Bella, Gabe and Josiah

It was fun to have the week off to just play with the kids. It was weird to have a teenager around all of the sudden, but we made due. It helps that she likes to take naps just as much as the boys, so I still had naptime to myself... Josy has discovered his love for stuffs animals. It’s adorable. Yesterday he actually had two giant giraffes and was trying to snuggle both of them. Gabe really liked watching Bella play computer games. Unfortunately he also likes snacks and isn’t allowed to eat in the den, so this was his solution. This is where Josy ends up most of the time when people are watching tv, since he’s not supposed to be watching tv at all... Gabe desperately wants a pegleg. So when I made biscuits from a pop can, he was convinced it would make a good pegleg. We’ve since upgrades to a half gallon milk jug and a waffle box, but I doN’t have a picture of that version. He also thought this would be a fair light saber battle. Um, it was not. One of Gabe’s friends is moving to Engl

Last week we decided to go play on the soccer field. It was actually my first tine playing on a soccer field, which is funny considering that my brother Nathan basically lived on the soccer field, but I was definitely not the athletic member of the family... Anyway, the kids thought it was great. Gabe and Bella played soccer and Josy crawled around the nets, going in and out. In Gabe’s words, he was “make suring the net was good.”  We found some other random stuff to play on also. Both boys were trying to get over the hurdles, which they didn’t have much luck with. And I think we found some football equipment to play on, but I’m not really sure. Gabe was also convinced we needed to try and find the owner of a sweaty shirt we found. Um, no. We will not be touching that...

Bella left today. There’s a lot of thoughts and emotions involved in all of that and it’s a lot to process. Plus, I have a lot of pictures of the last week that I still need to post. But for now I’ll just post the pictures I took this morning of her and the boys, right before she left.

We took advantage of a break in the rain to go explore the old mine ruins. Gabe thought it was wonderful. Every time we saw any type if ruins, he would yell “a piece of mine!!!” even if it was just a piece of metal or an old pipe. He insisted on bringing home 8 big rocks. It’s a good thing that he had lots of pockets because after stopping every 15 feet to rest, I convinced him to put most of them in his pockets. That made life much easier...

Bella came home for a visit, so we decided that the best thing we could do was to do a family camping trip. Unfortunately, we did not think to check the weather report and it literally rained the entire weekend. At one point it rained slightly less, but that was it. It was a very wet weekend... That said, we still had fun. We were outside, eating good food and the kids did a lot of laughing at each other. Plus, we didn’t see any bears. Friday night was a late one. Between all of the prepping and packing and randomly having to pick up the cat from animal control, we didn’t even get to the campsite until 8. Then we still had to set up the tent that Pat has only used once and that was 10 years ago, so it took awhile. And in order to cook hot dogs, we had to get a fire going in the rain. Even with Gram and Gramps help, Josy wasn’t in bed until 10:30, which actually worked out okay because he went right to sleep. Bella ate her hot dog and then she announced that she was going to bed, which

Gramps’ phone is so much better than mine!

Today is day 14 and Gabe has no symptoms so I think we’re fine and school reopens tomorrow. Part of me is a little sad because it’s been fun hanging out with the boys. However, I’m also very, very tired of playing pirates... Yesterday we went to the beach to play baseball. (Doesn’t everyone play baseball on the beach???) Unfortunately it started raining a bit as we drove out there and it was pretty close to naptime and someone got sand all over his thumb, so we didn’t last very long. But at least we got out of the house for awhile and we found a lot of treasures! After naps we played in the backyard for awhile and Josy decided that it would be fun to climb the slide. Um, what? The kid can’t even walk, but he can climb the slide. This one is going to keep me on my toes... He actually made it all the way to the top. Crazy kid...