It's In The Bag

While my two youngest kidlets have been in school for three weeks now, the two oldest just started this past Monday.  Heaven knows that I was anxious for them to go back so I could regain my sanity and reestablish a normal schedule around here.  But for the first time in my life, I am mourning the end of summer.  It was a great one.  Not just with all the fun stuff we did, but the weather was perfect!  We didn't have blistering hot, unbearable temps this year.  We also got lots of  summer rain!  There's nothing like watching and listening to a lightning/thunder storm.  I love the sound of the pouring rain.  Meister thinks I'm nuts because I love the rain so much.  He finds it gloomy and depressing.  I think he's the weird one.  I think my mourning all comes down to the fact that we had a super late start to summer.  Winter just did not want to go away, so it wasn't until the beginning of July that it actually felt like summer.  By then, Hobby Lobby was stocking all of their Christmas crap.  That was the last thing I wanted to see! 

Here's a quick look at some of the fun we had this summer:

I bought Seven Peaks passes for all of us.  They were worth EVERY penny I spent on them.  I'd say $40 was a pretty sweet deal for the entire summer!!  They paid for themselves in only 2 visits.  I think I will definitely buy them again next summer.

Talk about purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain!  This is right after one of the many cloud bursts we had .  Isn't it beautiful?

Not all of our summer has been fun.  We had just come home from a loooong day at Seven Peaks when the radiator blew!  We had steam and antifreeze spewing out of the hood of the van and all the way down the driveway.  It totally killed the edge of my lawn.  UGH.  It really pays to have a handy man who can fix it all.  He saves us soooo much money.  His willingness and effort to maintain our vehicles allows us to drive the ones that we have into the ground.  I love not having to pay a mechanic, but what I love even more is not having a car payment!  Unfortunately, I think this ugly, "Moldy Pickle II" is on her last leg.

 Here we have Dylan, the mad, mad, mad scientist!  This kid is a sponge, thirsty for knowledge.  He is just like his daddy.  He reads and soaks everything he reads in.  He had LOTS of fun with some science experiments this summer.  We had to put the kibosh on his water bombs though.  We had a close call with some projectile hazards with one of them and decided it wasn't worth the risk anymore.  He moped around the house for a week.  Poor kid.

After the explosion, that water bottle skimmed right past Dylan's leg and scratched him pretty bad.  Too close for comfort!

 4th of July sparkler fun!  It was such a pleasant evening.  Not too hot and we had great fireworks going off all around us.

I already blogged about our camp out with the Morgan side.  We went again with my side, two weeks later.  We LOVE to camp.  It's a ton of work, but so worth it.  Meister and I started this tradition with our kids because we were too poor at the time to take them on a real vacation, not realizing the impact it would have on them.  They have such a love for nature and vow that when they are grown up with their own families that they will carry on the tradition.  This is the traditional cousin pic that we take every year.  They're in order from youngest to oldest.

I love it when the wildlife walks right through our campsite!  They're so majestic and beautiful!  I just don't ever want to see a bear!  It's never happened in all 13 years we've been camping and I hope it never does!  That is an experience in life I DO NOT need! 

Landon and his friends racing wood chips down the raging gutter in the pouring rain.  Oh to be a kid again!

We took a couple trips to the Living Planet Aquarium.  Although it was nothing like the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay in Vegas, the kids LOVED it!

We happened to catch the octopus for feeding time.  I was so cool to watch.  The lady told everyone not to use flash photography because it could blind the octopus, who is used to the deep, dark depths of the ocean.  I was so caught up in watching this octopus and her relationship with her handler, that I just had to get some pictures.  My strobe totally went off.  Can you say HUMILIATION!!!!  I could not believe it.  I hardly ever shoot with my flash, so I didn't even think to look at the setting my camera was on.  But yea, one of the kids had taken a picture or two and switched it to auto.  I felt my face turn 10 shades of red.  UGH.

The kids had  a great time at Hollywood Connection.  It was pretty dead when we went, so the kids were able to ride the bumper cars several times in a row with no one else on the floor.  There were some fun little kiddie rides as well.

Watching them play miniature gold was a hoot!  My poor kids SUCK when it comes to golf, but boy did we have some great laughs!!!

Let's not forget mom's passion!  My flowers bloomed so beautifully this year!  It seems like every year, I always have at least one variety of flower who's growth is stunted, for whatever reason.  I've never quite figured out why that happens, but this year it was the marigolds.  You can see little specks of yellow peeking out from beside the petunias, but they're pretty pathetic.  Last year, it was the petunias.  I don't get it, but oh well.  My beds still look AWESOME!

To summer:  I love you and will dearly miss you!  I feel weird mourning your passing, as I'm usually saying "GOOD RIDDANCE!" to your unbearably hot weather!  Until next year, with a tear in my eye, I bid you farewell.

On to first day of school pictures:

Todd

My first born isn't a baby anymore.  NOPE.  He's a Freshman, a 9th grader, Fresh Meat, how ever you wanna put it.  I'm freaking out a little.  He's officially earning high school credits.  WHAT.THE.HECK???  He's nearly 15 and is developing into a fine young man.  He is sensitive and loving (and a pretty big tease to his younger siblings) and has developed a love for serving others.  He spent his summer helping my parents with their humanitarian mission to send clothes, shoes and school supplies to needy, third world countries.  Hearing him play his beloved guitar and the cello make my heart sing.  Before I know it, he's going to be off on a mission of his own!  It seems like yesterday we were the center of attention in a land far, far away, where blond hair and blue eyes were not very common, but very much loved and paid attention to.  Korea, the land of his birth, where I became Mommy for the first time, is a distant, fleeting memory.  Where has time gone?

Emily

My lone princess.  The once shy, timid little girl, attached to her mommy's hip, is now a social butterfly that I cannot tame, fluttering around the halls of middle school, in 7th grade.  She has a heart of gold and wants to embrace those who are less fortunate.  She told me that on her first day, she and her friend, also named Emily, saw a girl sitting all alone at lunch.  She said she looked sad, with her head down, as she ate her lunch.  Instead of turning the other way and walking off to their own table, they went and sat down by her and befriended her.  Can you say PROUD MOMMY MOMENT?  My eyes fill with tears just thinking about it.  Who knows how Emily and Emily may have cheered up this poor girl, all alone and probably scared to death on her first day of 7th grade.  Always remember this:

"What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure, but scattered along the life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable."  -author unknown

Dylan

A chip off the same block, made from the same mold, spittin' image of his daddy.  Anyway you put it, he is the most like Meister of our 4 kids.  As mentioned before, this kid is a sponge.  He's a vat full of knowledge beyond his 5th grade years!  He has an amazing ability to read and retain knowledge like no other 10 year old I know.  I think he knows more about Space, NASA's Apollo program, WWII, the Holocaust and Vietnam than most adults do.  How many 10 year olds do you know that watch documentaries on such subjects?  Sure he loves the normal kid stuff, but they're not usually his preference.  He has a silly, goofy, really funny, but sometimes annoying sense of humor!  He LOVES to give people weird, make no sense, nicknames.  He is the ONLY one of our children to have expressed an interest in any type of sport.  He loves football and is really miffed that I wouldn't let him play tackle this year.  I want him to focus on his cello playing for this year and didn't want him to be overloaded with too much extra curricular activity.  Depending on how that goes, maybe, just maybe, we can throw football into the mix next year.  I think it would be a great outlet for his hyper, spazzy spurts that he goes through.  Life without our little Dylan would be awfully dull and boring! 

Landon

Of all 4 children, he is the most independent.  The first three were attached to my hip and were shy and timid.  But then came Landon.  On his first day of kindergarten, he looked at me and said, "Mom, you can leave now!"  That made me cry harder than I already was behind my dark sunglasses!  When I walked him to his first day of 2nd grade three weeks ago, he told me that I couldn't kiss him in front of his classmates.  Being the soft hearted, loving boy he is, he made darn sure to give me big hugs and lots of kisses before we left.  I have never had to push him to do his reading and homework.  He just does it.  I never have to tell him more than once to do his chores or mow the lawn.  He just does it.  He doesn't mind that I still call him my baby and occasionally sing "Rock-a Bye Baby" in his ear.  OK, well, maybe he does care about that last one, but he'll let me do it anyway.  It was part of our nightly ritual when he was a newborn for me to hold him close and lull him to sleep with that lullaby.  It worked like a charm until he was almost 5!  If he was tired, but cranky and wouldn't go to sleep, all I had to do was start singing that to him and his eyes, no matter how hard he tried, could not stay open, and he was asleep in no time at all.

I always heard people say that by the time your last child was off to school, you were jumping for joy and rejoicing that they were all out of the house for the day.  That has not been my experience at all.  I tear up and cry with every new milestone he hits.  He's my baby.  The very last one.  If only they could stay little forever!!!  But no, he'll be 8 come November and time is going to keep on ticking.

My blog is nothing spectacular.  I don't write hoping that I'll get lots of followers.  I do it for ME!  I named my blog what I did because I want to freeze moments in time, preserve my own little family's history.  I'm not the greatest at it and I don't have a witty, funny sense of humor or a wonderfully catchy writing style, but I try to highlight the things that I hold dear to my heart.  And that's what's most important....to me.