it has begun.......

School is in! And I am tired! Haha, seriously though, I know this is going to be a great year. My kids are awesome, I have a pretty good schedule, and who wouldn't want to work for their dad (especially when he is as cool as mine=).

I have some pictures to post........We went on vacation, the garden is crazy, and Kole started school. Get ready.....cuz here they come.....

Here are the boys, planning out the route to the beach.....OCracoke Island, Outerbanks, NC

WERE THERE!!!! They were running from the waves. Needless to say, we got very wet.

We got a kite to fly too.....it was fun.

This one is definately getting framed.

Seagulls on the ferry boat. We drove our car onto to boat to get to the island. I thought this scene was to perfect not to snap a photo.....

Another cool shot from the dock.

Family photo.....

Blackbeards museum......ARG!!

We found so many shells!

ARG AGAIN!!!!

Kole and I went crabbing! It was so fun!!!!! We caught 2 big ones and lots of little ones. The male blue crab is in this shot!

Family photo on the ferry.

It rained a couple days so we played some card games...it was fun too!

Kole learned to do a back flip and a front flip in our villas pool.

Ocracoke Lighthouse......

We loved the beach!

Now on to my garden.....It exploded while we were on vacation! It is a jungle, in both good and bad ways. Weeds are awful.......but everything is producing so well.

These are watermelon and are now bigger than my head.....if you can imagine...haha. We have 6 of them growing well.

Our HUGE sunflowers.......

I actually just picked all this today. I have gotten baskets and baskets full of produce. We have green beans, gourds, corn, sunflowers, watermelons, pumpkins, tomatoes, potatoes, banana peppers, jalepeno peppers, green bell peppers, carrots, squash, eggplant, onions, and cucumbers. I think thats it....

Zach was in awe......My tomatoes are just going crazy!

I took a canning class this summer as well.....Here are some green beans.

And hot pepper mix.......

Ok Now what you all been waiting for......First day of school for Kole!!! He loved his first day. He says the bus ride is a little boring, but woke up this morning (saturday) and begged to go to kindergarten.......not on a weekend my dear!!!!!

Zach was fixin Koles hair here......

Ready to go! He was up at 6:30 jumping on our bed saying, we are going to miss the bus!!....Get up!!! His bus doesnt come until 7:55.............

There he goes.....I was crying behind the camera! It is hard to let them go......

This is getting back off the bus....

Here he is running towards me yelling, "IT WAS GREAT!!!!!!!!!!"

So anyways, things are good with us. Still recovering from a long, emotional first week of school. I think I am going to go nap now.........

email....

For those who need to add my email address.....

I still have pickle1483@aol.com as my primary address....

But with this site, they made me create a gmail account....

So this site knows me as pickle1483@gmail.com......

So I am assuming, when adding my email so that I can view your blogs, you should use the gmail account, although i never check that account for email, just use it to be on this blog site.

Make sense? Kinda? It confuses me as well=)

Summa time....and the livin' is easy.......

It has been a while. Sorry.

We just got back from Lost River! It was so nice to just chill in the woods, have a fire everynight (sometimes during the day too!), and hike some trails. We rented a little cabin for 3 nights during the 4th weekend. We played I only got 2 pictures of the whole time! It was alot of fun. Kole really enjoyed softball, misty valley (ice cream every night), loblolly trail, and the fire works.
I really missed that place!

This is what most mornings, evenings, and rainy afternoons looked like!

Kole was yelling "I always have to swim alone!" in a sing songy way over and over again when i took this picture. He needs a sibling.

So before lost river, we went to the lake house for the last time=(. It is definately bittersweet for all of us. We have made good memories there.

Kole is becoming an expert boat driver.

We went to swallow falls on this trip as well. Here are a few shots from that.

He was trying to catch the run off from the cliff behind him!

Summer so far has been awesome. I think we might do another vacation, but a week long this time. Just not sure when or where yet. All else is good with our little family. We are definately blessed!

graduation, slip and slide, and other stuff.

Yea, Yea it has been a while.

Sorry.

I keep thinking, today I WILL post something, but there is too much to do and I just haven't gotten to it until now.

So, Kole graduated from Kids R Special last night! He did such a wonderful job singing his songs and "standing like a statue" as he would say! The program was so nice. They had a slideshow of pictures, 4 songs the children sang, words from the teachers, awarded diplomas, and then announced what each kid wanted to be when they grew up! It was too cute!

I have been a little under the weather the past few days. I took a day and a half off of work to recoop. I have a bad ear infection and am on steriods, antibiotics, ear drops, and a few pain meds. I was in so much pain yesterday afternoon, I was crying! I now know what it was like for Kole before the tubes went in.

School is almost over!!!! Just a few weeks left and then summer is on. Still have to get some things planted in the garden and the plan was to do that this week. Hopefully I am feeling well enough tomorrow to do it. When everything gets in, I will post some pictures.

Here are a few picture from recent that I thought you all would like.

Kole made some awesome cookies out of cake mix! They were soooo good! Kole has been into cooking and says he wants to be a chef. He did most everything for these cookies except for dealing with the hot oven. Thats a mommy job.

It is hard to see in this picture but Kole is the third from the left. They were singing one of the songs. They sang Country Roads and it was so sweet. In onf of the songs, the verse was "I'll be friends with you" and Kole pointed right to his Dandaddy! It was so cute and touching, both mom and I cried!

Kole is hugging the director of Kids R Special and receiving his diploma

Here we are after to ceremony. He was so excited! Nana got him a money tree and kole couldn't wait for more money to start growing!!! Haha

This was Kole's graduation present from us. I just took these this morning. He had such a good time on his sponge bob slip and slide!

Water pools at the bottom. I hope he wasn't peeing here.......

So thats all folks. I am gong to rest up today and try to get to feeling better! Mr. John's (Zach's Dad) Bday party tonight, saturday a possible bachette party (if I am up to it) and then a few days at the lake house. Can't wait.

P.S. Please keep Zach's dad in your prayers over the next few days. He had a brain scan this morning because there was something abnormal going on. We will know more in a few days so I will try to keep ya'll updated.

Spring

I love Spring. Not as much as Fall, but I do love getting back the color in nature. It is exciting.

I drew this on my white board of Rivesville. Trees on the brain.

I have been on a plant kick lately. And by lately I mean since Jan. I bought an a granny smith apple tree and planted it on a warmer day (above 30) in Jan. It is actually still alive! I was a little surprised. It is budding and look healthy and the deer haven't eaten it yet. I borrowed a tomato cage from my inlaws and wrapped mesh around it. They haven't figured out how to get into it yet.



So after the first tree, I couldn't stop thinking about trees. I bought a few more and now we have 8 redbuds, 4 apple trees, and 1 pear tree. I want an orchard in the back yard. That would be awesome.



After the tree phase, i went through a seed phase. Here are some pictures.

This first picture is 4 eggplant seedlings! They are doing really well. Better than I thought they would actually.

This is crimson clover. It came with an herb packet of seeds from ebay. I don't really know what you use it for or what it would look like. Its very bushy and looks like....well clover. Go figure=)

The middle is crimson clover and the other two are peonies. They are doing ok. We will see as they are still very newly sprouted.

These are my baby tomato plants! These didn't start well but when I moved them under this light they just shot right up. If you can see, the one is under the lamp shade! Can't wait to get these in the garden. These seeds came with a kit from the dollar store=).

These are the tomato plants from that same kit. I have it rigged up in the kitchen until the weather gets better and I can hang them outside. They did really well at first but now, they aren't doing so well. They have stopped growing and some of the leaves near the bottom of each plant are dying and falling off. I have been spraying them with epsom salts and I might have over done it. Any Suggestions???

This is close up of the above plants. The leaves are yellowing and they definately are not as big as the others. These sprouted first and were doing much better, but then they just quit.....

So anyways, if anyone out there has any suggestions, fill me in! It might be the epsom salt and water mix i was spraying, or something else. I just want tomatoes!

Zach is putting up with my planting frenzy pretty well. He just chuckles and lets me do my thing. We just got a new building from Lowes to replace the one that got blown away in the storm. Zach is pumped about it. It is much bigger and ncier than the old one. He went today and got a zero turn lawn mower as well. That boy and his toys. Atleast the lawn will be mowed and we will have a place to put the mower=). I am happy about that!

Kole man is doing great. He is reading now and is very good at it! We are thinking about putting him in soccer soon. Karate was fun, but after 6 weeks, they repeat the lessons and I think that he is geting bored with it. We will finish this session up and move on to something that can keep him moving and interested!!!!

I ended up not geting RIFed!! That was such good news for us! It was such a stressful time not knowing if I was going to have a job next year or not. I am glad it is over for now. We are going to push for a bill that requires FACS to be offered in middle school so this doesn't happen again. We will see what happens next year.

So here is the update my friends. Enjoy!

The Family Bird House

I am stressed. There are many things going on in our family's life and I am just a little overwhelmed by it all.

What do you do when you are stressed? What I wanted to do was pull the drapes closed, turn off the lights, curl into a tiny ball, and never leave the house again. But this is not what we did. Instead, we decorated a bird house.

This was really fun and lifted my mood. It was just what I needed to forget about the grown up, stressful, life changing events of recent and live in the moment. I was able to enjoy my family, have fun, and be creative. This was just what I needed.

Here are some pictures of our awesome bird house. Those birds are super lucky to have such a talented family living near by=)

The house was premade but in thr rough. Just needed some lovin' to fancy it up! As you can see, it is a gas station for birds.

Even excavators need gas......

Rust-eze, will get your bumper/beak sparkling!

Even spidey stops by the bird pumps.

Kole was so proud of himself. He did most of the painting. Zach and I just helped a little!

I am so thankful for moments like these, where we really can enjoy each other as a family.

Wind storms, Court Case, and Karate!

There has been alot of goings on lately! I thought I should probably do an update so that I wouldn't get stuck with another 6 month one=).

We had a huge wind storm last week! It knocked down part of our huge tree in the front yard and narrowly missed the power line and house. We also lost our metal shed behind the house. We found it the next morning crumpled in the woods about 75 yards from where it had been! The wind just picked it up and threw it........crazy. We also were without power for a few days. No fun. We were so bored and it was so dark at night....and quiet. I didn't realize how much ambient noise is in the house until we were without electric.

Here are some photos from that adventure:

Here is where the shed used to be. You can see the metal crushed in the woods.

Here it is up close.

Dad, John, and Zach are trying to pull the hanging dangerous limb. Thank goodness no one got hurt!

In other news, we had our court hearing on Wednesday to determine a temporary parenting plan concerning Kole. I don't want to write details on the web, but mainly it went pretty well. Call me or email me if you want to know more than that! I am more that happy to share it with family and friends....just not random cyber space people. I just wanted to thank everyone for praying for us about this situation. I felt more calm than I anticipated I would and I am sure it was because God answered those prayers.



School is going well. My students are now in the relationship unit. It is so interesting to learn about my students. I am really enjoying teaching them better ways to communicate with their families, siblings, and friends. Zach is going great. He is working very hard with his job right now, pushing himself to the max. He is just so good at what he does! They finally broke ground on the transitional housing project that he has been working on for such a long time now. He has really babied this project and I know that it is such an acomplishment to get it to the building stages. He is such a wonderful person and I am so glad that he is mine=).




Kole-man is doing well. He has been counting his "good" days at school because Zach has told him that when he reaches 100 he can have a puppy. We will see how long that will take...ha. Honestly, though, Kole is doing really well at school. He is reading!!!! I couldn't believe how well either. He had told me he was practicing reading at school and he knew some words but when he brought home the Dick and Jane book and read through the whole thing......I was amazed. He really sounds words out and figures them out! Once he has sounded them out he just remembers them as "sight" words. I knew he was smart, but man, I just am so impressed with how fast he is catching on to this. He has already read through the second Dick and Jane book and he can's wait to start the third. Being an avid reader myself, I love it!!!!!




Kole also finished up his karate class first session on Wednesday evening. He did really well! He got an award and was so proud of himself. Here are a few pictures and a video.

Here is the whole class!

Kole getting his award

"Sparring"