Chase at 5.5 months

Our baby is growing too quickly! He's such an amazing baby and a true delight to have. He sleeps so well...off to bed by 8:00 or 9:00 pm then he sleeps until 5:00 or 5:30am when I'm happy to wake to nurse him and he falls right back to sleep so I can run off to the swim center and do some water exercises for an hour, get a shower and return home in time to make breakfast for the older kids before he wakes for his breakfast. He then naps 2-3 times during the day and spends all the rest of his awake time in my arms.

He is quite spoiled. He is definitely my kid and I love it :)

So here are some pictures and a video of baby Chase, our happy guy.


sitting upright, if only for a second


and so begins the topple

Happy Chase hanging out at the park

A day at the park

I know it has been a long time since I have blogged and I apologize to my family and friends who do actually follow this blog. We've really been up to a LOT.

My father came to stay with us for two weeks and we put him to work! We accomplished so much that I think I was exhausted and needed some time to recover. We cleaned the yard, pulled weeds, dug and cut tree stumps, cut branches, tilled for a garden, built a trellis for the raspberries then we moved inside and he fixed our leaking air conditioner, removed wall paper, prepared walls with drywall compound, sanded walls, painted walls and moved furniture and he worked with Al a few days, too. Thanks Dad!!! We loved having you to visit and I especially loved all the projects that we were able to tackle. I could not have gotten so much done without you.

Then the weather turned off VERY nice and we have been spending nearly all day every day outside so I've had little time for blogging until today when I got some great pictures that I just had to share.

After attending my nephew's baseball game last night, my children were inspired to play a little baseball. So we grabbed our baseball gear and hit the baseball field by 9:30am.


Lillee wanted to pitch and Connor was ready to hit it out of the park!


I could not believe this shot until I enlarged it…please, click the picture…enlarge it, can you see what I see? :)


Isabel was happy to just play on the playground, she lost interest in baseball fairly quick.

Connor has learned to shuttle himself across the monkey bars and here is a short video showing what a monkey he truly is.

Do you see how crisp and beautiful it is outside? This is why we’ve spent every day outdoors…it’s therapeutic! Well, that and we really needed to do a lot of yard work and I’ve spent a long time in the garden. I’ll post garden pics when I have some green growing. Right now it looks like beds of red clay…not very exciting for all the work I’ve put into it. And to think we get to count all of this as school work!

How close does one have to be for fame to matter?

When I was in college, which seems like decades ago (well, it has been over a decade), I spent a lot of time trolling around the world wide web. The internet was just catching on and I was a bored college kid looking to fill some empty space in my life. I stumbled into a "chat room" one day and found it was kind fo fun talking to people from all over the world. I became an addict for awhile, but it lead me to some really interesting friendships.

One of those friendships was with a poet. We had wonderful late-night chats about nothing in particular, just sort of exploring words and my friend would put these simple thoughts and words together to make beautiful poems. So poignant, so simple and yet the images conjured by the words were so vivid. I thoroughly enjoyed our chats and then after college when I went home where there was no computer and few people in the county had internet access, I lost touch with my friend.

Recently, I was thinking of his poetry and looked him up...he's done a lot in the last 12-13 years since we last spoke. I emailed him and we reconnected. Of course, like any well connected person on the net, he was on facebook so we became friends.

As I'm thumbing through his facebook to see what his interests are these days I noticed a message sent to him from Michael Buble. I thought, "Surely not THE Michael Buble." There was no identifying aspects in his remarks however the facebook picture happens to be the same as a photo from the website of this famed musician.

Well, I could not resist I had to inquire...was this THE Michael Buble commenting on my friend's facebook? The response is, "Yes!!!"

I know someone who knows Michael Buble, not just knows Michael Buble but knows him well enough that Michael Buble comments on his facebook without soliciting a response! How cool is that?!?! And how close does that put me to fame?

Ok, maybe it's not a picture of me with Michael Buble like my friend Crash got with Jack Johnson, and my daughter did not get serenaded by Jack Johnson and I absolutely do not have pictures of him in his underwear like Crash has of Jack Johnson. But by golly, I have a friend whom I've never met in person and haven't spoken to in 12 years who knows Michael Buble personally and that has to count for something, right? :)

I am not serious about any of this, other than my friend does really know Michael Buble and my friend is a talented poet and writer...I just felt a need to try to be a bit funny when nothing too exciting has been going lately :)

Mud Bugs

Al's been stuck on a project at work for MUCH longer than originally anticipated so my dad came to stay with us for 2 weeks to help Al at work and help me with projects around the house that Al hasn't had time for.

Boy I've kept my dad busy! We've been cleaning up the yard, pulling weeds, cutting stumps, digging stumps, making runs to the dump, stripping wall paper, fixing drywall, prepping walls for paint...and that was just in the first few days :)

We've done a lot of yard work to prepare for putting a garden in. My father dug around one stump to cut it off as low as possible and this created a trench that the kids loved digging in. Then the rain came and the trench became a moat.

While working in the yard this morning, the girls started digging in the moat and slinging shovels full of muddy water all over one another. Before I knew, they were both dangling their feet in the moat and covered in mud. I told them this was ther chance, they were already dirty so they might as well go ahead and enjoy it. Well, I think this might be one of the only times they listened to me!

Lego dress-up

My parents purchased a great board game for Connor called Lego Creator. It has become quite the favorite game in our house. Connor is great at it and wins almost as much as I do. Al wins one here and there and poor Mamaw & Papaw (my parents) have not won yet but are good sports and keep trying.

One rule of the game is the most colorful person goes first. Connor always wins this as we play at night after the girls go to bed and Connor is always in his pajamas. We had not discussed playing Lego Creator since the previous night so we were surprised to find Connor moping when he came from putting on his pajamas. He had glanced over to Al and noticed Al's very colorful pajama pants. By the time I had put 2 & 2 together, Connor had already started counting the many colors in his pants. He then moved over to Al's pants to start counting his colors.

Turned out that Al was short 3 colors so Connor gets to go first, right? Nope, the race was on. Al was off to find additional colors to add to his outfit. It started with a shirt and tie and then I helped Connor find some extra colors. This went on for about 1/2 hour...it was sooo much fun!!!

Here are the results: