Happy 85th Birthday Grandma!!!

My Grandma is celebrating a birthday today and since we can't be there to sing in person this is the next best thing. She is an amazing person and has always shown me love and support. I'm very blessed to have her in my life. I'm still learning great valuable lessons from her. Thank you for everything and I love you Grandma!!!

She doesn't get it from me. :)

Knowing that the arts can help kids in so many ways, I love when they draw or make up their own art. I have been encouraged in the past to have Kat enter the Reflections program the school has and this year she has been drawing so much, it seemed doable. So we talked about it and she decided she was game. Reflections has a national theme that the children make their art around. There are many categories you can enter into, such as drawing, photography, poems, etc. Drawing seemed the simpliest to me. I thought I'd have Kat draw a small rough draft and improve it a bit. Then she could make it big on a final paper. Yeah, 2nd graders have no idea what a rough starting sketch is.
This year's theme is "Diversity means..." We got out a dictionary and talked about it being a "variety of things." Such as lots of flavors of ice cream. She had a great idea for drawing circles with different groups of things in each one. She made a great first drawing. Didn't want to change anything. Lost the first copy, and a couple days later I bought bigger paper to do the final copy on.
Now, I turned things over to Kelly. Really, he is the one that knows something, anything about drawing. Unfortunately, I didn't remember to tell him the theme. So Kat starts a big picture drawing things that are important to her in each picture. Her family. (Glad we made the list!)
Well, we got things all straightened out and two days before it is due, she draws in pencil. Then she wants to go play. The next night she colors, minimally, so she can go play. Kelly tells her she needs to color more. She does. She goes to bed. The next morning Kelly tells her she needs to color more. She gets really into it at this point and Kelly has to tell her to stop so she can get it done and go to school.
A week later we go to see the projects displayed at school. And, there with her picture is a second place ribbon. She now gets to be judged at the district level.
WAY TO GO!!!

Halloween

Halloween wouldn't be halloween without going to the Pumpkin Walk. It is a fun tradition of going to a local park where many people set up scenes using pumpkins. This years best scenes, in our book, included Tangled, Angry Birds, Calvin and Hobbes, and Phineas and Ferb. At the end this cute witch greets everyone. I think this is a great picture. And yes it was warm enough to just be in t-shirts. Amazing that was less than a month ago.


This is us at the church carnival. Kelly was in charge of it this year. He and those that helped did a great job. The kids had lots of fun. Jace was Pickachu. Kathryn was a ugly doll or a monster doll. Her grandma and aunt made them for birthday party favors. They are very cute and made a great and easy costume. I'm thrilled their costumes turned out good. In my imaginary world they both loved the costumes from our assortment that we keep stored in the basement. I was not planning on doing any work for this Halloween. But, they had other plans. Luckily I found cute easy designs on the computer and Wa-La!

You might think were crazy. . .

Kathryn has expressed an interest in running. So being the good parents we are :) we decided to train and run a race with her. Or at least a fun run. Immediately I thought of a fun run that is being held to help my cousin with medical costs. (Chemo is not cheap.) Eventually the deadline to sign up rolled around so I made myself stay awake long enough, at least until 10 pm, so I could sign. For some reason I never got around to signing up when the kids were still awake. I even ordered shirts for all of us so we could have matching shirts. It was going to be so fun and I knew we would be so cute.
Training was inventive to say the least. Once I took Kat and Jace on a run around the block twice just before bed. And, Kelly started jogging with Kat the long way to school. He enjoyed teaching her from his vast running knowledge. (He ran cross country and track in high school.)
Well the week of the race started and I for one am excited. I kept mentioning that Saturday we would be running. Then the kids come home with fliers about the school district's Red Ribbon Run. Being drug free is great but we already had a run to do, so I told the kids we couldn't run it. And, things were still as I planned. . .
Until, Kelly saw the fliers a couple days later. He really wanted to do the Red Ribbon Run and his main reason, "We can get performance shirts for just 5 dollars." So in October 15th, Kathryn and Jace did their first and their second fun run.
I'm really glad they did. They did great. Kat ran the first one in about 10 minutes and Jace was only a couple minutes behind. And, Kat was able to run most of the second one. Jace spent most of the second one telling me, "I didn't want to do THIS one." Kat's best line was half way through the first one, "A mile is a lot longer than I thought it was."
Kelly also likes that everyone gets a ribbon with the drug free run. Way to give the kids a sense of accomplishment.
We made it!!!

Quilts shouldn't take this long to make.

It all started because a friend gave me this great fabric with horses and horses paraphernalia on it. Jace loves horses so I thought it would be perfect to make him a quilt for Christmas. Plus, there was a big sale around Thanksgiving to buy Kat fabric for her quilt. So for Christmas, I'm not telling you how long ago, they got quilt tops, batting, and fabric for the backs. The one bonus to this plan was that Kat helped quilt them together. She got so good I can't tell which blocks she did, Kelly did, or I did. Here blanket has quilting around the flowers and Mickey Mouse shapes on the other squares. Jace's has quilting around the horses. I think they turned out alright for my first quilts. Thanks to family and friends that helped me know how to do it and loaned me the quilting frames.

Achievements!

Warning: this video contains shrill sounds.
Alek is already too big for me. I love how excited he gets about life but really can he be excited and just stay put for a minute. :) He turns six months old tomorrow and this video was taken a couple weeks ago. I thought he might crawl before I got around to posting this but he is still not quite there. He can pick up one leg and one hand but doesn't know what to do with them.