Our Poor Puppy

Today Izzy had her surgery to be spayed. She also got microchipped. It ended up that she needed to have a couple of her baby teeth extracted as well. So, she has stitches and pain all over. We thought we would show her to you. She has been pitiful all afternoon. Poor thing! And now our job is to keep her "inactive" for a week!! We'll see how that goes with our energetic little Jack Russell...

Chloe, the artist

Here's a sampling of Chloe's work. It's funny to see her drawing so well, when not so long ago, she was drawing unrecognizable pictures ("Is it a bunny? Oh, I see, it's a castle...")



Giraffe


Prince, Dragon, and Princess. And up top, she wrote "once upon a time there was a princess". She writes everything phonetically, so sometimes it's a little hard to interpret.


At school, they have computer time once a week where they can color and write on the computer, so here are a couple of her pictures. This one says "I like to dance"


"My mom is Emily. She is pretty. I like the way she reads to me. She is the best mom in the world" Isn't she a sweetie?


And then this one is about Ben. "My dad is Benjamin Wilson. He is pretty. We like to go to the Dorney Park" (which is an amusement park near us that we went to last October) The last sentence says "I think my dis site" We don't know what that means, and when I asked Chloe after school the day she brought it home (so, within a couple hours of writing it), she couldn't remember what she'd written either. So, that's a mystery.

Our Playdoh Creations

The girls have been really into Playdoh lately, so I thought I'd put a couple of their recent creations.

This is our playdoh family. You can see in the bottom row, there's Izzy (our puppy) complete with her tongue sticking out, and poop coming out (you can tell Gracie's a 3-year old...she's really focused on that right now). And then next to Izzy are Chloe & Gracie (notice that Chloe's eyes are brown and Gracie's eyes are blue...Gracie made sure that they were correct). And then up top are mommy, daddy, and Julia. Gracie got a little crazy on the hair at the end, so Ben especially has HUGE hair.


And here is Chloe with her butterfly. She was so proud of it that she put it piece by piece back into a container when it was time to put the playdoh away, so that she could pull it back out later to show her friend.

Some Memorial Day Pictures

Chloe in her Memorial Day Play at school

Our Happy Julia girl

We tried to take a picture of the girls after church on Sunday, but Julia was not wanting any part of that...

Here are Chloe & Julia on Memorial Day... Now Julia's more cooperative.

Here are all 3 girls in their Red, White, & Blue

And Julia sitting in a chair...at least long enough to smile for a picture

It's been an absolutely beautiful weekend, and we've had lots of fun outside. Today (on Memorial Day), we went and had a picnic at the park, played for awhile, and then went and had ice cream. What a fun outing!

Julia and Gracie swinging. Julia thinks it's really funny every time Gracie swings past her.

We've had a very fun and relaxing weekend, which is always nice. We had some fun visits with friends, a couple fun outings, and lots of together time as a family. What more could we ask for?? And now, we're ready to start Chloe's 2nd to last week as a Kindergartner before our summer truly begins.

Living (more) Locally

I read an article about a year ago that has really stuck with me and made me think. It was about a woman who ONLY ate local food for an entire year. Literally, they did not eat anything that wasn't grown or raised within 100 miles of their home (so I guess that means no McDonalds, no Chili's, no Taco Bell???). She found farmers who raised chickens, cows, pigs, etc to get her meat, eggs, and dairy products. She found wheat farmers to get wheat to grind into flour for bread and pasta. Instead of sugar, she used honey to sweeten things. She grew or bought only produce that was in season and available from her area...so no oranges, bananas, pineapples... (those are some of our favorites...Gracie eats a banana most every day).

While I will never go to that extreme, I would like to eat MORE locally grown things. We live in a great area for a variety of things. There are lots of farms, orchards, dairies, farmers' markets, and pick-your-own farms near us. My goal, for this summer especially, is to buy whatever produce I can from a local source instead of the grocery store. It's healthier, fresher, and much more delicious. The main thing that makes me not do this all the time is the convenience factor. With 3 little ones in tow, it's hard enough to run by the grocery store and walmart, let alone add a couple more stops along the way. But I'd like to put those excuses aside and really not buy produce in the store, that I could buy fresh. So, ask me at the end of the summer, and hopefully I'll tell you that I didn't buy any berries, peppers, tomatoes, peaches, or any of that at the store...we'll see. I have several friends who buy all their milk from a local dairy. I'd love to start buying at least some of our milk that way (although the dairy is about 20 minutes away from our house, so it's hard for me to justify a 40 minute round trip to buy "local" milk, when I could drive down the street to buy milk at the store).

I'm also planting a garden again this year. I planted one last year, but it got wiped out by a major hailstorm (worse than any I'd ever seen in TX) right before I could harvest anything. I had about 8 tomato plants, 3 pepper plants, and a couple zucchini plants. You can see in the picture of the garden after the storm, I had maybe 2 plants left standing (but with only the main stem left) that tried to grow again, but by that point, it was a little too late in the season for anything to grow and ripen.

So, hopefully this year will be better for my garden, and we can get a lot of produce that way as well. I'm also planting more variety (peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, sugar snap peas, lettuce, baby spinach, and I'm debating about planting a watermelon plant as well).

The girls love to go berry picking, so here in a couple weeks when the strawberries start to ripen, we're going to have an outing at the farm and find some juicy ones. Let our summer of fresh, local produce begin!!

Julia knows what she means, even if she doesn't know what she's saying...

Julia is starting to make definite consonant sounds, although they're not connected yet to a specific meaning (like she says mamamama and dadadada, but she doesn't mean mommy or daddy yet...she's just practicing the sounds). But the funny thing is, when she's happy, she always says "dadadadada" and when she's unhappy and complaining, she says "mamamama". Even without knowing what she's saying, she has it right...

Julia's continuing to hit the milestones!

Julia is now 8 1/2 months old, and learning new things all the time.




She just started crawling a couple of weeks ago, and is now getting into all sorts of things...the dog's food, her sister's toys, etc. She and the big girls love to have crawling races. Julia always loses of course, but she's laughing and squeeling every minute of it. She loves Chloe and Gracie and is so excited every time they play with her or talk to her. Chloe and Gracie love her too, although Gracie is often too rough with her...laying on top of her and hugging her too tight.

But Julia's newest trick is pulling up. She's been watching Jocelyn, a baby friend of hers, pulling up for the last month or so, and then the other day, we were at their house, and Julia pulled up right next to Jocelyn and was standing there next to her. She hadn't really stood up any more for about a week after that, and then I walked into the living room to see her standing up by the toy box. Here are the action shots...




She wasn't too thrilled about having fallen over...

Someone just told me...
With your first child, you try to help them stand up and learn to walk. With your 2nd child, you don't help them, but you still encourage them and cheer them on. And with your 3rd child, you push them back down when they start to stand.


I'm not sure about pushing her back down, but it's definitely a little more bittersweet this time around. Julia is our last baby, so we're much more ready to just have her stay a baby a while longer. But it seems like every day, she's learning some new thing or discovering another way to accomplish her little plans. She's already seeming much more like a toddler and much less like a baby. I know that these days of having a baby are very fleeting. After all, it seems like just yesterday that Chloe was a baby, and now she's 3 weeks away from being done with Kindergarten!!

A Stuck Girl

The other day Chloe & Gracie were playing up in their room. They were up on the top bunk and somehow, Gracie fell between the mattress and the headboard and got stuck. Chloe came running down saying "Gracie's stuck!!", so Ben went to investigate and found her truly stuck. Here are the pictures... You can see she was having a great time!

A Start

I have several friends who blog regularly as a "scrapbook" of their lives, so I've been debating for awhile about starting to blog. Hopefully, one day I can look back and remember how little my girls once were, all the fun things that they do and say, and just have a general record of our lives...so, here goes nothing...