On Monday night, I got word that my grandma was not doing well and that she may only have a few days left to live. So, I found some plane tickets back to Washington that night and bought them. All I have to say is some airlines that I thought were my favorite (ahem, Frontier) have very poor customer service when it comes to booking bereavement filghts. While others, (not naming names, but United) who were my least favorite airline thanks to some poor seating arrangements and rude flight attendants when I was flying with Jayden, totally redeemed themselves. So, I spent all day Tuesday doing laundry, packing, writing lists, shopping, packing, oh, did I say packing? I was having a bit of anxiety about flying with both kids alone. Jayden on the other hand wasn’t leaving without everything he owned. So, I opened up another suitcase that I wasn’t packing and let him put every book he could find in there, zip it up, drag it to the front door and tell me it was time to leave for the airport. He was a bit excited. Wednesday morning, I got up at 4, finished packing the last of our stuff, got the kids up, dressed, and headed off to the airport. On the way to the airport Royal kept asking me what I was doing. I kept saying, “I’m praying. This could be a disaster of an experience for me”, really expecting things to turn bad at some point and leave me fried. Turns out, God DOES answer prayers. :) The airports, security, changing planes, departures, arrivals, flight attendants, not to mention the kids, were all perfect. It was so nice. You’d think I would’ve learned my lesson and start to pray about everything, all the time, no matter how small, because I didn’t think to ask God to help us all get some sleep once we got to my parents house and I think I got about 3 hours last night between Jayden and Willow waking up. Oi, I’m pretty darn tired.

My grandma is still with us and is now out at my parents house, so me and the kids have all been able to see her. Jayden keeps asking why she’s so tired and why is her body so worn out and why this and why that. He is so cute, he’s totally got his dad’s soft spot for little old ladies. He wants to make her a bowl of hot soup to make her feel better. And after today, we talked about how pretty soon great grandma is going to go live with God in Heaven and that God is going to give her a new body that isn’t old and worn out. He sat and thought about it for awhile, then said, “I think great grandma is going to have a red one” I said, “Her new body is going to be red?” And he said, “Yes. Well, no, I think yellow with blue dots. Well, no, I think it will have cars on it. No, I know! It is going to have a black train on it. Yes, great grandma is going to love a new body with trains on it”

Despite the sadness that goes with losing yet another member of our family, it is so nice to be here. I love Washington. And we have been taking full advantage of the freakish heat here (even if it does feel a lot like Wichita) and the lake!

Here’s to show that big bugs live here in Washington too. I think they are starting to follow me around. I found this spider on my towel when I was pulling it out of the bin. I quickly dropped it and found a new one.

Joanna and Willow. Willow is slowly warming up people. Jordan still makes her cry just by looking at her.

My dad enjoying some delicious cupcakes my mom made. I think I ate 3. Well actually I know I did.

My mom

Here’s how the lake looked last night.

Sister Jo - she makes me laugh a lot

Pancakes for breakfast this morning and what looks like could be coffee is really just milk.

Evidence that Jayden has been helping the puppies escape their enclosure.

Willow

Going swimming!

Jordan’s going in!

Never leave a 3 year old in a room alone when there is a bottle of lotion around. This is what happens.

The icing on the cake is that he ended up pooping his pants as well, since he decided he needed to go AFTER he had put lotion everywhere which means his hands were too slippery to get the bathroom door open. Awesome!

First off, baths. We take baths over here. A lot. Baths take up a good deal of time in the evening after dinner when I feel totally overstimulated from the day and I need the kids entertained without them having to touch me for awhile. :) Thank goodness they both love baths and taking them together!

Next up, bugs. The bugs here are huge! And since it seems all our neighbors are spraying their houses for bugs, I think the really huge ones who are smart enough to get away from it, are migrating to our house. Royal found these suckers last weekend.
Nasty!

And look at this sucker! Royal actually spotted it in the grass when he was mowing it. It is HUGE!


Even with all these gigantic, nasty bugs around. I’m still not on the bandwagon of having our house sprayed. I think it’s more dangerous to expose Jayden and Willow (and poor Scooties) to the poisons and chemicals that it would take to keep the bugs away, then just having the bugs around. Plus it gives us something to check out and be gross out by.

And now for the birds! For the past few months, we have had some barn swallows make a little home on our covered porch. At first, I thought it was a little annoying having them swoop at us everytime we went outside, but then I thought it’d be pretty cool to watch them have their babies so close to us. So, we put up with the birds and eventually they got used to us and stopped throwing mud at us when we were out there. They provided great entertainment and some life lessons for Jayden. We would sit on the porch and eat lunch and watch the birds building their nest. Then sitting on their nest. Then the 5 little babies birds hatching and poking their heads out. The mom and dad birds flying off to catch bugs to feed to the birds. Although, when asked Jayden would tell you that the momma bird didn’t feed bugs to her babies. She fed them with her “great, big, birdie boobs”. Obviously my large chest has had an impact on Jayden, as well. :) We came out one morning and the bully baby bird in the nest had pushed out (well it’s my theory) 2 of the other birds, obviously the nest was getting to crowded. So we had to explain to Jayden why the birds died. Not that he hasn’t already had a ton of experience with mutilated animals on the porch thanks to Scooter. So then we watch the 3 birds left fight for food and open up their huge little mouths. And there really was a bully in the nest, I watched him climb over the other birds all the time. When they were getting fed, he’d get some, then the parent birds would fly off and the little bully bird would climb over one of his siblings and change places with it so when the parent birds came back, he got food again and the bird he climbed over didn’t get any. It’s a wonder the other little baby birds survived. I’m sure none of you will find it shocking that the little bully bird got the fattest and he was the first out of the nest and flying around. Even though all 3 of the little baby birds have flown off, they still come back at night a lot and sit under our porch, especially when it gets stormy. I love those little birdies. I actually learned quite a bit about barn swallows during this whole thing. They are federally protect, so we couldn’t destroy the nest even if we wanted to. They often come back and build a nest in the same place every year, so I might get to watch these birds have more babies next year! And while I thought the nest would be real nasty full of poop and stuff, it turns out that when the babies are tiny, the parents pick the poop up and throw it out of the nest, and the once the babies are a little bigger, they actually back themselves up over the edge of the nest and poop out of it. Smart little suckers!
Here’s the bird’s nest. The male bird always sat on our light, while the female was roosting around making the nest perfect.

Here’s the first bird out of the nest. The little fat bully bird. They pretty much let me get close enough I could of grabbed it if I wanted to.

And now for the backyard! Well actually, just the kids in the backyard.
I won this little bubble blower contraption at StrollerFit. I can hold a plank position like it’s nobodies business. Nice to know I still am a little competitive.

Little Willow. 8 months old now!

And this is what I did while sitting in the backyard. Working on a pink pumpkin hat!

Jayden tells me today, “Mom, Scooter is my VERY best friend”

Ahhh, Jayden and Scooter. Theirs has been a love-hate relationship from the beginning. Jayden would love on Scooter and she’d tolerate it. Then he’d love on her a little more and she’d swat at him. Then he’d squeeze her just a little too hard and she’d scratch and bite him. Through many time-outs and talks about how we treat animals, Jayden has SLOWLY started to be gentler to her.

Then, after telling Jayden how great he was treating Scooter and how much she loved him petting her so nicely, I walked away to make lunch. 2 minutes later I was breaking up a kid/cat fight because Jayden was trying to force-feed Scooter one of Willow’s little plastic stacking rings, telling her, ‘You have to eat this Scooter, it’s your breakfast!’. Baby steps……baby steps….

Royal has been working a lot over the past couple weeks, which in turn means I am working a lot here at home, if you call what I do working. :) And I have been really sick and am just starting to feel better. So, those are my reasons for my lack of pictures of the kids recently. Tonight, I decided I’d just take some pictures of the kids in the bath and post some of those, just so you had something new to look at. I got one picture snapped and then my battery went dead. It’s like it’s just not meant to be. So, here’s the picture. It cracks me up, because Willow just starts smiling whenever I bring the camera out, and Jayden pretty much tries to not look at me as much as possible.

Oh! and one other thing I thought I’d share. I have made a few things on the sewing machine I got for my birthday. One of them is this sunhat! And even if the hat is pretty shoddy workmanship, the kid wearing it is pretty cute!

Jayden loved lighting sparklers last night! We totally kept him up WAY past his bedtime so he could watch the fireworks with us, and I wish my video camera was working because he was hilarious. He got so excited he couldn’t sit still and I figure he was channeling his grandpa Fireball (or his mom) because he was talking a million miles an hour.

Even though the weather wasn’t the greatest this morning, we decided to go hike around El Dorado State Park anyway. Everything was so green, which we wanted to take advantage of, because in a month or so everything around here will be nice and brown!

Royal, the ever tracker, spotted deer tracks the minute we got on the trail. And once he showed Jayden what they looked like, Jayden was tracking them too. And then we (by we, I mean Royal) spotted them.
See the deer?

There it is!

The holidays make it so much harder to live so far away from our family. I really hadn’t thought about it before, but the 4th of July really seems to be a family holiday. I mean, we always spent lots of weekends, not just holidays, with our families, but the 3rd and 4th of July we were always out at the lake - good ole Mason Lake…oh, how I miss the northwest… We’d spend the weekend eating, swimming, floating, eating, boating, eating, swimming, watching all the huge fireworks go off, swimming later in the dark, sometimes “sneaking” out on the seadoo in the middle of the night. Sitting underneath my mom’s homemade quilts, fighting over who was going to go get the s’mores stuff, complaining that the smoke from the fire was always blowing in my face, getting holes burned in my pants from sparklers, melting my shoes on the fire because the log botherers made the dagum thing so hot…. This is my 2nd 4th of July out here in Wichita, and I just can’t believe I’m missing all the parties again, and it feels so weird to just be hangin’ out at home. I love hangin’ out with my little family, but it just feels like we’re missing something. If, I mean, when :) we move back to Washington, I swear I am going to go out of my way to find the people I know who have no family in the area and invite them to our family gatherings. Now that I am an outsider, with no family or longtime friends in the area, I know how lonely even these small holidays can be. Anyway, boo hoo, poor me…it’s really not that bad. We have had a bunch of fun today. Our original plan was to go out to El Dorado State Park in the morning, before all the heat hit, and hike around on some trails there with the kids, but since it POURED down rain last night, we figured the trails were going to be mostly mud, so we scratched that plan. After I fixed breakfast and got Willow down for a nap, I strapped on my shoes and pounded out some pavement. After being somewhat quarantined in the house last week with the kids being so sick with colds, it felt so good to get out of the house by myself, even though it was muggy beyond belief thanks to the rain and my head is still quite plugged up from my cold…man, am I complainy or what???? Good grief! Changing topics already!

We got Jayden some fireworks this year, because well, they are just so fun. Jayden helped me pick some out for him and the one he was most excited about, even though he had no idea what it was going to do, was these racing cars. You lit them on fire and they were suppose to race down the street.

The first one was a bust. It’s back wheels melted off before it went anywhere. Thank goodness for the second one that did what it was suppose to!

And then there were the snaps! I think I still love playing with snaps! These were by far Jayden’s favorite. Although, we haven’t busted out the sparklers yet.

And smoke bombs!

We spent some time playing in the back yard too. Our neighbors down the street came and gave Jayden some more toys for his sandbox, so we had to try those out!

And while Willow has no idea what is going on, we decked her out in a patriotic outfit!

Royal took a picture of me, just so you could all see I was around too! :)

When Willow went down for another nap, Royal had some stuff for work he needed to work on, so Jayden and I decided to go wash the cars. After Jayden sprayed me twice in the face with the hose set on the power washer setting, that responsibility got taken away. So, he got demoted to just washing. Which as it turns out, he didn’t think was that much fun. He started just playing with the bucket of suds, throwing all the bubbles out, then he decided to get in the bucket.

As it turns out, the bucket had bubbles, so that means it was perfect for a bubble bath. Bye-bye clothes.

Now we’re just waiting for the sun to go down so we can bust out some sparklers and then we’re going to sit on the porch and watch everybody else to shoot off their fireworks!