Stop Photography trial video^2

A little short we put together. Having fun with stop photography. Planning on making some more and the kids want to make some as well. So keep your eyes peeled for more fun videos.

New Bike... Slave Labor... Train

This has been an exciting week. Glenn's been looking at Craigslist pretty regularly for housing, bike parts, etc. and over the weekend he saw a Adam Tandem Trail-A-Bike for $95. Russ and Camy went and picked it up for us and Russ brought it to town on Monday. Caleb and Hannah think that it is great! We are planning on using it and our Cannondale Bugger that we got from the Masts (our friends from Fillmore Wesleyan Church) to get around to save money on gas. Here is a picture of us trying it out and after our 4 mile ride to see Kyle's practice and play at the spray park.

I was getting really tired of doing 3 or more loads of dishes a day and never getting them all done and I am wanting to have the kids get more involved around the house. The other day I was looking through some other families' chore charts online that had lots of kids. I tried looking at ones that had kids around my kids ages and I decided that in addition to their normal "kissing chair", set the table and clear the table jobs that rotate I would get new dishwashers. On Wednesday I announced that I would teach Caleb and Hannah how to do dishes and that from now on Hannah would be breakfast dish washer and Caleb would do lunch dishes leaving only supper for me, yeah! They were so excited to have these new jobs and Caleb even offered to do the supper dishes but I told him he was not old enough. When Lydia is 4 and a half she can take over breakfast dishes and Hannah can take over lunch dishes and Caleb can do supper dishes. They are actually looking forward to it. (me too!!) I took a picture of Hannah and Caleb on their first day on the job. They look like they are really suffering ;)

Also, on a final note, Lydia just ran through. She had been in the bathroom and as she ran in the bedroom she said she was going potty. I asked her why she was going into the bedroom without her pants on and she said, "THERE'S A TRAIN!!" I guess that explains everything. She always runs to the window when she hears a train it's just that, normally, she's dressed.

New Photo Album

Here is our latest photo album that we added to facebook. It is too much work to upload pictures here so I just thought I would add pictures there and put links here. We will see. These are pictures from April and May.

I saw the strangest thing as I was driving down 5&20

OK. Actually I saw some pretty interesting things... a dead bird, a dead turtle, some cool lights, a couple of big frogs, some cool mailboxes and oh, yeah, I wasn't driving I was walking. In protest of the high gas prices and as a matter of principle and to get better fit and to save a couple bucks we are trying to drive as little as possible. No one walks in this town so we are weird.

Whenever possible except for in extreme snow I walked to Bible study this year, except for the few weeks when I went to the laundry mat directly after Bible study. Everyone was amazed that I walked. It was less than a mile and the kids enjoy it. We always walk to my grandparents house about a half a mile away. Everyone thinks that is strange and my grandparents often ask if we want a ride home at the end of our visit. Today we actually walked to Paul and AmyJo's house which is about 2 miles. I grew up in that house and I don't think that I have ever walked between here and there before. Well, now I have. Caleb and Hannah rode home with AmyJo and Glenn and I walked with Lydia and Abigail in the stroller on the way there and it took us about 30 minutes. We played and had dinner together and then all 6 of us walked home. We were going to have the girls switch out riding and walking but then Hannah tripped and skinned her knee really bad and Lydia was so tired that Glenn carried Abigail and Hannah and Lydia got to ride until we were about 1/4 mile from home. We had a couple of flashers on our backs and Glenn's headlamp on my head and everyone was carrying one of the really bright LED flashlights we got at Real Deals Dollar store. We got some funny looks I'm sure, most of which we couldn't see. We did have one brief encounter with the police coming to check out the weird lights but it was just Dave, Paul's friend and it was no big deal. Caleb walked the whole 2 miles home and we are so proud of him!! My feet hurt and I'm tired but I am sure that we will do it again. We are trying to figure out a way to get all of us around on human powered wheels as it is a lot faster! Right now we just have one kid seat and a trailer that holds 2. Caleb is doing great riding his bike but I don't know that we can trust him to ride on 5&20 yet. It took us a little less than 50 minutes to get home which wasn't too bad since we stopped a couple times to fix shoes, kiss boo boos, etc. A quick first aid site was set up to assess the damages and apply bandaids then to bed for a well deserved good night's sleep.

I think that we need to wear signs that say "Pass Gas". It is the HPV (human powered vehicle) motto. Even if we can do it part of the time it sure will save us money in our gas guzzler Suburban.

That's all for now. I need to post some pictures of our last couple of months, I just never put pictures on this computer, so, if we get a rainy day and get our school work done early.... neither of which happen often but I can always hope.

Oh, and the title of this post is what we think other people were saying/thinking as they drove past.

Going in the great outdoors

We have been taking walks out back behind our place and walking around the pond. We have located a Killdeer nest, a Robin's nest and a Canadian Goose nest. We know that there are more Killdeer nests out there because there are several momma's that pretend that they have a broken wing as we walk around. Tonight we forgot the "make sure you use the facilities" message before we left. While we were out there both of the potty trained girls decided they needed to go. Glenn waited until I got there and they came running up to tell me. They then dropped their drawers right in the middle of the path. Hannah got the back of her shorts wet. I think that Lydia liked feeling the wind on her bum because she kept deciding she needed to go again and again. We finally got through to her that she needed to get off the path before undressing. She never got more than 2 feet into the weeds though. We will have to work on that. Glenn's MCAT is on Friday then we are going camping!! Can't wait. I guess today was practice for next weekend.

March in Pictures

Since it is the last day of March and I just downloaded our pictures to our computer I thought that it would be fun to put some of our pictures from this month on our blog so others could see some of the fun that we got into. Caleb is really enjoying reading and he likes to read to us. Here he is reading Go, Dog, Go to us on his bed.
Kyle turned 6 this month and we were invited to his birthday dinner of hot dogs and vegetable lomein. It was fun. Caleb and Kyle continue to be best friends and love to play together whenever they can. They are shown here with Kyle's new Nerf dart gun set. Caleb got to go away for the weekend with the Nelsons to Ehren's basketball tourament in Oswego. He was excited because he got to stay at a hotel and go swimming.One exciting thing that we have just discovered since it is lighter later is that Dollar General, next door closes at 6pm on Sundays. They have a nice parking lot that isn't used after it is closed so we are going to use it to ride our bikes on. It was fun riding our bikes for the first time this spring.
In math lately we have been working on fractions. For one of his lessons he had to read a peanut butter cookie recipe and follow it. He was so excited! He's pictured here enjoying the first fruits of his labor.
Every Tuesday, after Bible study at the rec center we go to the laundry mat to do our laundry. While our clothes are washing we head over to the library and check out books. This week Hannah picked out a really cute book called Fancy Nancy (a must read for any little girl that likes to dress up) about a little girl who likes to dress up fancy and tries to teach her family how to dress fancy too. We all had to dress up like Fancy Nancy out of our dress up bins.
And last, but not least a smile from our Cracker. We decided God gave us Abigail because he knew we needed to laugh more. All of our kids are such a delight!
March has been a big month for studying for the MCAT which Glenn will be taking April 16. We have also been busy with homeschooling, visiting friends, getting over colds, and helping out some at Timber Harvester.

The Flood

I flooded Palermo's tonight. If you didn't know, we live above a pizza place called Palermo's right now. I often wonder if we drive them crazy, 6 sets of feet wandering around, playing soccer, dancing, etc. up here. Well, I am sure that I annoyed them tonight. We had just put the kids to bed and Glenn asked me if I would be interested in some tea. I thought it sounded like a good idea and since the water out of the tap is so hot I decided to just get it from there rather than boiling it on the stove. I then walked back into the living/bed/dining room to give Glenn his tea options. We discussed them for a minute too long and when I walked back into the kitchen there was a flood. There had been a slow leak under the kitchen sink for a while but with a bucket we had caught it and only had to dump it once a week or so. Until today... I guess I should have boiled the water for tea on the stove. Instead I flooded Palermo's. Oops!