Illness

Due to recent illness floating around our schools, as I put Jake to bed tonight I said, "you be sure to get some good sleep tonight because I want you to stay well." Later, Randy went in to say good night to him and Jake said, "mom said the flutes are going around. Remember last year when Bradley had the flute? I need to go to bed so I don't get the flutes dad." HA!!!

Sunday Hike

Tomorrow I am taking a personal day off from work. I was hoping to go hiking at a state park, but the forcast calls for rain all day. So....rather than hoping for good weather tomorrow I asked the boys and Randy if they wanted to hike with me today. And, they said Yes! So we all went to Lake Tawakoni State Park and went on a 3 mile trail. We had soooooo much fun and it was a BEAUTIFUL day! Bradley brought his camera...I didn't want to carry mine. I had to at least get him in one of the pictures. It's not a very good one though. The boys are looking out at the lake. Then they looked down and saw that they were standing on top of a "cave" HA! Bradley poked on the top of it with his hiking stick and when some of the top gave way he said "yep it's a bear cave Jake." Jake took off running.

Eating oranges!

Well, I almost had an easy day today. I spent the day at school doing odds and ends for teachers and for the last period of the day volunteered to fill in for the P.E. teacher while she helped some students in her room. Well....when you have to have a tornado drill for 30 minutes, while the favorable tornado conditions move through Lone Oak, the only place to evacuate the children to safety is the boys and girls restrooms. So, I got to spend 30 minutes in the nasty smelly middle school boys restroom with ten boys and another aide. Gross!!! Surely tomorrow will be better! And no, the picture above is not the actual bathroom I was in, (I don't take my camera to school) I just wanted to give your brains a visual. Too bad they haven't invented smellovision!

Apologies

I don't know why, but I haven't felt much like blogging. Could be due to the same old same old of life, nothing really exciting happening around here. Go to work, come home, go to work, come home, go to work, put the fire out on the hot water heater and boil water for baths the next two nights...Hopefully the new water heater will be installed tomorrow. I won't totally be dissapearing from blog world. Just need some really good inspiration to blog about something.

Since I'm on here tonight though, I will tell you something funny Bradley said at Brookshires tonight. We were buying juice boxes for lunches and I noticed the price of capri suns went up to $3.07 a box!!! They were $2.24 last week. Bradley and Jake got an earfull about the price and were informed we wouldn't be drinking these much anymore. When we got up in the line to pay Bradley said, "Hey mom you know how you were listening to the President speak last night? Well, he said he was raising the price of everything." I and the lady in front of me laughed and he said, "No really he said it!" I got a good laugh out of that.

PS...Never drop the equivalent of 1 Cup of boiling hot water on your foot...it hurts...bad

Cousins

Well, our family is taking it easy tonight. We already have the boys in bed and Randy and I will celebrate the new year tonight with some peace and quiet. We had a great Christmas and got to see lots of family and even got to meet our new cousin Elizabeth. We started the week at my parents home and ended our travels Saturday coming home from from Greenville Iliinois where Randy's sister lives. Sunday I went with some girls from church to see The Great Debaters (wonderful movie) and out to eat. So we are tired and relaxing this evening.

Here are pictures...enjoy

Jake and Mikah

Mikah's first taste of cereal

Jake playing blowing on the Wi at his cousins house. He has a bruise on his forhead from bringing his hand up so high after his bowling that the remote flew up and hit him in the forhead HA!


My new niece Elizabeth

The cousins

Jake's new cool toy from Mimi and Grandpa. It took Ramdy and I forever to install it, just to find that we couldn't get the dad gum moon to work. It would help if we hadn't temporarily lost the instructions to the moon. Well, we decided to leave the moon hanging for the time being until we could later return it to the store. So, we go to tuck the boys in and found the instructions and proceeded to turn the light off and tell the boys goodnight. As we flipped the lights off, the moon turned on. We read to instructions to find this helpful hint....
NOTE: In order for the moon to function properly, the room lights should be off.

Geez!!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE NINJA UNDERWEAR WARRIORS!!!

Walking in a Winter StickyLand

I bought those little Pampered Chef glass bowls last weak in the hopes that they would help me cook some things in the toaster oven (our oven issue is a whole blog in itself). Anyway, I thought I had a wise idea to make the little cakes with the bowls into Christmas trees and make a "Winter Wonderland" type sceen with them. Well, this is what we ended up with :) Most likely I will never be a gourmet chef, but the boys and I sure had a lot of fun tonight. And we sure were sticky when we finished!

Abilene

Well we spent 7 plus hours on the road today, but it was so worth it. When Randy was coaching in Ferris, we had one of his student/football players live with us for eight months until it was time to take him out to begin his college years at Hardin Simmons University. Well, today he walked the stage and received his diploma! We are sooo pround of you Snyder!!! (His name is Randy also, but when you have two Randy's living in the same house, it was easier to call him by his last name) Snyder will be heading out to Arlington to become a police officer, while his sweetie Shanna finishes up one more semester of school...here are some pictures of our happy day.

The Graduate!!!!

Walking the stage! Randy and Shanna. Snyder, you have made a lot of good choices over the last four years, but Shanna is by far the best one you have made yet! I believe she is a keeper!!!

The boys were sooooo well behaved today. They had to sit 4 hours in the car, then get out and sit and eat lunch. Then go sit for an hour to get front row seats for graduation. Then sit another hour and 1/2 for the ceremony. Then sit through a 2 hour adult conversation at dinner (wow, I can't believe I just called you an adult, Snyder). Then sit for the 3 1/2 hours coming home. We let them have a little loud and rowdy fun in the car on the way home tickling each other. Randy and I were willing to put up with the noise since they had been good all day long.
The Boys Having Fun

I didn't realize that my camera wouldn't video with the light on, so this starts out dark and I tell Randy to turn on the light in the car and then you can see what Jake is doing to Bradley while he is yelling TICKLE...

I Feel Loved

So our staff at the school does the whole Secret Santa thing this week. For various reasons, I chose not to participate. I just couldn't justify spending the $40 for me to get stuff all week. Well turns out, I'm the only one who didn't sign up and I knew that before the whole event was finalized and the santa's were picked, but I still didn't think I should do it. Well some sweet elf full of Christmas Joy shared some of the spirit with me today and gave me this CUTE snowman ornament. It made me so happy, and what a sweet person to do that! No one from work reads my blog (at least to my knowledge no one does), but I wish they did because they could see a big THANK YOU!

And I also had to post a picture of our tree this year. My parents got one of the new pre lit trees so we got their old one, lights and all. It is such an upgrade from our 4 foot tree we have had for our entire marriage. Funny thing is when we put up this tree Bradley said ,"man, our tree last year Jake was so much bigger than this." Ha so funny to see how they remember things!

And time to close with pictures of my sweet pirate!


And my little pirate showing off his Karate moves...hmmm....I think he may be a little confused.

It's That Time of Year Again

I got to go to the Mercy Me concert again this year. LOVE IT! I went by myself last year and ran into my friend Katy there. This year she ditched her husband and kids and the two of us went together while our husbands kept the kids. I caught a free t shirt that they threw into the crowd! Yipee! It's just an awesome concert and I will probably be posting about this same thing again next year. As long as they keep having a hometown concert, I will go!

So Proud

Well here is a picture of Bradley and Randy with the trophy for winning the game against Hico. We lost the friday after Thanksgiving to Cisco. We are excited to be in Lone Oak and thank God for leading us here. We love Lone Oak! Jake didn't get to make the picture because I was holding all 43 pounds of his sleeping self while this picture was being taken! He was upset to find out he missed the picture with the trophy.

Look Alike Meter

Something fun from Jaime...

Birthday and Play-offs (Exciting, but Tiring!)

So, the Buffaloes won last night...28-21. It was a late night. Jake fell asleep in the third quarter in Nana's lap and stayed asleep through all the excitement. I took our blanket into Saltgrass Steakhouse after the game and he slept on it on the floor for an hour and a half. We got home at 1:30 am...thus the delay in updating on the game. Next week we take on the team ranked second in the state, Cisco. We will do our best!


Today (while daddy went to work :( ), we celbrated Bradley's 9th Birthday! Thank goodness mom is on her way down to take us out to eat dinner, I'm worn out. We had an army themed party. There was an obstacle course. They had to pop a balloon that had a bouncy ball inside of it, run and jump the hurdle, throw the ball into a bucket, run to the bounce house, find the slip of paper that had a shape on it, run to the puzzle pieces and grab all of them that had that shape on the back of the pieces, put the puzzle together, then kick the soccer ball into the goal. This took all of 5 minutes. HA!!! They loved it though. Then we had a shark pinata (we invited his soccer team and they were the sharks). You can see the pinata hanging in the upper right of the picture below. Then each child got four cans of silly string to have a war with. Everyone had a good time, and for some reason all the kids decided to turn on me and spray Bradley's mom with the silly string HA! Anyway, We had a great time, but we are pooped. I guess in the back of my mind when I planned this party, I thought Randy might possibly make it home. He walked in the door as the last kid was leaving :( I'm glad we are in the play-offs though. Well, here's pics....ENJOY!
36 cans of silly string! Woo Hooo!!!
Kids working on the puzzle during the obstacle course. This was the only chance I had to grab my camera during it.

Opening Preasents!
This is Bradley's friend from church who was also on his soccer team


SILLY STRING WAR




Don't look too enthused son!

GO BUFFALOES!!!

We're about to leave to go to our first round of the play-offs against the Hico Tigers. We're favored to win by 8....I'll update later and let you all know.....HOPE WE WIN! Either way, I'm proud of Randy! GO BUFFALOES!

Halloween

Well, since I couldn't find where to order Mr. Mainways costumes, we had to go with Buzz Lightyear and Peter (Chronicles of Narnia) from Disney.com. The boys are soo cute!

Happy Halloween!

Well, it took me a while to figure out what the kids should dress up as for Halloween, but I finally got some good ideas from Mr. Mainway in this you tube video. I really like the invisible pedestrian. I tried to find his company but couldn't. Darn the luck! I had a hard time deciding, but I think you will be pleasently surprised with my choices when I post pictures Wednesday night!

This is a picture of my kiddos last week BEFORE their soccer game....TIRED BOYS. Not a good way to start a soccer day. However, this Friday night was a by week for Lone Oak, so I let the kids rent a movie and start watching it at 6:00 pm. By 8:15 the boys both said they were tired and ready to go to bed. Just for the record, this is Bradley's FIRST time ever to tell me he is tired and wants to go to bed. I didn't tell them that this it was before their bedtime. I just let them go on to bed and then popped in a movie for myself to watch. This morning they were much more rested and ready to go. Jake's game was at 9 and now we have to wait until 2:00 for Bradley's game. I'll try to get pictures up of Bradley's game if it's not raining. We got a few sprinkles this morning but it looks like it may be raining later. JAKE THROWING THE BALL IN IN THE HUDDLE AFTER THE GAME DASH IN ACTION: Jake's coach calls him Dash because there is another Jake on the team and it can get confusing. Jake used to tell other kids his name was Dash so he responds well to it. Not to mention he can beat any kid down the field. Once Jake breaks away with the ball he is usually down the field. The kid defending him got confused here and Dash backed off so the other kid could take the ball and score for our team!

Don't know what's up with video...I'll keep working on it. Here's what happened at Bradley's game... We played in the rain for ten minutes, then it started pouring and lightening. We were out there just long enough for everyone to get soaking wet and then load back into the car, AFTER handing out snacks to the players for their ten minutes of running (it was Bradley's week to bring snacks). I am just so glad Randy was able to go to the game today. It was kind of a bummer that this was his one weekend off to get to see Bradley play and he only got to see ten minutes, but it sure was nice for Jake and I to head back to the car early and not worry about being in the pouring rain.

Here's another video...The other team was playing DIRTY...they were throwing elbows and pushing! This one kid repeatedly took kids out and the ref had to pull his coach over and straighten him out after he did this to Jake!

SPIDERS!!!

OOPS! I realized the photo I had here had a copywrite symbol next to it! I think it's illegal to put it here, so if you want to see a cool photo of the spider webs go to the link on the right that says SPIDER WEBS.

Bradley got to go with a group of kids from his school today to Tawakoni State Park. They went to see this giant spider web that thousands of people from all over have come to see. They say the first one was over 200 yards long. The rains have washed the webs away I think 4 times now and the spiders just build the web back. I'm sure it would have been cool to see, but I am a little glad I didn't make this field trip because it was probably CREEPY too!!! I let Bradley take his camera. The pictures below are his. The one above, I coppied from the Lake Tawakoni State Park website.
THOUSANDS OF SPIDERS JUST HANGING OUT!