Life

I was looking through some pictures I had snapped of our everyday life and found these. Kind of random, but at the same time full of meaning to me.

I spend alot of time in the car nowadays. Taking kids to elementary and middle school eats up nearly 2 hours of my day. Add in soccer, piano, scouts, and preschool and we are in the car A-L-O-T. Good thing I love driving, and I seriously love my iphone! Not only can I send out emails, pay bills, and listen to my awesome music while I am waiting. It can also snap fun pictures of my Rose enjoying my music.

She is in love with Lilo and Stitch right now, she found an old DVD of the boys and has been wanting to watch it all the time. Then she found a song from the movie on my iphone randomly, Can't Help Falling in Love by the A*Teens. We listened to it pretty much constantly for 3 days in the car.

Darin has turned into a pretty awesome pre-teen at the moment. Notice I said "moment"! Ha, actually he's not a bad kid at all, but there have been definite moments that leave me wondering "huh?!?" He has really branched out this year and has enjoyed making new friends and learning new things. He has totally taken on more responsibility and freedom and has handled that really, really well. Well, except for his "Oh, Yeah!" moments. I'll have to write more about that later... But he also has gotten more of a sense of humor and makes us laugh.

Darin wrote this poem for a school assignment. Which totally blew us away, especially since it took him all of 30 minutes riding in the car on our way back from a trip to Dallas.
Life
The beginning and the end, alpha and omega
The existence of a living creature
Nature itself repeated over and over again
The reservoir of carbon drawn out to make other beings
The ability to live and die
Micro-organisms to mammoth sized dinosaurs is what life is
Just depends on how we use it to determine what will happen to it
It is that small spark of life that has made us what we are now
Life is a test
A test of our nature of doing things
It never ends
It is the very essence of our daily lives
The way life
is, is never the same
Life

Ahh, that Ginger! Sometimes she just kills me. She has pretty much limitless energy and talks like crazy. But she is the sweetest companion to have around too. She is always happy and she wants to be just like me, whether I am folding clothes or putting away dishes. She is super helpful. It's gratifying to have someone who thinks that everything I do all day is AWESOME! I'll tell you one thing that never happened when the boys were little, they could care less about what I was doing. And Ginger will tell me what a good Mommy I am too, which is super sweet.

Last week I was stocking up our pantry and household products. I spent half the day shopping and half of it putting everything away. Ginger was pretty much underfoot the whole time. Which was lovely for the most part, I like it when my kids go shopping with me. And both the girls were great at unloading my haul. However when I was busy putting everything away in the pantry I stepped out to this...

And when I asked her to clean it up she promptly did. Which was so nice, until I stepped out of the kitchen and saw this in the family room...

Clearly Ginger is also picking up some skills from her brothers! Remember about how I said they could care less to notice anything I did when they were little. Um, yeah. Their idea of cleaning off the table consists of moving whatever objects were covering it to other countertops, side tables, sometimes even to the floor directly below.

This isn't everyday normal life for us, but I had these pictures of Nathan from TAKS tests earlier this month. One of our many TAKS traditions is to serve whoever is testing breakfast in bed. We have a bunch of traditions surrounding TAKS testing (see here). See here for why I LOVE TAKS testing Season!
Anyway, the part of this that is normal life, is notice that Nathan is wearing the same exact shirt. He had testing days back to back, and two different breakfasts (Biscuits and Gravy and Waffles with Whipped Cream. But still the same shirt. I probably get after him 2 or 3 times a week to change his clothes because he just wore that or it's dirty. If you ever read, "Love You Forever" by Robert Munsch (possibly my favorite children's book) you will know what I mean when I say that sometimes I could sell him to the Zoo!:-)

Nathan is a sweetie and when I think of how he has changed over the past year, I am so proud of him! He has grown up alot and become alot more independent. He has always been a good student in school but this year he has had to work a little harder and has done a great job.

I came home from taking the boys to school this week and found Ken and the girls watching a movie clip on his computer. In fact the clip was the one of the little boy who doesn't want to be a Jedi and wants to be Darth Vader. They crack me up! In the early morning I can usually find them doing something silly together like playing a game, making faces at each other. That is the fabulous benefit of Ken working from home!

We were looking forward to Ken's LAST business trip earlier this month quite a bit. Since he moved back to Engineering late last year he has only been traveling about 1 1/2 weeks out of every month. Of course, in true craziness that seems to permeate our life, the week before Ken left for his "last" business trip he was asked to do a different job position by his VP. Which will probably require more travel again, but I'm happy for him. Ken has been restless and wanting a challenge and I think this new position will be a much better fit for him. The only thing is that it seems like he is playing catch-up. He has a ton of work to do and has been working pretty much constantly and feeling a ton of pressure the past three weeks and probably will the next 4-6 months.

This is nothing new to us, we have been through other times when he has been under pressure at work or at school, or at work and school at the same time:-) We are grateful for the times when we have been challenged and we rose up and faced it together to accomplish either Ken's dreams or mine. One thing we instituted pretty much right away was the rule of 1 hour of undivided attention. Ken will spend one hour each week giving each child their own undivided attention. Sure you think 4 hours out of the week is no big deal, but it is not! It is huge. It is a huge deal for the kids and takes a huge amount of planning to make it happen plus normal family time too.

One thing I just said jokingly when we were talking about it as a family was that I think Mom, should get one hour for every child we have. So each kids gets one hour each and mom gets 4 hours each week. Isn't that a fabulous plan!!!