Love The Monkey Life: Catching up EMILEE!!

Yup, so I'm behind AGAIN...and this time it struck me to group my posts by monkey...so let's see how this goes!

If I had one thing to say for the past couple of months about our firstborn is that Emilee has been BUSY!!! And that of course has kept the rest of us busy with her! She started high school, jumped into FFA, sings for choir and in her spare time still plays hard!

We went to Oklahoma for a wedding just before school started and we snapped a little goofing around

As them temps and humidity have started to come down some, we are getting out to the park to burn off some energy as often as we can. The boys still play on the swingsets etc, but Emilee tends to wander off and take nature photos (which she's pretty darn good at!). But I grabbed the camera from her and saw a nice photo opportunity...it came out great if I do say so myself. Nice background and beautiful girl!!

Getting to the lake has been difficult, with either bad weather that only strikes on Saturdays or Joshua being out of town. But we've managed to get there a couple of times and Emilee just LOVES wakeboarding!!

And even a bit of kneeboarding to prove she can keep up with her younger brother!

And then there was a pig...dun dun dun dunnnnn! So FFA. Emilee decided to give an Ag class a try this year, and with it comes the extra cirricular club of FFA. Mommy, being a city-ish girl, and a sports-type girl, really had no idea what FFA and "mom can I please have a pig?" meant. Boy oh boy, am I finding out quickly!

Getting a pig starts with "pig picking" day. There were about 100 pigs to choose from, and Emilee had to decide which was "the winner"...

Meet "Kitty," Emilee's hampshire pig project for FFA. She will care for, raise and train her 4+ months. (And yes, just to get the drama out of the way now, Kitty will become "dinner" at the end of that time.)

We pretty much live and breathe going to the barn and all things Kitty right now. Emilee has to go twice per day (and that means the first trip is before school at 5:45am) and spend 2-3 hours per day doing all the things that have to be done, including community barn chores. I am going a little nuts with all of the round and round to the barn, but as you can see, Emilee is LOVING every single minute of it!!

October update on Kitty... Early this month Kitty got very sick. I didn't realize things could get so serious with pigs so quickly, but suffice it to say, we almost lost her. But thanks to Emilee noticing her symptoms, her FFA teacher up and leaving his classroom during the middle of the day to get her some fever reducer and antibiotics, and Mommy spending a few hours spoon feeding her pedialyte...Kitty made a full recovery! She's now almost twice the weight she was on the day Emilee picked her! And I thought it would be cute to show her being back to herself with this video Joshua shot of her playing a little soccer.

Another huge event for Emilee is that she turned 15 in September. GEEZ she's getting so darn grown up!!

And this "cowgirl" thing is showing up in pretty much all she does nowadays :-)

One of Emilee's birthday gifts was a can of paint. She's been dying to paint a wall in her room flourescent green to offset a pink wall her room came with. So here's a before...