Happy 10th Birthday Jared!

Jared at his Aunt Kara's wedding in 2004.

Jared has really grown. Still, it's hard to believe 10 years have gone by. We love Jared's huge smile with dimples. Jared is really into Legos right now, especially Star Wars Legos. He will spend hours building star ships with details like escape hatches and lights. He also still enjoys art in any form and has recently created a whole nature series with oil pastels. Lately he has spent a lot of time talking about what he wants to be when he grows up and he can't decide between a Lego designer, an architect, an artist, or illustrator. He has been making up his own comic books, usually involving Legos somehow. Jared also enjoys anything funny, especially Bill Cosby and Abbot and Costello. He can recite most of their acts word for word. We love that Jared still thrives on hugs from Mom and Dad, is a huge help with his sisters, and loves to spend time with his many friends at Cub Scouts and workshops.

Humanitarian Yard Sale

After confiscating many clothing and toy items from the kid's bedroom floors, we had a family meeting to discuss what we should do about this problem. Part of the discussion was that there are many children in the world who do not have nice toys and clothes and after the recent disasters overseas, there are many children who do not have anything. While trying to decide how we could give some of our things to those children who have nothing, Chris suggested that we could have a yard sale and give the money to them instead. What a great idea. Our church's humanitarian services are known world wide and the church always responds to give aide after natural disasters, so we decided that we would give the proceeds from the sale to the LDS Humanitarian Fund. We made that decision on Sunday night. Monday, I set out to find a location for our sale as our home is off the beaten path. On Tuesday, we still didn't have a location so I sent an e-mail out to several of our friends inviting them to join us and asking for ideas for a location. Someone suggested the church and on Wednesday I got permission from the Bishop to use the church. Thursday and Friday were spent going through all our clothes, toys and household items to see what we could sell as well as hanging up fliers at local businesses. Saturday morning we woke up before the sun was up, packed the Suburban and headed to the church. The event was well attended by the community even though rain threatened the whole day. Several families from the church also donated items to sell, brought baked goods to sell, or helped to run the sale. We are so grateful to all those who helped and happy to say that we made $171.80 that will all be donated to the humanitarian fund.

The kids helped to set out all the donated items and then stuck around all day to help with clean-up too.

Finally, a Monarch!

Two years ago for Christmas Aunt Kara gave the kids a butterfly house. With the house, which is a net-like cylinder, came a card and instructions to fill out and send in the card to receive monarch caterpillars and the food with which to feed them. Shortly after having received this wonderful gift, I discovered that one of the girls had eaten the card (Yes, our girls eat paper). No sweat I decided, we have plenty of milkweed in our yard, we will just collect the caterpillars off the milkweed in the summer, feed them milkweed and voila! monarchs, right? Wrong. I searched and searched, but to no avail. Not a monarch caterpillar in sight. While digging for the garden in the spring we discovered several moth pupa and put them in the house. We did enjoy watching them wiggle and hatch. In the fall, we came across many wooly worms which we also put in the house and enjoyed as they metamorphed into cocoons and then moths. But still no butterflies. So this summer I was determined to find a monarch in some form or another. As it so happens, while we were down in Florida visiting Aunt Kara, there were monarch caterpillars devouring her milkweed plant. Would you believe, we actually put two of them in a plastic container and drove them all the way from Fort Lauderdale back to Virginia. When we arrived home there was only one left, but that's better than none. Now, I would have loved to have put the little guy straight into the butterfly house, but over the last year and a half, the house had developed a hole in it (thanks to our cat). I had to settle for putting the caterpillar outside on our milkweed in hopes to find his crysallis later. Periodically, I searched, but with no luck until finally one day when I was working in the yard I found this... Isn't it beautiful! And not three feet away was a second one. Naturally I collected them both and carefully moved them to the butterfly house. We weren't sure how long it would take, but a couple weeks later the first butterfly hatched. About a week later, so did the second one.

Here is one of the monarchs in the butterfly house, drying his wings.

We didn't get to see either of them come out of their crysallis, but we thoroughly enjoyed it just the same. We let them go as soon as their wings were dry and we love to watch for monarchs flying in the yard and wonder if they are ours.

A Smarty Party

Krystal turned 5 on September 27th. On Saturday, (the 26th) she had a birthday party. Inspired by the candy (Smarties) and the abundance of school supplies that I bought on sale, what a better party for a budding Kindergartner than a Smarty Party! The first item of business was getting all pretty for the party. Krystal did her own hair, she's really into that right now, and had me paint her nails.

Amber was not to be left out of all the fun, with pretty nails and wearing her sissy's sunglasses.

Once the four students arrived, they were directed to chairs that had the first letter in their name and they each decorated their letter and then cut it out. We found out that for Pre-K and Kindergartners, some letters were easier than others to cut out, but they all did a great job.

Jared wanted to be the teacher's aide for the party so I gladly put him in charge of the games. He came up with three games. The first of which is Musical Apples, like Musical Chairs but with apple pads on the floor instead.

The next game was Pin the Glasses on the Teacher. Jared drew the teacher and the babysitter helped the girls make the glasses. Here is Clarissa trying to peek while putting her glasses on the teacher. Silly girl.

The last game was Teacher Says, like Simon Says, but well...Jared was a teacher instead and made the girls do all kinds of funny actions. They loved it.

Finally it was time to open presents. Krystal loved all her cards and gifts. This is a game that one of her friends gave her that went along with the school theme of the party. It is pretend school and the kids absolutely love it. I think I might retire as their teacher and just let them teach each other. Just kidding.

Krystal wanted chocolate cake, which turned out to be brownie cake because I got the wrong mix, but she loved it anyway. This picture is actually of her blowing out the candles the second time because the first time Amber got so excited she blew them out before Krystal had the chance. We thought it was funny, but Krystal didn't. After cake, the girls all went to Krystal's room and played Barbies for the last 30 minutes of the party while Chris and I enjoyed a blissful moment of looking through the ads in the newspaper. Then, we sent them home with goody bags full of school supplies and Smarties and I give each of the students an A+ for perfect party behavior, including my four teacher's aides.