What a summer

Have I really not posted since May? So much has happened I can't put pictures with all the events. I've done blog posts in my head as each event has finished but it doesn't seem to transfer automatically to the computer. Huh, go figure!

May and June were filled with soccer. The girls were in the same mini-soccer program so that made my life easy. I do all the running around with soccer, for the obvious farming reason, so to have two of the three kids on the same schedule makes life bearable. Nathan's soccer team plays two days a week, once home and once away. There were a few games cancelled due to weather, some that should have been cancelled due to weather, but it was a good season for the boys. The last game of the season was so exciting that I think my heart didn't slow down for a few hours after the game was done! It was one of those games that kept you on the edge of your seat from the get go. Tied at the end of the first half, they scored a few minutes into the second half, we scored a few minutes left in the half, it goes to double overtime and then to penalty kicks it went! They scored on shot 2, we scored on shot 5 so then it went to sudden death penalty kicks! They kicked first and missed, we kicked next and scored! I don't know how many of you are competitive but that game just about killed me! I'm competitive to a fault. Thankfully in my wisdom *cough* I do keep my thoughts to myself and I don't coach (from the bench or the sideline). I learned a great lesson from one of the moms. I can tell she's competitive but she is constantly talking to the boys and it is always encouraging, never coaching from the sidelines. I try to do the same thing, and if I can't say anything nice I try to be quiet!

June also saw the end of preschool for Bethany, grade 1 for Larissa and grade 4 for Nathan. All three kids are hitting years that seem hard for me. Nathan hits double digits in a couple of days, grade 2 seems so grown up, which Larissa is, and my baby is going to Kindergarten! Aaaaaaah!!! Good thing summer isn't finished yet, I can be in denial for a little while longer!

July was super busy for us. The local fair was the first Wednesday with horse competitions starting the evening before. We knew a few people competing so we had to go watch. The girls love horses so this was a great way for them to see horses in action and play with their friends who were there watching too. Nathan went to help Ron with the beef pit barbeque, he doesn't care so much for horses! The kids entered items in the fair so we were frantically getting those together the day before too. They showed well and all earned money, which they were thrilled with and have now been encouraged to enter more items next year! Two days after the fair we left on our family vacation! We headed to the Rockies with our camper in tow. It is the perfect way to travel in the summer time! We were in Drumheller to see the dinosaurs then off to Banff, Jasper and Edmonton. We spent only a couple of nights in each place and packed in as much as we could in the nine days we were gone and needed a vacation from our vacation when we got home! The kids thought the waterpark at West Edmonton Mall was the best part of the whole trip so I guess next time we can just camp there. They did have a good time in the mountains and thought it was great to throw snowballs in July! We got home from our trip and Nathan started sports camp in town. He did eight sports in four days and then played all of the sports they learned on the last day of camp. He learned how to play badminton, volleyball, basketball, lacrosse, field hockey, pickle ball (I have no idea what that is!) and a few others that I can't remember right now. He had a great time and told me our summer has to be planned around sports camp every year. Sports camp ended on a Friday and that Sunday we packed up Nathan and Larissa and left them at bible camp for five days. They went last year as well and could hardly wait to go back. Bethany wanted to stay too but she's too young, she's going to hold me to the promise of next year! When their time at camp was done Bethy & I picked up the older two and headed to my sister's place to meet our new niece/cousin and her two brothers. There are four nephews so this is the first girl on my side of the family, other than my two, and the youngest so she will be well spoiled. After that quick visit we went to my mom and dad's for night and saw my other sister and nephews. We got home on Friday and started an intensive week of swimming lessons on Monday! Each kid had two lessons a day and all three kids were in different levels so that meant we were at the pool for six lessons a day. It was a busy week but all three kids loved their lessons (they all moved on to the next level) and played with friends while waiting for each other's lessons to be finished. I got to visit with other moms so it wasn't a hard week. The weather was very cooperative too and there are some huge shade trees to stay cool under. We also started combining July 30. As for the house a deck was built, brick work done and lawn was seeded. I think I remembered everything for the month!

We kicked off August by going to family camp at the same camp Nathan & Larissa were at in July so Bethy could enjoy all the activities too, now she's really raring to go next summer! We had an "off" week last week but easily filled it by watching the Olympics. This week the kids are at VBS in town in the mornings and I'm cleaning house, which I didn't do last week while cheering on Team Canada! Did I mention I'm slightly competitive?

Next week the kids are off camping with Grandma & Grandpa V for a few days. That gives me an opportunity to spend time with one of my sisters and her family and then we're visiting friends and staying with my other sister to celebrate Nathan's birthday and my nephew's birthday. When we get home harvesting should be almost finished, Ron's sister and her family are out for a few days and school starts after the September long weekend. Thankfully school supply shopping is done. Whew, what a summer it has been!

Columbia Icefields

The brick on the house and weeds still on the "lawn"!

Future agronomists checking out the wheat field

Mmmmm, Rollkuchen

I'm a sucker for my kids. Especially when it comes to grocery shopping. I don't give in to all of their demands but there are a few I can't resist. Watermelon is one of them. When a certain 5 year old's big brown eyes look up at me and ask if we can have watermelon and rollkuchen for supper one night as she's standing right next to the watermelon, it's really hard to resist! So needless to say, I had some super happy kiddos yesterday when we had watermelon and rollkuchen for supper. For those of you who don't know what rollkuchen is, the best way I can describe it is dough fried in oil. As far as I know it's a Mennonite "dish". I haven't met a non-Mennonite yet who has known what rollkuchen is. My kids are shocked that there are people in this world who have not had rollkuchen. Ever.

This was the cooking station on the front veranda. There is oil on the veranda now but the mess and the smell are better left outside!

We don't have patio furniture yet but our tv trays and lawn chairs work well.

This is rollkuchen. The ones with the slits in them are crispy, the way Ron likes them. The other ones are puffy, the way the rest of us like them. The syrup pours easily into the puffy ones once an end has been bitten off! You can also stuff a piece of watermelon inside if you don't want syrup. But let's be honest, who doesn't want Rogers Syrup in their rollkuchen??!!

I was told these were the best ones ever. That's probably because they were the first ones of the summer season but hey, why not get an early start on Mother's Day gift bribes?

Spoil Mom Day

Yesterday was Mother's Day. This is the day where you find out how your kids truly feel about you and what they take away from their life with you. Do they remember all the discipline moments, the learning moments, the "mom is so frustrated she doesn't know what to do with you" moments? Or will they remember the fun moments, the read-to-me moments, the "I'm laughing so hard I'm going to pee my pants" moments? Thankfully my kids remember the latter rather than the former!!

I had been given strict instructions on Thursday already that I was to sleep in on Sunday. The day started off at 7:50 with Larissa "sneaking" into our bedroom to wake up Ron so they could make me breakfast (not in bed, I don't like food in bed!!). They came to get me at 8:20. First I was given my gifts then I was treated to bacon, eggs, toast & jam, tea and orange juice. We went to church then out for lunch with two families, came home for a couple of hours and then headed to the lake where we met up with the same friends we had lunch with and had supper by the beach. It was a great day, I am truly loved!

Here are the gifts I was blessed with:

This one's from Nathan. The wall plaque he chose on his own from the grand re-opening of the church library. The card and bath salts are from school. The card has a haiku on it:

Mom

nice, kind

cooking, relaxing, visiting

I love my Mom

scrapbooking, reading, singing,

awesome, caring

Mommy

These are all from Larissa. I think if you click on the picture you can see what they all are. My favourite is  the "I Love You" card. Inside was fill in the blank sentences, here are some of my favourite answers:

My mom is "35" years old. (I'm not, but thanks!)

My mom weighs "55" pounds. (really??!!)

My mom's favourite food is "pantkacks" (pancakes, apparently)

My mom's job is "being a mom" (it's true!)

My mom really loves "me" (there were two lines for that answer, apparently only one word was needed!!)

This was Bethany's gift to me. It was so cute. She jumped up onto the bed and "read" it to me. She then said, "It's not true, Mom. My arms are longer so I love you more!"

Now the challenge will be to top this for Father's Day!!

More Construction

We are adding a sidewalk and patio to our house this spring. It was all supposed to happen last week, but as our luck would have it, it started raining! We told Josiah that if we needed rain all we had to do was hire him for a project. He's now booked for mid-July. Just kidding! The sidewalk up front is the only thing that's really progressed for now.

As you can see, the puddles are preventing work from getting done. I think the guys have been here about an hour a day before they get rained on....again.

This is our back patio area. It's tempting to just dig a hole and make a pool!!

I wonder how long that trackhoe will be a yard ornament....

Ron has said that we have had enough rain now to make up for the lack of snow this winter. We are not saturated like we were last spring, so that's good. We are just over half finished seeding and Ron's not in panic mode yet. The forecast is promising for the rest of the week so hopefully yard and field work can get well on it's way to being finished!

Look Who's Five!!

Our baby is five today! Five is a big number. Five means she's no longer a little preschooler. Five means she'll be leaving home in the fall to be swallowed up by the big yellow school bus. Five means she will gain more independence as she is away from home and playing on the playground without us right there watching her. Five is scary for us as parents. Five is exciting beyond words for Bethy. I keep telling Bethany that every birthday she has from now on she will turn four all over again so she can stay home with me and just keep going to preschool. She refuses. I said the same thing to the other kids when they turned five. They refused too. Either I'm doing something wrong that they don't want to stay home with me forever, or I'm doing something right that they don't want to stay home with me forever. It depends on the day!!

Bethany loves life. I don't quite know how to describe her in a way that would actually capture who she is. She says what she thinks (she gets that from her Great-Oma V AND her Great-Opa B!!). She's not afraid to be who she is. She can't sit still. I think the highest Ron & I have counted when she is actually still is 4....maybe. She's discreetly attentive. You don't think she's paying attention to what you are saying and weeks later she will give you the details on the conversation you had. She's competitive. It's how she passed swimming lessons, she couldn't let the other kids do better than she did! She's inquisitive. There are no less than 10 questions from her brain in five minutes. Ron took her to the elevator one day. Forty minutes into the drive he sent me a text saying she hadn't stopped asking questions since they left the yard. He wondered how I could answer questions all day! I say Bethany might be a genius some day because of all the questions she asks. Or not so much because I'm the one answering all the questions! She retains all the answers too. Random information comes out of her mouth and when I ask her where she learned that information she can tell me exactly where she heard it. Be careful what you say around her!! Bethany loves music. She is constantly singing some song from some show or preschool class. If she's not singing she's dancing. She has attitude. It's going to either get her into trouble or keep her out of it. Hopefully we can steer her in the right direction! She knows how to assert herself. If there's a line drawn she will erase it and tell you exactly where she thinks it should be. (It's a good thing her mother is just as assertive!) Bethany wakes up every day with a smile on her face, a sparkle in her eye, and a desire to live life so it's always exciting. We hope we can enjoy her enthusiasm!

Love you Sweetie!!

Six Months

Sunday will be six months since we've moved into our house! The time has gone quickly, it sure has been easy to "settle in". The kids hardly ever mention the house trailer and never say they miss it or the other yard, which is kind of funny because we don't have any grass here. They have spent a lot of time playing in the garage. I back the van out, Ron has the truck at the farm, so the kids can skip, do tricks on their bikes (ok, that's just Nathan!), ride bikes with training wheels and not get hung up every 2 seconds on a gravel ridge, skateboard...I think you get the idea! The other week we came home and it was raining hard and very windy. Larissa says, "Mom, I'm glad we have a garage, now we don't have to walk out in this yucky weather!" She is definitely appreciating the house for what it offers and not taking it for granted. The kids can't decide which is their favourite thing about the new house. Nathan loves the size of his room and the fact that he has a place downstairs to shoot hockey. Larissa said the other day that our lives would be so different if we didn't have an island in the kitchen! I was preparing supper and she was sitting at the island with her craft supplies so we could "work together". Bethany wonders when we'll stop calling it the "new house" because it just feels like we've always lived here. Ron loves the lack of water consumption our new toilets and washing machine have provided! He will often tell people how much less water we use now. In the trailer we had 11 year old toilets and a traditional top load washing machine. Now we have 6L flush toilets and a top load HE washing machine. We haul our water so it's maybe more obvious to us than it would be to some people. In the trailer we would haul 3500 gallons of water every 4 weeks. We are now down to 2000 gallons or less in 4 weeks. We didn't have a single time of running out of water at 1:00 am in -30 this winter! (That maybe happened once or twice in the trailer!!;D ) I can't say I really have a favourite part either. The house just feels like home. There was no adjustment to living here. Perhaps that's due to the fact that we came by here almost every day during the building process and we we've been dreaming of this for years. The kids had no adjustment issues either. They were involved in choosing things for their rooms and they were just as excited about the new house as Ron & I were. Comfort. Love. Home.

We have been winding down our year long activities these last couple of weeks. Nathan's piano lessons and Larissa's private violin lessons finished last week. Bethany's final dance recital is this weekend. We've been busy running to extra practises for that but by Sunday at 4:00 it should all be done! Then soccer starts. That will be three evenings a week for 8 weeks plus Larissa has violin group class on a fourth night of the week, if we choose to go, so it might be busier in the next 8 weeks than it was all winter long, and I'm doing it all as a single mom! We started seeding last week Thursday, took a break due to rain, then started up again yesterday. There is no rain in the forecast for the rest of the week so hopefully we can get a good chunk done. What looked like an early spring due to lack of snow and an unseasonably warm March has turned out to be a very average year for us. I had secretly hoped for seeding in March, harvest in July and the month of August off to do some camping and fun family activities but I knew that would never happen. Ron would want to plant a second crop!! In reality I knew my "hope" would never happen but I figured it didn't hurt to dream! Fourteen years of being a farmer's wife still hasn't erased the 20+ years of being a teacher's daughter! Don't get me wrong, I love the farming lifestyle I just sometimes still feel like and old dog learning a new trick!

I have been out of picture-taking-mode the last few months so I don't have too many to share. I did receive a few complaints last time for not having any pictures posted (you know which aunt you are!!) so I will deliver on my promise to have some this time!

This is Larissa with her violin teacher.

The kids playing in the garage.

I know this isn't a clear picture of Nathan but I'm hoping you can see his facial expression. Lips puckered and tongue out of the mouth, a classic "I'm concentrating on what I'm doing" look for him!

My Parents sure made it look easy

Parenting is hard! It's not a new revelation to me, it was just reconfirmed tonight. I had a great talk with my boy. Bedtime is great for that. I love bedtime for that very reason. Most nights it's just saying goodnight, a kiss and a hug. Other nights though, are like tonight. I started it. I did it on purpose too. It all started at the supper table. Larissa asked a very innocent question. "Can quadruplets ever be three babies?" The kids know up to triplets but we've never thought of going beyond that, we don't know anyone who's ever had three or more babies at once and animals have litters, so why did we need to go higher? So we did the whole 4=quadruplets, 5=quintuplets, 6=sextuplets (giggle). Yup. Giggle. (insert my inner groan here) Did my 9 & 7 year olds really just giggle at the word SEXtuplets? They sure did. My kids know the actual words for their body parts. They know it takes a man and a woman to make a baby. I can't remember using the word sex. I just explain things as the topics come up. Am I bit conservative in educating my kids in that regard? Maybe in this day and age I am. Can you blame me for being protective and wanting to keep them young and innocent? Is that not my job as their Mom? (these are questions I'm asking myself. I don't need actual answers!!) At the table we ignored the giggles and kept going until 8=octuplets. Neither Ron nor I could remember what 9 was. The kids were either satisfied that we knew until octuplets or still too distracted by sextuplets that the conversation basically ended there. Until I picked it up again with Nathan at bedtime. I asked him what was so funny about the word sextuplets. He looked at me, half rolled his eyes and gave me a look that said, "Do I really have to tell you?" So then I asked him what he knew about sex. "Uh, Mom, this is awkward." And then I heard everything about what he knew about sex to friendships at school to faith to our shower pressure being too hard that it pierces his back! We cried, we laughed, we sat in silence, we prayed. I love that kid! I have a boy. Everything I've heard about boys not talking is true. I don't always get things out of him....right away. I guess the key is keeping him up until midnight the night before so he's sleep deprived and he feels emotional enough about everything that he just talks. I wonder if it will work when he's 16? ;) Nathan's a great kid. He's confident, happy, even keel. He's also observant. Very observant. Some of the things we talked about tonight I don't remember thinking about as a kid. When we decided to have kids I thought it would be easy-ish. I remembered enough of my misspent youth that I could relate to everything that my kids would go through. (did I mention I was also naive??) What I didn't bank on was that it wouldn't be just my personality in those kids!! Nathan thinks. I don't think.  I talk it out and change my mind half way through a conversation and then maybe change my mind again. I fly by the seat of my pants. Open mouth first, activate brain second. Ron thinks. I'm so glad this parenting thing involves both of us! My parents sure made it look easy. I knew I was loved no matter what I did. Home was a safe place. Ron's home was the same. We're trying our best to raise our kids in that kind of home. I hope my kids will think we made parenting look easy too!!