Tree sap and play time

I promise to get back to sharing some of our learning games and such soon (by next week). Time is a bit short right now so I will just share a few pictures I took the other day (before the temps dropped). We put on winter coats and gloves outside today. :(

Zee loves to touch everything. I love her chubby little fingers!


Pictures of Travis playing more football (doubt that surprises anyone).
I managed to get a picture of the ball in the air this time!





Girls playing house.
They got tons of visitors that day.

I want to move the play house to another part of our yard. I think you can tell that it is under a pine tree so they get lots of buggy visitors and they sometimes get into tree sap. My children love the tree, pine needles, pine cones, and buggy visitors so they don't want the house moved.


Demi saw one of her old cars in the garage and insisted that she isn't too big for it and said she would be happy to clean it up (it was VERY dirty) so she could ride it.


Here she is trying to get it to go. She is WAY to big for this little car!She had to stand up and walk it to move. LOL!

Here she is walking it again. She walked it all over the yard insisting she isn't too big for it. I am happy she doesn't want to grow up too fast.After giving up on driving the little car she decided to protect us from any evil lurking in the yard.

I doubt you can tell from this picture but she CAN NOT SEE in front of her!!! I don't know if she doesn't know how to wear the helmet or if she shuts her eyes when she has it on (she likes to walk around with her eyes shut) she wanders around bumping into things and falls down! here she is holding the sword out waving it from side to side to feel for anything in front of her.
This is the look on her face once he hit the old log in the yard. She really had no idea she was near the log.
Here is another story about this huge log laying near the playhouse. I noticed Travis was working at it but I didn't know what he was doing.


I saw him measure and hammering. I was thinking that hammering nails was a good activity (good for hand strength). I really thought he was just hammering nails into the log. He has been known to do stuff like that.
When he finished he asked me if he and Demi could eat outside at the new picnic table.


LOL! I felt bad that I wasn't able to see his hammering and realize he was building a table! It might be the smallest picnic table I have ever seen but that is also a very small house next to the table. OK, I can picture you all looking at Demi sitting at it and saying how can a mom not see that is a picnic table. Just scroll up again and look at Travis in the first 2 pictures and you will be able to see that until Demi sat down in front of it this looked NOTHING like a table! I think this was the third board he put on it so to me it looked like he was pounding nails into a log! I know now tat they have a picnic table they will NEVER let me move that playhouse! I think this is so CUTE!!! BUT I think I am now doomed to years of sap covered play clothes. The up side is I have a reason to keep sewing!

OH! I wanted to say thank you to everyone who left a comment or wrote me emails! I had no idea so many people looked at my blog! I was shocked to get so many emails. Once my hubby is back to work and I de-germ my house (wipe down everything he has touched or coughed on) I will take some time to post some of our newer inside learning games. I can only do this on sunny days because my camera is on it's last leg and will not take pictures in my house if I don't have enough natural light comming in the windows. I can't afford a new camera right now so I have to try to make the best of the one I have.

I got many emails asking about my sewing patterns and tutorials on my craft blog. I will get back to sharing some of my sewing patterns starting next week craft. By the end of next week I will have at least one pattern posted to share (I hope to have more than that up by then but even if life stays crazy I can get one up). I am working on finishing up a couple projects for friends with my small amount of free time I have this week (only have a couple hours of work left to do to finish). My hubby is home sick with a bad cold. This week having a sick hubby, 3 children, housework, homeschooling, and a couple old projects needing to be finished will take up most of my free time this week. Two people wrote asking about my old links and patterns on my my craft blog and I did get a free minute to look at my blog and I can see that many of my old patterns and pictures are no longer working. I just realized this is because I had some of them on yahoo pictures and I lost them when yahoo pictures shut down. I don't know if I still have all my old pictures and PDF pattern files BUT my youngest is still in diapers so I can redo most of that stuff it just might not be exactly the same because I don't ever do the same thing exactly the same twice. Zee could always use some new diapers and I am always looking for reasons to sew so this will be no problem to fix. I will get that fixed sometimes in the next two weeks.

I hope you all can read and understand what I am writing. It is late. I am tired. It has been a long day and I am worried if I wait until tomorrow to read this over I might forget to publish this (I forget to hit publish button a lot).

Time to Vote

Here are the children all excited on the sofa with shoes on waiting for Rob to get home so we could all go vote as a family.

We live far away from the city so out in my neck of the woods we still vote on paper ballots. I took Travis in the booth with me when I voted. I then had Demi drop my ballot in the box. Once she saw my paper drop down in the metal box she YELLED "I VOTED! DADDY I VOTED!" She was skipping and singing all happy about voting. She had everyonein the place laughing!


Going out to vote was just the beginning of our evening. We came home turned on the TV. Cooked a pizza. Made a ton of copies of our sample ballot. The sample ballot we got when we went out to vote. We gave it to Travis to fill out. He put it in with his school work. We spent a lot of time teaching our children about all the candidates so we felt he was well informed and able to make up his own mind. I must admit I didn't look at his ballot yet but I plan to keep it for years from now. After he filled his sample ballot. He asked for a voting box and the big election began. Children are so funny with this kind of thing! Rob and I watched the TV and the children ran a big election. At first I heard things like we have a vote for Mc Cain and one for Obama. Then I heard one vote for Travis and one for Demaris. One hour later I heard Sleeping Beauty and a Starwars clone both started some ground roots write in campaigns. I think all the princess ran for president, VP, and congress. LOL! They had Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Green party, some independents, and even a newly formed pink party (Demi's choice) by the end of the night. I had to go get the camera because it was so cute for me to ignore and not capture in pictures. I now wish I would have been able to get some video of it.

They thought about how they wanted to cast the votes.

Took time and carefully marked ballots.

Took care in handling ballots.

Then dropped the ballots in the box.
Here is a picture of Demi acting as a voting official. She is keeping an eye on the ballot box to prevent tampering. We did have some cases of ballot tampering.This is a picture of the ballot box early in the night. I think they filled it to the top with votes by 10 pm (the 50th or so election of the night).

We closed our poles at 10:30 PM. That is a late night for my children. Everyone camped out in the living room with the TV on. I am the only one still up. I am listening to the TV and taking this time to blog. Everyone else is sleeping at my feet. I have a feeling my children are going to be running some new elections tomorrow. I think they will be opening the poles and covering close races for days (maybe even weeks from now).Goodnight everyone!

Found my Monday pix!

I took the camera outside with us on Monday. We have been finishing up our school very early every day so we get hours in the afternoons to play outside. We try to make the most of fall because very soon winter will be here and we will have to spend more time inside. On this day I got to toss the football around with Travis (I am not as good at doing this as Rob but I try). I played pretend with Demi. I explored our big world with Zee. After all that I found lots of time to snap some pictures of my kids just being kids.

Sisters.....

Every day I feel that I hear a lot of yelling over how one sister is doing the other sister wrong (both of them can get a bit nasty with the other). I sometimes think my girls don't like each other. BUT! When I take a step back and just watch my girls together when I don't hear any fighting I see a wonderful friendship growing between the two.

My silly Demi! LOL!
Zee points at and explores everything. She wants to know what everything is.



My son is such a boy!


This boy runs for hours every day. I would love to have some of his energy!


I think running is in this boy's blood.
Here is Zee full of giggles from the crunching leaves. The crunchy sound and feel from the leaves make her giggle every day. You would think by now she would expect the leaves to crunch but she never does. She giggles like it is the first time she hears them crunch each and every day.
Travis taking some time to show baby sister his football.
He was telling her all about how to play football.




My sweet baby girl!

Travis teaching Zee how to kick the football.

I think Demi must be expecting a lot of company. Can you see all the chairs in her house?

Travis went to visit Demi at her house. I don't think he could fit in the house because it is wall to wall chairs.
Playing in the leaves.

My boy really loves to run.
YUCK! She picked up this stick and got it in her mouth in the 2 seconds it took me to snap her picture. She didn't have a stick when I was focusing the camera.
Demi needed to do some work on her car.
This boy runs and runs!
And this baby falls down in the leaves a lot.


Demi decided to help rake up some leaves.About 2 minutes later she was crying it was too hard to rake the leaves.


Baby Zee decided she would give it a try.

Here you can see Demi happy that her little sister is doing the work for her. LOL!

I hope you all are enjoying the cool, crisp, beautiful days of fall!