By invitation only....

Obviously you have recieved an invitation to read our blog! I hate to make it private and have to "invite" people to read about our life happenings and share our pictures with but some things you just have to do. It was just recently brought to my attention that when you googled Michaels name, our blog came up. This wouldn't be such aa big deal except that Michael has been in the Homes and Land magazine in a full page spread ;) for 2 months now. Not the best thing when you have pics of your kids and your house on here. We all know that there are creeps out there and I don't want my kids pics floating around plus we have a situation with our oldest where things about his life are purposefully kept from some people. So, here is our effort to keep our little life, well, little. I think in the end this will make for a more personal blog about our family because I will know who is reading it and won't hesitate to put many things on here. Glad we know you, thanks for caring enough about us to want to read about our "moments"!

Trever Graduated Pre-K!

Again, I know that I am super behind on posting some of our pics but I thought that y'all would want to see pics of Trever graduating from Pre-K! He has learned SO much this year! They took a test at the end of the year to see where they were acedemically and he did great! At first I had read the results wrong and thought he was in the bottom few but then Michael pointed out that I had pretty much read it backwards and he was 10th in the whole Pre-K of about 30 something kids I think. We are SO proud of him. He really loves school! He loves school so much that we have bought a homeschool Pre-K curriculum to do this Summer. We are using Horizons from AOP. So far we both LOVE it!





Here is Trever and his teacher!

Blanket Time!

I will start off by apologizing bc my posts are starting to be few and fffaaarrrrr between. We are indeed in a busy season right now and VBS starts this morning so we are buckling in and preparing for this crazy week. I will try to post more regularly after this week bc I have so many pics and things to share!

I frequently watch The Duggars and all of their 19 kids..for many reasons. The main reasons that I watch them is to see how their family functions with so many kids and so many chances for disasters. Kids didn't come with a handbook you know so we have to just watch other people and learn. They have a thing called "Blanket Time" where their kids have to set on their blanket and play with a toy or read for 30 minutes. She mainly uses this for the smaller kids while she is homeschooling other bigger kids. I had considered attempting this but it honestly was very intimidating and so I didn't do it. Then, my sister from another mister Sarah (who is one of those Moms that literally was born to be a Momma) told me that she did this with her kids. Anyway, she motivated me to at least start trying it little by little and it has been a success and such a wonderful thing! I have incorporated our Bible Time into Blanket Time. The boys each have thier Bibles and "read" through it and we talk about different stories and then they will usually play with a toy or eat a snack. We do not do this every afternoon but we do it several times a week. We are up to 15 minutes now which is amazing to me! I took these pics back a month or two ago (see jeans ;) but you can at least look at them as proof that my kids can sit still for 15 minutes!

Garden Update

Well, our garden is growing! Honestly, I am just happy that everything didn't die. After we had our big "plant", we had about a week of torrential rains and storms so we weren't sure how much actually made it through. It seems that everything made it except a few cucumber and squash plants (which we re-planted last week). Granny blames this on a big ole dog footprint and another one beside it that says "Crocs". Not sure who she is trying to blame that on! What do you do? haha! Up until the other day I was thinking that this garden stuff was not really that hard. That is until we were at the garden "checking it out" and Granny hands me a hoe. I look at her and she says "I'm going to show you how to do this so you can show Michael. We've got to get all these weeds out of here." So, Michael has been working a lot of extra here lately. We are very thankful for business but I know that the last thing he wants to do is come home after working from sun u til sun down and me tell him Granny said he needs to hoe the garden....I'm assuming that's how you say it? I get to it and let me tell you, that is hard work!!! My shoulders, back and arms def. felt the burn! We got it done though! Another thing we have going is cherry trees. Between our house and Grannys, there are two cherry trees that have really grown and have begun to produce lots of cherries in the past few years. Granny gave Trever the job of checking the cherries early on and he has been faithful in checking that tree everyday! Cherry picking is one of the boys favorite things to do right now! Yesterday was the first day we picked enough ripe ones to make cobblers with. There is nothing like Granny's cherry cobbler to eat after supper! I love living in the country but right now we really just can't get enough of it! (Trever and Michael were at t-ball practice in case you are wondering why they are MIA)



Granny's helper!




Dollar Tree was out helping in the garden too!

Casens 2nd Birthday Party!

I still can't believe that Casen is 2! His 1st birthday party (outside) was rained out and we ended up with about 80 people in our house (you know, the one that the 3 of us are busting out of). It was cramped, but fun! For his 2nd bday, it rained again! We had cut our guest list in half this time (hello, 80 of y'all gets a little pricey) and decided to only invite immediate family (which there are a ton of btw) and Casen's 2 yr old friends. We were going to do a moon bounce and I wanted him to be able to actually jump with his friends. Of course, here came the rain so we rescheduled it for the next weekend, which actually seemed to work out better anyway! He had a great time except that he would absolutely not get into the moonbounce. It never fails that if you actually spend money on something for your kids and have in your mind a way something is going to go you might as well set it on fire and throw it on someone's porch bc it won't be happening that way ;) It was so good to see everyone that came and to catch up with them! Thanks for all of the birthday wishes! Here are a few pics!



This is his new face that he does when he is concentrating....

Cramblit Craziness

Ok, so it has been a minute since I have posted something new. When I say we have been busy, I feel like that is an understatement. This has just really turned into a busy season in life for us right now. Just to give you a brief glimse of the latest happenings: Michael has been super busy at work, we have started a construction company on the side that keeps him busy in his spare minutes, he is also coaching Trevers' t-ball team, I'm not going to go into the schedule of practices and games, we have entered the "Cramblit Birthday Stretch" bc Casens is the last day of April, Trevers is in June and mine is in July so here come the parties, Trever is also finishing up his first year of "big boy" school. He graduates from Pre-K Thursday and has had many school activities. I finally finished up my class at the "Houn" and now Casen is home with me everyday and not in daycare (ok, that right there is enough reason to be behind on blogging -jk ;)Michael and I have felt led and decided to not be so "comfortable" at church and have joined a new ministry team and we will be teaching High Schoolers (he co-teaches 9th grade boys and I co-teach 11th grade girls) this big "Promotion Day" as we call it, takes place this Sunday so we have been trying to gear up for that. I think I will stop there...just wanted to give a quick update. Now on to trying to post all the pics and what not ;) Thanks for checking in!

Trever's First Field Trip!

Friday was a busy but great day for us! It was Casen's birthday obviously but Trever was going on his first field trip! His Pre-K Class was going to Brown Farms to pick strawberries!! Michael had taken off for Casens' birthday so he took one for the team and stayed home with him while I went to meet Trevers class at the farm! I say that Michael "took one for the team" bc it seems that once you have more than one kid, the time you get to spend with each one individually gets less and less. I usually am with Casen since he's "the baby" and is much more "needy" (aren't all men? jk :/ ) and Michael and Trever get to do "big" stuff a lot of times. Example: Michael recently took Trever to work with him for "Take your kids to work day" ( I just now realized that we don't have a pic of that...just great :( Memories, all about the memories, not pics...ok back to my story. So I was very excited to spend time with Trever by myself. (More excited than he was because as of last week he informed me that I was "boring" - that will be another post soon) ANYWAY, I know this is bad, but I have never actually picked strawberries from there or anywhere. I have bought them from there before and been there for other things but never to pick strawberries. This is one of those things you do "when you have time" ya know. I have to say their strawberry "patch" or whatever it is was very ...beautiful! It really was! I have never seen strawberries that looked so juicy and just beautiful! They tasted excellent and I can honestly say that we will not be buying any strawberries from the store this year but will be going to pick or buy them from there. Obviously you want to support your local businesses, "home grown" type produce is better for you anyway and it's fun!! Trever had a blast! Another thing this made me think of as I looked around and noticed that not every little 4 or 5 year olds parent(s) were there, was that God has truly blessed me with the best job in the world! I am SO very blessed to be able to stay home with my kids to raise them and get to go to things like this. Not every parent is this fortunate. God has truly blessed us! I am also thankful that I have a great husband that works so hard to help make this happen! I took some pics and we (all the parents) laughed so hard at Trever bc he cannot stand for the sun to be in the vicinity of his eyes or he scrunches his face up and it is just funny! He just cracks me up!


You have got to click on this pic to get a closer look at this face he is making! haha


Obviously I am just cracking up at Trever by this time...




I don't usually post pics of other peoples kids but 1) this parent wouldn't mind and 2) it just shows how funny these kids were about the "morning sun"


You can spot Trever ....the one shielding his eyes! lol