Soccer and Spray-ground

We’ve been real busy this summer. I am working weekends again so I can be home with the kids during the week. I love it. I only work Saturday and Sunday evenings so I get to be home some and still go to church.

The kids have kept me busy. My nephew has been with us for about the last 3 weeks, it’s been fun to have him here. I am keeping one of the neighborhood girls also so we have a full house on any given day between our guests and Mesha’s friends.

Ok, I wish I could type more but see my last pic and you’ll understand why I can’t! Have a great summer!

I took this while typing this post!

Where’s Waldo

Here is a pic Stephan forwarded me from his trip to San Francisco a few weeks ago. Can you find him?

Emerie

Click here to find out why we’re so glad the neighbors bought a trampoline…

Flip flops, McDonalds, and the dog.

Today was a funny day. This morning was like any other, got up, made the kids breakfast, Mesha is usually running by that time so I didn’t really miss her. We ran errands, had lunch at McDonalds and visited with some friends while the kids played, nap time came and went as usual.

Then 5 o’clock comes and the weight of toddler and preschooler aged whining and fit throwing began to feel heavy on my shoulders. I look at the clock once again, 5:30, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I am only minutes away from a life preserver, Stephan should be walking through that door any minute.

Wait! Stephan is in San Francisco working very hard at standing in long lines at WWDC and feasting on fine cuisine. My heart sank, then lightened again, Mesha should be home soon. But alas, I quickly remembered she was gone as well and it was just me… and them. (Theme song from “The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly” playing, you know the gunfight song, and believe me we have exactly one of each, I’ll let you decide who’s who).

So I loaded em’ both up and off we went to McDonalds, no not to eat, I’m not so hard up for playtime that I’ll eat MCD twice in one day. No, to retrive Emerie’s Dora flip flop that she must have accidentally dropped while getting into the van as we were leaving. The shoe is extremely important to her and I will elaborate on just how important, with a small excerpt of my afternoon:

Emerie is waking up from nap, I am smiling and telling her the neighbors are playing the trampoline, I am telling her this because it makes her happy and it is of upmost importance that she wakes up happy or it’s hell the rest of the day. What? Don’t believe me, come over sometime and spend an afternoon when she wakes up in a bad mood. Anyway, I digress. She was so happy running around half asleep when she realized we had lost her other Dora flip flop, 20 straight minutes of crying and tears, and whining. 20 straight minutes, no kidding, ask Renee, she heard it. Finally I called McDonalds, the manager went out into the parking lot and found the flippin’ flip flop, Thank you Jesus, and I’m not taking His name in vain, seriously, Thank you Jesus.

After retrieving the shoe we went to Wal-Mart for some fathers day supplies and a little wine for mom. We stop by MCD again to get a movie I won’t have time to watch at the Redbox, “The Jane Austin Book Club”, anybody seen it? If so tell me about it, I seriously don’t think I’ll have time to watch it. As I was renting the movie I had the van pulled up right beside the box with the windows rolled down for the kids and the dog. When I got back in the car I instinctively rolled up the windows and cranked up the air. As I am rolling up the passenger side window I notice something odd in my periphery. I look over and my dog is hanging by his neck with his head out the window, body squirming. Oops. I quickly rolled the window down much to his relief and he gave me a pissy dog look. Sorry Oliver. No harm, no foul right

It’s gonna be a long week.

Summertime slideshow

So I made a slideshow of some new pics and for some crazy reason I can’t embed it from you tube onto my blog. So here is the link if you are interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxVGlPKiJWc

Summertime

I love summer, needless to say we have already been so busy. So here’s an update on our family.

I am going back to weekends so that I can be home with the kids. I will be working Sat/Sun 3pm to 3am, no more overnights! I was having troubles driving home.

Stephan leaves for WWDC in San Fran next week, he is just a tiny bit excited. It is the World Wide Developer Conference that regards just about everything Mac, all the Steve Jobs groupies will be there.

Mesha is off to summerfest at Windemere in the Lake of the Ozarks tomorrow. She is also very ready for some fun. It should be a particularly moving time for the kids. She is going with our church and they just lost their youth pastor, no explanation, no warning, he’s just gone and the church cannot give details at this time. Summerfest will go on and I am sure God is planing to do some amazing things in their hearts. Then she comes home for one day and leaves via airplane for Indiana university where she will attend diving camp for 2 weeks with Jeff Huber and co. He was the 2004 Olympic dive coach and seven time US national coach of the year. He puts on a good camp and we are fortunate to be able to send her this year. She has demonstrated enough potential that we decided it would be a great opportunity for her, and she’s excited and nervous all at the same time. She’s home for one month and then its off again to Jo Bill Dixon’s wilderness cross country camp. It’s pretty brutal, but she loves it, go figure.

Emerie is only happy doing one of three things, playing outside, watching a show, or swimming. I guess were going to be at the pool lots this summer, seriously, she’s a trip. If don’t keep her busy she let’s me know.

Owen has transformed right before our eyes into a fully charged little boy. Gone are the days of McLovin, he is mostly rough and tumble and beats on his sister quite frequently. Every now and then he gives us a nugget of what he used to be, he really is still my little sweetheart, but with a little piss and vinegar mixed in.

I guess you could say summer is our favorite time of year, we’re going to be a whole lot of busy but I plan to try and keep this updated. Have a great summer and keep us updated on how your family is doing!

Note to self

…don’t sign up for the military. I just finished playing Call of Duty 4 with my husband and really it just felt like a bad dream. I couldn’t jump and that captain peirce guy just kept yelling at me. I am no good at that game, I don’t have time for today’s video games, hec the tutorial to teach you how to play the darn game took me an hour. Give me some good ol’ Mrs. Pac Man and I’m good to go. Or how about some Galaga, I can whip some tail at that game, not to mention Super Mario Brothers, I beat that game several times. Guess I’m just getting old

Tricycle Jackass

Mesha and her friend were out playing with the little ones yesterday. They ended up having tricycle races and it quickly evolved into an episode of Jackass that I had to put and end to. For those of you who don’t know what Jackass is, Mom, it’s a show in which a group of wild teens get together and do stupid stunts and usually end up hurting themselves, very badly. In fact, last week at a trauma conference I attended, we were watching a slideshow of morbid traumatic injures due to accidents, and the speaker states, “This why you don’t let your kids watch Jackass”. I digress, we have a very large hill on either side of our driveway and I could imagine having take one of them into the ER where I work. I am all for fun but something about the high speeds and the tricycle wobbling out of control on the asphalt scared me. Call me crazy. It started out cute…After I stopped the trike thing they turned to the big girl bike. They pulled one another up and down that hill several times. I wish I had that energy. Anyway, here are some pics.

Oh please, no…

I am worried about Stephan. I found these in his closet tonight when I was doing laundry. If he has told any of you that he plans on joining the crip gang please try to dissuade him. Liberty isn’t ready for that, and I hardly think his laptop is appropriate “packin.”

BPBD

Well helloo people. Sorry for the gap in posts but I seem to have come down with a case of bi-polar blog disorder. That’s BPBD and I don’t think there is any medication to fix it. When I blog, I blog, sometimes twice a day, and when I don’t, I…well that part is painfully obvious, I don’t.

In reality, I have been pretty busy. Nationals went well, Mesha placed 21st out of 30 and her coaches and I were thrilled, as was she. She was worried she would come in last place, but honestly 21st for that level of competition was awesome, just getting there made us really proud of her. She dives 6 hours a week when most of those girls dive upwards of 15. She dove with future olympic athletes, no kidding, amazing diving, thrilling to watch.

We have been enjoying the weather and spending lots of time outdoors. Thanks to “Ed”, our handy dandy neighbor, we have a new pull behind bike trailer for the kids. He found us one for $10 at a garage sale last weekend! So the kids and I have been tootling around Liberty getting some exercise and checking out this whole biking thing. Today I was turning and made up some creative hand signal to alert the car in front of me that I was turning left, yeah, I don’t think he got that message. As I pedaled by he just stared at me. I am not sure what the hand signal meant but I knew I had to make one, so go figure. I had a quick class in hand signals at the bike shop a few minutes later so if you encounter us in Liberty I will be making the appropriate signals from now on. I only have to get the stink-eye once to get the point, (Mr. Perfect in the honda.) So I mileaged our distance and we rode about 5.5 miles today! And it was fun, go figure!

Otherwise, not much else going on. We weathered the storm last weekend except for a few limbs from the tree in our backyard. The flowers are all in bloom and the birds are feeding from our new feeders. I never realized how many beautiful types of birds there are in Missouri.

Oh yeah, last weekend we went to the Dave Ramsey, “Total Money Makeover” Live event at Kemper. Five hours of Dave in the worst seat you can imagine, it was mildly entertaining but well worth the information. We left pretty pumped and set to start phase II of the Peterson Family Total Money Makeover. We have the car and Stephan’s student loan left to pay off. The last phase is saving 6 months of an emergency fund and then we can have our lives back. That means no vacation, no summer clothes, very little eating out, and more thrift store shopping. Which is fine by me because I love thrift store shopping! But it is going to be a good 9-10 months of living on love and macaroni and cheese. Pray for us…

Here are a few pics from today’s adventure in bike riding and permit obtaining! It took quite a feat to get that darn permit, we had to get Mesha a new birth certificate and social security card after the adoption. She finally passed the test on the third try and my car wouldn’t start on the way to the DMV, so I had to get a jump, at home, and again at the DMV, I think I left the dome lights on last night. I was beginning to think maybe there was some reason we weren’t supposed to get it, but it’s too late now, so pray for us about that one too.;-)I think Stephan is giving a driving lesson as I type…

Mesha is thrilled to be having her picture taken outside the DMV