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Thursday, August 30, 2012

Quote (conversation) of the Day...


 Scene: downstairs living room, I walk in the front door...
Erin- "Mom! Mom!  Teach Quill is missing!"
me - "Who is missing?"
Alix - "Who? Teach Quill is missing!"
me- "Who is Teach Quill?"
Erin- "Teach Quill is not a person!  Teach Quill is missing!"
me- "What in the world are you girls talking about?"
Both girls- "Teach Quill is missing!"
me- "I get that.  What I don't get is who Teach Quill is..."
Erin- "Mom! Teach Quill is our piano book!"
me- "What?"
Alix- "Yeah.  Our piano book, Teach Quill is missing!"
me- "Your piano book?  Do you have a new book?"
Erin- "No mom!  We've had it forever?"
A light goes on...
me- "Do you mean your TECHNIQUE book is missing?"
Alix- "Sure, if that's what you want to call it..."

Science anyone?

We had the opportunity to go to the Seattle Science Center with our friends the Hartsells.  It was our first visit, and it was great.
Scary dinosaurs...
 Teeny tiny children...
 Alix
 Erin and Brooke. 
 Just another hamster day...
 And the hurricane wind tunnel.  The girls are in 80 mph winds in there... Sam was the smart one, she wasn't going in there for anything!
 Gotta love the gorgeous place we live!

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

That wasn't me...

chasing after the garbage truck up the street, pulling both garbage cans, with 10 kids (literally) following after.  She just looked a lot like me.  But in my (I mean- her...) behalf, I (she...) did catch the truck and get the garbage dumped... =)

Thankfully - there is no photo documentation of this live, neighborhood entertainment...

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Run for your life!

Not really.  But I bet I sucked you in with my super-exciting title...  It was more like, "run, jump and throw for fun!"  A lot of our friends' kids are in a run club.  Ours aren't.  The twins aren't old enough, you might remember how much Brooke loves (HATES!!!) running, and Sam is always just along for the ride.  But our county has a series of track meets all summer, and kids three and up can participate.   So we gave it a go one afternoon....

 Alix doing the long jump.  She loved the races best, but my battery died before she ran.  She took fifth in the 100 and 200.
 Erin turned out to be a natural long jumper.  She jumped 7 feet 9 inches.  That's almost double her height.  And she'd never done it before.  It was good enough for fourth place in the 7-8 yr. olds.

And my little Sam... She got to do the ball throw and the 50 and 100m dash.  It was really hot out and she was having a little trouble in the heat, but she really wanted to run and so she did.  You can see how much in last place she was, but she loved it.  Her running stride is a little funny because of her low muscle tone, but she raced.  I had tears in my eyes watching her run.  This is the girl we weren't sure could do anything, and she was running in a race.  We got her out of the sun, with a lot of Gatorade and she did a little better waiting for the bigger girls to finish.
 Brooke long jumping
 One way to cool off in the sun...
 And Brooke running in her race.  She took fifth in the ball throw and that made her feel good.  Running is not her talent, but she was willing to try a couple of races any way.  I was proud of her for being willing to do something hard for her.  She didn't have the best time, but placing in the ball throw gave her enough confidence to run one more race.  I don't think she'll go back next summer, but I'm glad she tried it and did her best.



Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Trash to Treasure...

Sadly - we had some good friends move away this summer.  Helpfully - I offered to help take a load to the dump for them.  Handily - they had some old junky chairs they were getting rid of... Stealthily - I stole them for my own use...  Happily - my children grabbed our old spray paint and got to work.  Messily - we painted for an afternoon.  Enjoyably - I watched their creativity in making their chairs their own.  Beautifully - finished and turned trash to treasure...

the "before" picture... (It was hot - we were swimming in between coats of paint...)
 All five finished chairs.  Can you guess who's is who's?
 Super Sam
 Princess Alix
 Awesome Brooke (she painted it to look like a cloudy sky...)
 Frog loving Erin

The red one with stripes was mine.  Do you know how many coats of red spray paint it takes to cover up a dark green chair?  At least 4...

Monday, August 20, 2012

Terrifying fun...

The fun part?  Riding your bikes to the ponds for a picnic...
The terror?  Realizing that "feeding the ducks"  means the ducks/geese will charge you to get your bread....  It took about half a second for the girls to be up on that bench once the geese saw us there...


 Most of them relaxed after a while...

 Riding the 2.2 miles home.  It was fun when people thought all six girls were all from one family.  Close.  They do kind of "live" with us for the summer... =)

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Quote of the Day... (for the "oldies" out there...)

 The girls and I were talking about our mortgage and how we have to pay to live in our house. The girls were curious about how old Tom and I would be when we could "live here for free".   I said I'd be sixty and Erin wanted to know how old she'd be...
me- "34."
Erin - "Wow.  That's almost 40!"
Sam - "And 40 is a teenager!!!"
Stay tuned for A LOT of really belated summer posts... We've just been too busy having fun...