I'm still here

Here are a couple pics to look at until I have more to blog about.


I wanted to try my hand at growing my annuals from seed. The pansies are the only ones to bloom so far.


Chippy just loves to hide sunflower seeds in our potted plants. I usually have to go out and "weed" every so often. He sure is cute even if he is annoying.

Tea Party for the girls

I decided to schedule a Tea Party for Monday. We didn't really know when the children's parents were returning to this country, so I took a risk. As it turned out they were home by Sunday night. But we decided to go ahead with the Tea Party anyway. We invited several girls from church and their American Girl dolls. Kristina was really looking forward to it and she dressed one of our dolls for the occasion.




Of course, one of the brothers got in the picture. :)






It was a pretty short affair, but I think they all had fun.

After the guests left we loaded ourselves in the van and drove the children back to their parents.

If you've been reading this and the last blog post and don't know what I'm talking about with these extra children, please see the sidebar for info about Katya.

What I did last week

Saturday, the 28th we picked up the three extras. :)

Sunday after church they enjoyed the pond.




Monday: Memorial Day parade


Bubbles in the evening.




Tuesday: Great Lakes Science Center




And a trip to the quilt shop and Trader Joes.

Wednesday Amy had to babysit, so we didn't do quite as much. That was the day that the new dryer came, but they didn't install it so I had to wait to catch up on laundry until after dh came home from work. Even then, I had to wait until Thursday because of a few bumps in the installation. Then on Thursday the washing machine gave me an error code saying that the water supply was blocked. Thankfully, dh came home at lunch to fix it. :)

Thursday after Amy's voice lesson, we spent some time clothes shopping for Katya and Charity. We found several cute things for Katya.

Some friends of ours from church own some land with a pond. So we went there on Friday.


I've only highlighted what we did. We were pretty busy. I felt like all I did was concentrate on "parenting" four kids, which was fine. God was certainly, gracious in giving me all I needed to do that.

Chad:




A couple of my favorite Chad sayings: "I don't go to bed until the bottom of the night." "I can't go to bed until it's all the way dark."
He would also make statements about food especially if we were having something he'd not ever heard of before. In that case, "I'll just have carrots." Or "I'm not hungry." Yeah, right!

At one point, we had a little lesson on "stealing." Amy left her gum out, so he decided he'd just take a piece, but I saw him do it, so I instructed him that he needed to ask Amy for it otherwise he'd be stealing. It happened again with some candy, so I reminded him about what we'd talked about. He then would say something like, "Oops, sorry."

My eating no-nos for the week
--a frozen watermelon fruit bar because the steamship tour was incredibly hot! --Aladdins' triple chocolate mousse cake on date night; a treat for a hard week. It was one of the best date nights we've had in a long time (dinner, shopping for camp chairs, taking in the end of the first band concert of the season in the square).
--Two s'mores on Sunday afternoon. The children were going home the next day, so we roasted hotdogs and marshmallows for a special treat.
And now back to normal.