Time to update...

It's been a while since I've done any blogging and much has happened (as always) in the meantime, so I'll start from where I left off....

Caleb had a piano competition in May at Bolingbrook High School. He played Moonlight Sonata by Beetheoven (I'm not sure if I spelled his name right, but to be honest, I'm too lazy to walk over to the piano to check right now). Each competitor played their piece before a judge and then went on to play another piece by sight without having seen it before. He didn't win, but he did an excellent job and I was very proud of him for taking the challenge. Growth comes when you step out of your comfort zone.

We went to get out our pool from the playhouse last week during the 90 degree heat and found that it had been eaten through several times by a mouse (or two). Bummer. We really need some cats. We're not sure what happened to ours, but they're gone and we need to replace them with some female mousers... Anyhow, instead, the kids had fun on the Slip 'n' Slide for a half hour at a time (after that, our well water would run out and they'd have to wait until it made a comeback).

The girls weren't so keen on sliding on their bellies through the water. They ended up running down the plastic, or army-crawling to the end.

Noah looks totally cute right now with no front teeth. It took forever for his right front tooth to fall out (even though he could push it all around with his tongue). When that one finally came out, the adult tooth was visable underneath. I've seen kids with one big tooth in front and one baby tooth and it looks so goofy... I was afraid that was going to be Noah's fate being that his other front one was hardly even loose. No worries, though... Just a day later, he went with his brothers and Daddy to a friend's house to pick up bees and they played some game called Starlight/Moonlight that gave him a bruise on his temple, a bloody nose and a seriously loose front tooth. The next day it came out with a bite into a bagel...

Memorial Day started out innocent enough. Paul and my dad worked on putting up our new fence and the boys and I were cleaning the junk hay out of the barn to get ready for the new spring hay...

Then the rain came.... and came... and came...

For about 2 hours it down-poured and our yard looked like a moat around a castle. It was a repeat from last year around Memorial Day. (Only this time, Paul wasn't camping. He was here to experience the whole thing ;)

Here's our pool rafts that floated from the back playhouse to the driveway.

And here's the aftermath. I think every piece of corn stalk and cob that was in the field next door got stuck in our yard. The rushing water and debris took down our fences again and left us with a lot of clean-up to do. That stuff is NOT light when it's been waterlogged and it takes quite a while to dry out when it's piled a foot or two thick. YUCK!!
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The next day, after a full morning of working very hard to shovel the cornstalks to our burn pile (we only moved a third of it), the boys and I came in to get a phone call asking if I called 911? "Ummm, no". Apparently, Gracie was playing with the phone and wanted to see our tax dollars in action... I'm not sure how she got those numbers in order as soon as she picked up the phone (I haven't taught her about calling in an emergency), but she did. The nice emergency lady said that she had to have a Sheriff come out anyhow, just to make sure. After I told Grace that a sheriff was coming to talk to her about playing with the phone, she went into a panic for the next 30 minutes and ran off to hide when he arrived. Just a guess, but I'm thinking that she won't be playing with the phone for quite some time.

After the mini flood in our area, I found "Freddy" the turtle crossing the road on my way home from the store. I picked him up, stuck him in the trunk and brought him home for show-and-tell with the boys. He was a pretty large one, and they had fun playing with him, feeding him apples and getting in their hands-on homeschooling for the day. After a few hours of fun, I told them they had to let him go. They put him in our "pond" in the back yard... never to be seen again.