New House

Hey all. Here's a peek at my new house. It looks WAAAAYYYY different now than from 2 months ago. This is the new improved version after I pulled out tons of over grown plants, tamed the ones that I left in, and replanted new flowers and shrubs.

Check out the front porch. (it's hard to see) but it's big! Well, big compared to any house I've had before. It's so fun, and I love it.

More pictures of the inside to come!

Bluey

Well -  We got a new fish.  Our good friends from church, the Millers, gave us this beta fish last week.  (it was her preschool's classroom pet).  Since we have no other pets, and haven't set up our large fish aquarium yet, this fish has been an exciting addition to our family.  

Kimball especially enjoys looking at, talking to it, and poking the fishbowl.  

He's awfully curious about it, and I wonder how long it will take him to knock the bowl off the counter or drop things into the bowl.   Or just reach right in and grab it!  I wouldn't put it past him.  I tried to put it up as high as I could to protect it, but I'm afraid it makes no difference.  I'm sure one of those things will happen.  So stay tuned.  

But for now, the kids are enjoying their new pet fish, which they so appropriately named "Bluey" (because he's blue).

Wowsers. It's HOT!!!

Ok.  I went outside this morning at 8AM to mow the lawn, before it got too hot.  (I think I woke up all of my neighbors -- but I don't care.  Most of them hire Mexicans to mow their lawns. So I have no sympathy.)

So, after being out there for an hour and sweating to death, I came back inside & showered.

Fast Forward to 3 o'clock in the afternoon.  I get the myself and the girls in the car to run to the Dollar Store for something.  The car says it's 110 degrees.  It's literally so hot in the car we are suffocating.  The car wasn't even cooled off yet by the time we reached our destination.  And the drive took us easily 10+ minutes.  So for 10+ minutes, we are dripping with sweat in the car.  I reluctantly turned off the car when I went inside the store -- knowing that it was just going to RE-bake the inside by the time we got out again.  

Now, let's think about this for a second.  It's only, what ?  June 12th?!  Weather.com says there's only 40% humidity at this exact moment.  So, it's actually relatively LOW humidity, if you can believe it.  So basically , this leaves me with:  1) a large desire to go away somewhere much cooler for the entire summer, and 2) wanting to figure out a way to build a pool in my own backyard.  Yep. I think Matt was right on that one . . .   we need a pool.  BAD.

WOWSERS!!!!  It's HOT!!!

Reinspired

Today was a good day.

After reading "NieNie's" blog for the past couple of days, I have been inspired to have more fun with my family and appreciate (more) all that I have. Her blog sure puts things into perspective . . . and quickly helps me get over the "my-kids-are-driving-me-crazy" or "pitty-party" moods.

Anyway, today we beat the heat by setting up the slip & slide. My 3 kiddos had a good time and several neighbor kids enjoyed themselves too. Here are several pictures from the day . . .

Action shots. . .

Kimball kept trying to drink the water from the slide sprays . . . nice.

Ahhhhh . . . Rehydrated!

After lunch and naps, Allison and Sarah had a little face

painting session on their own. No supervision. It wasn't a problem, (thankfully, since Kimball wasn't involved) and I was able to capture their "creativity" before we took baths and washed it all off. (man, Crayola watercolor pencils are AWESOME. If you don't have them, you should get them. The color washes RIGHT OFF with water. Sooo fun for the kids, & nice for the parents! And great for Halloween!!)

After that, we made a nice big bowl of chex muddy buddies. Mmmmm. One of our favorites. And it's already gone!

Summer Fun begins

Last week we did a few fun things to kick off summer vacation. 

Thanks to Aunt Melissa who remembered to bring her camera on our trip to the Downtown Houston Aquarium.  It was a lot of fun.  We tagged along with the "other Craners" (Matt's brother's family).  Here are a few pictures from the day . . .

Me & the girls

                                                        

                                               

Sarah touching the baby rays

Spencer, Jonathon, Sarah & Allison

We also went to the drive-in movie last weekend, to see the new

Pixar movie, "UP."  It was pretty good, but not at all what I was expecting.  In my opinion, "The Incredibles" and "Finding Nemo" were WAAAYYY better.   Sorry Pixar.  UP just didn't have a story line that kids could relate to. Cute, but besides being animated, it was basically a movie only adults could really appreciate.  Kinda too bad. We all still enjoyed ourselves though.  Above is a picture of Allison (front right) with a bunch of friends before the movie began . . . fun memories in the making!

We've also been to the neighborhood pool a few times by now.  Kimball, our 20 month old is bound and determined to drown himself.  He has absolutely NO fear of the water and LOVES to jump right into the pool, whether there is anyone there to catch him or not. He doesn't care! We even let him sort of flounder in the water for a second, hoping it will scare him into not doing it anymore.  Nope.  It doesn't work.  Augh, This kid!  He's going to be the death of ME! or Himself! or BOTH!

Month in review

Well, I haven't posted in a while.  So I thought I'd do a fast month in review and include some pictures.  

First, Today is Matt's birthday! He turned the big 3-2.  So, the girls and I cooked a good dinner, made brownies complete with candles, Allison made a cute card and wrote a poem, and we even put up balloons!

Above, is Allison's kindergarten celebration . . . a program that all kindergarten classes from her school (there's 8 of them -- sheesh!) put on.  It was cute, and Allison is holding an "E" in the picture because she had a speaking part for the letter "E" in a  poem where they spelled out kindergarten and each letter had a sentence about what they did over the past year.  (hope that makes sense)

Here's Allison with her Kindergarten teacher, Ms. Young.  She's engaged to be married this summer, and so some "room moms" got together and threw her a surprise bridal shower at school with the class.  It was really fun and cute, and one Mom even made a veil for Ms. Young to wear.  

Notice, that in the "class picture" below, that Allison is arm-in-arm with the boy on her right, and holding hands with the boy on the left!  hee hee!

I asked her tonight if any boys in her class liked her, and she smiled and said that boys don't like girls because they're afraid of growing up and marrying a girl.  So funny.

Below are a few pics of some green anoles (lizards) that live in the sago palm tree that we have in our front landscaping.  We have at least 3 different ones that we've seen and Kimball LOVES to go outside and look for them.  (I think it's kinda fun too.)

Next is a picture of Allison.  She came downstairs one day after school and asked me to tie this rubbermaid container to her head.  I asked her what she was doing and she said she was pretending to be the Mars Rover.  "What?" I said.   She responded, "you know, the robot - Mars Rover."   "oh." was all I said.  Sure enough, I just googled it and it's a robot that does exploration missions on Mars.  Wow, guess I'm not as smart as my kindergartener. Just in case you wondered what it looked like, I posted a picture of the REAL Mars Rover for comparison :)

  

Allison has also designated herself as the "librarian" in the "study" of our new house that Matt has put together.  She made a name badge for herself, wrote out the library rules, and made Sarah her assistant librarian.  So, hey, when the books need to be picked up after Kimball pulls them down, all we do now is call on our librarians to clean it up -- and they do!  Man, that was easy.  Why didn't I think of that?Below is a picture of Sarah "helping" paint a room in our new house.  Ok, ok.  I KNOW I need to post more pictures of the house, but it's all in varying degrees of "readiness. " (or rather, cleanliness . . . or unpacked-ness  . . .  or whatever . . .  But don't worry.  I'll get to it eventually .

AND FINALLY, 

our "old" neighbors (they lived next door to us at our rental house here) invited us to their annual crawfish boil on Good Friday back in April. (so these pics are over a month old),  It was fun, and educational and Amazing to see how much FOOD they made!  They had 2 coolers

FULL of crawfish,as well as huge pots of shrimp, crabs, & veggies  . . . they'd boil it all in special seasoning , and then dump it out on 8 foot long tables covered with tarps.  And people would just dive in and eat like pigs at a trough.  It made me smile.    

No one ate any of it but me, (I was in heaven) but the kids liked looking at the crawfish.  Sarah was the only one brave enough to hold one.  

Kimball was pretty curious about them & checked them out briefly.      And Allison kept a safe distance. All in all, it was a good time & I got some good pictures of the event.

So there you have it.  Some fun updates on us, with  lots of pictures!!