Memorial Day Fun

Sunday after church we drove up to Livingston for a little R&R. We spent most of the time down by the pond, fishing and relaxing. The kiddos enjoyed being in nature and exploring.

Here is Allyson and Avery saying goodbye to a fish that was caught. I was quite surprised that Allyson was not scared of it.

On the other hand, her cousin Dylan did not want anything to do with the fish he was reeling in. These video clips are too funny of him.

Allyson digging in the worms!

Sister showing little brother the ropes on flower picking!

Me and the hubs!

Sassy Sister! We went for a walk to pick fresh blackberries and she found a flower to pick, of course!

Finn just looks too big right here. I was so proud of him for staying by us while everyone was fishing and not trying to swim in the pond! I don't have any pictures of this, but a fun memory for Finn was visiting the chickens. They had 5 nearly almost full grown chickens and then about 8 baby chicks. Finn LOVED going to see the chickens or birds as he calls them. Since we've been home, he keeps telling me "a bird Nanny", which means that Nanny took him to see the chickens!

Daddy and his boys fishing! I foresee many more days like this in their future!

Here is a little video footage of the boys at the pond.

It was a nice time with family and God's creation over Memorial Day. A special thanks to my Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Jim for having us out.

T-ball Princess

Last Saturday Allyson wrapped up her t-ball career...for now. Haha! It was cute watching her, but I think we might stick to gymnastics, dance or art for a while. We shall see. She had fun and enjoyed being an Astro for a few months.

She started a new batting technique on Saturday...lifting up her back foot! It was so funny to watch her hike it up. And she actually hit one in play like this.

So this at bat was too funny. She missed the ball and swung the bat around and ended up hitting it off the tee like that! What are the chances!?!

Preschool...check

Last week we went to Allyson's school for her end of the year performance and Open House. I just love these!! They sang several songs that they have been practicing and they are too cute. Here is the first one they opened up with. She is in a white top and yellow skirt. You could tell she really got into that one.

There were so many songs she sang that were too cute. One that had me crying was "You are so beautiful" where they performed in sign language. It was just precious. They are currently not uploaded to YouTube, but if I wait around for the videos, I'll never post this!

06.03.2014 UPDATE - I uploaded the video! Yay! So you have to pay attention to her signing the word "beautiful"; it should just be a quick motion across her face, but hers is pretty dramatic...I love it!! Even her teacher came up to me afterwards and asked if I noticed! Too funny!

Our little princess! Just love her to bits. She has such a sweet spirit about her. In the next few weeks we will find out what we will be having: a little girl or boy. Either way, we will be totally stoked. I would love for her to have a little sister to nurture and grow close with, and then on the other hand it is fine by me if she stays my only princess. Time will tell.

After we left the sanctuary, we headed to her classroom where she showed us her journal she had worked on all year long. It was neat to see her handwriting improve over the school year. She said she wants to be a Mommy when she grows up. That definitely made me smile, knowing I haven't completely messed up as a Mom and scared her away! Ha! The picture she drew was her with a baby in her tummy! Geez! Another funny was that she said Daddy was 1 year old and does not like to go to the bathroom!! Ha!

Next, we headed to the Family Life Center for cookies and punch. We decided to sit outside and let the kids move a little since it was so nice outside. These pictures below are too funny. Finn did not want anything to do with this photo opp, but once he saw Ally and Jase holding hands he went over and broke up the party! It was too funny! 

I thought this was a cute picture of them! I just love Allyson's face, looking up at her big bubs!

It was a great evening celebrating Ally's completion of preschool!

That's a Wrap

Jase officially wrapped up 1st grade this past Friday! So so proud of him! He has worked so hard this past school year to finish up his curriculum and we are looking forward to summer! I am taking this week off (and maybe next week too), but we will continue to maintain "school" 2-3 days a week during the summer. We hope to wrap up our United States geography study, finish our Robin Hood unit study (which he loves), and begin a unit study on the Pioneer days. He is excited about our summer of learning and I hope it continues to be that way for him. Way to go Jase!!

If I'm being completely honest, homeschooling can be a challenge at times. You're the teacher and parent at the same time. On the flip side of that, I have thoroughly enjoyed this past school year. It went much smoother than his Kindergarten year. Not once this past school year did I have second thoughts of Plan B for his education. I had plenty of "back-up plans" during his Kindergarten year, but this year seemed much easier for both of us. I love watching him learn and seeing him get excited as I read books to him. His first year I said we were day-by-day and it seems like that terminology has moved to year-by-year, but I am coming to the realization that this might be what we do until he graduates high school and I am excited about that.

The plan this summer is to continue to work with Jase on the items I listed above, but to mainly focus on Ally and get her prepped for Kindergarten. She is completely different than Jase and I love that. Academically she is not at the level he was at this time of the year (now he was 4 months older when he started Kinder), but she has other strengths I am hoping we can expand upon. She loves to draw pictures and just sit at the table and "do crafts" for hours. She has such a wonderful imagination...I can just see the stories she can come up with and the drawings to match. Plus her love for flowers is off the charts; I hope to weave that into her curriculum some how. I am definitely wired more like Jase, so I can relate a little easier to his learning style, but I am looking forward to broadening my horizons and engaging Allyson this next school year.

Week 16 Update

16 weeks this past Sunday and it marked the first day to wear maternity clothes with this little one. My stomach is starting to come out a bit and to be honest I have been feeling frumpy in non-maternity clothes. Plus, clothes were starting to get pretty tight or begin not to fit. So, it was time to pull out the bin. Here I am in my first maternity outfit this go 'round on Sunday.

Me and the boys drove down to medical center this morning for my monthly check-up. Shawn was able to meet us there, which was nice. We heard the baby's heartbeat (150 BPM), which is always a relief when I am still early in the pregnancy and you can't feel the baby move just yet. I have felt a few flutters here and there when I am lying in bed, but it's still hard to tell. Seems like around 17-18 weeks I began to feel the others move, so the movement should be picking up soon. My blood pressure was normal (maybe 110/72) and I gained 4 pounds this past month. Other than needing a nap everyday and feeling pretty tired by 8:00 pm, I have been feeling fine. I'm hoping I get some fresh legs in the next week or two...I sure could use them. But if I don't, the tiring journey will be well worth the prize later this fall!

I scheduled my next appointment, which includes the anatomy scan (i.e. ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby) for next month. Super excited! Yes, we are going to find out. The way I look at it, you either find out at 20 weeks or at 40 weeks, so why not 20?! The plan is to have a small reveal party with family a day or two after my appointment and find out then with everyone at our home. Should be fun and stay tuned in for that blog post! :-)

I love our doctor. He has delivered all 3 of my kiddos and I am very at ease with him and trust him fully in the delivery room. The kids have been joining me on all of my appointments with this pregnancy and my doctor always makes it a point to carry on a conversation with them. They're not a bother to him, which always makes me feel good. Today he and Jase were talking about Star Wars and Jase was telling him how big of a fan he is. My doctor told Shawn and I there is a house we need to show him in Rice Village, that Jase would like it. After my appointment, he went and looked up the address of the house for us. Super nice of him to do that.

So, on our way to lunch we drove by the house! It was designed after Darth Vader! How cool is that!!! It was built in 1992, it is currently appraised for $2M, the market value is $2.8M and taxes on this bad boy was over $38,000 for 2013! Yes, I might have did a little bit of research on it!

Even the shape of the house is different when you look at the aerial view. Anyway, we thought this house was pretty neat. Jase said it reminded him of Episode VI too...I forget exactly why...I'm not a Star Wars guru by any means.

Astros Game

Monday night we headed downtown to the watch the Astros play a little. While they are not the most sought out team, we still enjoy our Astros baseball!

Daddy dropped me and the kiddos off at the front gate and I let the kids play before the game. We do not always have a ton of time to play, but this time we were able to let them play for 15-20 minutes, which was nice!

So Ally pretty much kept these glasses on probably until the 5th inning or so. She was a little nervous about fireworks and loud noises and I think these helped "hide" her from everything.

Here are the kiddos racing the Astro Player. Allyson must have ran this race 10 times!

While Daddy took the two younger ones to the restroom, Jase and I took some selfies. Why not?!?

Even though the Astros lost, we had a fun time making memories!

Allyson's Field Day

This morning Allyson had her Field Day at school. She was really excited about it! Her school gave her a shirt after she arrived at school this morning and we were encouraged to wear yellow to show our support for her class! Finn and I only had 1 yellow shirt in our closet, so slim pickins'. Jase had a couple to choose from.

We loved watching Ally as she performed all of her relays. She did a great job and is getting so big!

Here is a video of most of the relays she participated in. 

She was beyond excited to get her medal from Ms. Tracy.

All About Ally

Seems like I've been so busy lately with the kiddos, school and just life that I haven't been posting as often as I usually do. After posting about the boys recently, I felt led to document a little about sister.

Allyson has been a busy bee lately. She goes to preschool every Tuesday and Thursday at a local church and enjoys it. She comes home everyday telling me who she has invited to our house to play and who was nice/mean to her. She is definitely a little social butterfly. Ally only has 2 more weeks of school left and then she'll be home everyday. Even though she is young for her class, we are going to start her on Kindergarten curriculum this fall. She has started asking me how to spell words and is interested in reading. I have been working with her on sight words and her writing has improved over the last few months.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday she is in the school room with us and has work of her own to complete. This is one of the pages she did a few months ago and the bottom answer made me crack up. We have been pushing eating healthy food for quite some time and her answer is a classic!

Here are the kiddos scoping books out this week. Jase was showing her something in a book he was reading. I try to keep school structured {it is just the way I am wired}; however, I know that is not necessarily how my kids are wired. So, whenever they both plop down on the floor with a mess of books, I usually just sit back and enjoy the view.

We went to Kelley's this week after one of Jase's games and Allyson was so captivated with this figurine. She asked us to take her picture with him. We even joked around and said we should have asked to borrow him for the Texas Showdown party! Ha! She has a great imagination and plays so well by herself. We were driving down the road here recently and Shawn looked back and she was telling a story and using her fingers as little puppets. Speaking of parties, she has been planning her birthday party for months now. {I wonder where she gets that from!?} We have already had theme changes, so I will not be taking her serious for a couple more months now. She is totally into it and has invited anyone she comes into contact with. We were in Bullritos a few weeks ago and she made a new friend while eating that was probably at least double her age. Ally later told me that she invited her to her birthday party. So random! Haha!

T-ball! She has not missed a game this season. While she is physically at the games, she is not always mentally present. I know she is young, but I do not foresee a huge sports career in her future, and that's completely fine with me. Below are some pics of her from her last game. She is playing pitcher in the picture on the left and while the batter is hitting she takes her glove off and pushes her socks down and pushes her baseball pants up. I'm not sure if she was working on her tan or worried about her fashion statement, but it cracked us up!

Allyson is also in ballet right now too and that is definitely more her speed. She enjoys the dainty movements and we are getting excited about recital coming up at the end of this month.

To wrap up the post, below is my sweet girl yesterday singing along with a bible verse CD we listen to during homeschool. It helps the kids learn the memory verse we are studying each week.

Birthday Dinner

I know Jase's birthday was early last week, but I just downloaded my pictures from my phone and wanted to document his birthday dinner. Anytime we ask the kids where they want to eat Jase usually answers with "Texas Roadhouse". He doesn't get a steak or anything...I think it's the rolls and cinnamon butter that draws him. Can I blame him?? We decided to go there last week for a little celebratory dinner. All of the kids were excited!

Yeah, that huge brownie and ice cream in the picture above...pretty tasty if I do say so myself. It was $6, but well worth it and fed us all. So as they were bringing out the brownie and singing Happy Birthday to Jase, our other son completely got scared. Poor little guy. I already had my phone out to take some pictures of Jase and I just had to grab a little footage of Finn. Sorry Buddy, we love you!

It is still hard to believe that Jase is 7; this past year has flown by!!

Lego Man

Little Finn has become the Lego Duplo expert these days. Usually every school day he will find the Legos and start building. If he is still building when we wrap up school, then I will join him on the floor and we will work together. I am enjoying my time with him more and more each day.

Here is Finn building away in the school room this past week.

Texas Showdown Party

This past weekend we celebrated Jase's 7th birthday. Yes, that said 7th! We went back and forth on themes this year (from the American Revolution to Texas' Independence) and finally settled on a Texas Showdown theme. Right away we knew we wanted a Wild West atmosphere with good old Texas cookin'.

The cake that the Pope's made turned out just perfect. Jase's request for the cake included "tan, like the color of the fence, maybe some rope and a Texas flag." They completely nailed it and Jase was beyond pleased with it. He even requested chocolate cake with chocolate icing and I let him run with it. He made a good call because it was delicious. Around the cake I had a "Happy Trails" Trail Mix Bar set-up where they could make their own trail mix. It was simple and fairly cheap {plus I had the mason jars} and I thought it fit in well with the rustic theme.

So if you know me, then you know that we love to come up with catchy names for the food items. This is something we all pitch in with here at the house and enjoy. Here are some of the food items we had this year: Pioneer Pickles, Wild West Watermelon, Wagon Wheels, Texas Toast, Vicious Veggies and Rustic Ranch. I have to tell you that I found an idea for the ranch cups. They used small plastic containers {from the dollar store} and had a label on top that said "Every horse needs a little ranch." I changed it up and said "Every Cowboy needs a little ranch." They turned out cute.

Then for the main course I wanted to make sure to include items that Jase liked. My mom cooked the brisket, which was delicious by the way. Shawn cooked sausage on the pit and all of the fixins' we made inside. Mama's Macaroni and Cheese was pretty tasty. I ended up using Pioneer Woman's recipe and it did not disappoint. For Old Besty's Beans I also used a Pioneer Woman recipe...again so tasty. I will definitely be making both of these recipes again. We also had Cowboy Corn {ears of corn} and Bowie's Beans which were some refried beans I made.

Ok, so I HAVE to share the lemonade punch recipe. We had it at a shower earlier this year and it is absolutely delicious!! I will definitely be making this again, like maybe this weekend! Haha!
2 Cups of Country Time Lemonade Mix
64 oz of chilled Pineapple Juice
1.5 Liters of chilled Sprite
2 Cups of Cold Water

Onto the activities for the kiddos. Below I am explaining that there are 4 training stations they must complete before earning their Sheriff Badge. It was basically organized chaos. They kids could go to any of the stations at any time and in any order they wanted to. It was not a race, just go at your own pace.

Target Practice - Here the kids used an old fashioned rubber band gun to practice shooting bandits. You can find the instructions Shawn followed here. You will notice that we kept ours pretty simple and did not use any clips as they did in the video. We did cut notches out {with a file} at the end of gun so the rubber band stayed a little better in place when you pulled it back.

Animal Round-Up - This was probably my favorite. We placed animal crackers on a plate and then covered them with whipping cream and the kids had to "round-up" the animals without using their hands. It was funny to watch them and I think they enjoyed the snack too!

Nickel in the Haystack - So I wanted to do some type of mining for gold or needle in the haystack, so this was somewhat of a combination of the two. Since we were already renting hay bales, we just picked up some loose hay and it worked out perfect. We placed quarters, dimes and nickels in the haystack and the kids had to search for the money. The only catch was there was a 50 cent maximum find. I couldn't have someone running off with $5.00 and another child getting nada. I just used spare change I had here at the house, so it worked out perfect.

Calf Roping - Pretty self explanatory on this one. Shawn made lassos for the kids to use and they roped the rocking horse. This was probably the most difficult station to be honest. The rope probably could have been a little stiffer, which would have made it easier to maneuver. But hey, no one ever said country life was easy!

After 15-20 minutes we gathered all the kids and awarded them with Sheriff Badges. We also gave each one of them a red bandanna and a pair of sun glasses for eye protection for what was coming up next.

Texas Showdown - We all headed out front for the big face-off. Each Partner was given a gun of his own to use {and to take home}.

We split them up into teams and threw down rubber bands for them to use. They were excited!

I don't recall any rubber band injuries, which was a blessing! The kids had fun "shooting" each other.

After the showdown, we headed to the backyard and everyone ate. Then we followed that up with cake and ice cream. I just love this birthday boy!

 Finally, we finished up with presents inside.

At the party someone was asking Jase about his birthday parties and he told them that there is always a theme! Haha! And then he told them that this was the best theme yet! That made my heart happy. That is why Shawn and I do it. I'm so glad the birthday boy and his friends enjoyed the party and memories were made.