5 Miles

I was told I haven't updated the blog enough lately, so this long weekend is giving me some time to update the blog. We're up at my parents house and while we have internet, I don't have access to all the things that have been keeping me busy (AWANA and MOPS).  So during this down time I thought I'd post a number of pictures I have on the computer, waiting to share with you…so in this post and a few below you'll get some updates on things we started this summer.

As I look back on our summer we had a few big things happen:

Alex–Potty trained. Mostly.

There are accidents at times, but for the most of time he's doing a great job. He kept dry the WHOLE trip to PA and back, and had no problem using all the rest stop restrooms, I feel that's a big deal!

Will–Rides a 2 wheeler with NO training wheels!

I had anticipated a slow summer. We had no big trips planned, so we'd be home and relaxing and playing outside all the time time, right?

We ended up spending weekends in St. Louis and Chicago (for a beautiful wedding), going to West Virgina for a retreat for members of our team of Kenya Team, and going out to PA for Grandpa Miles' funeral.  Between church and MOPS playdates, we stayed busy. And I'm sounding like a true adult saying, "Where did the summer go?"

One of the parks near us has a fun playground area, plus a good portion of wooded area with a trail and creek running through it.  So we visited it one day and enjoyed the playground a bit. 

And, about the time I was getting bored, the kids were ready to go for a hike. This is the creek near by.

And they had great fun playing in the creek!

One last fun picture of Will on a different day, at a different park.

Finally–the before and after pictures of our house! If you squint really closely, you might see a change!

Before:

Can you tell the black paint is chipped and peeling?

After:

Yea! Shiny new paint and nice new numbers.

Before–the garage:
Can you tell the paint is chipping and peeling on the door? It was really bad close up.

After, the garage:
Yea! Painted door!

Before, door:
Oh, this one does a good job showing the peeling paint! And the plain door.

After–the whole house/door:
You can't tell too easily but we painted the door black…it looks good with the black shutters, hard to see with the white screen door though.

Here's the during:

Once that got done, we put in some flowers among the bushes. The boys helped me dig the holes for those.

Alex had more fun looking for earthworms then digging.

Today/Yesterday (Tuesday) was Will's birthday. We really didn't plan much of a celebration–first, his party was supposed to be last week, but has been postponed until after Labor Day weekend. Second, we had agreed to host this evening a get together with for our Kenya Missions Team. But I still wanted to make his actual birthday a little special, so we did do a few things for him.

We started off by giving him his birthday gift from us. We set it up the night before and had it out for when he got up in the morning.

It's from Fisher Price and called a GeoTrack. This is a plastic train track/road system with remote controlled trains. It's an older version then you can find in stores now (for those who might be in the know about these toys), but it doesn't matter to Will and that's what counts. We actually got the whole set (the main part and several extensions) from some friends cleaning out their basement. It looks brand new, just not in the box–that's why we wanted to set it up the night before!

He was thrilled with the surprise–I was not surprised he noticed it right away.

He was nice and shared it with his brother. The boys played with this ALL day. I made them go outside for a few hours after nap/rest time, but then they were back in and playing with it after supper. Alex started to play with other toys but Will was still enjoying the trains. It was wonderful, it gave me plenty of time to clean the house and make the meal for tonight.  They even played with it most of the time during our meeting.

When Mommy is busy doing laundry & cleaning up a house after being gone for a week, she goes the easy way for a cake. I didn't want to make a large cake becase we'll be doing that for his party and I knew people would be bringing desserts for our meeting tonight. But I wanted a cake just for Will, so we found one at the store today, added the special candle Grandma Harbin gave him and a quick decoration by me. (Yes, I'll take the blame fro the blob of a 5…I'll do better on his next cake, I promise!)

He didn't seem to mind. It'll probably be the only store bought cake he gets (I'm a bit embarassed to admit it was on the marked down shelf, but that's the only way I could justify it!).

He did ask me around supper time why no one came over for his birthday today. I reminded him when his party will be and told him people would be coming over then. He's so smart about some things, I forget that he doesn't "get" some of these things right away! Anyway, that made me glad we'd planned a few things for him. So, now we have a 5 year old!

Here are the pictures I managed to get. Sadly, I left my camera charging cord at home and the camera died so I didn’t get as many as I’d like (normally I take lots and pick the best. This time I only have a few, so I couldn’t be picky). Click on the picture below to see all the pictures.

Grandpa Miles' Funeral

It was a nice service, from what I could tell. I spent most of the time keeping Alex quite. Most of the beginning was remembering Grandpa Miles’ life, different people stood up and shared memories. There were lots of laughs and people seemed to enjoy hearing the kids laughing along (though many times they had no idea what they were laughing at). Then the pastor spoke a brief bit, but I was out with Alex. Several hymns were sung, which made Will happy (I had said their might be songs and he wanted to know when they’d be). The piano was quite out of tune. Karl’s reaction to the first few notes brought a laugh out of me.

We did go to the grave site, James and his brothers were pallbearers. The boys were most interested in why we had a flag on our car and Will wanted to know if we could keep it. James asked “Do you really want to keep a flag that says ‘funeral’ on it?” and Will said “No”.

It was interesting to talk with Will about what it means to be dead. I told him the Great-Grandpa was NOT asleep, but the part of Great-Grandpa that talks and laughs is gone. Will said “That’s his spirit, it’s in heaven. He’ll get a new body!” Alex was a bit confused when we said Great-Grandpa would be put in the ground, he thought we’d put him in the ground under the carpet in the funeral home.

The afternoon and evening were spent at the farm, in a nice relaxing time.

We've been in the midst of some crazy times here.  Saturday we got a call we'd been expecting for a few weeks…James' grandfather, who'd been pretty ill, passed away. The funeral was scheduled for this Friday. While some chose to come out for a long weekend, we decided to go out a bit earlier to give the kids a few days break from the drive. So Tuesday we drove out to PA. It was a long trip (13 hours–a new trip record!), but we did it and (drum roll please) Alex managed to keep his underwear dry the WHOLE time!

We've been staying with James' brother in Philly. Wednesday we went to a near by orchard to pick corn for supper and some pears (Will has been asking for pears for awhile and I've made him wait for them to be in season).  Here are a few pictures of our adventures:

Right after Alex climbed into the wagon, Serena started to cry. She's rather picky about sharing her space.

James shows off our harvest!

That corn was heavy, so Alex and Will helped Micah out.

Micah shows his embarassed pear (those are ones ripe enough to pick–they're blushing!)

The boys heading back to the car.

"They get to do it in their underwear."

"That doesn't look like fun."

"When I get older, maybe I'll do that."

Alex came out of his room, still sleepy-eyed from his nap. He was rubbing his eyes and then he mumbled something. I asked him "What?" and he said, this time a bit more awake, "I had a BIG bless you!" 

It took me a moment before I could ask "Do you mean a big sneeze?"  He said "yes".

We worked on painting the front door, shutters and garage door. I don't have 'after' pictures yet because we're not quite done. But while we had the paint out, we painted a chair made for Will. Uncle Tom made this two years ago, and we finally got around to painting it.  Will REALLY wanted to help paint it. I was hoping to have James use the sprayer on it while he was painting the garage door. When I said that, Will started to cry. I had NO idea it meant so much to him! So we let him do the first coat with a brush and then we'll do another coat with the sprayer.

We'll just say it was good Dad was there to smooth out the major globs every few minutes.

Finished, with almost as much paint on him as the chair!