Happy Spring!

I did it! I met Reeve's challenge and I finished the winter chair in my four seasons cross-stitch...now I'm on to the more colorful Spring chair.

We actually had a very nice last day of winter. It was sunny and the temps were in the 40's.

For those of you with curbside trash/recycling pick-up please consider yourselves very fortunate. We do not have that luxury and there is nothing more sobering than having to deal with the storage and then removal of your own trash. We're very aware of how much garbage we produce and we try very hard to minimize our waste. I seriously think the last time Tom went to the dump was way back in September. I have a recycling system setup in the garage for paper, bottles, plastic, and cans. We actually have 3 to 4 times as many recyclables than we do garbage. Since we had an early snow this winter season that stayed around all winter Tom wasn't able to get his truck moved from in front of the wood pile. His little red truck has been our garbage truck, but I couldn't take the pile up any longer.

It took me about an hour yesterday to load up the mini van with just recyclables. I removed about a quarter of what we have in the garage. Incredible! The kids could barely fit in the back seat.

For the Love of Joe

Our neighbor and friend with the goats also has an adorable baby (he'll be a year in the summer) donkey named Joe. He's the sweetest donkey I've ever met. He loves hugs and is super calm.

Many a time we've told Kyle not to run up to Joe from behind, and many a time Kyle doesn't process instructions of the warning nature. Kyle is wild, loud, and Joe is patient and calm with him.

Joe is also very patient with Brenda's friendly and playful doberman Angel. Angel loves nothing better than to run up to Joe and jump on his back to wrestle with him. I guess we have Angel to thank for tempering Joe...Angel is way more rowdy than Kyle. We were all cracking up at Joe running around with a doberman playfully on his back. Joe loves it and really knows how to get Angel going.

Even though Joe is still a baby Brenda hoisted the kids up on his back for a test ride.

We're going to have a lot of fun visiting Brenda this summer. Reeve absolutely LOVED riding on Joe, and we all loved Joe's wonderful temperment and sweet personality.

Today is the last day of winter and I'm almost done with the winter chair in my cross-stitch. I'll post the picture tomorrow and hopefully I'll meet Reeve's challenge.

100th Birthday for the Elroy Public Library

Our local library had it's 100th Birthday recently. They had a drawing contest and an essay contest to mark the occasion. Kyle kept making excuses as to why he didn't want to work on his drawing and essay. I didn't want to press the issue with him. Reeve reluctantly wrote an essay, which I made into a cursive writing worksheet using a great little website that I've discovered recently:

Well I'm happy to say that Reeve won first place for both his drawing and his essay. If you click on the picture above you can see the picture and essay better.

He was a little nervous when he had to go up in front of everyone to accept his prize money, but he was also very stoked! He never expected to win, but he secretly hoped he would.

The Library was very generous and the 1st Place Prize was $15 for the Drawing Contest (1st-4th Grade...Reeve's technically in 2nd Grade) and $15 for 1st Place in the Essay contest (1st-4th Grade).

When we got home Reeve told me that he felt very special. After he won he had lots of people that he didn't know come up to him and congratulate him. He told me later that he felt like Harry Potter, because everyone seemed to know who he was and they were very glad to shake his hand.

Cross-Stitch: Winter Chair

Okay I thought for sure I've posted since Feb. 22nd, but apparently my world is once again on warp speed.

A lot has happened in these past few weeks! Tom has resigned from his job with the State of Wisconsin and is now an HVAC manager for a local contractor. He's had one week on the job and loves it. No more suspensions without pay for being 15 minutes late! No more Supervisor from H-E-double L! The owner of the business is very calm, easy going, and genuinely nice. The kids and I met him yesterday. He has nothing but good and positive things to say about Tom...what a relief!

It's Saturday and believe it or not there is a lot I want to get done today. I decided I am going to try to post a little everyday, so despite the fact that this entry is short and sweet it won't take me nearly 3 weeks to post again.

This is a picture of my latest creative time waster:

It's a cross-stitch project that I started a year and a half ago! Where does the time go? I remember I put it on hold when I started back to work at the gas station and then the mortgage business. I decided to get back to my cross-stitching when I found myself obsessively doing sudoku puzzles in my down time...that's the time when I know I have a million things to do (like cleaning/paperwork/etc...) and well I just don't feel like doing them. I try to limit the time to early mornings when I like to wake up before the rest of the family on the weekends or when I get up with Tom during the week. Also in the evening is a good time or when I take 5 min. me-time breaks during the day. The nice thing about cross-stitching is that it is so portable and you can just spend 5 minutes on it here and there.

However Reeve has put a challenge to me. The project I'm working on now is a Four Seasons picture and Reeve has challenged me to finish the "winter" scene before the 20th of March (first day of Spring). He obviously doubts my ability to put all other duties on hold while I greedily spend time stiching. I have a lot to do yet, but I might be able to pull it off. Most of the main stitches are done and what's left is the back stitching and some window stitches.

Covered in Snow

The last snow we got just under a foot. Luckily it happened on a Sunday and Tom and I were able to tag team the driveway shovel duty.

No neighbors to plow us out this time! We ended up shoveling 1/2 the day together.
By the time we finished the first part the Township snow plow came by and dumped about 5 inches of snow over the entire area that we shoveled.

These pictures don't quite portray how funky it looks here and how much snow we seriously have piled up, but if you scoll down to posts I made on Jan 22nd and Jan 30th you can compare and see that we have a ton of snow now.

This pile by our 1990 Ford Festiva (42mpg!) is like ten feet high! We're running out of room to put all this snow.
I must say WE LOVE all this SNOW.

It's an amazing feeling to go outside when it's about 16F and blowing wind and get so heated shoveling snow that it's too hot to wear gloves and too hot to wear a coat. I just had a t-shirt and sweatshirt on and I was sweating. I didn't want to take the sweatshirt off because the snow was still falling and as it was my sweatshirt was soaking wet with snow and sweat by the time I came inside. Fun, eh? Well we're suppossed to get more snow on Monday :-).

Day 3 in Porcupine Mtns

Day 3 was the second day the guys went snowboarding. No more blue "easy" runs for these guys...they went straight for the black diamond run. Reeve was too quick down the run for me to be ready with the camera. They'd all go up on the chair lift, I'd go in and hang out in the lodge or take a walk and the next thing I knew Reeve was down the hill and waiting for Tom & Kyle. Or I'd see Reeve coming down the hill, but by the time I got close enough to take a picture he was stopped. He did really well though!

I thought both Reeve and Kyle mastered the art of "braking" with their snowboards really well.

By the end of the day the kids were exhausted in the heat of the lodge.

It gave Tom a chance to come down the hill once by himself.

Too Much Stuff

Wow! This is an awesome little 20 minute video.
Words to live by, that's for certain!

Story of Stuff

I watched this with both Reeve and Kyle and they loved it! Reeve was so inspired that he said he didn't want to get any more toys, and Kyle said he would only watch one 30min (it's educational...no commercials) TV show a day.

Informative Articles on Children's Nutrition

A good friend of mine is a homeschooling Mom with a PhD in Nutrition. She just started to write some articles on children's nutrition for a website called Helium.

I thought both articles were very informative and insightful.

This is the link: http://www.helium.com/user/show_articles/384496

She's experimenting with this type of journalism for the first time and was interested in feedback.

Day 2:Snowboarding at the Porcupine Mtns, MI

After cross-country skiing we checked into our little kitchenette suite at the Sunshine Motel. We made some rice and guacamole and then we went to sleep. We woke up the next day kinda late...it doesn't start to get daylight in the Upper Penisula until around 8:30am! We gathered our gear together, got dressed, made food for the day, and headed out to the ski lodge.

It was so nice skiing here. The weather was perfect and there weren't any crowds.

Tom and the boys barely had to wait to get onto the chair lift.

It's harder (I think) to get onto the chair lift with a snowboard than it is with skiis, but these guys had it down to a science.

Since Tom's goofy foot (right foot forward) he's teaching Reeve and Kyle how to snowboard goofy foot. It looks harder to walk one-fitted in the board when you're doing it goofy foot, but by the end of the day the kids were getting pretty good at it. They all enjoyed the chair lift ride, especially Kyle.

They started riding the "blue" slope which is easiest run after the "green - very easy" runs.

After a couple of rides down this hill Reeve was really bored. He always came down the hill at least 15 minutes before Kyle and Tom did and he was itching to ride the black diamond run.

He went along riding the "easy" run all day with them the first snowboarding day. On the second day they mainly rode the black diamond run. It turned out it was actually easier for Reeve and Kyle to ride the steep slopes than it was for them to ride their boards on flatter runs. The steeper runs were also less crowded, which worked out really well for learning.

Tom had quite the little rope system for training Kyle. Actually there were quite a few kids there(all on skiis) attached to a parent with straps. It saved Kyle from going too fast and out into the woods. Reeve was beyond the straps and Tom couldn't get him to slow down. He zipped downt the hills as fast as he wanted to, but I will note that I KNOW Reeve was very careful. He doesn't like to get too risky.

Nordic Skiing in the Porcupine Mountains, MI

A couple of weeks ago we traveled North about 6 hours and spent a long weekend in the Upper Penisula of Michigan right on Lake Superior.

The ski lodge (pictured in the background) was very cozy. It had a great view of the slopes and two very warm fireplaces. Early in the morning families pile in and grab their favorite long table. They leave all their lunch gear and belongings on the tables and then go out and ski. It was really cool to see that most everyone brown bagged it in the lodge. Some families were very organized and brought skewers to cook their food (okay it was meat) on the indoor fires.

When we got there we went on a cross country ski trail and ended up skiing for about 5 hours and traveling about 6 miles. Reeve was the trail blazer and was constantly having to wait for us all to catch up to him.

Kyle was a real trooper because the poor kid kept falling down and it was a very difficult trail we were on. We lumbered up steep inclines and edged down even steeper trails through a very thick evergreen forest.

Foggy Last Day of 2007

The last day of 2007 was a really foggy day. It was surreal to see so much whiteness everywhere. It was very peaceful and beautiful and one of those days where you don't miss the sun.

Fun in the Backyard

This is what we did for Christmas. We had fun cross-country skiing around our house and sledding down our big hill.

Catching Up

I'm still working on organizing my pictures. I had hoped to have some pics picked out to print to send along in a Valentine's Day card...since we didn't get a Christmas letter out this year...but it's not looking like I'll be ready to send out V day cards either.
Probably in about 5 posts from now I'll be posting pics of our mini vacation up north. We just got back from the Upper Penisula of Michigan on Lake Superior for a ski trip to the Porcupine Mountains. The weather was perfect, the snow was perfect, and Reeve and Kyle learned how to snowboard on some black diamond runs!

Snowy Winter

I don't know how I got so behind on posting...I think I was uber frustrated about not getting the video thing to work. I mean this is the age of u-tube you'd think I'd be able to figure out how to upload a silly little 20second video from my camera, but no I couldn't figure it out.

These pictures are like a month old! I