Patriotic Pictures

Here are some pics from the 4th of July. We had gone to watch fireworks outside the Big League Dreams Stadium. We were running late, so I didn't get my patriotic pictures before we left, so they had to be in the dark afterwards. This is in our front yard.

The two boys in the front are about to pass out.

Kellen always has to go his own way. No, he cannot just sit where you tell him to. He has to move just to spite you, I swear.

And there he is back in front. He's fine as long as he gets to decide, I guess. Look at my sweet little Liam's face. I just love that kid! (Love 'em all for sure!) The four in the back have such sweet smiles on their faces. They really had fun watching the fireworks.

Texas Weather

For those of you who live in colder climates than I do, perhaps you will have no sympathy. It's true that Texas doesn't get snowed in, and we never get below zero. We do have a couple of weeks in the 20s, which doesn't seem that cold to some of you, but that's a big swing from being 107 during the summer. Okay. Anyway, it's definitely warmer here than most other places I have lived. However, we do manage to get ice and hail storms at least once or twice a year. Well, this year we got one in April with straight line winds of 70 mph (which means it's as strong as a tornado, but going straight instead of in a circle) along with golf ball sized hail -- which I did not take a picture of. I was a little more interested in this.





Yes, that is our trampoline that we just got for Christmas in the neighbor's yard. And yes, it did knock down his fence and slice his rain gutter. So several of the neighbors came to help plop it back into our yard and put our neighbor's fence back up. I dragged the sucker to the other corner of the house and jammed it between our house on one side, the fence on the other, and the front-facing fence on a third side. Surely, this would keep it in our yard. But no, like a runaway dog, it hopped the fence to the other neighbor's house the next night when we had high winds again -- this time doing no damage besides scraping a little of the grit off some of their shingles. I did not take a picture of that for some reason. My neighbor did, but she never emailed it to me. If I can get it from her, I'll post it another time.



This next picture is just our back yard on July 8th of this year. It doesn't usually rain this late in the year. We don't see rain usually in June, and here we are in a July downpour. The kids had camped out the night before and were planning to camp out again. No such luck. Brandon and I ended up having to use all my towels several times to soak up all the water that ended up inside this tent. If you look closely, you can see the raindrops. Texas weather is crazy.

Who was that masked man anyway?

Kellen is always telling us who we are. The kids like to play a game where they say that they are someone different in the family. Brandon will say, "I'm Liam," and so forth. Kellen is very certain that no one can be anyone else. "No, you Brandon," he'll say. Well, sometimes, Kellen is actually someone else.

"You Dad. You Kenzie."

"I'n Spi-er-nan."

Why, yes, that is "The Apple Dumpling Gang" playing in the background. Who knew you could still rent that thing? The kids were loving it.

I decided to do a second blog for just my kids. I want that to be separate from my projects. The projects can be available for anyone to see, but this blog is just going to be so those of you who are far from us can still see what's going on. There's a lot to catch up on, and I don't know how much time I'll have, but I have wanted to do this for a while. I'm just rambling now, which those of you who know me will not be surprised about. Anyhoo, no pics yet. I still need to get all set up. By the way -- the crafty blog is www.thebossyquilter.blogspot.com for those of you who are interested. More later.