Almost Halloween!!

We saved our pumpkin carving for tonight, because here in hot and humid Texas (yup, it's still easily in the 80s here and STILL crazy humid) you can't carve much earlier or your creation will turn into a moldy, icky mess. So here's a few pics from our fun...

We started out in the driveway.

And had to move inside the garage when a downpour came through...

Emilee's boyfriend, Garrett, stopped by to help get the goop out of the inside of the pumpkins.

And here are the finished creations! One pirate ship (that also doubles as a pretty cool pumpkin face)...one pig...and one crooked smiling jack-o-lantern!

What's For Dinner?

Carter and I are on our own for dinner tonight (Em is at the barn and going out with a friend and Joshua and Trevor are scuba diving). So I gave him the rare treat of picking anything he wanted me to cook for dinner tonight. I was 100% sure he was going to ask for chicken nuggets and yogurt...his two absolute favs. So I was shocked when, after asking him what he'd like, he immediately and excitedly exclaimed "GREEN EGGS AND HAM!"

Yes, Boog, Mommy can definitely make you green eggs and ham! (Well, green eggs and sausage because that's what I had on hand, but he told me that was just fine lol!)

Geez he just tickles my heart with super cute out-of-the-blue requests like that!

Someone was also not in the mood to get his picture taken...

But he finally peeked all the way up for the shot!

Homecoming, Texas Style

So here's a new one for us! It's Homecoming Week for Emilee's high school. Celebrations and spirit activities are happening all week. Today is the much anticipated football game and it's tradition that all of the girls wear these Homecoming Mums. I was kind of like "WHAT??!!" when I was told about this tradition. We definitely didn't do anything like this when I was a kid in California. And I should clarify, these mums don't just show up or get handed out. They are HAND MADE. And PERSONALIZED. By CREATIVE PEOPLE. And that's pretty much not me lol! So I was super lucky to have an awesome creative friend who took me under her wing and helped me make made Emilee's mum while I watched (Miss Kelly, THANK YOU!!!). It might be a bit hard to see, but Emilee's is personalized with a pig for FFA, a treble cleff for choir and some silver western charms.

So here's Emilee as she headed off to school this morning, jingling and smiling and looking very school-spirit-filled!

First Week Of School

Everyone is out the door this morning for their last day of the first week of school. The week seems to have been a success. Everyone is fairly happy with their teachers, was excited to see their friends after the long summer, and we're adjusting to the get up and out the door routine fairly easily.

Here's their annual First Day picture from Monday. Each of them is seeming soooo grown up right now!

Emilee, 15.9 yrs old, Sophomore

Trevor, 13 yrs old, 8th grade

Carter, 6.5 yrs old, 1st grade

We are outta here in a couple of hours to go camping for the weekend. Yup, we are being THOSE parents and pulling the kids out of school
early :-)! Have a great holiday, everyone!!!

Committing

So it's been almost forever since I got something up on my blog. Well...two months...but still, that's terrible, when in the blog world daily or three times a week at least is much more the norm. Oh well, life is crazy/good here and I'm just not getting on my computer for much more than a quick facebook check, email triage and the handful of hours I put in each month for my awesome work from home job. Anyway...here I am! We are out of town hanging in OKC while Joshua works. The boys and I are going to have some fun, visiting favorite friends and hanging out in our former home city. And this morning, the boys are still snoring so I thought I'd shake a little dust off my blog link and check in.

Soooooo. It's already been said, I'm RIDICULOUSLY behind here on my blog. I have aspirations to catch up months of updates, but for this morning I thought I'd share a quick current project. I'm seriously trying to talk myself into embracing and committing to the fact that we just might be staying put for a while in Houston. 7 years of moving constantly has me pretty gun shy. But the radar screen says "nothing ahead" so I'm talking myself into tackling making my house look more "homey" and "decorated"...not so much like I'm ready to move next week if need be. So in the interest of baby steps I tackled our entry way bench this weekend. The cushion was SAD. The cover is not removable and it's been spilled upon over and over by various multi colored concoctions.

So, I pulled out some of the upholstery fabric I had leftover from our camping trailer remodel a year ago, sat down with my sewing machine for a few and gave it a new (removable/washable) facelift! Much better, right?!

Next projects...paint and decorate Carter's room in a pirate theme, paint and decorate Trevor's room in a Houston Astros theme, buy new furniture to fit our WEIRD/ANNOYING living room shape and paint the kitchen. Stay tuned!

Our Garden!

In February Joshua decided he wanted to try his hand at gardening in Texas so we hit Home Depot and a local nursery and got started on our new family project...

Carter was probably most excited out of all of us...he's alway had an affinity toward plants. He will care for any greenery he can get his hands on...from a weed to a nice fruit bearing or flowering plant. You can imagine how excited he was to be helping Daddy on a whole garden!

This is a glimpse of the garden growing nicely in a shot I took on Easter when the monkeys were hunting for their Easter Eggs.

Now you've probably seen a couple of updates from Joshua on Facebook. He has shared some of the earlier harvests there in short picture posts as I have not had much time this Spring to get at my blog. But tonight both Joshua and Carter were so excited that I had to share.

So here are pictures from today, four months later! First is our cucumber patch which has more than overgrown it's little area.

And Carter excited about today's harvest of potatoes, green beans, leeks and cucumbers! We had a 12 pound harvest today!

Carter was most excited about the cucumbers. I think because they are coming fast and furious now...today he picked SEVENTEEN which came out to be 10 pounds 14 ounces (thus the ten fingers)!

And the cool part of the cucumber weight is...that is exactly what Carter weighed at birth...so here's a newborn Carter sized pile of cucumbers!!

Hello? Hello? Anyone there on this cucumber phone?!

The past couple of weekends we have been canning cucumbers/pickles.  Stay tuned, I will update on our canning adventures soon!

Fresh air!

We are nearing the end of the beautiful weather here in Texas known as Spring. Summer will be here soon and going outside will involve nothing but sweltering temps, dripping with humidity and mosquitoes.

BUT!!! Tonight was gorgeous so we all headed down to the end of our culdesac to play on the green space after dinner. Joshua brought all the baseball gear and he and Em and Trev tried some hitting practice.

Em was first up at bat...


And she claimed that Daddy spent most of his time trying to bean her in the head with the ball instead of throwing fair pitches! Duck, girlie!!!! HAHAHA!


Thanks for being a quick catcher, Trev!! Gotta love those runners who can chase squirly pitches and tipped foul balls!!


Carter took his batting pretty seriously as he is in training right now for his new tball season...


And he made six hits tonight with Daddy pitching (this is a big step up from tball!) before we had to head in because it was getting too dark. Nice job, Boog!