So, it’s technically fall, but goodness, it still feels like summer. We’ve had some record heat this year so we are all crossing our fingers and hoping it cools off quick so we can have a white Christmas. 😉 Which NEVER happens, so I don’t think we are expecting it to this year. But still. It would be nice!

Nathan entered the Lego competition in the State Fair this year! He’s been talking about it since we saw the Legos there last year and we finally did it. He was so excited that he won second place in his age bracket!

It started raining really quickly after we left the Legos, so we didn’t stay for very long, but we had to go by the baby animals like we always do. The kids all got to pet this tiny little chick and it was SO cute. Bless it’s heart.

This one. Y’all, she is a MESS. She got oatmeal all over her shirt, got into the markers while I was doing school with Nathan, kept picking fights with Parker….I finally got her to sit for three minutes and stick Minnie Mouse magnets all over the fridge but it did not last long. She’s definitely falling head long into THAT STAGE.

Parker got his Cubbie vest and he was SO proud! He came barreling over as soon as we got there to pick him up and jumped straight into my arms with this gigantic smile. So so cute!! He loves Cubbies with all of his heart!

Every night, I go in and check on all the kids before I go to bed and I often stop and pray for them. Tonight, she just looked so big. She was just my little tiny baby and now she’s such a big girl. Where does the time go?

 

We are so excited to welcome another precious baby into our family! Samuel Jude is just the snuggliest, chubbiest little dumpling and we just adore him.

He’s just a little baby doll!! He has a cleft lip and palate just like his big brother did.

Basically, family dinner nights have become a game of who can get in the house fast enough to get to Sammy first. Ha! WE love our newest little man!!

 

Way, way, way back in the day, Jon played football for the Lobos (which is actually how he ended up here!). We started dating the winter of his junior year, dated all through the start of the season and then got engaged right before the last game of the year. So, Lobo football will always have a special place in our hearts.

This year, they did a special dinner for the alumni the night before the opening game and we got to have a little football date. So much fun! It was so fun to see a lot of the old team and find out what everyone has been up to. A lot of them we haven’t seen since the college days. We poked around the complex and the field and I reminisced with the other now-wives about standing around the porch of the complex, waiting for our then-boyfriends to get done in the locker rooms so we could finally go eat something other than nachos for dinner. 😉 Such fun memories!

Right before the game, they honored the players of the 2008 season since they won a bowl game that year. Nathan and Parker got to go on the field with Jon and it was SO cute.

Love this. Our friend Eric took this when I was still trying to get into the stadium (LONG story – thank you to a particular lady who let me cut in line so I could at least make it in time to see them on the big screen!). The boys felt so big getting to do the special thing with Dad.

Love these two.

Afterward, we found our seats in the quickly packing-out stadium. Little Miss looked especially Lobo cute that night!

The whole crew! Bryant and Nicole weren’t there but we all spent most of the night thinking about them, because they were in the hospital with Gabriel’s new little brother and my new nephew!!

Such a daddy’s girl.

I started laughing so hard at this. Parker is typically a pretty reserved kid (never at home, always in public). The Lobos were down and all of a sudden, he just pops up on his seat and starts flashing the Lobo sign, trying to get the crowd to cheer them on. Ha! It didn’t work, but it was a good effort. 😉

Such a wonderfully fun night!!

I don’t even know where the days are going. On the one hand, homeschooling has been AMAZING because I feel like we have so much more time to get things done, but on the other hand, I blink and it’s time to get dinner going.

Little Miss loves herself some Snapchat filters. Ha! And I need to figure out how to do that eye shadow in real life. On myself, not her. 😉

They were supposed to be cleaning up… Riiiiight…

Sometimes, I find it’s just better not to ask.

We painted Eisley girl’s toes for the first time and she was SO excited. She would just randomly plop down and stare at her toes, ooing and aahing the rest of the day. SO cute.

All right, people. We get approximately 56 pieces of junk mail every single day. Most of the time, I just chuck it straight in the trash. On this day, Nathan asked me if he could open a couple of the envelopes, so I handed him some of the junk mail and he totally found two dollars inside one of them. WHAT? He was ecstatic!!

One of the things that we’ve had a hard time with is finding books for Nathan that really hold his interest and make him want to read more. We finally found a series that he loves the “Hey Jack” books by Usborne Books. There is seriously no greater joy for me than to see my son reading and loving it!! So thankful!

Well, after the panic and second-guessing and breathing-into-paper-sacks that was our first week of school, I’m excited to report that things are going much smoother. I’ve at least been able to put away the paper sacks. 😉 I’m even getting excited about the rest of the year!

Our sprinkler system hasn’t worked since we first moved in, so anything green outside is either because of the rain or the hose. 😉 Jon fiddled around with a bunch of stuff and got the sprinklers on briefly and the boys went NUTS. Screaming, running, laughing…it was really cute. Eisley was screaming too – but not out of joy. She immediately ran to the patio and that was it.

Little Miss looked extra adorable on our way to church the other day. THOSE BOOTS. THOSE CHEEKS. #amiright

Nathan is learning about Venus right now in science and we got to do a little experiment about volcanoes and how volcanic rock hardens. The boys were SO into it. It was really fun! I’m learning a ton as I teach it, so it’s been really interesting for me as well!

Someone has been waiting for this day since Awana ended last spring and it FINALLY came! Parker is officially a Cubbie! He was SO excited. It was so cute. He gave me an extra big hug as he left and then did not stop talking the entire drive home about all the fun things they did.

And just because I apparently like to make myself cry:

Both of my boys on their first day at Cubbies. Nathan was 3 here too – look at how big Parker is and look at how tiny Nathan is!

Excuse me while I go weep in the corner.

Jon had to work that night so it was me and the Little Miss at Trader Joes. Where she spent most of the time singing, “No, no, no” in the cart and then hamming it up for the cashier so she ended up with 12,000 stickers to then adhere all over herself and the car. The cashier asked her name and she just smiled at him, so when we got outside, I asked her name and she gave me this duh look and said, “Moana.” I said, “No, it’s Eisley,” and she cheerfully said, “No! Moana.” Pray for me.

Bless her heart, she just has no personality. 😉 This is what I get within seconds of asking her to say cheese. 😉

We looked outside after dinner and a rainstorm the other night and there was a full double rainbow! The kids (and Jon) all went a little (lot) bit crazy about it. Ha!

Sitting on biggest brother’s step stool, wearing middle brother’s jammies and drinking her mother’s coffee. Isn’t the sign of the youngest that they think everything is theirs? 😉

Jon had to work all weekend and a lot of nights the whole week before, so when he got home late Sunday afternoon, I decided that we needed  to end the weekend with something fun and so we ate a quick dinner and then took the kids to get frozen yogurt. They had the best time.

Three busy little beavers. These are the best kind of school mornings!

He was so proud of how well he traced his numbers!

Sometimes Eisley morphs into this tiny, old woman and just wants to walk around the house with her blanket wrapped around her the whole day and it just makes me laugh. I need to get her some curlers and slippers to go with it. 😉

As much as we look forward to summer, I think most of the people in this house look forward to fall possibly even more. Football, the air is cooler, football, the Balloon Fiesta, football, pumpkin spice lattes, football, and did I forget one? Oh yeah. Football. 😉

I showed Little Miss this picture of her the other day and she immediately lit up and said, “Wuv hair!” I said, “You love her hair?” She said, “Uh-huh!” I said, “Honey, that’s you” and she got so happy and just patted her hair all proudly. Ha! Her hair has been SO curly this summer!

Blueberry Oatmeal FTW.

The Solar Eclipse is something we have been counting down the minutes to for WEEKS and it dawned dark and cloudy. 🙁 We were so sad! We watched the clouds carefully and barely saw the beginning of it before the cloud cover took over again. I brought the kids back inside and Nathan sat down on the couch, closed his eyes and prayed for the clouds to leave. I started going through math with him, looked up and sunny skies were out ten minutes later. 😉 Somehow, we had a patch of cloud-less sky the rest of the eclipse and Nathan just kept yelling, “GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS!”, while Parker kept running around shouting, “GOD MADE US! GOD MADE THE SUN!” Ha! Love when God works in ways obvious to my kids!

In total amazement. This was such a fun thing to experience with him!

This one obviously had no idea what was going on, but she knew her brothers kept putting the glasses on and shrieking, so she had to copy them. Such a ham. 😉 She kills me.

What a wonderful day!

And, all of a sudden, summer was over.

SO crazy since I feel like we spent most of our spring looking forward to summer! 😉 It came and went in a hurry (like it always does).

Something we learned this year: First Day of School when homeschooling looks a little bit different than a normal first day of school. 😉 Ha! Since Jon is a teacher, we are basically following his school schedule, so the first day the kids were in class was the first day we were in class.

I built it up all weekend, Monday morning came, we got up, ate breakfast, got dressed and marched outside because goodness knows we are still going to take decent pictures every year. 😉

FIRST GRADE. How? When? Why? He’s too big now.

Someone was really excited that he got to hold a sign too. 😉

Three little crazies. And I love them so.

So, then we walked back inside and started school. Ha! It was a little bit of a wait a second moment and honestly, I spent a good part of the first day (read: week) panicking that we’d made a horrible mistake and we were going to ruin our children forever, but after the panic subsided, I remembered why we decided to homeschool this year. And it really has been fun. 🙂

Here’s to a great school year!

Happy back to school everyone!!

We are so sad that the summer is over! Mostly because during the summer, Jon only has one job. 😉 During the school year, he works as both a special-education teacher and a realtor and so we all get excited when he’s home for the mornings in the summer. A certain little miss was NOT happy about Dad not being home when she woke up anymore.

(Also, BTW, you don’t need to be in New Mexico for Jon to help you if you need a house. Email me and I’ll let you know how to get in touch with him! 😉 )

Last year, we did a “university model” Christian school in town with Nathan and really and truly LOVED it, but when thinking ahead to the future and that we would have three kids and thus, three tuitions at the school, we decided maybe we should explore other venues. 😉 This year, we are going to be homeschooling and two things: 1) I am scared to death and, 2) I am super excited. Jon had to report back to his work a week before the students came, so we took that week to do a “soft start” to school and just did a lot of fun crafts and review work. The boys loved it and honestly, I felt a little bit better after doing that. 😉 But pray for us all the same! Ha!

We ended our summer with the dentist. This cracked me up – Eisley holding one of Nathan’s hands and Parker holding the other. They hero worship him around here.

Eisley even had her first unofficial checkup after Parker and did FANTASTIC. Behold the third child who just wants to do everything exactly like her brothers. 😉 Ha!

Wednesday, Eisley was just extra fussy and only wanted to be held in the carrier all day. I figured it was teething but then that afternoon, she started running a fever. 🙁

By ten o’clock, she was at 102.5 while on Motrin, so we gave her lots of ice water and ice cream and let her snuggle in our laps while watching Cinderella for the first time (which she LOVED – all I heard the next day was “O-rella? O-rella?”). By the next morning, she was basically back to normal, so it must have been some weird 24-hour thing. Always hate seeing my babies sick. 🙁

Eisley’s new favorite thing in our house is the little step stool we keep in the bathroom for Parker to wash his hands. Everytime I turn around, she’s carrying that stool somewhere so she can get into something. On this day, I was getting ready to make cookies and she was immediately right next to me. “I hulp?”

Something seems to be missing… 😉 That girl. Notice the stool. She is constantly into something these days. The boys were hard at her age because they just had (and have!) SO MUCH energy. Eisley is completely different because she’s not extra energetic, but she is a problem-solver in ways the boys never were and her dexterity is ridiculous. I am childproofing in ways I never ever have had to do before! And praying even harder for my girl’s safety!

I don’t even know where the summer went, but somehow, here we are. Right on the brink of Fall and school is starting back up! This is always the weird part of the year where it’s still so hot outside that it doesn’t seem like we should be back in a routine. 😉

The kids found their costume box the other day. This is what happens when you have two older brothers. Ha!

Love this of the boys out playing hockey. Good thing I didn’t put that toddler golf set in the giveaway pile yet. 😉

My dad has an incredible workshop at their new house and he’s made some amazing things! We were over there for family dinner and the boys both got inspired to go build something the next morning. So, all we heard were hammers for awhile. Thankfully no thumbs were injured in the process.

These crazies. I often get so caught up in the day to day of just everything that I don’t stop to really remember or appreciate the gift each of them is to me. We are not promised a set number of days, but I am so thankful for each and every one with these three pajama-heads.

Thirty-five years ago today, these two got married.

I am so thankful for their marriage, for their legacy and for their love – both for each other and for Jesus.

I think they’ve only gotten better looking with the years. 😉

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad!! May this God bless you and keep you both for another thirty-five years! I love you so much!