Emmaline's 5th Birthday

     Our little Princess turned 5 last week!  We celebrated by having a small birthday party for her with our immediate family.  (I have decided to try and keep the birthday parties as small as possible.)   Both sets of grandparents were there, as well as almost all the cousins, Aunts and Uncles, so it's still a pretty big crowd!

Bookshelves

Recently online I saw the idea of rain gutter bookshelves -
http://raisingolives.com/2009/07/raingutter-book-shelves-tutorial/

Elijah and Josiah's bookshelves

Emmaline's bookshelf

I thought that they were so neat and decided to put them up in my kids rooms.  Mark and I took a Saturday and went to the store to purchase all the materials.  The intention was to hang them up when we got home but... Mark went to hang them and couldn't find the studs, as whoever built our house did not space them evenly!  So, we had to go back to the store and get a stud finder!  After getting the stud finder though it was a very simple matter to hang them up and took Mark all of 15 minutes.  I really like how they look and the kids seem to read the books that are on them a lot. (Technically only Elijah can read but that's not the point!)  I think they look pretty nice!

Cooking Fun!

After reading a friend's blog about allowing her kids to cook, I decided to give some of my kiddos a chance to cook too.  Elijah was the first one to give it a try, I let him make corn muffins from a box mix.  He had a great time and required minimal supervision since he can read!  They turned out really good and he was soooo proud of himself!

Jeremiah's 2nd Birthday!

For Jeremiah's 2nd Birthday we celebrated with a old west/farm theme.  I made a barn cake and animal cupcakes and we decorated with "rescued" decorations leftover from VBS this summer.

After much prayer and discussion we decided to only have family at his birthday party.  Jeremiah finds large crowds to be overwhelming and usually has a "melt down" when he is overwhelmed.  So, it was just grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, which is still a big crowd (13 adults and 10 kids counting our family)!

Fall Leaves!

Elijah, Emmaline, Josiah, Jeremiah and I had a great time last week raking up all the leaves in our front yard and jumping into the pile!  It had been very still the whole week prior so all the leaves from our tree ended up in our yard instead of blowing away.  Normally we don't need to rake up the leaves, we just leave them and the wind takes care of them for us!  We had a pretty good size pile going and the kids had fun burying each other, throwing the leaves up in the air and making "leaf angels" (snow angels in the leaves).  After the kids got tired of jumping in the leaves we played duck duck goose and freeze tag.  It was a lot of fun!

Some Various Pictures

Micah, 8 months, practicing his crawling

Mark and Emmaline, 4 1/2, at a birthday party

Josiah, 3, Elijah, 6, and Jeremiah, 23 months at the same birthday party

Elijah and Emmaline, playing together

Elijah and his "robot"

A Taste of Summer...

Today it was over 80 degrees here!  Hot, Hot, Hot!  It doesn't feel like fall at all, even though the leaves are all changing, and the pumpkins and fall decorations are all out.  Since it feels like summer I let the kids have popsicle's as a special treat and they were on cloud 9! (This really was today, I don't know why the date stamp is so off...)

Crawling!

Micah started crawling last week!  He is still getting the hang of the whole process, but he can get from one side of the room to the other in a relatively short amount of time!  I love to watch babies crawl, it gives them so much joy to be able to move and keep up with everyone else!  :-)  Micah also has mastered moving in our walker, he can zoom around in that very well!  He LOVES to be able to keep up with all his siblings!  Between the two things he is quite mobile for only 8 months!

Airshow

Last week we went to an air show/car show in Akron, CO.  It is about a 3 hour drive from here one way.  We left at 7:45 a.m. and arrived there about 10:30 a.m., just in time for the start of the show.  We got to see an F-16 fly, a wing walker, several aerobatic older planes do stunts, RC planes flying around, a World War II reenactment and tons of classic cars!  It was great fun, especially for Mark.  The only downside was the heat; over 90 and not a cloud in the sky!  We all came home with sunburns, mine was the worst, I looked like
a lobster!   

State Fair 2010

We went to the State Fair the end of August.  We try to go every year, and the kids love it!  They had such a good time!  :-)  Last year it rained and rained and we were all soaking wet by the time we went home.  This year the weather was beautiful, not too hot or cold, just perfect for a day outside!

Josiah was just tall enough to ride on the carnival rides this year and he was so excited he didn't want to stop even when he was exhausted!