Quintten Halloween

I know Q gets his own Halloween post.  Well it is his first one and he is super cute.  So  why not.  I decided that he should be a baby owl for Halloween and it turned out perfect.  He was so cute.  I had the hat made and it was a steal by the way.  And then I used a onesie that I plan to use again for Thanksgiving.  I figure that his costume was very cost effective.

babies really don't like this.  I'm just saying.

September 2013

Everyone is in school not and sports are in full swing. I did limit everyone to only one sport per child this fall, since Q is still so young and I'm mostly responsible for chaperoning everyone to and from practice and games. Even still it was pretty interesting.

Cooper played his first real season of soccer and really enjoyed it. I think he did a great job and he had lots of fun playing with some of the boys who he played T-ball with in the Spring.

Quintten is now four months old. Time is just going by so quickly for this kid. He is rolling over both directions now and loves to smile at everyone who looks his way. Mommy is still the best that's just because he knows where his food comes from.

The Onesie

Let me just start off by saying that I missed one of the kids in "the Onesie." I'm not sure how that happened, but it did. None the less I'm still going to see if you can "Name that Child." I will label the pictures, maybe, as a number then you can write in the comments who you think it is. It might me easy but it might also be a challenge.

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Option 4

August 2013

Wow Three (3) months has really flown by. The kids are getting ready to go back to school. We are starting to have to get back into a daily routine, church school helped. And everyone is growing up too fast. This fall I will have a 3rd grader, 1st grader and a Pre-K kiddo. Where has the time gone too?

First off, Quintten is now three months old. He is too cute and just loves to smile. He is pretty happy all the time and watches his older siblings like a hawk. I'm sure he can hardly wait to catch up and do all the exciting things that he seems them doing on a daily basis. I will do a special post later about "the onsie." This is the time during the first year that I take those pictures, and I really want to try to show how they each look so much alike. I might even trip things up and move them out of birth order. But for now here is Quintten as a big three (3) month old baby.

The first day of school is always filled with fun and excitement. Summer is over, or at least it is according to the school calendar, it's still probably 100+ degrees outside, so lets send our kids back to school. Oh well, at least they love it and both of them have great teachers this year. Isabelle will have four teachers that she rotates between, Mr. Cook - homeroom and science, Ms. White - math, Ms. Doughty - Reading, Ms. Nuese - ELA. I think she will have a great year this year.

Barrett has Ms. Attaway this year for his teacher the same teacher that Isabelle had her first year at ACA and in First grade. I'm pretty excited, since I don't really have to get to know a new teacher, I just get to know his current teacher better.

Cooper does not start this month, but later in September, when school should start for everyone, and he will have Ms. Joan. Joan and I play soccer together so this should be lots of fun.

Oh yeah, I could not get Isabelle into see the stylist before school started so we had to wait until afterwards, but we made it before the end of the month. She decided to donate her hair to Locks of Love. She was able to cut off 10" of hair to donate. With the added bonus of getting a cute, new hair style to match.

July 2013

July was pretty calm all things considered. We went on a little road trip to Wisconsin, for Ben's oldest sister Jodi's annual party. The kids had a great time and Q did really well on the car ride. We have definitely been blessed with good car riders. It is always nice to see family in the middle of the year and not just at Thanksgiving. Plus Ben had a little surprise in store to me. A good friend and her family left Texas and moved back home, for them, and they came and surprised me at Jodi's party. It was great fun to catch up and see them again after they had left.

June 2013

I know I should really post where we are at today but I kind of use my blog as a way to remind me what to scrapbook so I'm going to start where I left off and this is in June of last year. I know a year behind, scrapbooking is even further behind than that. Poor Quintten maybe when he graduates college he'll have a book.

So I'm going to give a few highlights from each month to hopefully catch up. It's like I'm busy or something.

June - Summer vacation is in full swing and the kids are having fun, while I'm just trying to keep my head above water dealing with five kids, and the inevitable I'm bored from the big kids. So the highlights are a few. I really wanted to take Winter Wheat pictures with Isabelle, and we had to do it quick before the farmers all cute their wheat. One weekend we did some pictures with her friend from babyhood, Emma, and they turned out ok, but were still not what I wanted. So we tried again. That's why her hair is different.


For Father's Day I really wanted to have this one picture recreated with all the kids, while Q was still pretty small. It was super cute and turned out well, but stressed Ben out a lot since, Decllan was not quite two (2) and had to sit on his shoulders at first while holding the baby. It was crazy but the end result was nice.

Then of course Quintten turned one (1) month old. I can hardly believe that much time had already gone by. His first year is going to go by so quickly I can already tell. I kind of figured that I have enough baseball themed outfits that he could wear one every month. We'll see if I can make that happen. The winter months are the only ones I'm worried about. Here he is, I'm sure he got bigger and I should look that up. And I'm also pretty sure he did some stuff, like rolling over from his tummy to back, and I'll have to look that up as well. Maybe in July I'll be more prepared.

Awards Ceremonies

School is almost out for the year and what a year it has been. Mostly crazy at the end, except for the Room Mom drama from Bear's class but that is a whole different blog post, maybe. Both of the kids did great, Bear in Kinder and Isabelle in Second grade. They both loved their teachers and learned so much. Isabelle really improved her reading level and Bear is a little stud at Math. I hope they can keep up their mad skills during the summer.

Isabelle found out that her teacher is moving up to teach fourth grade math, and she hopes that she will get her as her teacher again. She really enjoyed learning from her. I hope it all works out.

Kindergarten Graduation

Now I'm not personally a fan of the execution of Kindergarten graduation, after all they still have TWELVE (12) more years of school to complete before they can be released into the wild and unknown of life. Or at least that is the hope for parents everywhere. Of course they then have the option of college, which could be anywhere from 3-8 years if pursuing post graduate studies, so it really seems unnecessary in life to have a graduation for Kindergarten. Hopefully some of the kids have gone to pre-school as well so it's not their true first experience in a classroom, I know not everyone has that opportunity but still. So do we really need a graduation to celebrate the end of Kindergarten, almost a full week before school gets out? There are so many more bigger accomplishments that will happen in my child's life that I think we could let this one go. I was going to skip, but as the Room Mom I had to go.

Anyway, that is my little, shortened rant of Kindergarten graduation. We went, we watched, and we clapped. Quintten was about three hours old, ok not really, but he was about four (4) days old. You just can't stop to smell the roses or the baby powder when you give birth to number five and school is still in session. (As a side note I did make Ben take the kids to school for a week, it was nice).

As expected Kindergarten graduation lived up to it's uneventful expectations, names were read and kids walked across the stage. I'm not sure how Bear felt about the whole thing, I'm sure he could gone without it but hey, we were there to support our child. Then of course afterwards there was cake and punch. Good times were had by all I'm sure. I guess I understand that Kindergarten can be a trying experience for some kids, the separation from Mom and Dad for a prolonged period of time, learning new things and meeting new friends. The dynamic change of being a class room full of strangers and having to work together to follow the rules and learn at the same time could be a challenge but do we really have to celebrate the "successful completion" of the year in a graduation format, I'm not so sure.

Either way here are a few snapshots I was able to gather, while setting up the cake table, nursing a baby and trying hard not to fall asleep from my lack of sleep. At least I was not quite as big as a cow for this day. Plus Bear does look pretty cute in his little graduation hat.