First Day of School

Today was Connor's first day of high school. Amazing that he is already at that stage in his life. He seemed to enjoy his first day...talked to a few of the kids that he had met during soccer practices the last couple of days. Today and tomorrow are half days...I think they are trying to ease the freshman into high school life. He was only annoyed with one teacher today because they got homework in that class. He made me laugh as he was telling me about it.

After 3 trips to school and 2 to Subway, Alex finally has his parking permit for this year. He almost didn't get it today because I almost missed that he needed a copy of his license (I was going to pick up the permit for him because he had to work) but it did require an extra trip to Subway to get said license so it could be copied.

Connor had soccer practice tonight where he scored his first goal. Yay!

Kenzie had soccer referee training tonight, which Connor was supposed to go as well. I'm actually not sure how it went because I forgot to ask her when she got home. Oops. I got distracted by her request to sleep over at a friends house. We then got into a discussion on why she couldn't...nothing bad on her part, will just need her help with the kiddos tomorrow.

Andy and Alex are driving to Pennsylvannia tomorrow to pick up a couple of church pews. We've talked forever about getting a church pew to use at our kitchen table but have never been able to. I happened to be searching online recently and found a couple for a great price...except they won't work at the table due to them being slightly curved instead of straight. But we are planning on using one in our living room to replace the sofa, that is currently being used as a wall...no railing at the stairs due to a remodeling project many moons ago where we took down the iron railing with the intention of putting up a wooden one. Somehow that has never happened. But the plans are tomorrow to move the sofa to the kids playroom to get rid of the junky chairs in there and put the pew where the sofa is and that will act as a wall at the stairs. Hopefully it will look okay. The pews we are getting are lovely and it's quite ironic that they are numbered 1 & 2 as when we go to church we almost always sit in the 1st or 2nd pew. This is a pic of what they look like. The gentleman we are purchasing them was so kind as to clean them off some and polish them with Murphy's Oil.

With some more cleaning and polishing, they are going to look awesome. I can't wait to see what they look like in person. I'm not quite sure what we are going to do with the second pew but for the price we just couldn't pass it up.

Alex actually had to work today. He almost never has to work during the day, always the evening shift but they asked him if he could help during the day today. Normally that would not be a problem except for it being Connor's first day of school and Alex needing his parking pass. Everything worked out but there was a lot of juggling going on today. He did have some excitement towards the end of his shift. Apparently the bank across the street from their store got robbed today. The cops went around to each of the businesses asking if they had seen anything. As Alex was leaving, he saw a guy getting arrested at one of the stores down the street. I have to assume that it was related to the robbery.

Work was crazy today...I wonder if it's a full moon, I know it's getting close. I feel like I was jumping between 10 different things today and didn't get a single one done. Bad thing is I'm not sure what they all were now so I'm not even sure I'll be able to finish them tomorrow.

The weather here has been lovely the last two days. Windy, cool..has actually been chilly enough to wear jeans in the morning and a light jacket outside while playing. It's great weather for staying in bed and snuggling under a blanket. Unfortunately, with these munchkins, there no chance of snuggling under covers for very long. LOL

August 19th... A day to give...

A day to remember...

A day to speak out...

All children are miracles.

Take a moment to go over to Day of Hope to read about what this day means. I'm remembering the little ones that I've lost too early.

4 Moms Open House: Living Areas

This is week 3 of the month long Open House tour hosted by 4 Moms. You can visit the 4 mom’s pics here for Kimberly at Raising Olives, here for the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room, here for Connie at Smockity Frocks, and here for KimC at Life in a Shoe.

This weeks tour focus is on Living Areas.

Our first living area is the Living Room that houses our piano...and pretty much nothing else. ;) The recliner you see is much loved and after 8 kids is almost completely worn out. The duck pics that you see here were our anniversary presents to ourselves many moons ago.

This is a crucifix that Andy's grandfather made and had hanging in their house for many years. It's made out of brass and has one of those old time soda can tabs as the hanger.
This corner house religious items that are made out of olive wood from Bethlehem.
This is our family photo wall. Every time we have a child, the photos need to get rearranged so they are still symmetrical.
I love this throw! We got it after seeing Noah at Sights and Sounds theater in Pennsylvannia. My mom made the lighthouse stained glass piece that is on the right hand side of the pic.

Next up would be what I guess you could call a rec room. The room houses a pool table that we got as a family Christmas present a few years ago...
a foosball table that we've had forever (back left of this pic). Up until a couple of weeks ago, it also contained a small air hockey game but the kids played that so much that it literally fell apart. In the back right hand corner you can just barely make out a desk. I love this desk! It was my grandfathers and it's huge. Right now, my daughter has taken it over but once it gets refinished, one of these days, I'm taking it back. ;)
This is our photo wall...it contains all the kids birth pictures on the bottom, their most recent pic on top and a group shot of all the kids on the far left.


Next is our family room, the room we spend most of our time in...this room always comes with at least a few munchkins. ;)
Hiding under the blanket along the left hand wall of this picture is a beautiful table chess table. We got this as one of our family Christmas presents too.

And here is a peak into our classroom...this room also comes with at least one munchkin. :) The bookcases, tables and red chairs in this room came from when my company remodeled our work areas. I wish now that I'd gotten more. There's actually another bookcase that you can't see in these pics so there is plenty of storage in here.

I have no idea why this last pic turned out so small... the shelf on the wall is homemade an holds trophies that the kids have earned thru various activities...mostly softball and piano awards.
That completes the tour of our living areas. Thanks for visiting. Be sure to check out everyone else's pics by clicking on one of the links at the beginning of the post.

Creature of Habit

It always amazes me how young children can be and still know the routine. We almost always hang our clothes on the line to dry but it's been raining all day so we had to throw a couple loads in the dryer. Adam loves to help with clothes so he was watching as I removed the clothes from the dryer. He then grabbed one side of the basket while I grabbed the other. He then attempted to carry the basket to the outside door, while I was heading for the inside door. A tug of war resulted at which point he got really mad at me when I would not let him take the basket of clothes outside to be hung up. He didn't understand that the clothes were already dry and ready to be folded...he just knew they were clothes in a basket coming out of a machine in the laundry room and that they should be heading outside. LOL Poor little one...so tough to be almost 2. ;)

Wash Out

Today ended up being a complete wash out for everything we had planned. Kenzie wanted to have a picnic at Ferry Point...she even made brownies for it last night...but it's been raining since sometime during the night, so no picnic. We'll have to try for Friday but the brownies will be long gone by then. ;)

Connor was supposed to have tryouts tonight for the hish school soccer team but that also got rained out.

Tyler is the only one that was able to do his activity...lucky for him karate is held inside. ;)

The temperature was wonderful today...actually on the cool side...but tomorrow I'm hearing we'll be right back into the heat. Lovely. I'm ready for fall. It's been an incredibly hot summer so far.

I was glad to be working from home today as traffic was a mess. I'd love to do more days at home but I've only been able to talk them into 2. I guess that's better than nothing so I won't complain too much.

I think I'll actually try to read some tonight...currently reading Stork Club...after i vaccum downstairs and fold a couple loads of laundry.

Deja vu

I'm thinking as I looked at the clock at 3am this morning that I've been here before...and pretty recently. Only this time it was a little girl that was having trouble sleeping instead of the boy. Keari made her way downstairs to our room in the wee hours of the morning saying she was scared. Usually she climbs into her big sisters bed when she gets scared but Kenzie had a friend over last night and they were sleeping in a different room. Keari climbed into bed with us, snuggled into my shoulder and feel fast asleep. Now normally I'd carry her back to her own bed at this point but I was so tired from being up the night before and I only had a couple of hours left before I had to get up for work that I decided to just let her sleep with us. Hubby of course barely knew she was there. After talking with her this afternoon, it turns out that she was scared because she saw lightening. I'm not sure she really did or if it was just a car driving down our street but either way she didn't like it. Let's hope for an uneventful night tonight as I'm really tired. Of course, I should have been in bed a while ago but I've been playing with different templates for the blog. I've had the same template since I started back in 2006..not that I've done a very good job of keeping my posts updated during that time...but I thought it was time to change things up a little. Hopefully it's in fairly decent shape because I'm too tired to do anymore with it right now...any changes will have to wait til tomorrow.

And speaking of tomorrow...Connor has soccer tryouts for school. He's really excited about trying out for the team. Let's hope that the rain they are calling for holds off so they can get the tryouts in.

Mystery Ouchie

I woke up at 3am to Adam crying ouch, ouch, ouch. Not really what you want to hear that early in the morning. I debated whether to check on him or not...he gets disturbed really easily by the opening of his door...so if there was nothing wrong, then I'd end up waking up by checking on him...and if there was something wrong...well, I opted to check on him as I was afraid he'd gotten his leg caught in the side of his crib. I found him lying in the middle of his crib with his head buried in his mattress repeating ouch over and over. So my initial thinking of a caught leg was incorrect but I was right in that I did disturb him by walking into his room. When he heard me by his crib, he popped his little head up. My second though was a stinky diaper...that also turned out to be false. I took him to the living room to lay for a bit but he was so restless that I finally ended up putting him back in his crib with some music on and laying on the floor for bit with my hand in his crib so he'd know I was still there. Anyone ever do that? I knew it was time to leave when he started playing games with my hand and giggling...whatever had caused him to wake up was obviously no longer there so I headed back to bed to get a couple more hours of sleep before I had to get up for work. Needless to say I was very tired this morning but was thankful for having taken a shower last night as that gave me a few extra shuteye minutes this morning.

Andy and the kids had a good day today...spent most of it at the marina catching fish. Everyone loves fishing and the younger girls appear to be naturals at it. A good number of fish were brought home to eat for tonights dinner.

Tyler had karate class tonight and earned another stripe. I believe this is the last one he needed before he could petition to the next belt level so hopefully by next month he'll be an orange stripe belt. He really likes karate and I hope it continues for a long time to come.

Quiet

I can't remember the last time the house has been this quiet in the middle of the day. Adam and Keari are both taking naps, Connor and Bekah are outside playing soccer in the rain, Alex has been playing computer but is now getting read to go to work...and everyone else has gone to my parents house. It's nice to have some down time and what better time for that than on a rainy Sunday.

While it was quiet I decided to make some cookies. Amazing how fast that seems get kids to come out of the woodwork. Next thing I know, Connor and Bekah are done playing in the rain and both Keari and Adam have awakened from their naps. Guess I should have waited a little longer before starting the cookies.

This is supposed to be chocolate chip batter but it seems to be missing the prime ingrediant.

The cookies seemed to have turned out okay and were delicious even if they were a little chipless.

Adam was in a fiesty mood after he got up from his nap and decided he didn't like the newspaper in their recycling bin.

The girls had such a good time at Ferry Point Park that we headed back there again after dinner today. This time we decided to take the shorter path.

Adam doing his best to keep up with his older siblings

Andy and Adam watching the older kids as they explore

Another beautiful view as the sun sets over the water

I love the baby footprints in the sand

Family Time

The day started with soccer practice for Bekah. More of her teammates showed up for this practice so it was better than last weeks. And what a gorgeous morning for practice...nicet temp and no humidity. Afterwards, we came home to eat lunch although I got distracted by all the mess on the floor which set me off. Ever have one of those days where just the littlest thing can send you over the edge? Mine today was seeing paper on the hallway floor that kids had been stepping over for a week. It drives me nuts and I can't figure out how to get them to understand that if they kept things picked up as they went along, keeping the house clean would not be a big production. After much lecturing...or more aptly ranting, everyone finished lunch and then everyone headed their separate ways...mainly I think to escape having to listen to me complaining at them more. Alex headed outside to cut the grass while most of the others kids headed out to wash the cars. I went down to fold clothes, a nice quiet by myself task...which lead to putting my clothes away...which lead to cleaning out my drawers because I couldn't get everything to fit...which lead to cleaning out our closet to enable the drawer spillover to have a place to reside...which lead to straightening up the entire bedroom. Sheeze, how did one small task of folding laundry mushroom into something bigger?

After dinner, since it was still so nice out, we decided to talk a walk around Ferry Point Park. The kids have been before but this was my first time. It's really pretty there, a nice oyster shell trail along the water with benches and picnic tables scattered along the way. I told Andy we'd have to come back and bring a lunch next time. Below are some pics of our walk...

Connor acting goofy ;)

Trying to decide which path to take, right or left. Kenzie wants to go left because it's shorter...Connor's heading right to the longer path. We ended up going right.

Connor enjoying the view

Andy and the kids going off path around the point

Brotherly love

Watching the sun go down as we wait for the others to return from their off path adventure

Awesome view of the Narrows from a tower that is adjacent to the parking lot where we'd parked the van

Fair Time

The county fair has been going on all week. The older kids made a trip to it on Wednesday and got into who knows what trouble as they left in the morning and didn't return until dinner time. Connor went to visit a friend this afternoon who lives in the direction of the fair so when we went to pick him up we figured it was as good a time as any to stop by. I enjoyed looking at all the homemade quilts although I don't think the rest of the family did since when I turned around, they had all disappeared. Tyler was nice enough to come back and get me so Iknew where they were. We took a look as some adorable bunnies and lots of chickens and roosters. I didn't see a single one that had a crazy hairdo though. I really think we should have entered that crazy rooster of ours. We had a lovely dinner of chicken sandwiches, chicken tenders, french fries and hot dogs and then headed to view the pigs. I love looking at little piglets. I lived on a pig farm for a number of years and got to see the piglets in varying stages. I don't think Adam enjoyed the pigs very much though as some of them started being quite noisy which prompted him to get noisy. Poor little guy. We looked at some cows, saw some horses warming up for jumps and watched jousting. It's amazing how fast some of the riders could go and still get the ring on their jousting lance. It was a beautiful evening to be at the fair...the weather today was awesome...no humidity, lovely breeze. We could actually open the windows and turn off the air conditioning, which is a blessing.

Buckets

That's what it was raining this morning. I knew I was going to be in trouble getting to work this morning as I was listening to the tv while getting dressed. They were talking about massive thunderstorms coming thru the area with large downpours and tons of lightening strikes. I hurried up and ran out the door hoping that maybe I would get lucky and at least most of the way to work before it hit. I should have known better as soon as I stepped outside...it was only 6pm and the heat and humidity were awful already so no such luck...I hit the deluge about 10 minutes into my drive...rain so hard that you could barely see. I drove out of it about 15 minutes later and then was good until I was about 10 minutes from work. I hit another huge down pour, it was coming down so hard and fast that even having the wipers on the highest setting couldn't keep all the water off the windshield. I thought about pulling off to the side of the road, as many other people had done, but was worried about somebody running into me there because visibility really was terrible. I opted to keep going, albeiting slowly, and by keeping the car lights in front of me visible I was able to get to work safely. The poor drains outside our garage looked liked a boiling pot...it was a bubbling mass of angry water. I was very thankful that we have a covered garage at work so I didn't actually have to get out in that mess...would have been soaked in 2 secs. I also said a few prayers as I was driving in it, one that I could arrive safely, and two, I thanked God that Alex didn't have to be driving anywhere right then. No way would I have wanted a 17 yr old, newish driver to out on the roads during that storm. The storm moved through our area in about an hour so thankfully the drive home was uneventful.

Tyler had another Karate class tonight. It was a good thing he went (this was an extra class for him to see which nights of the week he liked better) as only one other kid showed up. They were able to get lots of individual attention although I think both kids were getting a little punchy...this was their 4th day of 3 hr Karate camp in the morning.

4 Moms Open House: Kitchen and Dining Room

The 4 Moms are doing a month long Open House posted each Thursday and the second one is Kitchen and Dining Room. You can visit their pics back to the 4 mom’s here for Kimberly at Raising Olives, here for the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room, here for Connie at Smockity Frocks, and here for KimC at Life in a Shoe.

This is a view of the far end of our kitchen. We remodeled a number of years ago and this room used to be our dining room. Before we remodeled, the pass through you see used to be a doorway into a sunroom.


Here you are standing right inside the doorway. There used to be a wall that divided the two rooms right where the counter juts out. We discovered just how shoddy some of the work that had been done on this house was when we went to remove that wall...it was only held up by two nails. The doorway you see to the right is another entrance into what used to be the sunroom and is now our dining area....we don't have a formal dining room in the house, as you will see.


A view from the other corner of the room...the main entry way is just out of sight to your left. The lovely duct tape that you can see on the microwave is courtesy of our youngest who decided to hit the microwave one day with a big spoon. How he could reach that high is beyond me...he was only 1 1/2yr old at the time.
This is a view when standing in the doorway mentioned above. Prior to remodeling there used to be sliding glass doors in both this doorway and in the pass through area.



This is our dining room table...had a hard time getting it all in the pic. ;) We still have 3 more leaves that can go into it. It's called a reunion table and seats 16 comfortably although we have had up to 20 around it at one time. The nice thing about this table is that it is extra wide so there is plenty of room for food in the middle and you still have room for your plates and stuff around the edges.

The milk jugs that you can see on the freezer in this pic are a homeschool project...at some point these will turn into piggy banks.


Even though we did the remodeling of the kitchen years ago, we never seem to get around to painting it. Something always seems to come up that takes any spare money we might have. But one of these days I would love to paint it a lovely shade of green and have yellow accents.

That concludes the tour of our kitchen/dining room. Hope you enjoyed it and thanks for stopping by! You can check out the links at the top of this post for others in the tour. :)

No Excitement

Today was actually a pretty boring day. The older kids spent the day at the fair, Ty had karate and everybody else just kind of hung out. It was sooo hot today...Andy and I took a walk with Adam and Keari tonight and there wasn't a breeze to be found anywhere and the air was stifling. I thought I heard that things might cool off a little starting tomorrow...that would be wonderful.

Perspective

I was late leaving work today due to a conference call that ran very late and where one person was being totally unreasonable regarding the request that was being made. Everybody else was willing to make compromises except this one person. As annoyed as I was when I finally was able to leave, I was counting my blessings a few minutes later. I got caught in a backup on the beltway which I assumed was due to an accident based on the firetruck, ambulance and police car that went flying by us on the shoulder. It also told me that it was something that had recently happened. The accident had occurred about 1/2 mile in front of me and involved and overturned car. When I passed the scene the person was strapped to a gurney with a neck brace on and who knows what else. It was a reminder how fast things can change and that usually things that annoy us on a day to day basis are trivial in the grand scheme of life.

By the time I got home, Ty was at Karate class, the older kids all headed off on their bikes, Keari was grumpy because she'd just woken up and Bekah, Taylor and Adam were just themselves. ;) Keari and I sat down to a bowl of cereal for dinner...it was a quick dinner of bagel bites and left over pork chops/mashed potatoes tonight because Andy had been out clothes shopping with the kids this afternoon. This is a picture of Keari in one of her new dresses. She's loves dresses...we might actually have a girly girl with this one. ;)

The bagel bites were nowhere to be seen by the time I made it in the house and I'd had pork chops/mashed potatoes for lunch so cereal sounded like a good thing. Then of course we had to have a brownie for dessert. By this point, Ty and Andy made it home and instead of going for our normal evening walk, the girls wanted to go swimming. I took Adam in for a bit...he absolutely loves the water and kept trying to get me to let go of him. He didn't seem to understand that if I didn't have my hands on him that he would sink under the water. The mosquitos finally chased Adam and I out but by that point the older kids were back and invading our space. ;) They are still out there having a ball although they are all going nuts at the moment because a horsefly is attacking them. I do believe that we made a good investment in getting the pool all those years ago.

No progress

Today was a very unproductive today where I actually thought I was making headway but in reality didn't make any progress at all. I'm hoping that they are able to fix all the issues by tomorrow so that I actually have some work to do...I hate driving all that way and then not be able to do anything. Well, there is stuff I can do but the important stuff that have a deadline of Weds and Fri, I'm unable to work on at the moment. And they've been trying to fix the issue since 8/1 so I'm not optimistic at the moment.

And Andy's day was just as bad in a different sense...he spent the entire day running kiddos all over the place. Ty had to be at Karate camp at 9, then it was back to the house to pick Tay up for a drs appt...and hour later, it's back to the house only to turn around and pick Ty up from camp. Then it was time to take Connor, Kenzie and Taylor to piano...which took an extremely long time today...which I think is good because they must have been going over a lot of things today but I thing at that point hubby would have liked a short lesson so he could get back home for awhile. Somewhere in there my sister arrived to help Alex do so pt on his shoulder...my mom also showed up. Soon after getting back from piano, Ty needed to head back for his regular Karate class...I took him so hubby could have some home time. After class, we headed home for dinner, then Andy, Keari, Adam and I took a walk along the river. It was a gorgeous evening..not hot and muggy like it has been but I'm thinking this is only temporary as they are talking about temps in the upper 90's for the next 2 days.

The kids are constantly complaining about being bored but something sure tired them out today, at least the girls, because within 5 minutes of them laying down all 3 were asleep. I should really head that way myself....

Sorting

That's how I spent the majority of today...a task I hate but has to be done every now and then. The day started with Andy and Ty going to 7am mass...the rest of us followed at 9. Kenzie and Connor sang with the choir, that was a nice surprise as I didn't know they were planning on doing that. When we got home, I figured it was time to tackle Adam's drawers...I figured after weeks of trying to force him into clothes that were a tad too small for that it was time to break out the bigger sizes. You'd think that would be a fairly quick task...get the boxes of bigger clothers, empty the drawers of too small clothes, feel them back up from the boxes of bigger clothes, put smaller clothes in boxes, put boxes back in attic. For some reason, it always seems to take forever. Could be that there is always some kind of commotion going that distracts me every couple of minutes or the little ones wanting to help pack boxes which is a nice thought although they don't do it very neatly or maybe I just get bored of being cooped up in one tiny room for too long. While I was in there, I managed to clean off his dressers which seemed to have been accumulating too small clothes over time, cleaned out his closet of infant stuff (yeah he's almost 2, so I'm a little slow in some aspects), and unburied the bottom of his crib (that was being used to store bigger clothes but had somehow turned into my oldest daughters storage place..go figure). I do still have his toy box to clean out and all the boxes made it to the playroom but not up into the attic. There are probably 15 boxes and I just wasn't up to lugging them up the attic stairs in the heat of the day.

I did get interrupted in the middle of my project by Adam wanting to take a nap so while he was doing that, I decided to try and fix the missing tiles in our kitchen floor. One was easy to replace but the other one was caused by the floor being uneven from when the previous owners did an addition. We attempted to level it when we laid the new floor but it's not starting to crack to certain areas need to be releveled. I figured that needed to wait until the kiddos were in bed tonight, which they are now, so they weren't constantly poking or stepping in it as it's trying to dry. I think it's shrinking as it's drying so I might need to do another coat tomorrow after work.

When Adam got up from his nap, Andy and him slipped in quietly in the pool...the others were all entertaining themselves in other ways...so Andy and Adam has a lovely quiet swim in the pool. Adam really like the water, as long as it doesn't make noise...he hated the ocean when were there.

Guess it's time for me to start thinking about getting stuff ready to take to work tomorrow...I don't really want to though as there seems to be nothing but problems lately. Maybe one of these days things will get better.

Tomorrow will be a busy day, Ty has karate camp in the morning and class in the afternoon, Tay has a drs appt in the morning, Connor, Kenzie & Tay have piano practice in the afternoon. Maybe it will keep them all out of trouble tomorrow. Nah! LOL

Quiet

That's how I thought today was going to be. I didn't think we had anything planned for today so thought it would be a pretty laid back, lazy kind of day which for the most part it was. It turns out that Bekah had her first soccer practice of the year this morning. Since it was a beautiful morning, not sweltering likes it's been most morning, we all decided to go to the field to hang out while she practiced. I can't say it was much of a practice when only one of her teammates showed up but that tends to be how things are at this time of year, especially for the 4-5yr old age group. When they were done practicing, we came home, ate lunch, made some banana bread...yum.

Everything was going well until early afternoon when Adam decided to fall head first off Keari's tricycle. He ended up scraping his chin and cut two gashes, inside and out, with his teeth just below his lip line. Poor thing...and he sure didn't want the dr looking inside his mouth to see if he had bit all the way through. I took him to the urgent care center (which btw has terrible hours for being an urgent care center...I got there at 4:45pm which was 15 minutes before they closed) because I couldn't tell whether he had bit all the way through and whether the gash on the outside needed stitches...it's small but it keeps separating whenever he draws his lip into his mouth. The dr said that he'll have a scar there, that it doesn't need stitches and that he doesn't think he bit all the way through. He going to look pretty rough for awhile, though. He handled things pretty well until it was time to go to bed...daddy usually does that job but tonight he wanted mom...funny how kids want their mom when they aren't feeling well. Andy was able to finally take him but Adam sure wasn't happy about it. I think he settled down fairly quickly after he couldn't see me anymore. Let's hope he sleeps all night...we did give him some tylenol for the pain since we could it was swelling and starting to bruise. Poor thing.

4 Moms Open House: Yard and Entry

I know I'm late on this but I just ran across this Open House Tour on Raising Olives blog and thought it was a neat idea. The 4 Moms are doing a month long Open House posted each Thursday and the first one is Yard and Entry. You can visit their pics back to the 4 mom’s here for Kimberly at Raising Olives, here for the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room, here for Connie at Smockity Frocks, and here for KimC at Life in a Shoe.

We are a family of 10 that live in a 7 bedroom house (that sounds grander than it actually is, believe me) that was built in 1978. When we purchased the house in 1994, it only contained 3 bedroom. Since then we've made a number of renovations, the biggest of which was the addition over the garage that gave us another 3 bedrooms and a bathroom. Only 5 of the rooms are currently being used as a bedroom...one is a playroom and another is a den/office. We have 5 boys and 3 girls...the girls are all in one room, two boys (twins) in a second, our 2 oldest boys in the 3rd, the baby (he'll be 2 soon so not much of a baby anymore) in the 4th and us in the 5th.

The tour begins with a view of our house from the road...
and a side view. This is usually where our garden is at this time of year but the last couple of years have been so miserable and that combined with all the rain we had at the beginning of planting season, prompted us not to put one in this year.
Continuing around this side of the house brings you to our back yard. It includes a lovely pool for cooling off on the hot days that we have...

a trampoline to try and wear the kids out although at the moment it needs some repair work done to it before the kids can jump on it, a soccer goal and a small playground for the younger kids...

and a lovely chicken coop that houses some really sweet chicken and a crazy looking rooster. I should have taken a pic of him as he looks like he stuck his claw in an electric socket...he has feathers on his head that stick out in every direction...


This is a view of the back yard from our deck...

This is our deck, which is not nearly big enough for all the people we have running around on it. One of these days I would love to extend it to the other end of the house...

and last but not least, our entryway. This is the front entrance to our house. If you go up the stairs, you end up in our living room. That's our cat, Oscar, coming down the stairs. The doorway you can just make out in the upper right of the pic leads into our kitchen. If you go down the stairs, you end up in a rec room...but this is how we usually get into our house, thru the garage and into our laundry room...

Thanks for visiting!