Photos, photos, and more photos.

Telling the girls that she is "3"

Jadyn at a parade on June 13th.

Our favorite band

Jadyn and Kaitlyn at a parade on June 14th

Jadyn and Alan, looking out at the pond on Father's Day. I saw them from the kitchen window and thought they looked so cute.

On Monday, June 16th, Kaitlyn, Jadyn and I went to the view some gardens at the Como Conservatory. We also went to Minnehaha Falls. We had a fun time. I could have snapped photos of my girls and the flowers all day! Here are photos from our little field trip...

I'll race you to that tree!

This is Lauryn and Aaron's new kitten. Isn't she adorable? Grandkitten!

Updating

Hi friends! It's been such a long time since I've updated and I'm sorry about that. If you could see the state of our kitchen right now, you'd know why. We're doing some updating.

The kitchen has had wallpaper with fruit on it for quite a number of years. I'd been longing to take it down for such a long time now. We are very slow to make changes, and commit to it. I don't think either of us have the "designer gene" if you know what I mean. Somehow we were born without that. :)

We'd talked about updating the kitchen with new paint, counter tops, appliances, and flooring, for some time. Hurray, we've finally started! I will have to post before and after photos one of these days.

Bryan has been staying very busy for the last several weeks. He's been marching with the band in many parades and festivals. We have spent some of our evenings and weekends attending as many of those events as possible. We love doing this, and hate to miss a single parade. He has had a couple of parades that were 2 or more hours away and we haven't gone to those.

We are really enjoying having Kaitlyn at home for the summer. She is continuing her job at Applebee's and also has a new job as a nanny for a family. She is taking care of their son who is 10 years old and has special needs.

Kaitlyn's boyfriend, Chris, will be coming for a visit in about 2 weeks. He lives in Missouri. We are looking forward to his visit and getting to know him better. I know that Kaitlyn is counting the days until his arrival.

Lauryn and Aaron added a new family member over the weekend. They have a new kitten, and she is adorable! She is my grandkitten. :) I will have to include a photo of her here.

Jadyn is doing fine. I've noticed a new layer of humor in her lately. I can tell that she is understanding more humor and doing some new funny things.

Alan had an unfortunate little accident last week. He was outside playing with Jadyn one evening, while taking a break from working on the deck. He was pushing her in the swing and was planning to give her a big push and jump to the other side of her and surprise her. As he pushed off of his leg to jump, he tore a muscle in his calf. Poor guy! It was very painful for him. He did see the doctor and luckily it was only a minor tear. He worked from home for 1 day and has been trying to take it easy on the leg. It will take several weeks for it to get back to normal. We're glad it was only a minor tear.

Sunday's Parade

We enjoyed our weekend, and one of the highlights was going to see Bryan march in the 1st parade of the season.

We left immediately after church and drove the 60 miles or so. I think the parade in this town is among my favorites. It has that "small town" feel. I love that.

Here are photos of Jadyn enjoying the parade and photos of Bryan marching.

Waving to the firetruck.

My favorite saxophonist. :)

Bryan is 3rd from the left.

All done with the parade!

I'm enjoying today because everyone in the family is home. This is really nice for a Saturday. How many Saturdays does the average family have, when they can just be home getting things done?

Alan's current project is replacing all of the boards in the deck. He will replace all of the boards on the horizontal surfaces, including steps, railings, and the main area. It's a big job and lots of hard work. Bryan is helping him, and that is great. I've come to really appreciate how much Bryan can help with the work around here. Everything from mowing to carrying heavy stuff comes under his umbrella. I love it that he can help me carry heavy things from time to time. I usually tell him, "Thank you strong son," with my Mr. Miyagi accent. If you've ever seen the Karate Kid, you'll know the accent. Now that I've recovered from the shock of having my son suddenly grow from boy to half man, I'm learning to enjoy his strength. :)

How does our garden grow? Good news! Jadyn's flowers are coming up. I was very surprised when we went out yesterday and her plants had come up. I was surprised and relieved. Honestly, I wasn't sure how long the packet of flower seeds had been around and I was slightly worried that they might be so old that they wouldn't grow. They came up in only 5 days. She is growing zinnias!

Well folks, Stealth Girl has been at it again. She has had an incident with the cats' food and water every single day for about 5 days now. It's insane! We have no idea what has gotten into her and why she is suddenly obsessed with their food and water. It doesn't seem to matter that she gets into trouble when she makes these messes. She's obsessed!

Today for instance, she woke us up at about 7:20 A.M. Apparently she had been up long before this. She told us that she didn't want us to open the basement door. She finally said it was because she "made a mess down there". I went down to the basement and took a look. I came up the stairs and told Alan, "You better come have a look, it's not pretty."

She had gotten into the large container of cat food. She poured both of their food bowls to overflowing. Then she poured large amounts of food here, there and everywhere in the basement. What a mess. We didn't freak out or get super mad, we just told her she'd be cleaning it all up by herself. It took her a good hour to hour and a half to get that done. She didn't think it was too fun. Maybe somehow the clean-up will have an impact on her.

We have 2 graduation parties to attend this weekend, so that will fun. Tomorrow is Bryan's first parade of the season. We'll look forward to seeing their new show.


Have a great weekend everyone!

Stealth Girl's idea of fun. Just add water!

Even Jadyn has helped with the deck. She picks up old nails and puts them in a bucket.

Kaitlyn checks out the new power tool!

Strong son
This is a photo of Jadyn by a water feature at a nursery, last weekend.
This is Jadyn with some dandelions she picked for me. My friend, Suzanne gave me this vase years ago. It's for the special flowers that your child picks for you. I wonder if Suzanne will recognize this little vase? When she gave me this vase, Bryan was a lot younger. Who knew I'd have another little girl to someday to pick flowers for me? :)

Here's a photo of Jadyn that I took for a "virtual reunion" of our China travel group. The small photo she's holding is from about 2 months after we came home from China.She's changed so much in 2 years!

Stealth Girl

Compare these 2 photos. Do you notice the resemblance?

Jadyn has a number of nicknames. The ones we sometimes call her are: J, J.J, Lyssa (short for Alyssa), and Lyssie. Okay, so I'm the only one who calls her Lyssa and Lyssie. Anyway, I've decided to add another one to the list. The new one is Stealth Girl.

She is so super sneaky sometimes, when she does things she shouldn't. Today's wonderful event was the dipping of a small doll blanket into the fish tank and throwing water all about the room. Water was on everything- the wall, the couch, the entertainment center, her books, the carpet, the fireplace.... Need I go on? I might not have even known she'd done this, except she left the doll blanket in the fish tank! I wonder if the fish enjoyed the comfort of a blankie this morning?

Yesterday, she came to me and let me know that her hair was wet. About half of it was wet. I was quite surprised and I asked her where she got the water. She told me she got it from the sink. Well I had a funny feeling about that. A few minutes later I checked, and she hadn't used the bathroom sink. I told her to tell me exactly where she got the water. She finally told me that she got it from the cats' water bowl. I just about had a cow. Should I be glad she didn't get it from the toilet? I don't know which would be worse.

A couple of days ago I discovered she had pulled the tips off the leaves of one of my plants and shredded another leaf. She has poked holes in almost all of the leaves of one of my plants before and pulled the buds off of my "ready to bloom" Christmas cactus plants. She never has any idea where the buds from the Christmas cactus have disappeared to. They are just mysteriously gone.

A few months ago she dumped an entire container of fish food into the fish tank. The good news is that only 1 fish died. It did take me 3 days to completely get the tank back to normal.

Then there was the time she made mud pies with the cat's dirty kitty litter and water bowl. I thought I would die! I scrubbed her from top to bottom and it took me about an hour to clean up the mud pie mess.

Seriously people, I don't know if my sanity will be intact when she outgrows this stage.

Here's the blanket in the fish tank.

Hi friends! It's been a good week, with kind of a slow pace and that's nice. I've been gathering things for a church garage sale. It's always good to go through things and find what we no longer need and help someone else in the process.

I took Jadyn for her first visit to the dentist yesterday. That was interesting. It seemed kind of "unsuccessful". She sat in my lap in the dental chair, and after much coaxing, she finally let the hygienist look in her mouth briefly. She wouldn't let Dr. Steve get near her. How could he look in her mouth when she was rolled into a tight little ball in my lap? When she wasn't doing that, she was kicking her legs and whining. Good fun. Oh well, I guess it's a start. I was relieved there wasn't crying. She was very pleased with her new toothbrush, floss, stickers and things. We'll try again one of these days and she will also go and observe when any of us go for cleanings. I do know that her teeth are healthy and that's the main thing for now.

We do need some sun around here. It's been so cloudy, cool and a bit rainy for days. We will certainly welcome the sun when it arrives. I have flowers that I need to plant and when it's cloudy I don't feel as motivated to get out there. I'll have to do it today! Could someone out there send me some virtual sun?

Bryan's last day of school is tomorrow. I'm sure he'll be happy about that. Since marching band season is in full swing, he will still be at the school several times per week. I'm looking forward to seeing him march in all of the parades. There are about 11 parades on the schedule for June. It will be busy fun time.

Now that I know what kind of flower I am, maybe I'll feel inspired to get out there and plant my flowers, which are waiting patiently for me in the garage.

"Mischief is your middle name, but your first is friend. You are quite the prankster that loves to make other people laugh." It's kind of funny, because this does describe part of me.

I am a Snapdragon What Flower Are You?

It's Monday

We had a good weekend. It was good, considering that I felt abandoned. Just kidding really. Alan was gone for 2 days to a state political convention, and both of my older girls and son-in-law have traveled out of state. Alan has returned and our older children will be back this week.

Jadyn and I were the only ones home on Friday night, so we made a pizza and watched a movie. On Saturday morning, the 2 of us went to a friend's Pampered Chef party. Woo hoo, more stuff for my kitchen. Seriously, Bryan was excited to hear that one thing I ordered was another pizza cutter. You know at 16, pizza is a food group for him. :)

On Saturday evening, Alan was back and we went to a friend's graduation party. It was all good fun until the tornado sirens went off. So everyone (except the storm watchers) headed to the basement for safety. No tornado came, but we had the most severe hail storm we have seen in a long time. Wow! The trees and flowers certainly took a beating. I was just sick when I came home and saw our flowers. Many people had to rake up bags and bags of leaves. I am glad the storm didn't bring anything more serious.

On Sunday afternoon we worked outside a bit in the yard. Planted some flowers from the nursery and Jadyn planted flower seeds. She's pretty excited about it and I sure hope those flowers come up! She already believes they are probably coming up.

This tall guy is a Great Blue Heron. We see herons out at the pond in the warmer months. They are interesting birds and it's fun to watch them fishing. Now I know I'm safe here in my little house, but something about them makes me uneasy. I just have this strange irrational fear that they want to chase me and peck my eyes. Just sharing this because it's just one of my silly oddities. I took this photo from the deck, where it was safe. :)