Monica's Preschool

My little girl starts preschool tomorrow. Today she got to go there and meet her teacher and see her classroom. She is attending Starshine preschool at the First United Methodist Church.

Monica and Mrs. Ruth

In the hallway, her classroom is the second door on the left.

Her Daily Schedule

Monica sitting at her place at the table.

Monarch Chrysalis

Tonight while hosing off the kids, Brandon found a monarch chrysalis. I tried to capture how cool it is with my camera.

Rain Rain GO Away, we all want to play...

or maybe we will just play anyway!!!

The month of August

Well it has been a while since I blogged. So much has been going on in our lives over the past month. I am considering starting a new blog under a different name since I am no longer a seminary wife. Maybe I will be better at updating it? ☺

Okay so this past month, my daughter turned 4, my husband turned 33 and we celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary. Daniel started second grade with much hesitation. I guess school’s newness has rubbed off and he did not want to go. He cried for several days saying he just wanted to stay home. It was hard to send him off to school with tears in his eyes, but I knew he would be okay. He has a great teacher and his best friend is in his class. After being in school a few weeks he has adjusted and is finally starting to enjoy going again. He also started his second season of soccer. He is on the same team as the spring and they won their first game! GO RAPTORS! Currently my poor baby is struggling with poison ivy all over his face! His eyes are swollen and I don’t know how he has the will power not to itch it.

Monica starts preschool next week and she is super excited. She wants to go to school so bad and she is looking forward to being a big kid. She has a really nice teacher who is a retired elementary school teacher. I met her at a parents meeting, and Monica will get a chance to meet her on Wednesday.

Olivia is growing bigger every day. She is 100% toddler and has already entered the terrible twos. She demands things her way or the highway! She climbs on everything and thinks that she can do anything her brother can do. At the playgrounds she is climbing up 7-foot tall ladders and going down slides like it is no big deal! It scares me to death, but she has no fear of anything.

Brandon is working on his book. He will have his final manuscript in by October 15th, and has been busy every evening editing. This month has brought some exciting and scary news all at once. After a year of praying for a place for us to minister all of a sudden two churches, both in South Dakota are interested in Brandon. Both of them have their strengths and weaknesses, and we are just praying for wisdom as we all come down to the final decisions. One church is meeting next week and will chose 2 of the 3 remaining candidates to come out to the church for a weekend. The other church has zoned in on Brandon and before bringing him out there they will show a DVD of one of his sermons to the church on September 11th. The church will vote and if they vote for him they will bring us out for a weekend to meet the people and final decisions will be made. I have had so many mixed feelings as I want to move on, but at the same time we are grounded here now and moving on is hard. I am excited that God has been faithful to our prayers, and we pray that no matter where we end up, at either of these place, or neither, that we will be in a place that will be healthy and we can enjoy serving. Please pray with us as this process continues.

Living with the possibility of moving is hard. I want to enroll the kids in Awana, and settle into our routines for the year, but it is hard to know what to do. We are trying to just go day by day continuing as if we will be here, but in the back of my mind I am thinking of the possibility of moving.
Well there you have it, my first update in a month. I do wonder sometimes if anyone even checks this anymore, as I have been horrible at updating. I thank you all for your faithful following and interest in our family. Goodnight for now, and hopefully not for long!

Thank You Babu and Shosho

My sweet little girl is turing 4 this week. Thank you babu and shosho for the money you sent. Monica has a message for you.

Extreme Makeover- Home Edition

For my entire marriage we have lived in apartments, until we moved here. Moving into our first house was exciting, and it has been a welcomed change from cramped space, shared laundry, and no yard. This house belongs to my father in law, who inherited it when grandpa, is father, passed away a couple years ago. The house was built in the 1920's and at one time was featured on the front of a Hallmark card as a classic all American home with 2 bedrooms downstairs, and a finished attic space upstairs that is my son's room.

Outside we have a fenced in backyard, a front porch, and a covered patio that is screened. The last 10 years that grandpa lived here it was impossible for him to keep up with the house and things went neglected. When we moved here I had a laundry list of things I wanted to do to transform this once Hallmark house back into it's beautiful state. You know in the movies where they start a project and you see them happily working together, and then through time elapse clips they are able to complete the project before the end of the song? Well that is kind of how I envisioned house projects. Just happy fun things that make you feel good. Well, so far there has been no three minutes projects set to fun upbeat music. There have however been project that in my naive little mind will be easy, and then end up taking weeks to do.

The number one project for this summer is my back patio. It is a beautiful space that one hosted parties, and was a play space for B and his sister. Over the years it had become a place for leaves and dirty to collect, bugs to eat away at the wood, and an over all annoying space to try to keep up with.

All that is changing though. After 3 weeks of working on the patio, we have a fresh coat of paint on the outside, all rotten boards replaced, and today we have an electrician out there to figure out why the electricity does not work anymore. Soon I will have a couple of ceiling fans out there to help keep the space cooler. I cannot wait to post a picture of my new space.

On a more sentimental note, I would say there is something special about living in a home where B's grandparents raised their family. I think of them quite often. I never met grandma but I still sometimes envision her working in the yard, cooking in the kitchen, and embracing grandpa out on the patio. This was their house, they bought it, they loved it, and they chose to raise their family here. It is full of memories, ones that I will never know about. It does make me happy to think of how much joy it would bring them to see their great grandchildren run where they ran, sit where they sat, play where they played, and all the while being reminded of the two people who built a life together, right here in this home.

My blog needs a defibrillator

Just like when I try to journal and it never works out I realized that I just don't know if I can have a blog. I read everyone elses and I love reading what they have to say, but when it comes to my own I find it bland, boring and hardly ever updated. When I got my recent blog report and it said that it had been visited 4 times last month I realized that I accidentally killed my blog by not updating it week after week.

I decided that I am going to give this one more shot. Mostly for my friends who are not on Facebook and would like to have access to my stories and pictures of my life, of course that would mean I have to write stories. :) Just like when something in my household is not working I sit down and I try to think of a routine that will change the problem. For example, my kids room is ALWAYS a mess, how I can make it easier for them to clean? I am not saying I have come up with a routine on reviving my blog, as I think that it would take more than CPR right now to bring it back to life. I will come up with a plan today and I sure hope it works. If you are reading this that means you have not given up on me. Thank you for being a faithful blog reader to an unfaithful updater.

more to come........ :)

Deanna Rose Farmstead

On Monday morning our Monday Moms group from church went to a farmstead in Overland Park, KS. Monica woke up that morning super excited because not only were we going to see the animals, but her friends Jack and Caleb were going to be riding in her car. Monica loves Jack and Caleb and talked all morning about how excited she was about them coming in her car to the farm. The very first thing that Monica spotted when we got there were the ponies. Monica has become quite a horse lover over the past few months. I asked her "do you want to ride the pony?" He face lit up like a Christmas tree. Here is a picture of her waiting in excitement to ride the pony.

The pony ride is a short 2 minute ride around a figure eight, and Monica loved every second of it. After the ride was over she told me "Mommy, I pretended I was a princess when I was on that pony."



After the pony ride we headed over to see the baby goats. You could buy a bottle to feed the goats for $1. Monica loved playing mommy to the goats.
Olivia was less impressed with the farm life. She was not a fan of any animal, and hated if they came close to her. I was able to snap one quick picture of her as she was backing up screaming because the goat came close to her.
In the cow barn Monica got to practice her milking skills by milking this plastic cow. When you squeeze the utters water would shoot out into the pail. At first she was not so sure if she liked it, but after only a few seconds I could barely drag her away from it.

Olivia did not mind the cow barn because there was a gate between her and the animals. She was even brave and reached in and touched the cows.
After seeing some of the animals we had a picnic lunch by the playground, and then we played for awhile. There were a lot of kids there, so the girls had to share a swing. They had a lot of fun laughing together in their swing. We will definitely go back to the farmstead and see the parts we did not have time to see (due to nap time quickly approaching and meltdowns just around the corner). It was a fun place and best of all during the week, it is free!

Not me Monday

My sister posts on her blog a series called "not me Mondays" where she confesses the things that she would "never do" by telling the truth about what happened in her week. I have never tried writing a not me Monday post but thought that after this week, I would give it a try.

Over the weekend I developed a cold, and so of course when Monday morning came I did not wake up a super grump. I also did not allow my daughters to watch 2 hours of television right after breakfast. Our van has been broken and we have had an infestation of carpenter bees in the backyard. After realizing that they needed it I took the girls outside to play. I did not decide to mess with the bees by spraying them with ant bug spray, causing them to get angry and fly straight for my baby. I totally did not scream like a little girl telling Monica to run as fast as she could back in the house, giving her an even bigger fear of "flying bugs".

Also this week while cooking I realized that I had not seen my toddler for about 2 minutes, which is very rare as she is usually more than willing to follow me around the house crying at my feet. After looking for her I happened to glance out the window, and did not see her running across a street toward the neighbors trampoline. I ran out of the house after her and she just kept on running. The other neighborhood kids thought it was funny, and of course I did not yell at them telling them that it was NOT funny. I also did not yell at Daniel for not checking to make sure the screen door was shut all the way after leaving the house. I would never yell at my kids for doing "kid things", nope not me!

On Friday I did not lose track of time and my son did not come home from school to a locked door and was frantically knocking while I was in the bathroom. When I came out I heard him knocking and when I opened the door he did not say to me "mom you took too long and I just pooped my pants." Of course I did not freak out as my son stood embarrassed and upset on the front porch. I also did not call him a baby to his sister later. I would never demean my children in front of each other. I DID apologize to him for my bad behavior and asked him for forgiveness and we prayed together. That was a great ending to a traumatic event.

My baby boy

No matter how old he tries to act during the day, at the end of the day he is still my baby boy! I love you Danny!

Shhh I am on the phone!!! :)

Monica was pretending to talk on her play cell phone.

So it has been forever since I blogged. I can come up with a lot of excuses like
my husband is on the computer every night doing his second job, I am not feeling witty enough to blog, Pictures take FOREVER to load on blogger and it annoys me, I don’t think that anything interesting has happened. Honestly though if I was to tell the truth it would be just plain brain deadness. I am not sure if that is a real phrase or not but I like it, so I am going to use it. After a long day dealing with life and kid issues I am just too tired to sit down and tell the world what happened that day. Of course then the question could be asked “why do I have a blog them?” Sometimes I ask myself that same question. In theory I have a blog for two reasons. First, to keep a record of what is going on in our day to day lives and second to give our close friends and family a glimpse into our lives since they are not here. So my apologies to all those who faithfully check day after day and never give up on me even when there is nothing new for weeks on end. So here is a quick summary of my life over the past few weeks.

1) I continue coupon and am wondering why I did not start doing this earlier. All of the things below I paid $10.04.
2) I went on a ladies retreat with NRBC. It was a good weekend and I had fun being with just ladies for 2 straight days. I only took one picture the whole weekend, which is why this picture of my friend Elizabeth holding up a "trophy lamp" is the picture of choice to talk about the retreat.
3)Olivia is fearless. She loves going down the slide and she always goes head first!
4)Daniel learned how to cross the monkey bars.
5) Daniel continues to play soccer every Thursday and Saturday. He is loving it, and I have to brag, he is pretty good. His coaches (pictured with him here) are really great.

6) Daniel had spirit week at school. This was his outfit for "rock star day"
7) Olivia found a new hobby. She is in LOVE with Mrs. Frisby, our guinea pig. She has learned how to be gentle with her, and honestly believes that Mrs. Frisby is ALL hers. I guess this would be the place to mention that Olivia is in a possessive phase, you know the what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine attitude. Fun fun fun!
8) I very very rarely post pictures of myself on my blog, so I thought I would tonight. This was taken after Easter Sunday services.

9) It has become harder and harder to get a good picture of all 5 of us. This is our best attempt.

Couponing

A couple of years ago we had friends over to the house and for the first time I heard the word "couponing" I asked "what is that?" The concept of going to the store and getting things for little to nothing was foreign to me and I have to admit I did not really believe it was possible. Over the past few years I have become friends with several couponer and each of them tell me with a little bit of research and organization you can be getting products for a fraction of their retail costs. After moving here a friend of mine explained in details what it meant to be couponer. I decided to start looking for opportunities to use coupons. My first try out of the gate I went and bought 6 boxes of cereal retailed at around $4.00/piece. I found the cereal on sale for $1.99/box and I had a coupon for $1.00/off 2 so I was able to get the cereal for $1.49/box. I also found Lysol products on sale buy one get one free. I had $1 any 2 Lysol product and I was told even though the second product is free it still counts toward the coupon requirements, so really it was like getting $1 off 1 and getting the second one free. So instead of paying $4.30 per cleaner I was paying $1.65 a piece. Also I found toothpaste on sale for .99 cents and I had a coupon for $1 off one toothpaste so I really made a penny on each one of my toothpastes.
Since that first trip I have found more good tooth paste sales and have gotten these tubes either free or for 50 cents a piece.
My greatest couponing effort came when I had a couple of buy one get one free coupons. CVS does this thing where you get extra bucks back on certain products that you buys. What that means is that they say if you buy a product for $4 they will give you $2 in extra bucks. You pay the $4 up front but then you get a coupon at the bottom of your receipt that is worth $2 on your next shopping trip. So with my extra bucks and my coupons I walked out of the store will all the following product with $4 in my pocket. That's right, I got it all free and ended up with $4 left over. What a high that was! These are all product my family uses on a daily basis, so I am thrilled that instead of paying $25 for all of these I walked away with the store giving me $4 to take them out. Since then I have bought 2 bottles of tums with a coupons $5 off 2, and my extra bucks making it where I bought 2 bottles of tums retailed at around $12 for $1.28. I am heading to the store tonight and I am planning on getting some dish soap and toothbrushes and other products I have see in the ad. I have not extended my couponing into groceries but I am working on it. I am so thankful that I have found a way to save my family money!

Trying my hand at photography

Photography has always been a hobby that I love. I have wanted at digital SLR for awhile and my dear loving husband bought me one for Christmas. I have a lot to learn when it comes to taking/editing photos but I have had a lot of fun messing around and trying it out. Here are a few of my photos.