one sunday in november

One Sunday in November I took a day's worth of pictures. I didn't plan anything special this day, it just sorta happened. It was a busy day looking back on it, but I have a feeling that everyday would seem busy if I actually took pictures and documented everything we do. I didn't start taking pictures until mid-morning, so I will describe that morning until that point.

I awoke to The Girl playing multiple instruments on my bedroom floor. We are talking drums and tambourines and singing... it was great. Really. We did breakfast, which I think was pancakes and then we settled in to cleaning up the house and living the standard Sunday morning. We attend church on Saturday night so we do not have the typical Sunday morning church routine.

As I was cleaning the kitchen, the kids started pulling out projects and things to do.

The Boy pulled out a kit to make window clings and decided on a turtle. First he needed to outline it all in black and wait a few hours and then color it all in.



On the other end of the table, The Girl started this project. These little guys are like packing peanuts and are actually just like the biodegradable ones that some companies use. They sell these at expensive kid stores for crafts. I got mine for free from someone who was getting rid of their stash. You simply wet them slightly and they stick together. She was making a wall here.



This is the caterpillar that The Boy made.



After a bit the Aquadoodle was pulled out. I love this thing! Art with painless water filled markers! Who ever thought this up deserves a gold medal. We practice spelling words on this too, but that is another post.


Back to the kitchen and a bit later, this is the outline done on the turtle. It is now drying.


In the meantime, I am checking out this magazine. Look at those cookies! Yum! I love the detail of that one with the snowman and the boy and I actually got on ebay and checked out the molds that are used to make cookies like that. I was just so impressed with the look of it.



Yet another item was pulled out of the laundry room. This is another favorite. I found this toy at a yard sale on base at our last station. It is from Germany and that becomes obvious as you look at what this toy does. You get to use a little hammer and real tacks. You see in Germany they can sell fun toys like these because people are not as sue happy there. They know that if a kid swallows a tack that they as a parent are to fault, not the company for making a toy. My kids love this and I think I paid a dollar for it. Great fun!!!



This is the overall look of the table as all of this was going on at virtually the same time. My table nearly always looks like this though.

I tell people we just have the privilege of eating in a classroom.


The finished hammering project. Nice standard little picture there... now we can all collectively sigh at the happy little domestic scene.


Time for music!!! Singing and making up songs about virtually nothing! Can it get any better?


The instruments were put away and they collaborated forces to build a fort to fight the bad Tigers. No kidding.


The cushions are off my sofa again.



They made arrows and spears out of K'nex. They had to fight off the bad guys from their fort. Guess who had the privilege of playing the bad tiger? Yup... that would be me! See what getting half your college education in Drama gets you?!


After some grand battles we stopped for lunch. That consisted of amazing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Yum. We had a few other things with that but I can't really remember what right now. Probably some clementine oranges. We love those guys!


After lunch the turtle was finished and it currently resides on the window of The Boy's bedroom.
The colored portions become more clear as they dry and look like a sun catcher type thing. It will stick right on the glass until the sun will slowly over the time of about a year disintegrate the material and you get to scrape it off the glass with a razor.


I checked on the bedrooms and what was going on up there. It looks like the dollhouse people are having a picnic. Notice the composed dad and the family dog. Now, look at the mom's wild and disheveled hair. Should I be fixing my hair more often?! What is she trying to tell me?!

The kids are playing here having great fun in the tree house and enjoying the picnic.


Ah, now next door in The Boy's room we have the K'nex mess. This mess shows up way too often around here. He loves these things though. They can be so many different things and he does use them to build things with the kit instructions but he also builds tons of different things. Like arrows. Spears. Guns. Such things that are so worthy of a little boy's time.


It was right about then that we went outside and The Boys started doing this.


The girls started doing this. It was time for the garden to get winterized. Mushy pumpkins were getting buried so they could make yummy dirt to plant things in when spring hits us.


The boys continued doing a bit of this...


The girls did a bit of this...


Then it was time to get ready for kid's choir practice. I washed up the kids and got them into appropriate clothing and ran to the commissary because I forgot that it was The Girl's turn to bring in snacks for her class. We picked up some of these guys for the kids. They are safe. No milk, no peanuts, just issues for those with wheat allergies and she has none of that going on in her class. She has developed a dairy allergy, but that is a whole 'nother post. I have found it is just easier to bring in snacks for her myself more often then not. If I don't bring snacks then they end up trying to serve them goldfish, or ritz crackers and she can't have either of those things so then I have to run next door to the store and grab her a different snack.


I stayed to help out some in her class cause there are tons of kids and we got all the juice boxes ready. I pulled up the "wings" so that the kids could grab those and not grab the box and squirt juice everywhere. They still did squirt some juice around. God bless janitors everywhere. They need it.


I took a fuzzy picture of her class on purpose. I do not post pictures of kids on my public blog at all, but I wanted you to get the overall impression of her class. Lots of kids, lots of fun. She is the one in the red dress on the right side of the picture.

The Boy's class was practicing for the musical they did for Christmas. Another fuzzy picture for you to enjoy. He was up there on the left side somewhere. I made this one too fuzzy for me to even tell where he was exactly.

For dinner we had tortilla soup. I made up those little yummy tortilla strips in the skillet too. Yum. I did take a picture of the soup, but the lighting was not working for me, so I will subject you to my fuzzy kid pictures but not to bad lighting pictures. I have my standards.


Yummy ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. It is a tradition. We do not always go out for ice cream, more often then not we have sorbet here at home, but we always do Sundaes on Sundays. It is something that we picked up on from some of my dearest friends at our last duty station.

The Boy broke the norm and had mint ice cream. He ALWAYS has sorbet so this was something new for him. He ate half of it then he dumped out the ice cream and ate the cone. He just isn't an ice cream lover.

That was our day. I am sure that somethings were left out, like how I fell over once the kids were in bed, but you get the gist of it. I will have to do this again sometime in the future as well. It was fun to see our day from later looking back. It made me realize how much we actually do in a given day and most of our time was spent at home just messing around.

I hope you have an amazing weekend and time with your family as we prepare to celebrate this amazing season!

Liberty and Justice For All!

My dog is named Liberty. This is her, the sweet goofy spastic Labrador that she is. It is VERY hard for me to take pictures of her because as soon as I pull out the camera and point it in her direction she comes over to see what is going on AND she gets all excited. I was sitting on the floor when I took this one and when I laid down on the floor to get a different angle she had to come over and give me kisses, regardless of my asking her to stay. She kissed my filter on the camera lens. Wasn't that sweet?

This is the best picture that I have ever gotten of my dog. Let me see if I can find some others... you will see what I mean.

Ah yes, you see this is a perfect example. This is what I normally get. Now, I do need to tell you that this picture below was taken with my old camera. My old camera was dropped and it didn't work great, so you get to look at this fuzzy picture BUT this is what she normally does. She runs over as soon as the camera is pointed at her and she looks up at me in her sweet adoring way. This just does not make for the best pet portrait.


This is another example of the same trick she plays. This is when she was younger, she learned this trick pretty early.


This is another little thing she likes to do. She likes to simply roll over on her back and beg me to rub her tummy. She really doesn't care about my picture taking at all. It is all just about her and her tummy needs. She is just so selfish. Man.


Now, this is yet another problem I have taking pictures of Liberty. She is a very dark chocolate brown. She is nearly black and in this picture you basically just get an outline of her on the white snow. Liberty? Are you there or is that just your shadow. Liberty? Well, the shadow sure is moving around fast like her. Who knows, but look at those ears! She looks like she is trying to fly like Dumbo!


Now, the following is a wonderful portrait session done when Liberty was just a puppy. John was deployed and Libby was about seven months old. I had a two year old, a four year old, a spazador chocolate puppy, a teen cat having kittens in my garage and yes, my sweet husband was deployed. My wonderful love was playing over in the Sandbox and he requested that I send pictures of the puppy so he could see how much she had grown.

I had a very good friend of mine assist in taking pictures of the crazy puppy. I need to let you know that my friend spent most of the time cackling with laughter and snapping away. Many, many funny pictures came out of this photo session and I felt that they were very telling of my dog's personality.

Notice the grip I have on her collar. That should tell you something right there.


This is where things started to get a little crazy.

Do you see my eyeballs popping out of my head? My friend was still laughing by the way. Some friend! HA!

This next picture is when the kids came out of the door. Liberty took one look and then all Hades broke loose!


WATCH OUT! YIKES! I think she ripped my arm off in this picture. She probably only weighed about 40 lbs here, but I am telling you what, it was 40 lbs of muscle. Every last ounce.

My Liberty can still be a crazy dog. She can still go ballistic at a plastic bag blowing across the field behind our house. It could be an enemy you know. She still gets outrageously excited when people come to the house. She still LOVES, LOVES to play with kids and she still does find occasion to nearly rip my arm out of socket. She has come a long, long way though and she mainly lays around on her pillow like she is at the top of this post.

That is actually a new pillow that I picked up for her. I brought it home the other night and moved her old worn out pillow and put this one down and she was excited to see me, but she hadn't realized what I was doing. I patted her pillow and told her it was hers and she started wiggling all over and smelling it all over and then she kissed me. She wasn't going to get on that pillow until I told her it was hers and her expression and her excitement were so telling of what was going on in her head.

She is such an amazing dog and though I will never forget what a challenge it was to have a puppy with everything else going on while John was deployed, I could never ever regret having this super sweet, super dedicated, super personalitied dog.


Just look at her. She is mournfully looking at me because I am making her stay on her pillow. She desperately wants to get up and wiggle herself over here and kiss my lens. Sweet puppy, I can't imagine life without this spazzy sweet puppy.

The Day the Giggles wore us out!

Tonight, the kids and I sat down on the sofa for some good reading time. We read a couple of chapters in the book The Family Under the Bridge, we followed that up with the wonderful and whimsical book The Day the Babies Crawled Away.

We followed that with some lovely reading from the favorite collection of Madeline, and finally a wonderful couple of stories from yet another of my children's favorite books, The Usborne Book of First Experiences.

Admittedly, The Day the Babies Crawled Away, has not been on our shelf long, it is a new acquisition. We picked it up at a yard sale this last fall, for oh, about a quarter. It is a nice hardback book with a dust jacket. We all know that the dust jacket will not stay on the book, but I am willing to give it a fighting chance.

I will admit that we just giggled ourselves silly at this book tonight. It hadn't been read in awhile because it is a little too tall for most of my shelves, so it has to lay down on a shelf and it had gotten buried. I dug it out and we read it tonight and honestly, there are so many little funny details that my children just found hysterical. The kids often take books to bed and this one was one of the ones chosen. The Girl got the honor of toting this one off to bed and she was thrilled.

One of our favorite details of this book, that my children think is one of the funniest things in the world is the one little baby is almost constantly hanging upside down. In every scene, there she is! It is so cute! She has this little bow on her head, just like the ones I used to put on the top of my little baby's head and I think my little girl felt great connection to this silly little one because of that. In the last picture, it shows all the babies, through the windows, at home with their parents. Through that little bow-girl's window, we see the mom and daughter hanging upside down from the rafters in their house. My kids found this incredibly funny.

I don't think I mentioned that this entire book is done in silhouette. The background is in color, the sky softly changing to show the changing of the day... the silhouettes showing all the detail and all the charm. The illustrations are simply fantastic for a children's book, crisp and clear and so sweetly detailed.

My kids loved this book and what better way to put kids to bed than with lots of giggles.