It's Been a Very Long Time

I have neglected my blog for far too long. It is long past time for an update.


The biggest event of the summer was Nathaniel's graduation from high school. We shared the big event with four other graduates at the home of one of them. It was an enormously fun time of celebration with our church family and a few other guests. The night included the ceremony, barbeque, ultimate Frisbee, dancing and loads of fun!


Tim took Luke to Colorado this past month for 5 days of Luke meeting and visiting his paternal grandparents and his Uncle Andrew, Aunt Nicole and cousins Shea (Luke's age) and Sophie, along with Uncle Tom, Aunt Susanne, and their kids. They had a wonderful time exploring, playing, Kayaking and getting to know each other.

While Luke and Tim were in Estes Park, Nathaniel visited a friend in Colorado Springs. We had a very quite house here at home with only David, Whitney and me. It was very restful and we did a lot of rejuvenating in their absence. Whitney and I worked for hours on our crochet projects. She is making a bear for a friend's baby and I am making a baby afghan. This is Whitney's very first crochet project and she has done wonderfully.

Nathaniel and Tim are taking a landscaping management class at the local community college to hopefully grow the lawn business that Nathaniel started. We add, on average, a customer per week right now. I even enjoy getting out to help drive the mower every once in a while. It is a zero turn mower and very fun to drive! Nathaniel continues to make sure he gets plenty of social interaction. Here are photos of him and Whitney at Busch Gardens with friends.

Whitney spends her hours helping me in the house, baking delicious treats and planning and cooking our meals. I, especially am loving her domestic skills. She also spends hour upon hour honing her piano, guitar and singing skills. Wow! The music in our home is beautiful!
David continues to try to befuddle our minds with physics talk and words we often don't understand. He really enjoys things like physics, chemistry, mazes, codes and Rubik's cubes. Right now he is studying what makes up languages with the goal of creating a new alphabet and language, just for fun. He also loves to keep Nathaniel and Luke busy with wrestling. The last match in the living room was too close to the hearth. This is the sewing job done on David's head.

Luke is still spending time looking for and playing with his many bug finds. He recently caught a big, (in Mom's estimation, ugly) bug and brought it in his bug holder. After show it off, he said, "I love this bug =). I just want to hold it." How sweet and snugly.

This summer we have had many animal adventures. We raised a praying mantis from infant to 4 inches long. Wow! He was educational! Every time he shed his skin, he doubled in size. He learned things very fast too. In the end, we kept him overnight on a plant in the sun room and he became very angry when we tried to return him to his small enclosure, so we decided it was time to set him free.
We caught a 4 foot long Black Racer Snake in the neighbors tree and allowed it to crawl around in the sun room for awhile. I found out the non-poisonous snakes don't have fangs at all, so it really doesn't hurt much when they bite. We had a box turtle lay at least one egg in our turtle garden in the back yard. We have two newborn water turtles growing in an aquarium, in the sun room. We rescued and are keeping in the turtle garden some type of deformed, half-eaten water turtle that had healed by the time we found it, but resembles some type of dwarf. We call her Zombie. Most recently, yesterday I had to cut off the end of one of our goat's horns to keep her from strangling herself in the fence. It is always interesting living rurally. Not exactly country, but not city either.