Pumpkin patch!

With gorgeous fall weather here today...we HAD to go the pumpkin patch!! It is very hard to find THE perfect pumpkin. The girls spent at least an hour wandering around the pumpkin patch looking for the very best one. Daddy did a great job of directing the girls to each possible perfect pumpkin. However, sometimes even if you think you have THE pumpkin...it can be a false alarm!! And sometimes if the pumpkin is too heavy to carry, you have to find a smaller one!

RaeAnne found her pumpkin first, then she helped the other girls examine each of their pumpkins....of course, she told them "If this one is better than mine, I get to keep it and you can have mine." What a great big sister!! We started at one side of the patch and worked our way across the field. It was decided that we should have stayed on the one side because, of course, all the best pumpkins were where we first started! There was some back tracking to search, but eventually we walked back to the barn with our choices.

Now the great debate is on. Paint the pumpkins or carve them?!? I am thinking that we may have to carve the big one and paint the smaller ones.

It's coming along.....

Our ceiling and walls are DONE! It looks like a new room and we love the new color! The bad thing about painting walls...then the walls that aren't painted look awful! We are just so glad that now our ceiling will not fall down on our heads!




Now I am trying to shampoo the carpet in sections to keep little feet off it. Can't wait for our new furniture to arrive! Any volunteers to help me figure out where to hang all my photos? The girls have suggestions but.......

Oh Tooth Fairy will you please.....

come to our house tonight to make a little girl very happy?! Tessa has been wiggling this loose tooth for a couple of weeks. She told me one day that she was going to the school nurse so she could pull it. Well that night she came in the house and said that the school nurse couldn't get it to come out.



So this morning she was playing in Zora's bedroom. Tessa grabbed the tooth and out it come! Then she lost the tooth for a little while. Mom had to come down and find it for her. It was all wrapped up in bloody kleenex, so we put it safely away in a snack pack ziplock baggy so she can put it under her pillow at bedtime.

Under repair.....

We have been having some long needed repairs done to our house. After we decided to buy our house and move in we found out that the person who built our house was a "wanna-be" house constructor. Seems he bought this parcel of land and started "building" houses. He knew just enough to make them look good, but unfortunately he was not a master house builder. As our house is outside of town, there were a lot of things in the house that was not inspected like in most homes. In other words, somethings are not up to code...so to speak. Of course, we did not find these things out until we were already in the house. Because our house in Lindsborg had not sold, we could not get financing to buy this house. My Dad stepped up to the plate and put this house in his name until we could get our other house sold and refinance this one. My Dad chose not to have this house inspected...after all the house was only a few years old...it looked good and to "borrow" the money he did not have to have the house inspected. We were saving money not to have it inspected. WRONG!

The latest project we are having done is getting the sheet rock in our living room re-taped, but most importantly, we are getting it securely attached to the ceiling. Here we have been relaxing in our living room, thinking that life was grand, when the sheet rock at anytime could have come plunging down upon our heads!!





Thankfully we found someone through our friends, Sophie and Gary, who is dependable and willing to come out and fix our mess. And mess it has been. He had to firmly attach the sheet rock to the ceiling, then re-mud all the cracks, then sand all the mud down, and finally paint the ceiling. We really love our cathedral ceilings in our living room. That was one of the things about the house that we were first drawn to. It will be so nice once all the scaffolding, plastic and mud is gone and we can enjoy our living room again!





This is what our living room has looked like for the past week. Hopefully he will be done by Tuesday this week. Then I can shampoo the carpet and enjoy our living room!!

Bubbles & smores!

Daddy was gone this weekend. I felt I had to come up with something fun that the girls and I could do over the weekend to have fun and create memories. Something that Daddy really wouldn't give a hoot to do, but something that the girls and I would enjoy. So while working on cleaning the garage last week I came across a bag of charcoal. It's the kind that is presoaked and all you are supposed to do is light it and walla you have a fire. I bought all the items to make smores and I had the bright idea that we would drive to the lake, find a place to light our fire and make smores. I mean it sounds easy...right?

Things started out differently than planned as my stepson and his girlfriend broke up Friday. We suddenly gained one more person at our house. We are playing musical beds right now to get everyone a good night sleep. So Saturday afternoon we headed toward Pomona Lake and a area that I thought would be the perfect place to make smores and bubbles. Well, that place was reserved already. We drove around the lake to few other places and each of those were either busy or was marked as a no burn area. By that time I had realized that I had forgotten a few major items needed for our treats. So it turned out that we just drove around to a few different places at the lake. As the day became shorter, I had already decided that we would be checking out other areas tomorrow. This evening found us heading to McDonald's and we picked up the movie "Hoodwinked Two" to watch at home.





Sunday morning dawned bright and beautiful. After lunch we gathered up the rest of the items needed and off to Shawnee Lake we went! The charcoal turned out to be a little harder to get started than I expected, but we did get enough flames going to "roast" our marshmallows! And the sun warmed up the candy bars so we could squeeze the chocolate on the graham crackers. It was a fun, sticky day!






Sunday was bright and clear. Today we would definitely find the right place for our smores fest! We headed to Shawnee County Lake. I also made sure that we had the missing ingredients this trip! It was pretty easy to find the right place to have our smores party.

And the birthday girl is......

Jordis Li Meng!! She is NINE years old! And boy did we surprise her at school today! Dad and I arrived at her school while she was still eating lunch. When her class entered the room they were all happy to find a cupcake and drink waiting on their desks. Her teacher called her up to the head of the class and we all sang Happy Birthday to her.





Her choice for supper tonight was Chinese food! Zora and Rae kept asking if we were going to have cake at home later on and a party. We were teasing and told them that we had already taken cupcakes to school so we were going to probably skip cake at home. So after arriving home, everyone had to get busy on their homework. I was having trouble trying to get all the girls out of the kitchen after they finished their homework. I then brought her cake and present into the house and surprised her yet again!! Jordis is so fun to surprise!!







I can tell you that she went to bed tonight one very happy girl. Happy Birthday Jordis Li....we love you sweetie!! XOXO!!!

First full week of school

I am not quite sure why, but our school district started school on Friday, August 26th. Maybe it was like a trial run?! So this week was the girls first week, five WHOLE days in a row, of school. Good thing we had a three day weekend to recover!! By Tuesday night we had several cranky girls!! You know when the whine is over the top that bedtimes need to be readjusted!




Daddy had a busy day Friday while Mom was at work. ZoraLin had a major meltdown before school and wouldn't get on the bus for Dad. She had a change of heart after Dad told her how bad she was going to be grounded. Five minutes after the bus left, she was dressed and asked if he would give her a ride to school. He had barely made it home when he received a phone call from RaeAnne's school that she had broken her new glasses. When he arrived at school with the old pair he also was told about her black eye. Seems she and another classmate crashed into each other at P.E. Fortunately, Mom purchased the insurance plan on our glasses and they just happened to have an extra frame in stock. When I came home from work I was shocked and surprised that she also had some bad scratches on her face very close to her eye.




Today our social worker and her hubby arrived to do Tessa's 12 month post placement report. I have all the photos ready to send to our adoption agency.