a compilation of the last few weeks...

Obviously I've quit my 365 Photo Challenge. :( Hey, I gave it a good effort and lasted almost a month!

Nothing too huge has happened in the last few weeks - just life. We've had our bouts with sickness come and go (hopefully for a while - *fingers crossed*). So...trying to think back to the last time I posted and what's happened in order ..... Sick family!

There was a while where every Wednesday it seemed I was calling Cole's Bible class teacher to tell her that he wouldn't be at class - again! I think in the month of February he made it to one Wednesday night class. Yea. Between the bad roads and mostly sickness, our family was rarely at services all at the same time.

The second day Cole missed school because of not being free of a fever for 24 hours, we just lounged around in our jammies all day and played. :)



Mason asked me to play Candy Land with him.



I won...


Then we asked Cole if he had changed his mind and wanted to play with us for the second game...


Mason won...


And here is one of the "happy" losers...

He wasn't so happy. :)

Cole got a hair cut. But that actually might have fallen before the whole sickness thing. I don't know. It was requested to have a picture of his new hair cut - so here it is...


Not much different than the Bieber do, but a little more grown up and not so rounded and long on the sides and back. He actually wanted to keep his old hair cut, but Mom and Dad got to veto his vote. :) Isn't being a parent great? lol We were tired of the Bieber look. We didn't have the fever anymore. He'd had that fever for almost two years and it was time to move on.

The next exciting thing to happen in our lives was getting our taxes done! Chris and I, along with the boys had been battling with the cold/flu virus that was going around. It was a Tuesday and we both woke up feeling fine. No fevers. So we invited Linda and Terry over for dinner and so she could do our taxes. Chris helped her with the taxes while I prepared dinner. Terry read magazines and "played" the ukulele. :)
After dinner, we broke out the Super Scrabble!


P.S. - I won! :)

The next event in our house was my Lia Sophia party. My Mom, Tisha, Rachel, Sandi and, of course, Joy were here. It was a small group but a lot of fun. Chris was the best husband EVER and kept the boys and Lucas out in the breezeway for the party. He wanted to watch the Wings play, but two little boys wanted to watch Disney XD instead and he couldn't say "no". :) Lucas didn't last all night with the guys. He came and hung out with the girls for a little while. He found a Hershey Kiss in Joy's bag and brought it over to me. It was so funny because he handed it to me and then started shaking his head up and down, bending his knees and making grunting noises all at the same time. lol We were dying! He wanted that chocolate so bad. He kept looking back and forth between me and the chocolate in my hand. So I broke off half of it and gave it to him. I ate the other half. :) hehe

For a small party, I was able to get some free jewelry and some good deals. :) I was excited to have some more jewelry. I mean, what girl doesn't love more?

These pieces I got before my party. The bracelet was from Cole for New Years. And the ring was my free item for hosting a party.



The latest, coolest addition to our toys is our ipod touches. :)



These things are the COOLEST, SWEETEST inventions! We play with ours constantly. A lot of times, at night, we'll be sitting on the couch next to each other both playing on our ipods. Sometimes it's just checking facebook or emails, or we'll be playing each other in our "scrabble" game. We have an app called Words with Friends. It's pretty much scrabble. You can play with other people who have smart phones, ipods, or through facebook (but I haven't tried it yet). It's neat because you can play the game over a period of a week or longer or shorter. You just make your play, wait for your opponent to make theirs and so on until someone wins. I have games going on with Chris, Tisha, Nathan, and Joy. :) The boys like them too. A little too much. Mason is always begging me to play games on it. I downloaded a few apps for them to play, but I get nervous when he uses it because he can't read and sometimes stuff pops up that asks you to buy the full version of the game and I'm afraid he'll accidentally buy something. So I always tell him to let me know if anything pops up on the screen while he's playing. He yells "Mom! Words!" lol All this technology does come with good benefits - not just game apps. We downloaded Bible apps onto our ipods. So now we can use the electronic Bible instead of flipping noisily through all the pages. :) Two Wednesdays ago I used it for the first time in Bible class. Chris showed the Bible app to his Dad after service and he looked at me, smiled and said, "Ohh! I thought I saw you playing on your ipod during class." lol

Last Saturday, Tisha invited me to the Fenton Expo. It was free and there was supposed to be tons of fun stuff for the boys - so we went!

(the following pictures are from my ipod)

One of the gyms at the high school was filled with a whole bunch of bounce house things. They had a big slide, a huge train that had a small slide inside it, a baseball one, a regular bounce house, one where you race against someone else to see who can get the farthest while being tied to a bungee cord. They also had a soccer net set up with a real kid standing in front as the goalie and you could try to score a goal. They had much much more than that too! The boys had so much fun!






The story that goes along with that picture of Lucas is - we sat down for a snack. I brought some peanut butter and jelly crackers for the boys and some rice snacks for myself. Lucas wanted my rice snacks, so I broke them up and fed them to him. Cole was sitting next to me eating his crackers. Lucas saw Cole's crackers and wanted them. Cole pulled them away and told him "no". Then about 20 seconds later, I looked at Lucas and saw him eating one of Cole's crackers. lol I guess Cole will learn to keep a better eye on the food sitting in his hand! haha Cole said, "HEY!" and Lucas just looked at him like, "What? What I'd do? I told you I wanted one!" lol

(Sorry none of these stories are flowing very well into eachother. Just trying to get in all that's been going on.)

Chris is excited for spring to get here. He's got the wheels off his bike so he can get new tires, and get his rims powder coated lime green!


It's gonna be schweeeet!!!!!!

Joy and I went on a day trip to IKEA this week. That was a lot of fun. We piled ourselves, Karsyn and Kadence and Mason into her new mini van, and headed for IKEA bright and early. We were there for about 4 hours. We got some little things here and there, but the main thing I purchased was new dressers for the boys! They've been using the dresser that was given to us back when I was pregnant for Cole! Their clothes were outgrowing the drawers BIG TIME!!! Most of their clothes were being hung up in the closet and even the closet was getting crowded! I wondered if we'd be able to fit the boxes with the dressers in them in Joy's van along with the kids and everything else we were buying. She was confident we could, so we headed down to the warehouse part of IKEA to locate the boxes of dressers. I found them. They were huge and heavy! I tracked down a man to help me put them onto a flat cart. Then we realized we had two of us and three carts to push through the rest of the store to the check out. And the carts that Mason and Kadence were in were the kind where all 4 wheels turn!!! Yeah. Those are fun trying to push around. It's even more fun to push and turn them when they have a 20-30 lb kid in them! So, Joy pushed the two carts with the kids and all our other junk in them, while I tried to man handle the flat cart with the 4 heavy boxes of dresser parts and pieces. We bought our goodies, headed out to the loading dock and then tried for 15 minutes to fit everything in her van. We barely got it all to fit! Mason's feet had to rest on top of stuff with strict instructions to "not kick and be very still". We got home about 30 minutes after Chris got home from work. After he unloaded everything from her van, he immediately set to work on the dressers. We worked on them until his drill battery went dead (which was around 4:45), then we left to drop off his tires at the bike store and go out for dinner while he charged up his battery. We didn't get home til 8:30 that night. We put the boys to bed and then finished up the dressers. We didn't get done til 11:30! The next day was the fun job of switching over all their clothes and organizing the drawers. Finally, they're done!!!



They're bigger than we thought they would be, but they're big and sturdy and they'll last them a long time.

The next thing to do is to hang up this picture I made for their room. :)



And that brings you up to date on our lives! Whew!