Alena's first tooth.

If you can ignore the fishies in her teeth:) you can see the hole in her mouth. The very first one. Can we say EXCI-TED! She is a young soul and way behind her friends in the tooth loss area. She's got another one on the way out too. Good thing we have tooth fairies because she'd be making a necklace out of these babies. She thinks they're gorgeous. Maybe dentistry in her future?

My Fire Pit

MY FIREPIT! I have been saving my pennies to put in a fire pit. This piece of ugly weedy earth in our yard needed a purpose and I decided this should be the purpose.

My strong, hard workers carried all my stone over from the carport. They are HEA-VY!

Briggs was so interested in this project.



So glad my man knows what he's doing!



This is just the preliminary arrangement.

Sennia woke up from her nap to find the pre-glued pit ready with some of our natural seating options rolled in:)

Briggle was ready for the matches! Sadly he had to settle for watching daddy glue which he found pretty entertaining too.

We can't wait for our first friendly cookout.

Sa-turday is a Spe-cial day . . .

Did you hear that story about the dad who would make his kids work with him every Saturday morning, if there wasn't something to do, they moved dirt. Ya, that's me. Alena and Brigham loved this particular job of hammering nails gone awry in the deck.

Sennia helps keep everyone on their toes, prunes flowers-dead or alive, collects bugs and cleaners her "little house".

The boys weren't quite as thrilled to clean up the pruning and the weeding.

 

They all love the part where they get to cool off in the pool and eat yummy cantaloupe(except Alena who of course is eating a plum because she doesn't like cantaloupe. Our little black sheep angel girl).

 

That particular throw didn't land so well.

 

Somebody has learned that the slide is very VERY fun and that mommy always comes when she climbs to the top; especially if she's standing up. Oh my.

Gardening at the End

My helpful little gardener.

 

We had a great garden this year. Have, I guess. Some things are still growing. Flowers, herbs, peppers. . .a bean plant Eli's experimenting with. We're ready to put in watermelon, onions and soon-greens, squash and tomatoes!

So Happy Togetheeeeer! Bum, bum bum. . .

And then sometimes they do this to her.

Bug Experiments

We have many science experiments going on at our house at any one time. This month we've had some interesting bug experiments. This is Samuel's 'Dead Insect Collection'. This means he killed none of these, at least I think none of these, himself.

Here they are making a bug softener. The point is that you take a dead insect like the one below and put it in the softener jar and then after a day or so you can reposition it. It worked well for many of their bugs.

This is a black widow our neighbors thoughtfully brought the kids back from their trip to Ok

 

 

 

Another bug experiment was to donate my parsley to a select few of the caterpillars that hatched in it. Sadly Brigham brought that experiment to a halt. Caterpillars are much to enticing. 

 Bugs waiting to be positioned.

Gram and Poppop Visit

Seriously, I am going to make my kids practice taking pictures one of these days. It's pretty bad. Check Luke out! You'd think I'd made him dance in front of the restaurant or something. Everyone had a lovely time. No, Sam and Alena were not as insane as they look in these poses and Brig was cold but he enjoyed coloring his Lizard Coloring book and eating his mac and cheese. Eli and Luke were starving and thrilled to be allowed to eat of the reg. menu. So, here we are all for better or for worse:)

A little bit better:)