Update from Hayseed County

First of all, this little girl turned 3!!

What did she want for her b-day dinner?  "Noodles!"  

So although not very festive or exciting, noodles it was!

She loved all the gifts she received especially her ballerina outfit and her fairy wings!

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, what can you say about her?  She is a delight.  She is funny and crazy and wild and mischievous and crazy, did I mention crazy?  Since we moved to OK, her little world has been sort of rocked, she started sleeping in a bed, she ditched a very beloved friend "binks" the binky, she has a new home and new people to meet and she still has that pesky little brother that takes up Mom's time.  But she is so fun and we love her booty shakin' self!  

Oliver and August are the best of friends, they are super cute together.  If anyone can get a giggle out of August, it's Oliver.

August continues to LOVE his walker.  I think he may not even crawl, he might just wake up one morning and WALK!  :)  (the kids call it his wheelchair.)

I have made 2 delicious bread recipes lately.  Now I am not a bread maker, I tend to sort of botch bread that has to rise, but both of these worked out.  There was a french bread (above) recipe found here and a roll recipe found here.  They were both super tasty and they both freeze well!  Give them a go!

Oliver started Soccer, so cute.  He's loving it!

We became a little more adult and got a lawn mower.  That's it, we are adults- mini van? Check.  Lawn Mower?  Check.

Just chillin' a bit.

A rare moment when no one is fighting or crying or whining!  Hooray!!

We have been trying to make our house more of a home with a few projects here and there.  Ruby helped me pot a few house plants that she loved doing!

Well I guess that's about all that's going on here.  Just plugging along, waiting for visitors to come.  Any takers?

Zack 1, Thief 0

                                                     

If Hayseed County had a newspaper (which they don't) and if they had a police beat (which sadly they don't) it would have run something like this today:

Yesterday a bike was stolen from victims front yard.  Later that evening the perp. was seen riding the victims bike around the streets near his home.  The victim got in his car and followed the perp on the bike and apprehended the perp. for stealing his bike and asked for it back.  The perp. (a teenager) claimed "an old man" gave it to him.  The victim took the perp. and bike to the old man's house and in fact the old man had given the perp. the bike after finding 2 bikes sitting against his fence that morning and not knowing what to do with them he saw the perp. who old man said "was a nice young man" and gave the perp. the bike and took the other bike to the police station.  The victim then told the perp. sorry, but he was taking his bike home.  To which the perp. relied, "awwww mannnnnn."  It is unknown why the old man didn't take both bikes to the police station.


Yep, that's how it all went down!  Way to go Zack!  He took matters into his own hands and got his bike back.  Boo Yeah.  He said he felt bad taking the bike back since the kid was so disappointed and had been fixing it up all afternoon and was going to use it to ride to work.  But in the end, it was our bike, so- sorry kid.  Of course his story sounded fishy, but in the end it was true.  He was just an innocent victim as well.  Luckily that explains why he was riding it around on streets near our house which wouldn't have been too smart if he had stolen it from our house himself.

Why do strange things always happen to us?  Remember our stolen car that was returned twice?

Changes

I feel like lately in life I am frequently saying to myself (and Zack), "This is hard, life is hard right now."  It's hard to change, to leave the familiar, to forge a new life, to find your place in the new world you are living in.  

We are missing our old life.  Our friends, our routine, our house, the familiar, the interesting places we had at our fingertips.  

It's funny, I never thought of myself as an "ocean" kind of person, I could take it or leave it.  But after living by one and actually getting a chance to visit it quiet a few times, I came to love it, just in time to realize I was really going to miss it.

Right now our whole household is sort of in a funk.  We are all dealing with our own adjustments of living in a new place, going to new schools, taking on new roles, being left behind, getting older and not wanting to, discovering.

It's hard to raise 3 little kids, it takes a lot of patience and energy amongst other things and I usually feel like we are completely failing as parents because there is an ever growing list of "what are we going to do about this? or how should we handle that?"  And truthfully, we have NO clue what we are doing.

Mix in a dose of the world as we know it completely changing after moving and you get a lot of frustrated, whiny, woe is us people.

But, we will survive, we always do.  There have been tears. ( Lots of them, not just from the kids.)  And eventually our kids will grow up and which is both sad (when they are being cute) and encouraging (when you think you can't take one more tantrum).  

So I guess we will just have to start looking at the silver lining.  

(Anyone seen a happy cloud around here?)  

7 Months

This boy turned 7 months a few days ago!  In some ways the time has flown by, in others as most parents can understand it has felt like every minute of that 7 months.  (I'm talking sleep people, when will we get more sleep???  Sigh.)  Overall August is a really good baby, mellow and funny.  He loves to smile and he got his 2 bottom teeth when he turned 6 months.  To the day, they literally popped out on his 6 month mark.  And now he is working on the top 2.  I'm excited to see his little pumpkin grin when he gets his top front teeth!

(Just surfin' the net chatting with all his baby friends!  ha, ha)

Lately he has been called "Mr. Grabby" since he is constantly trying to reach out and grab anything in his path.  Especially FOOD.  This boy loves food.  Or at least he thinks he does!  He can't really get his hands on much of it yet, but he knows he's going to like it once he can!

His other favorite thing is to wander around in his walker.  (Thank heavens it made it in the moving truck at the last minute, it was almost left behind!)  He is in this thing ALL the time.  He loves it!  (Okay the outfit above it ridiculous, but I had to put it on him at least once, someone gave it to us when Oliver was a baby.)  August can be seen terrorizing the other kids in his walker.  It's hilarious to see him chase them all around.  And the other 2 are really frightened since it does hurt when the walker bumps into you toes or heels.  He's a pretty good navigator in that thing, he can really hustle when he wants too!  

So far August has loved baby food.  I think he has liked it all except green beans.  But honestly they aren't very good pureed so I don't blame him.  I don't think any of our kids liked green beans.  Once he is in the high chair, you better have the food ready because you will hear it until the spoon hits his mouth.  This boy and food are serious.  He will chow down as much as we are willing to give him at one time.  He loves to eat baby food.  

His other feats at this point are rolling over either side and he's getting pretty good with his hands grabbing things.  He is also a chatter box, and one thing is certain, he loves his siblings!

Now if we could only get him to sleep at night without a couple of parental visits that would be great!  Maybe next month!

The BIG 6

 I can't believe our baby turned six last Friday!  It amazes me how time passes, he's getting so big, so crazy.  In an attempt to distract him from the fact that we don't know anyone here yet and we have no family around, Zack and I tried to make this birthday as fun packed as we could for Oliver.  He really had his heart set on a typical "kid" birthday party with games and prizes and goody bags, kids, you know what kids think is awesome at this age.  But unfortunately we moved just before birthday time, so that made it a little difficult.

 So we tried to make it as fun as possible with just the 5 of us.  I think it ended up better than he expected. (Which isn't really saying much because he was very doom and gloom the days leading up to his birthday.  ha, ha)  He asked for a star cake.  So we made this one, Oliver decorated it himself, I thought that was cute.

 As a surprise we took him bowling which was a lot of fun, he had only been once before on a little kids bowling alley.  Thank you whoever invented bumpers for bowling, it saves us parents a lot of sad tears when kids would otherwise be getting gutter balls.

Little Miss Ruby didn't get into the actual bowling too much but she did love to play with all the balls on the rack.  And the camera.

August pretty much chilled in the stroller the whole time.  He recently figured out he can eat his own toes which give him great pleasure, except when he bites them with his new teeth!

What a cute little bowler!

Oliver liked all his gifts he received.  We tried to spice it up by have a treasure hunt to find some of his gifts. He thought that was pretty fun.  He loves a good treasure hunt, espeically when this time there actually was a treasure at the end.  I think his Batman Legos from Uncle Greg and Aunt Kris Tina were the biggest hit!  Thanks guys.  

All in all it was a pretty fun day.  

Here are some things that I think are great about Oliver this past year:

He loves to learn.  Loves it.  He loved Kindergarten and excelled at everything.  He is so excited to learn to read and do math.  I'm glad that he has a love of learning.

Oliver has a tender heart.  Sometimes this is good and sometimes bad, but I think it draws people to him.  He feels things very deeply.  Most the time he's either pure joy or doom and despair.  We are trying to help him find the middle ground.  He doesn't like to be in the spotlight.

He loves holidays, decorations, action figures, legos, sports, his family and of course his panda bear.

It's amazing to see how much he has changed in the last year, it will be fun to see what this next year brings.

We sure do love him and glad he is part of our family.

A Real Scorcher!

                                                
It seems the weather here is getting into the Olympic spirit this week!  The competition is stiff, but yesterday it was the second hottest day in Oklahoma history!  It hit a whopping 112 degrees.  It hasn't been that hot since 1932 when it hit 113!!  Way to go Oklahoma!  Silver medal for you.  Not bad, not bad. (But please don't keep trying for the gold!)  So happy we moved here just in time for the flaming hot summer.

Garbage Can

Who knew you could be so happy to see a garbage can!  But today after nearly 2 1/2 weeks in Oklahoma, we FINALLY got our city issued garbage can!!  YAHOO!!  I wish it looked as nice as the one in the picture above, but apparently when you live in a small town you don't get an actual "NEW" garbage can you get someone else's old one.  Yep, after hounding the city for the past 2 weeks about bringing one, I came home from the grocery store to find  a crusty, dirty old garbage can by our house.  Excellent.  I mean I know it's a garbage can and it's just going to get dirty anyway, but there is just something about knowing it's your own grossness as opposed to someone else's dirty gunk and dead bugs inside.  Sigh.  Oh well.  That's life in Hayseed County.  I guess I will just be happy that we finally got one.  Zack went in over 2 weeks ago and paid for the water/sewer/garbage and the lady said they would bring a can within a few days.  A few days passed, no can.  Zack went back in, and was met with a "they haven't brought that yet?"  Well fast forward another week and many more visits in to check on things and many more "they haven't brought that yets?"  We were getting frustrated.  I mean it's HOT here, really, really, hot, like 105 degrees hot and there our garbage is sitting out there in our backyard festering in the sun.  Gross. I mean there was an army of flies forming that would soon be big enough to carry our house away! So finally the woman drove by on Friday and stopped because Zack was outside and she said, "no garbage can still?" Of course not, she said the garbage guy brought one, but couldn't find our address and so he ended up dropping it off at someone else's house.  ARG.  How can you not find our address?  There are like 5 streets in our little po-dunk town.
Anyway, Zack went in on Monday to remind her to call the people.  And finally today we got our glorious used garbage can.  Now we can at least contain our sweltering stinky garbage!  Yipee.