Monday, November 16, 2015

Good Times




Crazy kids.  They cooperate so well with photos.  Usually.




And they do such a great job being silly.



Certain individual(s) were not enjoying the photos so much, so they were all told to scowl.  No smiling.



I mean it.




Okay, never mind.  You can smile, I guess.




So deep in thought.



Morgan thought they could hold him.  Awkward start.


Awkward finish, too.

Good times.

Friday, November 13, 2015

Pickup Pictures


As promised, here are our family pics for 2015.  Some of them are a tad blurry which was disappointing, but we had fun with it.  




This is my fav, but it's blurry when you blow it up. :(


Again, so thankful that my kids and hubby are cooperative with this.  Well, most of them were.  You know who you are.....  :)

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Chairs in the Pickup



We took some family pics last weekend for our Christmas card.  We took out my dad'd old black Chevy and had fun with it.  And, of course we brought along our old beat up chairs that we have used in our Christmas pictures the last couple years.  So, why not ride in the back of the pickup on these lovely chairs like these two did?


And of course, I don't have any pictures of my kids sitting in chairs in the back of the black Chevy, so I must take some.  I'm so grateful my kiddos have been well-trained to cooperate with taking lots of pictures.  And I rarely take just one photo.  I have to take them from every angle.  Maybe someday they'll appreciate having thousands of digital photos of their childhood to sort through.  Probably not.






Thursday, November 5, 2015

Family Pics


Our church is putting together a photo directory and we went to have our family picture taken last night.


Lots of debating and consideration went into what to wear so a selfie seemed like a good idea.  We bought a couple 8x10's of the kids.  Our plan is to go out this weekend and take our annual family portraits for the Christmas card.  We could have bought pictures from the photographer, but what's the fun it that when we can set up the tripod and take our own in the beautiful outdoors?



Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Family Science, or My Family are Good Sports

Two of the teachers at the high school where I work agreed to help me put on a fun science night as one of my parent activities I'm required to host every year.  It is SO hard to get parents of high schoolers to come to one more school activity.  I get it.  I'd rather stay home too on the one night we don't have anything else going on.  So it's always a challenge to try to come up with a meaningful and something to get them out of the house for.

We didn't have the stellar turn out I always dream of, but we had a decent turn out and the people who came had a fun time.  That's all that really matters to me.


We had 9 different math and science stations that family teams rotated around to.  My family came, of course.  They don't usually have a choice.  Looked like they mostly had fun, though.

This station was the Melt-an-Ice-Cube Race.  Roll a die and follow the instructions.  Shake salt on the ice, hold it in your hands, put it under your armpit (Brr!), blow on it, etc.  You're racing with another person to see who can melt their ice cube first.


Another station was building a balloon car with life savers for wheels.  It was fun, but most cars seemed to go in circles (including mine from testing the instructions!).  Hard to test the distance a car travels when it drives in a circle!


Nicole decided to lay on her belly to both blow up and test her car!  You can see both hers and Morgan's are beginning to drift to the left of their lanes.  Circle, circle, circle.


This activity was stacking cups without touching them.  They had to use a rubber band with string tied to it to pick up the cups.  This is often used as a team building activity.  My family's team skills weren't great.  They were getting frustrated with each other and Glenn kept saying, "We sure don't communicate very well."  Might have to work on that one a little.

So grateful for all the help from staff and my family (especially Ellea!)  Also very grateful it's over!  Now I can start planning the next one.

Monday, November 2, 2015

Of Pirates and Skeletons


Another good Halloween on the books.  I was really happy with how Morgan's "Captain Jack Sparrow" costume came together.  We found the wig and boot covers and put together the rest from a large men's dress shirt, a t-shirt made into a vest and a scarf (thank goodness for Goodwill!).  Morgan wanted a Jack Sparrow hat and came up with idea of making a dollar store cowboy hat into a tri-corner by safety pinning it up. Perfect!  He even got to use his daddy's Knight's of Columbus sword.


We went to hang out with Grandma for awhile in the afternoon on Halloween.  She had been out of town for three weeks visiting family back east, so it was fun to see her.  There was a trunk or treat activity at the courthouse and a costume contest at a local store, so we had to participate in that, of course!  The rest of the fam was at the State cross country meet (go coach Glenn!) and also cheering on some State volleyball.


It was the first year that the girls didn't go treat or treating.  That was sad to me, but I get it.  Their youth group had a trick or treat for the food bank on the Wednesday before Halloween.  It was a great excuse to dress up and they collected lots of stuff for a good cause.  It was great.


Love that they resurrected this costume from two years ago.  We decided to go with only skulling-out half the face.  I thought they looked pretty fabulous, but I might be a teensy bit biased. :)