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Please forgive me for all of these outdated posts.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:

The Blog Readability Test

So, my friend Roxie found this interesting little tool that somehow checks the readability of your blog. Basically, telling you what education level you would need to have to be able to read my blog. I would be very interested in knowing how exactly they decide what reading level to give your blog. I mean, do they 'scan' your blog and see how many big words you have used and decide based on that? Do they look for typos?

At any rate, I plugged my blog address in and this is what I was told:

I hesitated at first to post it. I felt slightly ashamed. But then I plugged in all of your blog addresses and found that I was in good company!

One-up Me!

So, my brother-in-law had to one-up me on the snake post!! If you have a minute go over to my sister's blog and check out what he 'wrangled' today!! Jeez!

Mommy - Daughter Outing

I don't get to do this very often but a couple of weeks ago I took Aspen shopping with me... alone. Nobody else! She had saved up a some of her money and wanted to buy a new Webkinz. She was specifically looking for a Collie. Well, we found one and then we had some lunch together! We had a really good time together and she wanted me to take some photos of her with her new friend!

Wrangled Myself a Copperhead!!!

This past weekend we went to visit my dad to celebrate his birthday. We decided that since sometimes it's hard to buy presents for a guy who pretty much can get whatever he wants that we would all (my sis, bro, and their respective spouses and Geoff) help him clean up his property. He lives kinda in the woods and it was quite the task! Well, while I was raking out the flower beds of all the leaves, I disturbed the slumber of a nasty pest! I started screaming my head off and ran to the porch! My brother raked through the pile of leaves until he found the evil thing! Honestly, I assumed it was a grass snake or something but my brother informed me that it was a copperhead! The picture to the right depicts what one might look like! My brother-in-law killed it with a rake and then threw it into the brush fire. Man, do I ever hate snakes! On a lighter note: my dad was driving my brother-in-law around in the bucket of his little tractor raising and lowering him so he could cut back some of the trees with the chainsaw. I'm not sure why, but I thought this was pretty funny! So here's a couple of pics and a small video clip of the event!

April Fool's 2008

Doesn't this look yummy? Don't you want a bite? I know this is a little late in the game but I just wanted to post what we did for April Fool's Day. Last year Aspen helped me make 'cupcakes' for dinner on April Fool's Day. Really, they were delicious meatloaf cupcakes with mashed potatoes on top tinted with food coloring. Well, even though it wouldn't really surprise anyone we did it again this year. I guess it will be a new tradition. I did, however, take one of these delicious cupcakes to my PSO meeting that night and gave it to Katy - the principal. She would touch it! She asked if the topping was glue!! Silly! My friend Jack took and ate the whole thing! If I get a chance I will have to post the recipe for the meatloaf on the recipe blog. I don't normally like meatloaf but this recipe is scrumptious!

Super-Duper Lawn Service!

Saturday I went garage-saling and saw someone that sparked a memory that I just HAD to post about! About 3 or 4 years ago we lived in a house that needed some major trimming done to trees and bushes. So... we trimmed some trees and bushes.... actually, we just completely removed them! These pictures show what our front yard looked like after the massacre!

A couple of days later, two young guys (in their 20's) stopped and asked if they could mow our lawn. Uh. Look at the pictures again. I think I asked them if they were serious. They said yes. I think I just chuckled. What were they gonna mow? Anyway, I told them that I was looking into having someone hall this stuff off and asked them what they would charge to do that. They said $30. I thought this was a pretty good deal since I had talked with the city and they would haul off the first load for free any additional load would be $40. I figured that we had at least 3 loads there. So I hired these two boys to haul it off. They were in a truck that they immediately loaded down with the brush. They left and returned with a trailer and loaded the truck and trailer down. Then they left to dump it (I have no idea where - probably somebody else's yard) and when they came back they were driving a little station wagon. That's right. A station wagon. Following are the pictures that I stealthily snapped when they weren't looking! Even today I laugh out loud when I look at these pictures!!

When I asked them what happened to their truck they said that they had run out of gas! I had to take off to go somewhere so I gave them a check even though they hadn't quite finished. No sooner had I walked into the house and they were gone! They didn't even finish the job! At first I was kind of mad but the rest was picked up by the city for free and I continue, even today, to get an enormous kick out of these pics!! Some of the best money I've ever spent! The person I saw garage-saling.... one of those boys having a crappy garage sale. I know where he lives maybe I should go dump a load of brush in his yard!!

Lightening Doesn't Strike Twice April Fool's!!

Wouldn't that have been so totally nice?!! I WISH! Hope you all had a great April Fool's Day!! Remember-forgiveness is divine!!

Many of you will recognize this picture from my posts on our trip to Mexico. The trip that I won on the radio (read about it here)! Well, they say that lightening doesn't strike twice in the same place... I say bull-malarky! I just won a second trip from the same radio station!!!!! INCREDIBLE!! This time it's to Cozumel! Aspen begged me to take her so I agreed since I took Geoff last time! Woo Hoo! Viva Mexico!

Obsessions

My friend Amber just wrote a post on her blog about her obsession with some old guy on a TV series called House. And she totally changed her blog layout to represent that obsession. I thought it might be kind of fun to "copy" her only use a guy that I think is gorgeous - Mark Ruffalo! Therefore... my new layout!

Template Issues

So, Amber has informed me that on her fancy-dancy wide screen monitor my layout looks like junk! Basically, I majorly tweaked a template that I found on the internet. So, if you have something other than a 17" monitor or you're using Internet Explorer (shame on you) instead of Fire Fox, then you probably don't think that my layout is all that great! This is what it's suppose to look like: