Happy 5th Birthday Princess #1!!

Princess #1 turned 5 on Tuesday. We celebrated the day with a couple inches of snow and a snow day from school, which was kinda a bummer because we had cupcakes all ready to go and she was supposed to be the special helper all day. (they allowed her to be the helper the next day though). That night we had a quiet family dinner and gifts from us. We wil have a big party for her on Sunday at church.

Five Years Goes Really Fast....

tomorrow Prince Charming will be walking her down the aisle!! :):(

Family Dinner of one of Princess #1's favorite foods... tacos!

Blowing out the candles on her Barbie rainbow cake
Her very first webkinz animals from The Marine and The Decorator
My little Pony and a book from The Salesman and The Veteran Teacher

Kindergarten

I was able to go into Princess #1's kindergarten classroom last week and help with centers. I worked on an art center where we made stained glass apples. It was a lot of fun and I was able to observe alot of what went on in the classroom and meet her friends. Her teacher is a wonderful teacher with lots of patience and kinetic type tendencies. I was also able to go on a field trip to the pumpkin patch with her class (I forgot my camera) at the beginning of the week.

Princess #1's class at circle time

Princess #1 making her apple

Pumpkin Patch

We went to the pumpkin patch as a field trip for Princess #2's school. We also made into a family night. When we were in Maine, Prince Charming and I decided that twice a month we wanted to have a family night with a specific bible/object lesson for the girls. This time I looked up a bible lesson about a pumpkin and Prince Charming did a great job teaching the girls when we got home. When talking to the girls later, Princess #1was able to make the connections between the pumpkin and our hearts (see link for lesson) but Princess #2 didn't really make the connection quite as well. But, we look at these years as foundation years, they may not get everything we are trying to teach them, but the concepts are building a solid foundation for when they do get it!

Princess #1 in the pumpkin patch Princess #2 in the pumpkin patch
Princess #1 & #2 on a "really big" pumpkin

Me, Princess #1 & #2 in the corn maze

Prince Charming and the girls looking at some of the animals in the small petting zoo they had

The girls playing on the "toys" they had

Princess #1 in the horse, in order to get there you had to run through a maze.
Family picture on the hay wagon
Prince Charming showing the girls the "junk" inside of a pumpkin just like the "sin" in our hearts

J is for Jack o Lantern

So this week we had a lesson on the letter J and jack o lanterns. One day was spent in the classroom learning the letters and another was spent in the pumpkin patch as a field trip. Here are the pictures from the "classroom"....

We glued pumpkin seeds all over the letter "J" and we made pumpkin playdough (homemade playdough with pumpkin pie spice and orange added) Princess #3 really like this and decided to put a whole glob in her mouth, that was fun trying to get out!

Walking on our letter "J" repeating the sayings

"this is the big letter J and it says Jah... this is the little letter j and it starts jack o lantern"Princess #2 painted pumpkin vines by running a matchbox car through brown paint and then making lines on the paper. She added pumpkins later with orange paint and green leaves. This exercise was to help her to understand following directions and not just "free painting"
She painted glue on a pumpkin and then put it a bag of tiny tissue paper and shook it to cover the pumpkin and make a "fluffy" pumpkin as she called it. In hindsight I probably would have used glitter instead, the paper didn't stick all that well without help.
This painting was a lot of fun because I had Princess #2 make a fist and then I painted her fingers orange and she got to "stamp" a pumpkin then she used her thumbprint as the stem. I thought this would be a lot of fun to do another time as a family as Prince Charming's "pumpkin" would be much bigger then the girls. We could make a family pumpkin patch.
Princess #2 played a game to help her gross motor skills and listening to instructions skills by setting up these bowls and trying to toss a ping pong ball into the bowls. It is alot harder than is sounds.As always we worked on flashcard letters. She is getting better at distingushing between the letter "E" and "F"
Back in the summer I made this box to go with our Flower lesson to recognize numbers. I made some pumpkins for Princess #2 to plant, she is still struggling with number recognition. We will continue to work on numbers 1-5

Happy Birthday Daddy!

Welcome to birthday season! Our immediate family has 23 people. (parents, brothers/sisters, and niece/nephews. Of those 23 people, 17 of them have birthdays from late Aug-earlyFeb! So you will probably see lots of post about birthdays in the next few months.

My Dad turned 61 a week ago and we celebrated the event with dinner and cake and ice cream the following Saturday on my sister's birthday, but we are not celebrating her birthday until this Saturday with my nephew's birthday. In a week it is Princess #1's 5th birthday which we won't celebrate until the following Sunday!

My mom and dad (Grandpa and Grandma) with Princess #1

Happy birthday Dad
Princess #2 helping Grandpa blow out the candles
PopPop and Princess #3
MomMom's first social event since her deck diving accident 8 weeks ago and Princess #1
Uncle Pastor and Aunt Pharmacist- maybe adding to the kiddo total in the next few years??

Fall is Here

We are so fortunate to live in a valley that has an abundance of produce. We live in a rural farming community and although we are not farmers ourselves we do get to enjoy to benefits of fresh homegrown produce this time of year! Literally we can drive down the road about 3 miles to our favorite farm stand, and find vegetables and fruits just picked from the fields the day before. The valley is filled with other such farms and they are full this time of year! I use as much fresh stuff as I can get right now, because the flip side of this rural community is we make due with Walmart produce the rest of the year.

Hunting season is also coming into full gear. I come from a family of hunters and I married a hunter. Prince Charming hunts deer mainly but he has been known to bring home rabbits, squirrel, partridge, goose, and turkey. In our house we rarely buy beef as most of beef is substituted for venison. One of our family's favorite cookbooks is Taste of Home's Hunting and Fishing Cookbook.

Anyway, all that to say, I have been a cooking/baking frenzy with all these great things available to me! Here are a few favorites I thought I would share:

Cobblestone Stew:

2 lbs stew meat (I use venison obviously)

8-10 carrots, peeled and chopped (or a 1lb bag of baby carrots

5-6 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped

1/2 onion, peeled and chopped

1 can of cream of mushroom soup

1 envelope of brown gravy mix

1 cup water

1tsp horseradish

1/2 tsp salt

Add all ingredients to crock pot and cook on low for 8-10 hours or high for 4-6 hours. Let stand 15 minutes to thicken before serving. (may need to add a little bit of cornstarch if the gravy is too thin)

Cream Dough Buscuits (this recipe is from the food network)

2 cups flour

1 tbsp baking powder

3 tbsp sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/4 cup heavy cream

Combine all ingredients until dough forms (do not over mix). Roll out into 1 inch thick. Cut buscuit circles (a drinking glass rim makes great size). I like to stack 2 of 3 on top of each other to get layers of buscuits. Bake at 450 for 12-15 minutes or until golden brown.

Pumpkin Pie

1 pie pumpkin

1 cup sugar

1/2 tsp cinnamon, nutmeg, & ground cloves

1 1/2 cup mashed pumpkin

1 2/3 cup sweetended condensed milk

2 eggs

1 unbaked pie shell

Cut pie pumpkin in 1/2, remove seeds, and cover with foil. Bake at 350 for 1 hour or until pumpkin is soft. Scoop out pumpkin and mash. Mix with sugar, spices. condensed milk, and eggs until mixed well. Pour into unbaked pie shell. Bake at 450 for 15 minutes, reduced heat and bake at 325 for another 45-50 minutes or until firm in the center.

Tyler Update

This comes from an old family friend... please keep them in your prayer, if you have not followed these posts, T-man is a 13 year old boy recently diagnosised with stage 4 cancer.

Praying friends and family,

This is the first chance in several days that we have been home to sleep and catch up on emails and phone messages. We are so full of emotions as we receive emails , calls, and cards from everyone praying for T and our family. God’s family, through prayer, is what is holding us together. We cry almost every email we get and phone call we receive as we are realizing how much people care and what God is doing in this situation. We have received many offers for help from a variety of people to help us through this time in our lives. Throughout this long process we will be asking for help from you. Through the surgery and past few days we have been taken care of and it has been a great blessing and testimony for Christ.

I am going to give you an update and clear up some details and then head back to the hospital. T was admitted Thursday for an out-patient biopsy and to insert a port-a-cath in his chest for future treatments. There were a few complications with the Biopsy, so T has been in the hospital since. I am going to spare some of the details of what has happened, to protect T, because he is unaware of some of the details of the past few days. He has had some tough times and stressing moments but he is heading back in the right direction now. We hope he will go home by Sunday but he has to be able to walk, eat, drink, and do a few other things before they will let him go.

We also met with the doctors on Thursday for a while about his cancer and his treatment. What I will say is that the cancer is a stage 4 and is extremely serious and time is crucial. The tumor in his gland has grown measurably in a week and is a huge concern. The cancer has spread to his lungs and is severe. The biopsy result (we hope to have Monday) will confirm the current treatment plan which is chemotherapy for two cycles to shrink everything. They cannot operate until everything is smaller. The cycle consists of 1 week in the hospital receiving treatment and then two weeks home taking medicine. This medicine is very potent and has many side effects but it is our only course of action at this point. Cycle two is the same as cycle 1. After cycle 2 they will re-scan and check sizes and hopefully operate. If the tumor doesn’t not shrink they will continue cycles until it does.

This is what I am able to share at this point but the details are very scary and T does not need to carry that burden. We KNOW God is in control and is with us all but the pain and emotion is extremely heavy at this time. Please pray for strength, endurance, healing, and A MIRACLE!

Wordless not so Wednesday

F is for Fall

side note: we skipped "E" and went right to "F" this week is in school to try and catch these seasonal activities! So for the next few months we will be out of order in our alphabet learning...

This week we did the letter "F' in school. Princess #2 is still having difficulty distinguishing "F" from "E" and "b" from "d" . They look so much alike! But we had lots of fun anyway! We started the week with a walk around the street to find the prettiest fall leaves then we...

We used the leaves to glue on to a large letter F on poster board

We practiced our shape of the week "triangles"

We worked on matching colors with the correct animals

We did leaf rubbings, this was really neat because it was almost as if a leaf just "appeared" as she colored. (I taped to leaves on the table and then taped a piece of copy paper over top. She just needed to color and the leaves came through)

Day #2: We made a leaf wreath to match the aquarium we did last week

We made a leaf collage that goes from green to brown in progression. Princess #1 ended up taking this into her Kindergarten class to share

We have moved from number counting into number recoginition. There is a difference between being able to count from 1-10 and recoginize each number. She has difficulty with 3 & 4.

We made leaf people

I taped the letter F on the floor for Princess #2 to walk on to repeat the letter name, what it sounded like and what started with f.

the two saying were:

"This is the letter F and it makes the sound fah, fah, fah"

"This is the little letter f and fall begins with f"

Prayer Request for T-man

This prayer request comes from a very old friend of ours, we have known Kitchen Man and T-man for over 13 years... please keep T-man's family Kitchen Man and wife, T-man (13 yrs), and B (4 months) and T-man's mom K in your prayers...


Please pray for my son T, who is now 13. Over the last three weeks his blood pressure has been monitored due to a high reading at his annual checkup. The doctor ordered some test done. My side of the family has high blood pressure but never at such an early age, so there is great concern.

T had tests done. The first test was with the cardiologist and they conducted an EKG, blood pressure tests several times, and some other minor checking. The doctor told us that the pressure was a little high for his age but not to be overly concerned at this point. He wants T to “Change” or “monitor” his diet by reducing caffeine and salt.

We found out that T has a tumor bigger than a golf ball but smaller than a baseball on one of his kidneys. We also found found out that T has cancer in his lungs in addition to this tumor on his kidney.

We are all very emotional, scared, and in shock to the point where it has not completely sunk in yet. We will be spending lots of time going back and forth to the hospital, surgeries, medicines, shots, tests, and other things for at least a year. It may take that long or it may be shorter before we should see any improvements but they are very hopeful that he will recover fine because he is young and in good health. He is not in any pain right now. We feel it was an act of God that it was even found!

We are trying to go one with activities “as normal” as much as possible. The next two weeks will be very tough so please keep all of us in prayer especially T.

On the Move

Princess #3 turned 6 months on Thursday and she commemorated the day with a few weebly crawling motions forward. (she has been going backwards for about a month) Since then she has gotten more confident and is slowly working her way around the room. Last night she made her way to the dog dish to help herself to some food.

She has also started baby foods. She likes all the fruits, she tolerates the green veggies, likes the orange ones (but carrots don't like her) and she LOVES rice crispies.

Oh the fun has now begun!

Blackmail

I am publishing this photo because I will use it for blackmail one day... my daughters wanting to do dishes!

Pretty in pumpkin

My women of worth and more About 4 years ago, a group of ladies got together to do a bible study, Breaking Free by Beth Moore. We continued to do studies together over the last 4 years, some coming, some going, some doing some studies, and others taking a break. We have always tried to stay in contact with each other though. A few years ago our church went through some difficult times and spilt. Half of the ladies left the church so we have not gotten together in at least a year! Not due to any tensions in our "group" but mainly just due to different schedules. But last night we were able to get together minus three because they have moved to different parts of the country (VA, OR, and AK- yes one moved to alaska!). It was great to connect with everyone again... We had a potluck dinner and painted pumpkins together. What beautiful women, they each bring something so special to the table for me and I appreciate each one of them so much!

Ladies....
"Ready when you are and even when you are not!"

Camera Shy hard at work on her pumpkin

Crazy Lady (the beauty behind the pumpkin), Onion Layers and Chocolate Lady (my very bestest of friends)

Spunky and Teacher

Lawyer's lovely pumpkin

Pumpkins with bling