Jeremy's Birthday

My husband celebrated his 33rd birthday yesterday.
Sad to say, that he was not given all that much of a birthday here at home.
I was so tired from being up all night with Makayla I had a hard time functioning yesterday.

6th Photo in the 6th Folder

This is our cat, Shadow, when he was just a kitten. He was so sweet, cuddly, and fun.
Now I am trying decide if I am going to make him live outside full time.

This is him now. He just plain ornery.

So I will do the same as Becky. All who read this have been tagged.
Come on, you all have got to have some great pictures and isn't it funny that it
will be a random picture not necessarily of your choosing.

Our Cat, Oscar

We actually have two male cats. One is neutered and one is not. They have a love/hate relationship. Mostly it is hate. Oscar is the older by a year, but Shadow is bigger and Shadow's favorite thing to do is chase Oscar. This has caused Oscar to look for out of the way hiding places. Places that Shadow will not think of.

Here is one of his most recent place. This is in the room where Bailee does school and we keep all of our craft stuff in. This was a new one. It is always funny to see where he will chose to hide.

When a Four Year Old Gets a Camera

Makayla found the camera on my desk the other day and she wanted to take some pictures. I thought it would be interesting to see what she found interesting. This is what we got. A picture of the wall is below.

The Fireplace

Herself in the Mirror

Her Boot

Our Shoes

World from our four-year-old's perspective.

A Frozen World

For those of you who live in the Lewis-Clark Valley, you have spent the last week or so under a layer of clouds. For those of us up on the Palouse, we have been living in those clouds. This is what you get when you live in the clouds and it is cold.This is a power line from our house to our shop.

Everything outside is covered with icy spikes.

Wonder Woman Part 2

This is Makayla doing her Wonder Woman Spin.

Just imagine her in a red,white, and blue outfit with her lasso of truth.
Another Wonder Woman tidbit was that when the lasso was placed around
a person they could not tell a lie. Wouldn't that be nice, especially with kids!
The nobody in "Nobody did it" would no longer have a place at my house.

Wonder Woman

For any of you who do not know who that is, she is a super hero from the 70's. She had her own TV show, I believe for 3 seasons. Wonder Woman is played by Linda Carter, who has an amazingly thin waist for someone so tall.

Nice outfit, I know, but what can I say, it was the 70s and she was a woman.

Anyway, my girls were given the first season by their Aunt Tami, who is Grandpa Ted's sisters. We love Aunt Tami. Tami and her husband, Rick, live in Stanwood, WA. We try to visit them every summer, but have not actually been able to do it for the last two years. We love the west side of Washington.

I bring up Wonder Woman, because my girls love her. They know the whole theme song and they love to practice their Wonder Woman turns that change them from themselves into Wonder Woman.

We have seen this season so many times, but it never loses their interest. They also love the male lead, Major Trevor. Their dad always gets the honor of being Major Trevor.

We Have Water

For those of you who have been reading this, I wanted to let you know we have water again.

We had rationed our water well enough that we did not totally run out until Wednesday and then our pump was fixed on Thursday. It was a long 24 hour period.

We now have mountains of laundry that need to be done. I have been working on it all weekend.

I am just darn glad to have running water and be able to do all that needs to be done.

Our suburban has been rescued from the mud also. Jeremy got it caught in the snow and I dug it into the mud. We still have some snow up here, but we have had rain and warm temperatures, so most of it is gone. Anyway, our neighbor graciously was driving up and down our driveway to make it passable for us and saw our stuck vehicle. He hooked it up to a chain and we got it out of the mud. Thank God for willing neighbors.

In the Sticks

For those of you who do not know, we live up on the Palouse just a couple of miles from the top of Lewiston Hill. We are situated in a place that only allows for satellite internet. And just so you know, just because it says satellite it does not mean it is more high tech. It just means it is more expensive and harder to work with.

Anyway, I say that to let you know that pictures load very slowly here at my house. This means I am going to load a few more Christmas pics, but then I am done. I want to be able to show you our new escapade with the snow and suburban, which is stuck as we speak in the afore mention snow.

Here are a few more pictures of Christmas:

Christmas Morning - Stockings are free to grab as soon
as you get up at our house.

My family left here:
ShaeLyne, Brandi, Makayla, Brittney, Justin, Sam, Jeremy
Bailee, Marvin, Myself

On to the snow and suburban:

This is Evans Rd. No your eyes are not tricking you, you really cannot see the road.
They did not get it plowed until last night at some time. We just got a lot of snow and
wind Sunday night that gave us these lovely conditions.

Last year, we were able to drive out through this field to get to the road.
Too much snow this time.

This is what the wind can do with the snow at our house.
That is probably about three feet high.
Before it snowed more, you could see our grass.

I walked out to our mailbox and took this picture on the way in.
Marvin and Jeremy tried very hard to get the suburban unstuck.
The little dots on the right hand side are my girls going sledding.

This is where I live right now. It is beautiful, white and prestine, but it is also challenging. Jeremy joked today that is a good thing we are self-sustaining, which is not true. After we could not free the suburban today, we went looking for a family member that was willing to lend us a vehicle. Thankfully we found one.

We will be leaving that vehicle out on the Evans and will have to trek out to it each time we need to go somewhere. God is good and he provides.

Christmas

Now that I have read a few blogs from other family members that include Christmas pictures, I just need to do it myself.
Christmas for us is a series of separate occasions. My husband has two sets of families, I have one, and then we have just our family time. I don't mind going to these different occasions. In fact this year, it was very helpful to me.
Christmas this year was good, but also a little sad. A good portion of my family live in Kenya and another branch live in Wichita. It was my first Christmas without my brothers, the ones closest to my age. Last year was my first without my parents. To have all of these people missing from my Christmas was very challenging. To have me pregnant and emotional also made it challenging.
We did have a wonderful Christmas though, because the meaning of Christmas will always be the same. Jesus will always be the center and he gives hope to all circumstances. If my children never learn anything else from me, I would be okay with them learning just that.

Anyway, here are some pictures from our Christmas.

This is our girls with Bill and Jessie Schmidt. They are my sister, Rachel's parents.
They have been a tremendous blessing to all of us with my family living so far away.

Bailee is now a teenager and her Christmas list has definitely changed.

Sammy in her doctor's glasses.

Girls with Grandpa Mike and Grandma Pam.
Well I have run out of time. I have to get ready for a birthday party, so I will post more later.

Winter Weather

I thought I would share with you what our weather has been like today.

This is what our living room windows that face west look like.
This is only the bottom, but they are like this all the way up.

New Year's Eve

This year I decided to let our girls stay up until midnight, so we could experience the beginning of the new year together. Jeremy and I went to Costco and bought some party food and we decided we would play games and maybe watch a movie.

We did the game playing and it was fun. We played "Life" which I won for once, usually I lose. Part of the reason I lose is because I never get children. I cannot remember the last time I played and ended up with any children. Definitely not like my life.


We then played a DVD movie game that we have which was basically a contest between Jeremy and I although Bailee definitely helped. Then the girls decided they would like to watch a movie. It was about 10:00 by this time and I knew if we started a movie chances were good they would be asleep before the new year, but I also did not have the energy to suggest anything else.

So we put in a movie and Bailee and Makayla actually made it through the movie. But all of us together bringing in the new year together was not to be. This is how things stood at 11:30pm.

We will have to try again another year.