June happenings!

What an absolute insane month this has been!! Tom got a chance to take the 2 big kids to the Kenndy Space Center the week after school got out.

That next weekend we had a yard sale to try and get rid of some stuff

Sadly, the kids only made $2.00 at their lemonade stand.

And then, last week...we had a chance to take the 2 big kids to Epcot! We hadn't been yet, so it was a neat chance to do one last Florida thing...and we brought our old friends from seminary (since General Assembly was going on in Orlando at the same time)

the last time we had seen John John was in 2002. We lived down the hall from each other and Kylie and John John were both 3 and Josiah was not quite 2.

We had a great time with John and John John....and were sad to not see the rest of their family.

The kids had a lot of fun! :)

Last weekend we had a girl's night out with some of my church friends and some of my mom's morning out friends....we went to my favorite restaurant in lakeland (bd's), had some cold stone creamery ice cream (yummy) and then went to target and wandered around for a while (only wauchula women...who don't have any shopping choices in town would go to target on a girl's night out!) :) I'm going to miss these ladies.

We celebrated Father's Day last weekend....sooo glad for Tom who is a sweet daddy to our crazy brood.

Our dead grapefruit tree finally all fell down in a rainstorm we had recently. We put the kids to work loading up the wood.

This past week has been our VBS week. We're doing Crocodile Dock and the kids loved going every night.....the twins did a great job in their preschool class and the older kids were able to learn and be reminded of who God is! Fear Not!!

Here's Tom with our friend, Mitch, doing a skit from up front.

The girls, especially, loved the singing and the hand motions to the music.

Leighton fell asleep one afternoon before VBS started. Staying up until 9:30 every night was a challenge.

Eating an Oreo the right way. :)

My happy boy.

It was a really exhausting week for all of us...tonight at dinner AJ couldn't stand it any longer....she fell asleep in the fellowship hall with kids running around her. (I was taking this picture from under the table, poor tired baby)

The boys doing peace out signs. :)

Sweet friends. Aliyah is our across the street neighbor and we will miss having such a sweet friend to play with right across the street...and Hannah has been a blessing to Kylie as well....starting to think about saying goodbye to our friends is really hard.

So...that kind of catches you up on our past month. We have 3 days until we hit the road...Jenner flies down on Monday and then we all load up (minus Tom) and hit the road for N.C. on Tuesday. Please continue to pray for our transition and saying goodbye. Pray for our house to sell....definitely a bit of a stresser. I can't wait to see some of you in NoVA before we head off to our new home in Arkansas!!

Thanks for checking in!!

Kylie's GNI (girl's night in!)

Josiah went camping this weekend with a friend and his family, so we took the opportunity to have a couple girls over to have a GNI for Kylie! We started off with a little purse craft....

Then we went to painting fingernails. (after running around a screaming for a while)
We ate dinner, ran around and screamed a little more, and had some yummy "purse cake" that my friend Lori made.

Did another little craft (decorated baseball hats with sequins and signed each other hats with sharpies)

And ended the evening watching Nancy Drew projected on the wall!

The girls had a ton of fun...Kylie's going to miss her friends when we move. :(

End of the school year!!

Josiah and his best friend, Rawson. Every time they get together at least 2 or 3 hours of their time is spend on legos!
The Beartooth Club boys with Pastor Brook. We had a lunch after church last sunday where the boys put on puppet shows for us with the sock puppets that they had created. So fun. and funny. :)

Josiah and Mrs. Rich at the 2nd grade awards assembly. He got the national physical fitness award and an honor roll award! We are very proud of both kids this year, they did a great job in school.
Kylie and Mrs.Coleman on the last day of school. What a great 3rd grade year Kylie had!! She continues to prove herself built for school. :)

I looked up online how to make hairbows and went crazy with the ribbon and glue gun last night. Probably not what I need to be doing with all the packing that I need to get done, but they turned out really cute...all 3 girls wore a handmade bow in her hair to church this morning!

playing catch up!

We went to Naturefest 2009 a couple weeks ago and one of the things that the kids could do was hold an alligator. Here are Josiah and Kylie taking their turns....

My spunky little Leighton puckering up. :)

A twin moment.

I took the 2 big kids out of school earlier this month (along with a friend) so that they could join us on a trip to the Lakeland common ground playground. We went up in the morning and had a picnic lunch while we were there. The kids had a great time!

Kylie's piano recital was last week. She played and sang a piece, and she was in an ensemble, singing, too. We are very proud of how much she's learned in our two years of taking piano lessons here.
Leighton's last day of TB meds was last thursday!! We were so thankful for Teresa from the health dept. coming by every monday and thursday for 6 months....but we're also very glad that she's not coming by any more. :) Leighton had gotten to running to the opposite side of the house and hiding whenever Teresa would arrive.

Today was water day for the 2nd graders....I brought the little ones by with lunch to watch a little bit and then we went to the 3rd grade award banquet (which I didn't get a picture of b/c of bad lighting).

We have been blessed to have Mrs. Rich as Kylie's 2nd grade teacher and Josiah's 2nd grade teacher. It's been fun to be in the class with our kids and to have relationships with their teachers...we will miss Wauchula Elementary School a lot!

Josiah's class this year.

karate, field trip, field day...etc....

Josiah had another great season of karate at the YMCA this year. He learned enough to earn his yellow belt before our instructor went back to NC for the summer. He has really enjoyed learning karate and we are hoping to find a class for him to get involved in in Arkansas! Kylie even took it this year and had a lot of fun with it, too.

Last friday was a fun, yet crazy day for our family. Josiah's class had a field trip to a blueberry farm (where we rode around the farm and saw how they grew the blueberries) and then to the packing plant (where we took a tour of the inside...which got down to 34 degrees...and saw how they put the picked blueberries on a conveyor belt and got them ready to send to the stores. It was a lot of fun (they got to pick some blueberries at the farm) and very interesting.

That same friday, Kylie's grade was having field day at the school! So, Tom and AJ (after dropping the twins off at a sitter's house) went to the school and watched field day for a little, and helped grill hot dogs for lunch for all the 3rd graders.

The battle of the books competition was this past tuesday evening. There were 6 kids on each of the teams from the 5 elementary schools in hardee county. Kylie's team spent the past two months meeting before school, after school, and some in between learning the ins and outs of the 15 sunshine state ready books for 2008. The competition was set up in a double elimination bracket... with each round having 14 questions about those 15 books. The kids would answer the question with the title and author of the book that the question was referring to. It was an incredibly stressful competition....my stomach hurt most of that night and I was drained by the time we got home. Thankfully, Kylie wasn't that stressed over it. :) Wauchula elementary didn't win (sadly, they went out b/c they didn't answer a question in time...even though they had the right answer)...but they did a great job and we were very proud of them!

The twins have started to really get into dressing up. Here's Leighton in her pretty shoes. Matthias was wearing the pretty shoes with his firefighter helmet earlier, but had them off by the time I got the camera. The latest on Leighton is...I took her to the pulmonologist and she had a chest x-ray which was "the best chest x-ray (the dr.) has ever seen on her!"...which was good news. She has had a cough that she's had a hard time getting rid of, so he increased her flovent prescription with the hopes that that will help over the next month or so. She has been up every night for the past 3 or 4 weeks, usually between 3 and 4 o'clock...the other evening we found her fast asleep in the hallway in front of our bedroom door...usually she opens the door and comes in, but for some reason she didn't that night. Needless to say, tom and i are both exhausted and are hoping for her to return to sleeping through the night normally, soon!

I am blessed to have these 5 sweet, wonderfully different, beautiful children.....what a priviledge to be their mother. And, thanks, Mom for being my mother...and thanks, Rose Marie for being my husband's mother! Happy Mother's Day!!!

He's got the whole world in His hands!

It's a little long, but you have to watch until the end!!

Josiah's circle block kata!