Ethan conquered a fear

Abriella and Abraham had the privilege of living in Vermont. When you live in Vermont on a large piece of land you have a riding lawn mower "tractor". Sam and I would mow the lawn holding one of them and they would almost always fall asleep in our arms :). They have both always LOVED tractors!
Ethan on the other hand never had that and has had a fear of them. We recently bought a riding lawn mower and every time Sam started it up he would run to the porch and not go back down until the mowing was done.

He finally realized it was not going to kill him and if his brother and sister were having so much fun then maybe he should give it a try.

He's had a great time ever since!

A sand hill

These pictures were taken in September but I'm missing the beach so I thought I would still post them :). The kids played on this sand hill for a very long time

I miss Abraham's long hair after seeing these pictures

School is in full swing

And we are having a great time this year!

3 Generations went to the Zoo!

Gran Meme got to go to the zoo with 3 of her grandchildren and 6 great grandchildren (and me). It was a wonderful time!

An Ice Cream Social for a wonderful Aunt

Aunt Madaline (top right) lives in a home so while we were in Rhode Island we all went there and had an Ice Cream social. These three sisters always make me smile :)

Getting a family shot is always comical. We didn't get any with everyone looking at the camera :)


And I got to hang out with my wonderful, silly, crazy sister in law who is going to hate me for posting this picture :) But that's ok because I love her!

A trip to Vermont

We had not been back to Vermont since we left 3 years ago. So during our trip to Rhode Island this August we decided to spend a couple days and go to Vermont to see some friends. Our great friends Kevin & Holly let us stay with them, we love making ourselves at home with them and had a great time catching up (so sad I didn't get any pictures with them).

One of the days we drove around and enjoyed things we used to enjoy when we lived there. We walked down to the Burlington Water front and enjoyed the beautiful weather.

Then we walked around Church St. and ate lunch at our favorite spot, The Red Onion.

It's hard to believe that I was 8 month pregnant with Ethan when we moved from Vermont.

Then we drove to one of Vermonts beautiful rivers and spent a couple hours there. Relaxing at a river with no plans is one of the most peaceful things a family can do. We had such a great time.



Ethan, sadly, has never walked along a river. He did great and had a wonderful time.



Sam and the kids built a small damn, found weird looking bugs, picked up sticks, threw rocks & played in the water.



I enjoyed watching my family and walking along the rocks.



And then..... my crazy family took their clothes off and posed for some crazy pictures :) Only in the middle of nowhere can you do things like this :)



And these people are dear friends! A trip to Vermont would never be complete with out seeing them. Sam worked for Paul & Roberta's bakery when he was a kid. So we went to their resturant before it opened and made ourselves at home. It was wonderful catching up with them.


We finished our day with some other wonderful friends that had us over for dinner (which I also didn't get a picture of). And then a BBQ the next day with some friends from the Fire Department.

I am glad we do not live there any more but that is only because of the winters. Everything else about Vermont I LOVE and do miss. It was wonderful to be back.

Boating with family

While our niece and nephews were here Sam's parents came down also. So we went out on the boat again and had a wonderful time. Javen, this handsome 13 year old did amazing on the tube. Sam had to work hard to get him thrown off that tube :) (Don't tell his mom though) He loved it !

Lena loved it and never wanted to get off so we convinced Meme to go with her. The only thing about these two is you had to go slow :) It was amazing we even got Meme out there.

Then they got to comfortable with that speed and Meme decided to show off a little. We all had a great laugh when the tube sunk shortly after this picture because we were going to slow!

Sorry!

Sorry about all the horrible looking pictures!

Blogger is butchering them some how and making them look super grainy.

I haven't had the time to figure it all out

but wanted to get some pictures uploaded anyways

The Lemonade Stand

After dancing in a southern style rain storm the kids got right to work making chocolate chip cookies and Javen put together a sign for the table.


A Lemonade & Cookies sign that is! They had been asking me for 2 days now if they could put together a lemonade stand so I let them do just that today.


Before I took them to the store to get the stuff I told the girls they needed to make a list of everything they needed and I also wanted to know what they wanted to do with the money they made. They decided they wanted to give the money to a charity.

The girls stayed out there for about 3 hours. It was hot and humid but they didn't care. They sat in the shade until they saw a car, then they would get up and jump up and down with the same excitement every time. The smiles on their face when someone stopped was priceless.

I had talked to Abriella last week about how there are places in Africa that do not have clean water and people get very sick. Well, during the preparations they must have talked about that and decided they wanted to give the money to a charity that helped get clean water to Africa. They earned $28 and they are so excited to send it away!


After a while the boys joined them with cups of water in hand to pour on them. It was a much needed water fight to cool everyone off.

And what fun is a day without some bucket wearing boys :)