Bella, Gabe and Josiah

And just like that, 1st grade is done. How did that happen???

Saturday was Josy’s first birthday party with his friends. He was so excited!!! Unfortunately, the weather was terrible. It was raining and cold and wet. Gabe’s teeth were chattering, Pat lost all feeling in his fingers and the wind blew the candles out and Pat had to relight them. But Josy had so much fun with all of his friends. We ended the party a half hour early because it was so cold. Who’d have thought that a late-May party would be so cold??? At least our little birthday boy had a wonderful time…

Summer is here!! Okay, maybe not officially, but it is warm and sunny and we must take advantage of it! Pat was out of town for work for the day, so I decided that rather than cooking, I’d pick up crepes and head out to the beach to play. It was absolutely the right decision. We even managed to run into some friends. When we got home, both boys needed baths and went to bed early, as they were both acting like little boys so had completely worn themselves out by playing outside in the dirt all day, which is exactly what they should be doing on a beautiful sunny day like this. I hope the summer is full of many more days like this.

We had a very nice, low key Mother’s Day. It was exactly what I wanted and what we needed. I woke up to Josy and all of Gabe’s snuggle buddies snuggled in bed with me. Gabe was standing next to the bed and told me he had made me breakfast: chocolate chip pancakes (from the freezer) and a glass of water. Then he told me that “the pancakes might be a little bit burned. I accidentally put them in the microwave for 20 minutes instead of 2 minutes. But I stopped it when I saw all the smoke.” Needless to say, I had no idea what to expect for breakfast… It was all I could do to get them off of the plate…  I had big intentions of eating them simply because my sweet boy made them for me, but there was no way. Luckily he wasn’t upset about it, he just made me another batch. And those ones he only cooked for 20 seconds… After church Pat put up the hammock and I took a nice nap in the yard. Lucy joined me for half of it. Then Gabe insisted on joining me too, which made the sleeping not happen. The

Snuggle Time is absolutely my favorite time of the day. That said, it’s getting a little bit ridiculous. This morning we had two boys, two blankets, one pillow and five stuffed animals. I did draw the line on adding the pinata. I have to have some standards.

I made my first meme:

Last week was Teacher Appreciation Week and I am determined to teach my boys that everyone loves flowers, so every year I made them buy flowers for their teachers. It’s actually not hard to convince them, they think it’s a great idea. This year I learned an important lesson. Never try and buy flowers the day after prom weekend…. Oh well. His teachers loved it! And Gabe took one rose in to his teacher who actually wrote him a thank you note.

While I’m catching up on posts, we had a lot of fun last Sunday. We started out with a bike ride. This is momentous because we didn’t go on any family bike rides last year because my bike had broken when the shed collapsed. But Pat took it in and got it fixed this spring, so I suddenly  a bike again! It was also the first time that Gabe has riden his own bike, rather than hanging out in the trailer. Also, Josy was determined to beat Gabe and spent the whole time yelling at Daddy to go faster. Then we pulled out the fire pit and Cathy came over to hang out for the evening. At church that morning, the deacons had given the boys all of the extra Communion bread. When I asked them what we were going to do with all that bread, one of the other guys at church announced that we could make tiny grilled cheese sandwiches. So that’s what the boys got for dinner. have Then we hung out by the fire and did our Bible time. Hopefully we’ll have a lot more fire time in this year because that was a lo

As Gabe was getting ready for bed, he announced that “this was an awesome day!” And while yes, it was awesome, I would actually use the word crazy… Let’s start with last night. Josy and I stopped by the flower store on our way home and bought a bunch of plants to plant. I knew that we didn’t have enough pouring soil to actually plant them yet, but I figured we’d at least get the process started. Then, because I was Snack Mom at baseball, I decided to make cookies. Pat ended up at the grocery store last night when the boys went to bed while I made cookies, which would have been a great plan, however then I realized that we were out of eggs and I had to put the whole thing on hold until he got home. So I made the cookies, but I only got three dozen made before I have up and went to bed. This morning I made pancakes for the boys and then got started on all of the things that needed done today, which mostly involved a lot of cleaning. Gabe and I got the flowers arranged to figure out if we