Imaginary friends

Some of you are privileged enough to have met Mousie and Tiger, Drake's imaginary friends from several years ago. We rarely hear about them anymore, but for 3- to 5-year-old Drake, they were definitely important individuals in his life.

I figured that Drake needed imaginary friends because he was an only child until he was 4-1/2. And I didn't suspect Levi would probably ever have one, because he and Drake play together all the time. ALL the time.

But I was wrong.

So without further ado, I would like to introduce you to Levi's new friend...Baby Einstein.

(Yes, I'm serious.)

As far as I can tell, Baby Einstein (the imaginary friend version) looks like the little cartoon head on the Baby Einstein videos. And he fits in Levi's hand. And "He's - Nice - Boy" according to Levi.

We woke up this morning to a rain storm, and Levi came out of his room concerned that Baby "Ine-tine" was outside in the scary thunderstorm. I assured him that "he" was not, without realizing that he wasn't talking about one of the videotapes. Then again after nap, he worried that B.E. had been left outside in the rain. Since then he has played hide-and-seek with B.E., drawn a picture of him, and let me hold him. Right at this very moment, B.E. is in the playroom on an airplane.

Mmm Hmmmm...

7 years old!

We ended up celebrating Drake's 7th birthday for almost a week, because it fell on a Monday and we didn't have his "friends" party until the following Saturday. I think he enjoyed having a "birthday week" instead of just a day, though! Here are some pictures from the various celebrations...

Madagascar 2 - Drake is a huge Madagascar fan! This kid does movie quotes like nobody's business.

Since the boys are exactly 4 1/2 years apart, they each have a half-birthday on the other one's real birthday, and we give the half-birthday boy one gift, while the real birthday boy gets several. Levi got a puzzle rack and four new puzzles! He is a puzzler, just like his daddy!

Drake got books, coloring books, and a drawing book, too! Here he is with his beloved new "Dragons of the Deep" creation science book from our favorite Alaskans!

His big gift from Daddy, Mommy, and Levi - a Razor scooter! This kid was over the moon! He has been riding it daily for the past week.

We got a cookie cake for our little family party - it was really good! I had never tried one before.

For the friends party last weekend, Drake wanted a "rain forest" party...Adam cut up all the fruit and I made the cakes - lemon rounds with vanilla frosting and chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting. (Adam helped me with frog placement!)

A closer view of the cake. (That's a pineapple top that we used for a plant.)

It's finally party time! This is a shot of the kids playing an ice cube game...who can hold the ice cube the longest without dropping it? Drake's friend Kiley won - their ice cubes had all but melted, so I was relieved when someone finally won the game!

Make a wish....

Opening gifts

Drake loved the gifts from his friends!

Here's the "tree" we made to decorate for the rain forest party.

Drake in front of his tree! He colored all the animals in the branches during the week or so before his party. (The trunk and branches are paper shopping bags from the commissary, and the leaves and grass are construction paper.)

***

Our big boy had a great time turning 7!

Moving and School

I was planning to write a blog post about our first week of school, and well...that didn't really happen. There's been some major busyness going on at our house. We have orders to Montana, and we'll probably be moving in October or November. Seriously, words cannot express our excitement! A new start has been a long time coming, and Adam was accepted for a special duty assignment at Malmstrom AFB, near Great Falls, MT. So there's a lot going on with getting ready to move!

We were planning to start homeschooling the first week in August, but when we got our assignment, we decided to bump it up yet another week to provide some extra wiggle-room. So we're toward the end of our fourth week of school now, and I have to say, it's - well - busy! Wow. I feel sorta like Drake when Levi was born. I always say that Drake knew he was going to have a new baby brother, and he had a grasp on what newborn babies are like...but he didn't quite internalize how much the new baby would affect his life. Yeah, that's how this whole homeschool "adventure" feels to me, now that we've almost finished our first month. It has been a major adjustment! I had all the details planned out pretty well, and I did suspect somewhere in the fuzzy recesses of my brain that it wasn't going to be all that easy. But suspecting and experiencing are two very different things!

Anyway, school is actually going quite well, aside from the fact that I feel like I more than earn my keep nowadays! Drake's reading is improving so much, and his desire to do it has improved ten-fold since I shelved his nemesis, the hated reading/phonics lesson book that we'd been using since March. (Planning to start a new phonics program soon, but for now we're reading lots of easy reader books from the library, and he's doing great!) He also no longer tells me he's "not good at math" like he did last year - he actually seems to enjoy math, and he gets at least some satisfaction from successfully mastering new concepts in math. I am very, very thankful that I chose the math curriculum we're using - it seems to fit his learning style very well. He is so not the worksheet type. Not at all. Also, his handwriting is actually legible now, and he forms all the letters correctly, most of the time! (Last year, he had no instruction in "how" to form letters, so he did it in the wackiest ways, like detached balls and sticks all over the place...not conducive to writing with any speed or legibility down the road.) So his handwriting has been "reworked" and I think it's pretty much fixed now - yay!

So all that to say...it feels like a snail's pace sometimes, but now that we've covered enough ground to look back a little bit, I can see a lot of improvement and a lot of learning that's happened over the past 4 weeks. And I pray it will continue to get easier as we get our "groove" even more deeply established! I'm so proud of my wiggly, imaginative, talkative, loving, very-much-a-boy first grader, and all he has accomplished so far! I believe he's in the ideal place to learn without destroying those very traits that I love about him.

Excited on the first day of school.

Drake was taking a break and played with Levi for a few minutes. Getting out the dried beans keeps Levi occupied for a L-O-N-G time! (As does filling the sink with bubble water...)

Experiencing fox ears...having large ears really does help you hear better!

That yellow strip at the top of the wall is our history timeline, labeled 5000 BC to 0. (It goes around the dining room and just barely into the kitchen.) This year in history we're doing ancient history, or "Creation to Christ". History is Drake's favorite subject so far, and definitely mine too! It's amazing to actually study history in order and see how the Old Testament lines up with other events and civilizations around the world!

Close-up of our timeline after the first three days. (There are a lot more timeline figures now!)

Hmmm...

It's a "minibeast trap" - our first flopped science experiement. What is the only minibeast ("bug") you can attract in Florida? Ants. We were hoping that maybe we could catch a beetle or something if we checked it early in the morning. Nope.

Drake writing in "cuneiform". (Not really; just pretending. Cuneiform is the oldest known written language, produced by the oldest known civilization, the Sumerians. Cuneiform was actually an alphabet - unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese characters - but it had 600 letters!) Drake had fun with this one, and dried his "cuneiform tablet" in the sun to keep.

***

Anyway, that's a brief overview of our first few weeks of school. Drake's birthday was on Monday, and he's SEVEN years old now! (How did this happen??!?) His party will be this Saturday, and I'm hoping to post birthday pictures when "birthday week" is officially over.

Washington Trip

Well, I had originally decided not to post any of these pictures, because we came home with over 400 of them! But then I changed my mind today and decided I would post just a FEW of them. Please keep in mind, not every activity and person is represented here! We had so much fun with so many different people, but I didn't get pictures of all of it. So this is my best attempt... (Ever heard the saying, "done is better than perfect?")

My guys and me on an outing to Lake Wenatchee with my parents. It was a lot of fun!

Brothers

Dakota, Grandma Ann, Levi, Adam, Drake & me

Adam and I took an AWESOME trip down to southwestern Washington state to celebrate our 10th anniversary (a few months late!). We spent 3 nights at a cute Bed & Breakfast, and saw the Mt. St. Helens area and some scenic waterfalls in northwestern Oregon. We hiked to the top of Multnomah Falls (where we took this picture of ourselves)! Multnomah Falls itself is very impressive, but I see now that I didn't load any pictures of the actual falls onto this post...oh well. You can Google it if you're interested. It's beautiful! It's the second highest year-round waterfall in North America, or something like that. It was quite a steep hike for a non-hiker like me, but I survived!

This one is Latourell Falls (and these pictures are actually out of order - we went to Latourell Falls first). It was my favorite. A smaller waterfall, but still quite tall and magnificent...and much less crowded!

My sister, Crystal, and me on the fourth of July. (Can you tell we took it ourselves?!)

We spent a 3-day weekend up in the Entiat valley at Adam's dad's house with Adam's sisters and all their kids. (There were a lot of kids!) What fun!

My sisters-in-law and me

(Brenda, left - Suzie, right)

Adam with his two best buddies from elementary through high school, Chuck (center) and Haus (right).

My mom and Drake

My dad and Levi

Drake and Papa Don (Adam's dad)

Levi and Grandma Nancy (Adam's step-mom)

So it was a great trip! Two glaring omissions that have come to mind are the night we spent at Chuck and Liz's house and the Hydro Park day with Grandma Ann...but I don't have any pictures. Oh yeah, and there was swimming, and my mom's birthday party at my grandparents' house, and...a whole lot more. Well,I know these few pictures don't really do a 5-week vacation justice at all, but I wanted to try to get something on here about it. Thank you to all you wonderful Washingtonians who blessed us with such a fun time!

Blog reflections...

So it's been a couple of months!

We just got home from a trip back to Washington State that lasted five weeks. It was wonderful to be back in our old stompin' grounds and see all our family again! I have to say the highlight for me was Adam's and my 4-day trip away to celebrate our 10th anniversary. What a great time we had relaxing and reconnecting, and just being a couple again instead of a daddy and mommy!

Now we're all back home again. Still readjusting a bit, but life is good. God is good! We are incredibly blessed.

I had to step away from blogging for awhile, partly because there just wasn't time when we were on our trip, but also to think a little bit about whether this is something I really want to continue doing, or something that I perhaps should continue doing. Why am I doing this? What do I hope to accomplish?

When I started this blog about a year ago, God was leading me through a time of learning to be real with other people and real with myself. It was a time of looking at myself and what made me tick, of learning to be honest about my faults, and of letting go: letting go of my closest friend as she moved away, and of Drake and his babyhood as I prepared to release him to kindergarten, among other things. My "real life" at that time looked a lot different than it does now! I've come to see my role as a parent in a very different light, and I've seen that miles don't necessarily separate people; failure to communicate does. (And choosing to communicate keeps friends close, even when they're 4,000 miles apart!)

I've also learned a few things about that ideal of transparency that I longed for so much, and in some ways still do. I see that maybe it's really not possible to be transparent with everyone about everything. Because so many parts of our lives and so many things that we think and feel - either for good or for bad - are tied to other people, there is no good way to share a lot of things with everyone. There have been so many topics that I would have liked to blog about, but they were in some way connected to another person, so it was not my information to share.

This has produced a lot of blogger-frustration over the past year! So now I relinquish my ideal of complete transparency. When speaking purely of my own feelings and actions, what's important to me, and what I'm learning, I want to always be real. But I have learned that other people's truth and mine are very often tangled together so tightly that I can't separate them, so they must remain unsaid. And a tongue that's tied in many areas doesn't feel very "real". So - it's complicated! If you've blogged or Facebooked or anything like that, you probably know what I mean.

Not to mention that, like it or not, our lives are changing for the busier. As we ease into home education (which we plan to start full-time at the beginning of next month), we are trying to find a new normal, and trying to figure out how to squeeze a few more hours out of each day. I'm feeling prepared and fairly comfortable with what I expect our days to be like, but I know that I'll be in for a few surprises.

What I think is going to happen with this blog is that I will try to continue posting some pictures and commentary as often as I can, which is probably the most "useful" aspect of this blog for all of you faraway family and friends. In other words, for the most part, this is likely going to turn into your run-of-the-mill "family activities blog" - which is sort of something I was trying to avoid when I started. But I do hold out hope to still be able to really write once in awhile, from my heart, which has been my favorite part of keeping a blog. But doing so on a regular basis, unfortunately, is probably a thing of the past. At least for now.

So, bring on the pictures! Now I just have to get them off the camera and onto the computer first, and there are a zillion of them...a job for another day, because you should take a look at what can happen to a clean house in just three days of living in it!

Baseball 2009

Now that Drake's baseball season is officially over, here are some pictures! There are also a lot of pictures on my camera, including the awesome beach day we had with Drake and his teammates and their families on Saturday. Someday, when I get the pictures off the camera, maybe I'll post those too.

Anyway, I can't say enough good things about our experience with baseball this year. It was nothing but fun and learning for the kids - no competition, no pressure. Just kindness and encouragement from a couple of great coaches and all the wonderful parents who participated. We couldn't have asked for a better introduction to youth sports. And that's not to say that I want my kids to play very many sports, though! Two evenings a week is a lot to give up for a couple of months when you're the homebody type. But it was very worth it this time.

And another thing - I did not take these pictures! There is a dad on the team who is also a professional photographer on the side (in addition to being a colonel or something crazy like that), and he took these great shots...and many more. So anyway, just giving credit where credit is due!

Our #10 and his teammates

The Cubs stretching before the game

Keeping his eye on the ball!

Run, Drake, run!

The kids all loved sliding into home - gotta get those uniforms dirty at each game!

Learning to trust

I haven't had a chance to really sit down and write anything in a long time...and while I can't say that I actually have time for it today, I'm doing it nonetheless.

For me, the past month (or two) has been one of those times of growing, stretching, going through the ringer, and being molded by the Lord. I hadn't felt like sharing much, because I couldn't really sort out what was going on inside enough to convey it. Nothing much has changed, circumstantially. But I am coming to a deeper realization that I'm not in control of my life, and that's actually a good thing. Even when I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, my Sweet Jesus does. Nothing is a surprise to Him. When I reach the end of my (admittedly short) rope, and I can no longer make myself believe I can hold it all together, He is there to catch me. I have to let go enough to feel the fall, and then I'm in His arms. It's a very short distance, really.

But now, after the fall - and the catch - it's so easy to climb right back out of His arms, trying to put the pieces back the way I think they should go. I have an ideal plan for the next ten years. And it's pretty obvious that if things could just work out the way I want them to, life would be great!

Right?

But how much I would have missed if everything had always gone according to my plans! Events that seemed like tragedies - and discipline I didn't want to receive - have brought about the most godly character changes within me, the times of sweetest communion with my Lord, and the deepest satisfaction I've found in human relationships. And those tragedies and discipline would never have found their way into my ten-year plan. Never in ten years, and never in a million years.

So what does that mean for an insecure, often obsessive, sometimes short-sighted, and very idealistic person - like me? It means that I must prayerfully consider and make my plans in pencil. I must be willing to give up my heart's desire-of-the-moment for the rich and beautiful and often scary plans that God has for me. He is refining me. And every bend in the road - that I can't see beyond - is another chance to learn, to trust, to grow. With childlike faith that does not demand to know the end, but simply trusts the Father.

I don't want to be blown around by the winds of fear anymore. I don't want my joy to be based on circumstances. Lord, teach me to trust You more. May I trust enough to always rest in Your arms, and not have to experience Your loving "catch" to remind me that You are infinitely faithful.

But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. Psa. 131:2

Constructive photos

These are some pictures from the day we took the boys to Construction Junction at the fairgrounds about a month ago...

Hmmmm...not so sure about this thing.

Drake at the controls of a mini excavator.

Levi in one of his bolder moments!

Levi: Are you sure I should be sitting up here?

Levi: I guess I'll be okay as long as I'm with Buddy.

Levi: Buddy, why do they keep taking so many pictures?

Building the way cool butterfly house at home.

Butterfly house basic paint job...

...and detailing.

Ta-Da! Drake did a great job!