The Great Outdoors - Part 4

The grand finale!! These are 3 videos that I took of the same day! Andyn had gone down the slide numerous times when I decided to step back and take a short clip of her doing it... of course, that's when she decided to do something crazy like try to jump or walk down the slide! It's all captured right here! The second video clip is of her sliding the way she was suppose to in the first place! And the last video clip is just an effort to make you really motion sick!

The Great Outdoors - Part 3

Sooo stinkin' cute!!! If I do say so myself!

The Great Outdoors - Part 2

A few more fun shots! Stay with me, the best is yet to come!

The Great Outdoors

I'm still in Jersey but I have a ton of posts in draft so I could post some while I was here!

This is from a day when I took Asher and Andyn to the park while their sisters went to piano lessons. I took a ton of pictures! It was a beautiful day and I got some really good shots!

My Old Wife

Hello. This is Geoff (husband of Steph) with an interesting letter we received a few days ago congratulating Steph on the celebration of her 65th birthday. As you know, we are not getting any younger. We are more creaky, more tired, more cantankerous, and more set in our ways with every passing year. Like many other aging people, we really don't appreciate references to our aging process which remind us how old we are getting. So thanks, AARP, for officially welcoming my wife into the ranks of the elderly! Please send us Centrum Silver for Christmas.

Jersey Girl

I'm so totally in New Jersey!! Spending a week with my best friend Shelley!! I will be updating my blog while I'm here!

25% less coverage. Bad.

I got my new issue of Family Fun yesterday and took a few minutes to thumb through it today. I just love Family Fun! I'm able to take my creative piracy to new heights after reading this magazine! So, like I was saying, I was looking through it today and saw this ad for Capri Sun: Nice. Cheery. Yellow. Fruity. Fun. In. The. Sun. Innocent enough... don't you think? What caught me off guard was the next page which is a continuation of the ad: I'm so totally writing to the editor!! I have an 8 yr old daughter who loves to look through this magazine. Bad.

Parish

Aspen received this card in the mail a couple of months ago. A few of the primary kids were asked to write their testimonies and they would be highlighted in that week's church program. We weren't there that Sunday so I don't have a copy of what Aspen wrote but I have this card. These kind of things make the world a better place! Thank you, Pat, for loving my daughter!

More Trampoline Fun

Please forgive me for all of these outdated posts. I had uploaded a bunch of pictures through Picasa to my blog and just saved them as drafts until I had more time to actually write. Well, it was starting to get out of hand so I knew it was time to start putting words to those pics!

A while back I posted about some trampoline fun we had. Well... here's some more. It's just fun to see what the kids do when they don't really know they're being watched!

I just have to say that I LOVE my camera! It surprises me how good it is! And it has lots of fun features. If you're in the market for a new one this is a really good one to have. You can get them on ebay now for less than $100 dollars. It has an excellent battery life and it takes excellent pictures. My favorite part is that I just set it on a cradle to charge it and with the push of a button on the cradle it uploads all of my pictures to my computer. It's super nice!

This last photo is me just playing around with my camera. I really like how the water almost looks like liquid silver or mercury or something!

Asher's First School Pics

These are Asher's first school pictures. Honestly, I did not like them but I had to have them because they were his first! I guess he's going to be my only red head! The bottom one is more like how he is (in the face) but I really didn't like the crayons in the background! Oh well!

Happy Belated Birthday!

I bet you thought the Easter post was late! This post is an add-on to my birthday post and birthday was in January!! It's just that I was looking through a bunch of my photos and realized that I hadn't posted some that were really important!! I actually already wrote about the experience in this post but I didn't post the pictures! So here ya go! Pictures of my sweet surprise party at the Beishlines - smushed cake and all! One of their daughters stepped on the cake when it was in their car! The last picture is of the cake that Terra made for me. It actually turned out really good despite the goof-up of ingredients (read in previous post)! Man, I love you guys! You know how to make a lady feel special!

Reading Award & Bad Mother Award

Every month the girls' school has an award assembly and recognizes the achievements for the previous month. Ainsley got an award for reading and testing successfully on 100 books. Did I remember to go? NO!! I have forgotten more times than I should have this year!!! Thankfully I have some sweet friends who snapped a couple of photos for me!! Thank you, Dennise & Jeff! Good job, Ainsley!

Speaking of forgetting children - I've also forgotten Asher at his school WAY more times than I should have! Every Friday he gets out at 11:30 AM instead of 2:30 PM and I can't tell you how many times his teacher or her assistant have called to ask if I was planning on picking him up!! At least when the assistant calls she cracks up laughing at me on the phone when I yell "Oh crap! I'll be right there!"

My Friend, My Foe, My Sister

Many of you know that I'm not real big on buying new clothes for my kids (nor for me and Geoff, for that matter) unless it's on super clearance somewhere. My philosophy is that I can buy REALLY nice clean stuff at garage sales for a fraction of the cost of buying them new! And kids grow out of stuff so quick it just doesn't seem cost effective to buy new. So... all that to say that I had a $100 gift card at Old Navy and decided I would use some of it to buy the girls new bathing suits this year. The gift card was free and I was feeling rather generous! The other thing is that they have been begging me for two piece bathing suits for a couple of summers now and I have been unsuccessful at finding them at garage sales (some modest enough that is). We loaded up with Aunt Terra and went to try on every bathing suit they had at Old Navy! We had a great time! They don't get to try on new clothes very often so it was especially fun for them!! Here are some pics of them in their new suits - and matching flip-flops!

Easter 2008

I realize that is has been a month since Easter but... who cares! I'm still gonna post these photos!

I took Ainsley and Asher and picked up Roxie's two girls and headed to the big Kiwanis sponsored egg hunt here in town. There were three different baseball fields covered in eggs! It looked like they had used crop dusters to fly over and drop a million plastic eggs over these fields! There is Asher with Morgan and Ainsley with Kathryn. I think they all had a pretty fun time. Though, all they had to do was stoop down and pick the eggs up! Also featured in the collage are a couple of photos of the girls coloring eggs over at our friends' the Wagoners!

Last year I took a photo of the kids at Easter and it has been my favorite photo to show people of all four of my kids together. So, I thought that I would take another one this year. They weren't quite as cooperative this time around. First attempt at an Easter photo:

Final attempt at an Easter photo: