Texas came to town

 Texas came to see us, and boy did we have fun!!  But, we need to get caught up before we get to Texas :)

 Here, Austin is showing you how to make fossils with nature; it is a four-legged animal on the left (very generic I suppose) and a shark on the right.  The rocks used to make the shark were pointed at the top, so this is 3 dimensional art.

 We have been doing major remodeling work over the past few years, and this is the end result for the outside of our house....finally finished, with the house, now on to the yard....

Ansley has become quite the independent dresser; this was her creation sort of, and boy was she proud.

Austin on the other hand had to devise a way to trap leprechauns.....seems the best way to do that is with green & gold.  this was his trap, with a working spring door which made a loud "whack" when it shut......no, the butter in the background was not a prop :)

 Well, Grandad and Nanny came to see us, so we had to put them to work!! Here, you can see Dad helping us tear down a wall; he is showing us that he still knows how to work after all of these years!!

Before.......

during......and.....you will have to wait for the after as we are still working on it.

The real reason they came to GA was because we finally got the kids baptised; so here is our group, squinting and all!!

Then, Austin taught Grandad how to play chess.  We still do not quite believe it, but my Dad really did not know how to play chess and Austin is learning, so he taught Dad what to do. Scary huh?!?

More pictures to come as we wrap up this project......

Soccer without Snow

These pictures are better; but not perfect :(  Austin is in white this week, and still has red hair, so you should be able to find him :)  He had fun again today even though his team did not win.  In the end, he is getting a quick lesson on do your best and keep trying.

 Running after the ball seems to be a MAJOR theme of this game.

 Oh no, wait, now they are going the other way!

 He really wants to get the ball!!

This is the product of Austin and I being home by ourselves for Christmas :) He asked to buy this plant, and now after 2 months, we can see the beautiful fruits of our labor.

Soccer in the snow?!?

I realize these are virtually impossible to see, but we were using Eric's phone as we forgot the camera and it was SNOWING!!  What!!??!!  Austin asked to play soccer this year, so we signed him up with a group well known in the area....little did we know it was a competitive league, very unlike his T-Ball team from last spring.  His T-Ball team was at a local mega-church and did not keep score or put pressure on the kids to do anything more than have fun and learn the game of baseball.....well, needless to say, this soccer club is not like that at ALL!!  So Austin is learning to play soccer and trying to learn sportsmanship, teamwork, and how to run, run, run and not get tired!!  He did well today and seems to do better with soccer than he did with T-Ball, probably because they are simply running up and down the field the entire time.  BUT, today, there was SNOW coming down to boot.  So snow & soccer; what a Saturday!!

Cindy Lou

Ansley wore her hair as Cindy Lou today for Dr. Seuss Day at school; that is some crazy hair!!