Beach or Bust....

We FINALLY went on a family vacation! Yay for us!! We managed to go to the aquarium earlier in the year but that was just small potatoes. We left out last Fri morning headed for Gulf Shores!! We were able to get a great deal on a super nice condo on the beach. I cannot explain to you how excited everyone of us was about this trip! We were there for 5 wonderful nights!
I have to mention that we did have some van trouble. Apparantley our wheel bearing was about to break....I don't even know if I worded that right but you get the idea. We had to order a part when we got into GS and schedule it to be fixed with a shop down there first thing. Of course the part wasn't going to come in until 2 hours after our check out time so a big thanks to the lady managing the property that let us check out late so I could keep kids at our condo and not entertain everyone at the tire store for 5 hours! That is a serious Thank you Lord!
Anyway, we had an absolute blast!
We went to the beach and pool (our building had a zero entry pool with fountains for the kids woot woot) multiple times every day except for Tue. A storm had come in and brought some oil with it so we went to the GS Zoo that day and we visited the pier! I will post pics of those later!
Here are some pics....they speak more than I can explain to you!


Casen had the right idea of relaxing from the first night that we got there! That's my boy!

He just was not sure about the whole ocean thing. This was about as far out as he got! He did really enjoy chasing sea gulls and kicking his ball around!



Michael didn't think this trip would be complete until he buried the boys! Trever was pumped...Casen, not so much (see his hands..he's just not sure)

Buried!!

We baptized Trever while we were there! JK... he went under and was choking...he just flails around like this everytime he gets choked or the sun is in his eyes...LOL!

Trever "surfing"! This little guy had been on a mission to do this since a week proir to or trip! He LOVES the beach!

This was a water spout that we had been watching come across the ocean!

Trever's face after Michael explained to him what a water spout was and that it was headed for the condo next door to us....haha

I saw these crabs out on the sand bar the first day and had been on a mission to catch one...my boys were super impressed ;)

We are Still Alive...

I know that I have completely sucked at updating our blog over the Summer. I am one of those perfectionist people but the type that if I can't do it like I want to or get behind then I just get overwhelmed with it all and just don't do it. SO...it all started when the twins came to live with us for awhile. I started slowly but surely getting deeply behind...on everything! Trever's 5th birthday was right in the middle of that. It was nice for his siblings to be here for that but I didn't get to blog about it and about him like I wanted too so I have just avoided this whole thing until I could get him on here.
Well, I'm not going to do it in that order bc it is going to take me awhile to go through my pics and decide which ones I want to put up so I am going to just skip over most of the Summer and go straight to our beach trip (in the next day or two)that we just got back from. Let's just all pretend that I am completely caught up so I can move on and keep this blog going ;)
I will give you highlights of what I am skipping just so you will be "in the know"! Most of you are my friend on Facebook so you already know most of this!

-We had some of Trever's biological siblings staying with us for about a month
-Trever turned the big 5!!! My baby is officially big! (sorta)
- Trever finished out his Summer Tball season...Go Pirates!
- I was able to go on a beach trip with our youth from church!
-We have decided to homeschool Trever this year!
- Michael was in the Homes and Land magazine and we are SO very proud of him!!

I think that is about it....if I remember more I will update you!

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....