home groomed snap

Recently I've grown tired of spending $35 every couple months to have Snap groomed. It usually ends up being longer than two months because I hate paying for it. So he ends up looking and smelling terrible. I looked into buying our own dog clippers but discovered too late that a decent pair (which I'd need for his extremely course fur) are nearly $200. So my brother was nice enough to borrow me theirs for this first time. 

Here's the dog before his grooming. Doesn't he look so sad and pathetic?

And after. BAM! 

Dog pictures are better with a smiling baby in them right? Haha. 

 You can see from the side that I didn't do a perfect job, but he looks 100% better. I think I'm going to look for a deal on clippers on amazon...

Noah and Evie's swim birthday party

Noah and Evie had been asking for a friend birthday party. We'd never done one before because I'm kind of lazy like that. For the first time I thought, "Sure, why not." So we rented the Swim Center's party room on April 26th for two and a half hours and invited six friends - sibling pairs with three for each. Noah chose Jack, Asher and Eli. Evie chose Elle, Mia and Aly. 

After swimming for an hour, everyone came back in for multiple pieces of cake and dippin' dots ice cream. "This is ice cream?! I don't like it." Hence the multiple pieces of cake.

Gift time!

 The kids made many, many laps floating along the river. Mia, Aly, Evie, Asher and Elle.

Our one rule was that no one was allowed to be left out. I think they did their best and I hope no one's feelings were hurt, but sometimes they got separated. Here's Evie, Eli and Noah who were playing on the slide.

Mia, crazy Evie and Asher carrying Elle. 

Watch out kids! That Terry is a scary one. 

Evie went down the slide mostly because Aly was doing it. I think she was still a little short for it...

The boys - Noah, Jack and Asher. Missing Eli somewhere.

After two hours of swimming they still didn't want to be done but our time was up! I snapped a few shots of the whole group before we left. Noah and Evie had a fantastic time and I'm glad we did it. But once every five years or more is probably enough for me!

new curtains x 2

I've had it in my mind that I wanted to make curtains for the kids rooms, especially since I received a sewing machine for Christmas. To buy them at the store or even online is ridiculously expensive and the selection is very poor. I could find absolutely nothing to match the orange in Noah and Samuel's new room and Evie was stuck with some old brown ones from the Gburg parsonage (but at least they did the trick). So my mom and I went shopping at Fabric City a few weeks ago and found some really cute fabric...for $12 a yard! That was not happening. I found some other cute patterns and blackout fabric at Hobby Lobby for 30% and 40% off. 

Let me just say this. I could never ever have done this by myself. My mom is the master sewing, even making my sister and I clothes when we were little, not to mention complicated curtains for their house, etc. So here she is helping me measure out Noah's curtains. Lizards. Boy fabric is SO difficult to find (still wish I could have gotten that glow in the dark Star Wars fabric I had found)!

Here's the boy's room before. These curtains were more like room darkening and we like as dark of a room as possible for naps. Plus, it wasn't so pretty and too long.

And here was my first shot at the lizard curtains. They turned out too short even though the measurements were accurate. I think it was because the top scrunched together, thus bringing up the bottom of the curtain and letting all that beautiful sunlight in and defeating the entire purpose!

Luckily we had a four inch hem folded over twice so once I took it out and measured again, I found the perfect length. 

Noah likes them. They work wonderful for keeping out the sun and I'm sure they'll help with the winter chill. Notice how they exactly match his quilt?! I'll also point out all of his colored pictures of General Grievous... He's a fan.

Now all I need is some curtains pull backs to hold them open. They're stiff! I have some $5 ones from a garage sale that we just have to find the time to install. 

The following week mom came over again to help me with Evie's curtains. I understood a lot better what we were doing the second time around. Here are those brown curtains in Evie's room. Since the house has dark brown trim, it was just too much brown. And it's not like they accented the green well at all.

So once again my first attempt turned out too short even though we left more fabric! I had to do the same thing as before...

Except I needed even more fabric than I had. Once I took out the hem I added in four inches of blackout fabric that I had wish we had never cut off in the first place! So I sewed that in and made a smaller hem folded over just once instead of twice like I was supposed it. But it works.

It stays wonderfully dark in there and looks great with the green. I really like these.  

Samuel and Ezra playing

Ezra got up from his nap a little early during school a couple weeks ago. So I brought him down to the school room to hang out until we finished. Samuel was glad to have someone to play/wrestle with. Ezra likes to play with faces.

Pinned him again. 

And Noah and Evie couldn't resist watching them even though they were supposed to be doing school. They are quite cute after all.

general grievous

I thought it was funny that Noah's new Star Wars Lego guy was watching him do school the week after his birthday. 

For a while, Noah took General Grievous everywhere with him. He likes his four arms, and more importantly, his four lightsabers! Looks like he's missing two here though. We also had to watch Episode III so we could see General Grievous in action. Noah just loves those newfangled Star Wars movies, but mommy does not (at all. barf.). I hope he'll see the error of his childish ways when he grows up.

screen time

Two weeks ago after a bath, I came into the living room to find all the kids snuggled on the couch with their fingers on little screens. How strange these devices are! We let the kids play a little bit of video games about half of the nights of the week. This particular week we didn't have much time and they opted for daddy's iphone (Noah's playing Star Wars Angry Birds) and Evie has my Nook and is playing some kind of preschool puzzle game. Even Ezra wanted to try.

coloring the window

Two weeks ago Samuel was upstairs while we were doing school. I came up for some reason to find that he had drew on the back porch window with white crayon. Lovely. I got my handy Norwex cloth wet and set him to work cleaning it up. I left him for like two minutes, seriously, and came back to find him finished but the norwex cloth was no where to be found. I asked and asked where he put it but either he didn't understand me or he couldn't tell me...or he was being naughty. I looked high and low and could not find it. I mean I looked in every drawer and possible cranny. No where to be found! Two weeks later it still hasn't shown up. I have no idea where it could have gone. The punk is still a destroyer baby.

reading across a river

 Evie's reading curriculum occasionally gives us a play day. She likes those days. More work for mommy but more fun for Evie. Two weeks ago she read and hopped her way across a word river. 

I like how Samuel's totally relaxed on Snap's bed.

She had to read all three words in a row and then step on the word with the long-u vowel sound. If she got it wrong, she had to fall into the river. If she got it right she could go to the next row. Lucky for her she only missed one. I had fun pushing her into the river. 

I made her do it twice for practice. Here is she safely across.  

speech therapy update

Samuel began his limited 16 sessions of speech therapy at Children's Care on March 10th. Like I said before, it was pretty basic. She was just trying to get him to say sounds using these picture cards of short words. Especially the sounds P, T, N at the ends of words. He leaves off the ends of pretty much all of his words. Since we only have so few sessions, she copied the cards for me and we're supposed to go over them with him. It's helped! 

Also because we can't keep seeing her indefinitely, she strongly suggested we check with the school system to see what their options were. I was a little hesitant of that, but she was certain he needed more help than she could give him and it's far too expensive for us to pay. So after another evaluation by the school district and a meeting to determine what option would be the best, we made a decision. The options were to have a school speech therapist come to our house, take Samuel to a school to see one of their therapists or enroll him in the Communications Preschool just down the road from us. My first choice was just to have a therapist come to the house but we were unsure if that would be adequate help. It was the same problem with going to a school. So we decided to enroll Samuel in the preschool. 

I attended the entire first hour and a half session with him on April 22nd and it went really great. Samuel wasn't afraid at all, the class was very small (six others) and the teacher (Kim) was fantastic. 

Here Kim in explaining their homework. Samuel loves working on it.

Even though the first session went well, I was still a little unsure if we'd keep doing it. But after talking to our therapist at Children's Care, who I've grown to respect, I feel okay about it. She said that the program was wonderful and was glad he could be in it. I also overheard another one of the mom's talking to Kim about how much her son has improved and that was encouraging. So I'm really hoping this will help Samuel. Terry and I have been noticing his speech improving. Not sure if that's due to the help he's been getting or just his own timing. Too soon to tell perhaps. But I'm hopeful!

Samuel has to wear a backpack to "school" where he can store his speech notebook (which contains homework for us to work on). He liked it so much that he wore it around the house for a couple days, like this one when he was going to play outside one afternoon.

A boy, his backpack and his dog. 

Nathan and Ana's announcement

The day after Easter I got together with my brother Nathan and his wife Ana for a special project of theirs: A pregnancy announcement photo! Ana found an idea on pinterest of a dog wearing a chalkboard with the baby news. She asked me to take the photo for them with their cute Goldendoodle Brodie. I was honored! And since she's already posted her choice photo from like 200, I thought I'd share some others for fun.

After dinner that night Terry, the kids and I headed to Canyon Lake Park. While Nathan, Ana and I were off taking pictures, Terry and the kids played at slide. The first place we tried was in what little sunlight remained in the park, on the bridge. Too many shadows. Plus it took me a while to figure out what kind of shot they wanted.

Nathan wanted to try in front of this fireplace.

Then we tried in front of a tree. 

Then we went down to the lakeside and I figured out they wanted a shot focused on Brodie, not on them. I like this one. 

Next we went down the sidewalk to a lakeside porch. The sun had just gone behind the hills and created a nice light. I liked this one too.  

Brodie appears to want to hide from the news. 

My skinny brother has nearly non-existant body fat and yet here is his imitation of pregnancy. Nice try. 

Finally we stood on the brick sidewalk and got a winner. This is the photo Ana went with.  

Brodie is a big baby. 

It was such a pretty spring night. 

Silly Ana. I like her. 

And... me. 

After the brick photos we were done and headed over to where Terry and the kids were. 

Fun uncle. 

He's got his hands full.

They had lots of sand in their clothes. Yay! 

Don't fall in Samuel. I have nightmares of this park for good reason. 

Swinging Ezra. And time to go to bed. What a fun night it was!