How does he do it?

Taylor managed to get another black eye... he caught a baseball with it! What a tough kid!

The Flowers now!

Here are what the flowers look like now. If you didn't see them when they got planted, just check out the blog below. Thanks to Mrs. Barb Schmidt for taking such good care of them, the flowers have all flourished. U. Dwane says she is over there almost every day watering them and babying them. They really look nice this year.

Flowers and Father's Day

Before

We planted the church planters again this year. They turned out really beautiful. I'll have to get a picture of what they look like now.

After

The back side of the church.

Father's Day picture

My petunias were really pretty this year.

Drew's birthday and Heidi's "new" truck

Birthday # 13 (for some reason, I only see 12 candles, one must be behind another one, or maybe I only had 12 candles... I can't remember)
We got him a cell phone... he was very happy. (as you can tell)

Heidi is helping her daddy this summer with expediting. Andrew saw this truck sitting in someone's driveway, (no "For Sale" sign on it, but Andrew says, "everything's for sale")
so he stopped in and asked what they wanted for it and we accepted the price they asked for. It is so cute, a stick shift, not fast, but very practical.

She is doing very well driving it!!

Time to catch up!

Katie's 16th birthday, May 29th Drew and Grant working hard splitting a huge pile of wood

The twins played soccer for the first time this summer. The first two pictures are of Taylor the the last one is of both of them. Grant wanted cheesecake for his birthday.. and with three birthdays in the same week, we are always willing to fix something other than regular CAKE. Grant turned 9 this year and he must have been hot because all of his birthday pictures are with his shirt off, so I will refrain from posting them, although I am sure you wouldn't be offended. :) Drew and I eating cheesecake... or maybe Drew is finishing up Katie's chocolate cake. (It certainly doesn't look like he's eating cheesecake.)

I've had a very busy couple of weeks...

Here are a few pictures of my last few weeks. We had many end of the year activities. Being the parent of a Junior adds to the responsibilities. So I will try to get "caught up" in one post!!

Here is a beautiful picture of Mt. Hess and Mt. Deborah in the Alaska Range. One of the men of our church took the picture (he is a photographer) and had it on his web page http://www.mytoesarecold.com/. So I had it blown up and then got it matted and framed. I love it, I think it turned out beautiful.

My Mother's day flowers. Did a already post this? No I don't think I did.

Katie and Thomas went to the Jr/Sr banquet together.

Heidi and my cousin, Thad, went to the Jr./Sr. Banquet together.

The decorations were beautiful!!

The end of the year Choir Concert was wonderful. The kids get better every year. We are sorry to be losing Mrs. Weed. :(

Katie was playing with my "cheap ole" camera and got some really good pictures of some flowers. I wish I had time and room to post them all. I just loved the lighting on these.

Graduation was really awesome this year. We had a graduating class of 10 or 11 kids.... really great kids.

One of the highlights of the graduation was Bro. John Betters receiving his honorary Dr. of Divinity degree from God's Bible School. It was really neat!! He got a long standing ovation!

Dr. Betters and Dr. Avery

Critters

Here are a couple of pictures of animals that we have seen this winter. The bottom picture is of an owl hidden in the tree. The next is a picture of a porcupine we saw on the way home from Anchorage today. We also saw some Dall Sheep today, I think I will post a video of them too. (Well, I tried to upload a video but I couldn't... Blogger wouldn't let me)

Porky

Can you see it?

A closer picture

OH Yeah!!

After and unusually warm last week of April.... we are pretty much "out of" snow!! Here is the progression from the first day of Spring (about 6 weeks ago) to now....

March 22

March 27

April 3

April 10

April 18

April 23

TODAY!!

And our yard becomes a pond with all of the melting snow, so the boys get to play and make lots of laundry for their mother.

New beds for the three youngest boys

Sorry for the blurry picture. We had beds made for the boys and this is how we got them over the rail, into the loft. They were very heavy, it took four guys to get them up there.


This is Grant's bed on the left side of the room....
these are the twins' beds on the right side of the room. They each have six large drawers under their bed. And I now have blankets for them... although they aren't matching yet. I am planning to buy navy comforters or maybe just navy throw blankets for them. I want it to be easy for them to keep them neat.