugly Bugs. Does that stop them? No. They come to the house dripping with pond goo and smiling from ear to ear. Why? Well, that won't happen anymore. Pond swimming days are over. Jacob met an Ugly Bug while walking in the pond Monday. He stepped just right on an Ugly Bug and it must have arched back and bit his foot. He came in the house limping from the pain with two little bite marks and redness on his foot.

Today we ended up in the doctors office because of that Ugly Bug. Thanks again to Google I found out we are dealing with a Predaceous Diving Beetle larvae. Predaceous...just that word! Everything I stated in paragraph 2 is what I learned today and we have a healthy respect for these critters now. No one wants to swim in the pond! yeah!! Makes me happy. Jacobs foot does have an infection, thanks to the Ugly Bug(I hope it died) BUT we have a $133 bill for a 15 min appointment, a bottle of antibiotics (yes, Dawn, I put a child on antibiotics!) and have to soak his foot in hot water 4x a day. The site now 3.5"x 1", swollen, hard and red. We hope it looks better in the morning!

White-Lined Sphynx Moth...where are you?

YUCK!

So it is becoming a yearly ritual. We find a hornworm in the field. We google all the info we can about it. We trick it to pupate by feeding the right food then simulating an under ground chamber. It pupates(cocoons itself), we refrigerate it from October to May, we take it out and put it in a dark cupboard and it hatches into a beautiful large moth, we let it go. We did this successfully last year with one.

This year has been different. Here is Jessica with the hornworm(hence the horn on it's back) she found early September 2007. We did everything right, it pupated, refrigerated, pulled out in mid may. It was suppose to hatch after 7-10 days, like the other one. It is still wriggling when we hold it, though much slower. It looks rather cramped for space in it's clear cocoon.

The eclosion chamber in October

Mr. Cocoon today June 26 still hanging out in my cupboard...teaching us patience.

Maybe he is slower than the other one

because he heard we bought a shadow

box to pin him in after he hatches?

Tuesday Night

At the time I was pregnant with Daniel, Dairy Queen had a popular blizzard called Georgia Mud Fudge. It has chunks of brownie with pecans blended with soft serve. I craved them something terrible and Paul would pick two up once a week for us on his way home from work. Well, here we are 8 years later and he never did stop. They still make the Georgia Mud Fudge(with chocolate ice cream) just for me ;) as I haven't seen it listed as a *kind* for an awful long time.

So every Tuesday night here we sit,

eating our ice cream and conversing in bed...a nice treat.

Lotsa lunch...

Now, I do not expect Renee or Cynthia to read this and feel any sympathy, I expect mockery, at the least.

I am now making 7 plates of lunch, yes seven...woe is me. I can remember sitting in my old small kitchen, making Jessica's lunch for the first time and thinking "I will have to do this for who knows how many years". It was bittersweet, and yes i was still quite selfish! And today, I had to make Gracie her first lunch on a plate and start the training how NOT to throw the plate on the floor(I am not kidding as I typed this I heard her plate hit the floor)


Yes, the food on the plates is evenly divided but as soon as the kids sit down let the trading begin! Today lunch consisted of 2 peanut butter and pickle(custom ordered) and 4 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pickled eggs, oranges, carrots and a graham cracker with thin chocolate frosting. Oh, and my yummy regular cottage cheese and fruit.

I must brag here. We buy sliced pickles in 1 gallon plastic jars from Cash and Carry. After we use up all the pickles I boil up 2 dozen eggs, shell them and plop them in the brine back in the fridge. My children actually love this! I am NOT creative so I am rather proud of this one.

The Perks of Marrying A Welder

So, we went to the park one day and the kids had a blast swinging on the taaaall swing. "We can go so high Daddy!" Daddy says "I could make one like that" Mommy says "Really? How much will it cost?"(yes, that is the first thing that comes to mind) Daddy says "Not much". So here we have it, a 12 foot commercial swingset, handmade by Daddy. If all goes well our grandchildren will be swinging on this in a few short years. Thanks Daddy.

Drug from Paul's shop, down the driveway, under the telephone wires and through the lawn.

Ta-Da!!

Sunset tonight over the raspberries

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"Can't remember the name, too tired to care."

"For You formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother's womb.

I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are Your works,
And that my soul knows very well.

My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them."

Paslm 139:13-16

I had a pretty sunflower...

But now I don't.

For six glorious hours, this dwarf sunflower had a home next to our garage. I bought it yesterday, planted it this afternoon, Micah trimmed it tonight. Not a bud left. He had just walked the yard with me and dead-headed my Lupine so I really can't blame him, and no, he didn't get in trouble. He walked out to his Daddy in the shop and said "I wasnd cut'n any-fing". Being the wise father of six he thought he best go investigate. And there is my blessed sunflower. A few muddy guilty tears, but all's well. Poor kid, he thought he was doing me a favor.

Incubating eggs....

I will spare you my rants on how hobby farmers are being forced get rid of their animals.

I will spare you my rants on how the costs of keeping pet farm animals has doubled and triple in the last 5 years.

I will even spare you my rants on how hard it is to obtain chickens or chicks.

Well, it is. It is next to impossible to find chicks outside of the 1 month a year the stores reluctantly sell them for a pretty penny. So what is my resolve? Craigslist. I put an ad on CL for fertile eggs and got 18 from a nice man who has a hobby farm in Ferndale.

They are all different sizes, shapes and colors so I have NO idea WHAT these guys are going to be, that is half the fun! So we started the incubator up for the first time in two years and will keep you posted, they are due around July 16.

My summer musings...

Our summer is starting like this...We made sure we had our state requirement of days put in for homeschool. We put the bookwork away but keep up our Bible reading year around, World History(because it is FUN and the kids BEG for it), Botany(again, the kids) and we decided last year we would study the 50 states. So we bought Cantering the Country and are studying one state a day, when we feel like it. It is going very well. All that is fun and dandy but I have realized we need more chores during the summer to fill in time gaps.

I am not one to give my children much free time, you can have a lot of fun family time without having much, if any, individual free time. I noticed about as soon as they walk & talk, if you allow your children to go off in a room and shut the door, they are not going to glorify God in their speech or actions. Once that door is shut, or the children are out of ear-shot, anything goes. Make-believe is not a ticket to pretend sin, either. All of our children at some time have put a stick in their mouth and pretended to smoke a cigarette, lol. "The rod and rebuke give wisdom, But a child left [to himself] brings shame to his mother." Prov 29:15

Now that I have more children, if they are playing in the playhouse together and mamma isn't there to hear, they keep each other in check as there are plenty of "helpful" tattletalers. We discourage tattletaling, but there are some things worth bringing to mamma for the sake of the other childs heart. They are expected to do it in humility and quietness. We expose sin, in love, to better our brothers and sisters, not to humiliate them or get revenge. This only seems to work well now that I have an 11 year old daughter!

That said, I am trying to get into Summer Mode and keep the children productive and yet give them a time of memory building, family fun as well. There are more than enough chores to keep us busy, if not, I am good at making them up! (I finally found a huge dry-erase board and attached it to my kitchen wall for writing chores and tasks on, I highly recommenced this to mothers!) The children do a lot of work/chores/tasks and they will tell you they like them, yes, like them..o.k. a couple of them will.

I have now collected enough knee, wrist & elbow pads, to cover most of the kids and we hope to go rollerblading once a week to a close church parking lot, newly paved and a LOT of fun. The kids are finding abandon baby animals what seems like daily that need the loving help of a human child, so they think. Daddy de-wasped the playhouse and that seems to be the Toy-of-Choice lately. Then there are go-carts, the pond, tadpoles, chickens, dogs, bikes, scooters, baking, sidewalk chalk, swings, tree-forts, sandboxes and a plethora of activities to keep these kids busy. Paul has done well designing our yard around the theme of children, lots of them! He brought home a real boat, not for himself, but he put it in the yard so the kids could play in a real boat. They also love our field grass as it is very tall now and they roll down "rooms" in the grass and make, well, crop circles to play in. My children love the Boxcar Children books. I have seen more inspiration in make-believe come from those books and it is good clean reading.

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I've also noticed one problem with blogs is some people tend to paint a picture that their family is practically perfect in every way(thank you Mary Poppins). We are NOT that family. Granted, I am not going to blog about my children's sinfulness, but let me assure you, it is there!. Thanks to the Lord's goodness, and only His, His total provision on how to handle every discipline issue for every type of child in His Word, it has caused our children to be a delight to have in our home. I just scratch my head when I hear the worlds way of training a child and see the loud, rebellious, selfish children/teens the world is producing.

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Ask her, is teething fun? She has been doing this for four days now. You know those top two HUGE giGANTic front teeth? She just cut them and today has been the first day of some relief.

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We went out to dinner last night! Yeah! We left Gracie with my wonderful niece Samantha and we went out to dinner with our children and three of our neighbors. The VB's and Miss Brenda, what fun!! I have a WHOLE NEW WAY TO READ A FORTUNE COOKIE, thanks to Dee. I can't blog it, but if you contact me on the side I will let you in on it...we all had tears in our eyes.

Yummy food, GREAT people! ...and fish.
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Honey, dearest...if you are reading my blog right now I REALLY NEED THAT DRILL to install the child safety locks.

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I'm losing my daughter today for 24 lonely hours. My help, my page, my friend. I tried putting Gracie in her suit case, but neither Gracie nor Jess were too keen on the idea. She was going to have her bestest friend in the whole wide world over to our house for a SLEEPOVER to play in the fields, tip-toe through the tulips, laugh and playing together.....oh...What? Ali? You have a Wii? Oh..um...let me ask.."Mom can I go to Ali's house, they have a Wii!!!"

Down home country fun just got one-upped.

Ahhhhh....

*this picture was much larger, however, after posting it I noticed there were some, ehem, articles hanging that were not appropriate to post

Crispy sheets, white whites, that fresh country smell Proctor & Gamble still can not capture. Do you have memories of running through the sheets your mother had just put on the line out in your backyard? I do. Crawling into bed at night after your sheets were dried on the line, they felt cool and crisp as you'd slip in between them.

Indians have moved in.

And I don't mean the casino down the road. Indians, blond indians, have moved into our backyard. They built a tee pee and have gathered sticks, berries, grains and cookies for their dinner.

Remember when you were young, you would play "lost children" or "indians". Remember building a little stone fireplace to cook your mud desserts on? You'd heap up sticks you gathered around the yard and only wish your mother would trust you with a match. You would build a shelter using all the blankets mom would let you take outside. Spend lots of time making it perfect, clothes-pinning here and there. Finally you would crawl inside, lay down on the poky, cool grass and stare up at the sky and think...maybe, just maybe when I crawl out I will really be out in the woods. Then you would feel little bugs starting to crawl on you and that adventure would end. I can still remember those fun play days, I guess that is why I love seeing my children pretend.

Father's Day and kill'n pigeons

What better way to celebrate the close of a Father's Day than for father and sons to go shoot some pigeons. Paul has this very large gun, a double barrel twin trigger, 12 gauge shotgun. Jacob has his trusty 10 gauge he bought from Grandpa Berk. It belonged to my bothers years ago and now my son, who loves it dearly. Out of gobs of pigeons launched they missed 6 and Emma and I found them all in the field! I watched as my 9 yr old blew several pigeons to smithereens.

That's my boy!

Here is Jacob with the 12 gauge, it is almost as tall as him!

**Disclaimer - Grandma pointed out my son looks like a redneck beer bellied child(not quite her words, but you get the point) Jacob chose this shirt which is huge on him.

Objects(bellies)in the picture are much smaller than they appear.

This is his trusty 10 gauge, quite the size difference.

Jacob got this one!

And this one too! Notice Daddy is poised to take 'em out if Jacob misses...and he always did.

Jacob wanted to shoot Daddy's 12 gauge, o.k., DADDY wanted Jacob to shoot the 12 gauge. It took very little convincing and Jake picked up the gun. Staggering around trying to get the sights up, he held it somewhat steady and yelled "Pull!". Daniel pulled the string. The pigeon flung into the sky, Jacob pulled the trigger. The shot took off a corner of the pigeon as Jacob about dropped the gun. It kicked so hard it threw him back a step and he nearly hit the ground himself.

Again, that's my boy.

What the little ones do while the skeet shoot was taking place.

Jessie off in the yard, reading a book as usual. She can read a book in the truck, laying on the pic-nic table, in the bathroom, in the treefort, in the laundry room...anywhere. We recently bit the bullet and bought a set of books that I admit cost an arm and a leg, but we did it with the intention of all 6 children enjoying them. They were written for boys by R.M. Ballentyne in the mid 1800's. They are captivating my daughter and even my 7 yr old son is enjoying them.

Fun day...no rain.

I love walking around with my camera. I took these two and liked the way they turned out.

What better time to take an outdoor break than when daddy is out of town?

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So...there is no rain for one day(Again, it's the middle of JUNE) and everyone is outside having fun. A wonderful neighbor came over for coffee and visiting. C.H. is a dear friend from our church and happened to move in down the road. What a treat! Our kids are around the same ages and get along great so they were well occupied playing house in the cabin, eating cookies(that C.H.s 11yr old son made) and catching chickens. My memory card went missing so I have no pics of her family, dog gone it.

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Later on Miker, the poultry police, was chasing chickens.

He corralled them chickens likes he was a cow-hand.

"Mamma, help me kech da ticken?!"

Gotcha!!

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What can keep an 11 month old entertained for minutes from her bedroom window?

Her brothers and sisters playing below in the sandbox.

Notice the light brown areas are flooding. These kids will literally stay outside all day if I allow them the hose in the sandbox.

Ditches, canals, drainways, overflow, dams, moats, oceans, seas, rivers, aquaducts.

You name it, they build it.