organized office!

i arranged for beth ann miller to speak to our moms group at church about organization. as a wonderful bonus, she came and helped me organize my office! what you can't see in the pictures is that everything you could see before was mostly clutter, long-term storage stuff that i didn't need out and easy to get to. plus it was hiding all the things i did need to get to. and for all my neat storage containers that looked so tidy, they weren't organized on the inside at all! just stuff shoved into drawer after drawer. when i'd run out of room, i'd get another to fill up. i seem to just fight the fires on my desk and in my inbox and all the rest just sits there and mocks me. but no, more! everything has a place now and i'm keeping it that way! now the things i use daily are at the ready and the other things are tucked away neatly in categories. if only she could organize my overflowing inbox!! :)

my cute little football player

josh is not so little now, but he's still cute! :)

take time to be a dad

allen is a wonderful dad and does so many things with the kids (though admittedly some of them scare me!), but i don't think he could do this. he might though, it takes an awesome dad and he is one awesome dad. i love this video!!!

holy ike!

although we're nowhere near texas, or any ocean for that matter, hurricane ike almost blew us away! we lost huge limbs, shingles, power, cable (no internet *gulp*), then my computer crashed (blaming the power surges), and it's just been chaotic with schools and businesses closed (it's like they've never seen a hurricane in ohio!). it's almost back to normal now though. we cleaned outside for days then inside for days reinstalling programs and files on my computer and such (although i backup regularly, it's still a pain!).
we'd sent the kids outside to play in the windstorm. told them if they ran really fast into the wind they might fly (they're easy like that!). but then they ran back in yelling about branches falling so we kept them in. it was dangerous out there! we didn't realize how bad it was going to get. who knew the winds would get up to 75 mph in ohio?? they had a ball cleaning up though, well playing in the big branches and fighting with all the sticks. :)
i'll try to catch up on some of the happenings from the last few weeks soon!

Coffee Cup Cake

A friend sent a fun recipe and since all three kids were home (yet another power outage from the storm), and since Josh was begging to experience a little homeschool too, I thought we'd try it. The kids loved it! They did addition and multiplication with all the ingredients, made a huge mess, and drove me insane. So then they were sent outside for a long, long, recess. : ) I guess we could also have done a history lesson about the leaning tower of cake. : )

MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE
1 coffee mug
4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons baking cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips
1 small splash of vanilla

Add dry ingredients to mug and mix well Add the egg and mix thoroughly. Pour in the milk and oil and mix well. Add the chocolate chips and vanilla and mix again. Put mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts. The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don't be alarmed! Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.

fishing in the great miami river

the kids had been looking forward to fishing and loved that the river was down so much they could walk all the way across!

field trip to garbry big woods

we took lizzy on a fun field trip a whopping 3 miles away from our house! it was matt's off day from kindergarten so he got to go too. we'd never been to garbry and were pleasantly surprised. we had a picnic lunch and a little hike. it was quite educational too with an arboretum of ohio trees. there was also a cool old pump for the water fountain and they had a ball trying to work it.

the hurricane + the cold front = the windstorm of the year

when hurricane ike's winds hit ohio, it was chaos. here's our post with details. i lost those photos when my computer crashed, but had sent an email to friends, so i have the small versions at least!

all about matt

matt had a fun assignment for kindergarten to decorate a drawing all about himself. he had to find or draw pictures of things he liked to do, favorite people, food, activities, etc. i printed up some pics and lizzy helped him work on it and they did an excellent job! i love what he chose for the head!! he even managed a good smile for this photo for a change! so according to this, matt is all about family, church, adventure, christmas, sports, "the girls", the dog, pizza, and even a slushie. sounds like a fun boy huh?! he's such a lundy. :)

Crazy hair night, again!

we always love crazy hair night at church for AWANA! lizzy looks like albert einstein, josh went a little orange, and matt even managed to defy gravity a bit. gotta love that aussie instant freeze spray! fun stuff! :)

Labor Day 4 - Allen on the New River, Gorge Section at Fayette Station

Allen finally got to once again tackle the Gorge section of the New River. This is at Fayette Station (Class IV - for the non-paddlers, that's 4 out of 5 with 1 meaning boring and 5 meaning possible death). After swimming for a few hours under the bridge, building sand castles, and a picnic lunch, the kids and I hiked down to catch the action up close! He even posed for me in the middle of the run! The boring pics of the kids and bridge and such are after the pics of Allen in the rapids.