At the Grocery Store

When Ryan is home, I do not take the girls grocery shopping with me. However, with working full time and trying to avoid running errands on the weekend, I have been taking them with me to one grocery store on our way home from work/school on Mondays. These trips are not going all that well. Grace and Faith are tired after being at school all day, I am trying to concentrate on getting the best deals, and we are all just wanting to go home. But, we need groceries, so we go to the store.

So, the Penny Horse has become the "incentive" to behave while we are in the store. They get to ride it once when we get inside, and once after we are done, IF THEY ARE GOOD. Being good includes (but is not limited to) not pulling your sister's hair, not climbing out of the cart, not pulling/touching/looking at any store displays, not throwing groceries out of the cart, and not yelling for any reason. Once, there was a hair-pulling, slapping incident, so we were not able to ride the horse after we finished our shopping. So, the next week, we did better, and we were even able to take these pictures. The horse goes pretty fast, and Baby Faith fell off of it a few times before learning to really hold on.

How many more weeks until Ryan comes home and I can go back to shopping by myself?

Cousins Are Fun

These are some more pictures from when we were in Denver with everyone for birthdays. Grace and Kaitlyn were happy to have their picture taken together, but were not interested in having Faith and Caleb in the picture, as indicated by the one of the 4 of them. Faith enjoys basketball...and it helps when Uncle Chad can give her a boost.

More Dress Up

Well, I think we can agree that what Cinderalla's dress has been missing all these years is a leopard print cap and that any gold handbag looks better with a red velvet dress, black boots and pink camo cap. Grace and Faith have really been into dress up lately. Faith will stay at my feet until I compliment her outfit. Grace is usually the mom, but I've also noticed that Faith puts her babies in time-out quite a bit. One of them also has to have tobasco on a pretty regular basis because she won't talk nicely. It is fun to watch their imaginations working!

Isn't She Pretty?

I've decided that this is one of my all-time favorite pictures of Grace. This is another one from Garden of the Gods the day before Ryan left for Iraq. I am really trying to simply enjoy Grace- which is a challenge sometimes because she is a lot like me. I know that God is using these Grace and these challenges to teach me some important lessons. Some of these lessons are tough ones, like patience, mercy, self control and joy.

I love how much she loves to draw, how well she can tell a Bible story, how hard she works to learn her spelling words and her attention to detail. She has a newly discovered love of whipped cream (not Cool Whip!) and wants to put it on a lot of things (like mandarin oranges). Looking at this picture, the things that she does that frustrate me (hair-combing, anyone?) just seem to fade, and I am reminded of how blessed I am to have been given such an amazing and wonderful gift.

Dress Up

We were just hanging out at home on Friday and the girls had fun playing dress up. Grace had changed into pajamas at this point, but Baby Faith was still "fancy". She told me that she and her baby were going to church. By the way, the object around her neck is a sweater and she is wearing Grace's shoes. Bet you all wish you had a church outfit that looks like this!

Faith as Spiderman

Here is Baby Faith as Spiderman. These were masks that were a favor for Caleb's birthday. Faithie really liked the mask and really got into the character. She liked Caleb's Spiderman toy as much as he did and had a little bit of trouble understanding that it was his prize. Probably one of the cutest Spiderman imitators I've ever seen!

Happy Birthday

I had a really fun birthday weekend. We went to Denver on Saturday and had fun with the cousins and Auntie Pam and Uncle Lyle. We took some good pictures and I'll post some throughout this week. This one of me and the girls is one of my favorite recent pictures. Everyone looks happy and we are all looking at the camera at the same time. Yesterday, we went to Nicole's house and had a Birthday BBQ, which was also a really good time. I was really missing Ryan a lot this weekend, and it helped to be with people we love.