Sheet Poses Starring Zach

Sheet Rock (with Chase as person taking advantage of said rock)

SUPER SHEET

Sheet Star

Sheet Wall

The Sheet Potato

The Sheet Thinker

After The Storm

Just a few more pictures of our gorgeous rainbow. Dan took so many that I wanted to be sure and publish his wonderful photography here on our blog.

Here is Zach doing what my children have always seemed to love to do after a storm....wade in the water. It was actually cold water and felt nice.

Look at the green green grass of home!!! Everything looks so fresh and revived. Friendswood really is a beautiful place to live.

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

We had a very bad storm just a few days ago and it was pretty awesome. The lightning was thick jagged streaks in the sky. The thunder was very loud and sometimes did not seem to stop (yes, Shadow was in the house), and the sky was sickly green! We were not even aware that we were under a Tornado watch....yes, here in Friendswood. We were supposed to be prepared to hide in an inside room with no windows. However, we were busy watching The Office. When I looked outside and noticed we had rain falling and sun shining I mentioned to Zach that I bet there was a rainbow out there somewhere. This gorgeous rainbow could be seen from our back and front yards. It stretched from one side over our house to the other side. It was magnificent!

Father's Day 2008

Dan had a wonderful Father's Day. OK, that is my opinion. You may have to ask him what he thought about it.
The boys brought him breakfast in bed.
I made pulled pork for our dinner. It was so good! I will be doing that again since it is so easy to do.

Here are some of the gifts he received. He was very excited about the Pendragon book (as you can see) because he did not even know the latest in the episode was out.

The best thing about Father's Day is that he was here with us. Healthy, wealthy with more blessings than he (we) can count, and quite wise....just ask him!! His nickname is not IKIA for nothing!!

We love him very much and are so grateful he is the daddy of this family and my eternal companion. Nobody does it better!

The SHADOW knows!!!

Here is our "watchdog", Shadow. She is so amazing in her role that she can let us know when there are dogs or people walking behind our fence. She lets us know when someone is walking their dog or themselves down the sidewalk either on our side of the street or the other. She is great to warn us of the birds on the electrical wires yet seems to forget to let us know that the birds are eating her food. She is also quite expert on letting us know if there has been the slightest change in the wind. How does she let us know? She BARKS forever! She is a leader in our neighborhood when it comes to barking and has been very good at getting all the other dogs to join in when she has determined there is a danger somewhere. We are also very aware if there is a siren nearby because she feels it is her responsibility to help the siren be just a bit louder by howling at it. Just like the wolf she is!! One of her best talents is to let us know if it is too hot, too cold, rainy, fireworks going off, and best of all.....she is very good at weather forecasting. Especially for storms...she can hear thunder in North Houston...possibly further. And when she hears it she lets us know....she comes to the door and whines. Loudly. To reward her for letting us know it is too hot, too cold, raining, fireworks, or thunder an hour or two away.....we let her come in the house. She seems to be very happy about that and it seems everyone believes it is the least we can do because she is such an awesome watch dog. Note, I never said brave!!!

And to think some people have actually accused us of spoiling her!!

If small animals come into our back yard she will catch them and leave them on the porch for us to see how useful she is as a watchdog. A trophy of sorts.

I hear her whining...must be thunder up north of Houston. Perhaps Dallas????

Time to let her in, gotta go.

Our Garden of Eden or Garden of Nelson

This is an update of our beautiful crepe myrtles we have in our back yard. I LOVE these bushes/trees and one of my favorite things is to have the curtains open and the blinds pulled up so I can sit on the couch and see them from where I am. They are gorgeous this time of year and seem to be lasting longer than usual.

Metal Mouths

OK....I know it sounds really mean to say "metal mouths" but since I have actually worn braces for 3 1/2 years....I feel I can say it and not mean anything derogatory by it. Zach was SO excited to get his braces he was a bit difficult to keep still. He had a constant smile on his face. Unfortunately, Chase was called in first. Poor Zach had to wait a bit longer.


Chase on the other hand was NOT excited to be getting braces and worse, he does not like to be taken away from his beloved video games, book reading, etc. We had to wait 2 hours just to be called in and then we were there for another hour and a half. Since we had the time, I took the boys two doors down to Subway and gave them "their last lunch" for a while.

Still smiling....no pain yet. The following day, the pain had set in and we had loaded up on Advil, Jello, and Puddings. I also came home for lunch to pick them up and take them to get LARGE shakes. I felt really bad for them because I remember how much braces can hurt. They are over the pain for the time now and we have another appointment to get the bottom braces on later next month. But, in 18 month to 2 years....they will have a perfect smile!

Some lessons are never learned!

So, being that I am so amazingly talented at technology, I took it upon myself to change our background! It is pretty isn't it? Only problem is...in making my blog "pretty" I lost some of the things I had on our blog.
When will I learn that at midnight the Holy Ghost goes to bed and I am nothing on my own when it comes to figuring out technology stuff? Heaven only knows!!!

I've been busy watching spacey stuff all week...

Discovery docked to the International Space Station a few days ago. I think I annoyed quite a few of you with fairly constant text message updates. Since then I've been spending a lot of time watching astronauts and flight controllers take care of the business of building a little bit more on the space station. and move things around When the new Japanese Experiment Module was being taken out of the shuttle payload bay and moved over to where it connects to the station, I was in the Mission Control Center watching and listening.

When the Japanese put the thermal covering on the "attic door" of their module they kind of forgot about how some of the things move that will reach out and grab the module that will be attached to that "attic door" on Friday. Somebody did finally think about some of the things that appeared to be in the way, so they asked the a couple of the astronauts who were going out today (Thursday) to do some other work outside the space station to go over and move some stuff out of the way to make room for the piece that is going to be attached to that "attic door" place on Friday. I was listening and watching as the astronauts moved things out of the way, and then listened and watched while flight controllers in the Mission Control Center ran the mechanisms through checks to make sure everything worked the way it should so there will be no problems hooking things up on Friday. May sound kind of boring to some of you, but it was tons of fun for me...that's what I do.

Anyway, there's more to do over the next week or so. I thought I'd just keep you up on what's going on. Oh yeah, you will be happy to know that the toilet that was broken on space station (they only have one!!!) got fixed and the astronauts are really happy about that (they were running out of ziplock bags...yeah, I know, TMI...oh well).