No, no, no, and also, no.

I am not ready for this. Not even a little bit. My little baby girl, the one who crawls around, puts her hair up in a pineapple ponytail that goes straight up, the one who can barely toddle, the one who just started kindergarten, the one that just barely learned how to ride a bicycle, the one who is much too young to be a young lady - she's a young lady now.

Laine celebrated her twelfth birthday a couple weeks back. She decided she has outgrown parties where parents have any role, so we supplied pizza, candy, and brownies, along with a basement clear of siblings, and she took care of the rest. She had half a dozen of her best friends over, they watched Princess Bride and laughed so loudly I thought there would be a body count by the end of it.

So now she gets to run off half the summer to fun camps with the church Young Women's program, start Junior High this fall, and become a completely independent little woman who doesn't need her Dad at all.

Yup, not ready for this at all.

-Christian

It's Great to be Eight

James turned eight this last week and we celebrated in style and all weekend long. James is a quiet boy who is still really shy, especially around pretty women. He is also a lego builder. He loves the complex lego sets and sits for hours putting them together. He also loves Minecraft and would play for hours if we let him.  He also dislikes pizza, the first kid I ever met that disliked pizza but loves all other Italian food. 

He chose a chocolate raspberry cake for his birthday. I loved making this one and it seemed to be enjoyed by everyone. 

Then he opened quite a few legos sets and books, his two most favorite things in the entire world. 

James got a birthday party this year and because of my rough pregnancy (and the thought of ten eight year old boys running around the house made me cringe just a tad) we decided to do a party at the local pool. James loves swimming and this was a perfect party for him and us.

 I loved that they provided everything, other than the cupcakes, and even did the clean up. I loved that and James seemed to have a good time too.

Saturday was James' baptism. He was so excited to have his family and so many neighbors present. He even smiled for a few pictures, which is like pulling teeth in most cases. 

So proud of James and what a great young man he is. He is a great little brother and a fabulous big brother. We are so grateful he is part of our family. 

It's a Girl

Christian here, posting for Natalie. Sincere apologies for the many months without a post. We've been pretty busy at the Bradley home. I probably ought to get the big news out of the way first up, we're pregnant, and it's a girl.

For those who haven't spent much time with us lately, Natalie has managed to be pregnant for 12 of the last 17 months (two back to back miscarriages, those sucked), and we still have three months to go. Natalie has magic pregnancy powers that make it morning all day long, and by that I mean that morning sickness is active around the clock. We had some real fun for a couple of months when she had to go on a daily IV drip to keep from dying of dehydration, just glad we were able to do it with the home hospice care service or we would have basically been living at the hospital. Baby Bellatrix as we've been calling her (no, that's not what we're naming her) has been about as much trouble as Matthew was in utero, but at least this one made it past the end of the first trimester so we're all pretty happy about it. We're due in July

That's probably enough baby stuff, what else has been going on around here? Lots.

Seeing the Christmas lights at the zoo.

Meeting stormtroopers at Comic-con.

Singing.

Cooking.

Snuggling cousins.

Growing mustaches.

Playing fetch.

Seeing American landmarks done in Legos.

Playing basketball.

Gardening.

And a whole bunch of other stuff, you know, Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years, work, play, school, all the usual. We'll keep you posted, just figured we should put something up in case you thought we just didn't want to blog anymore.

-Christian

Double digits

The day before Halloween our Eve celebrates her birthday. She loves having her birthday the day before Halloween, as she told the doctor this week- "I get presents then I get candy." I see her logic- how fabulous. 

This year Eve got a tenth birthday party, a family party, and a second family party (Christian was gone on her actual birthday this year). For her party this year she chose an art party. 

We had a lot of fun planing this one. Eve and I scoured Pinterest for ideas and found some fun art projects. We even found a fun invitation. 

The  girls painted canvases, made bookmarks, painted letters of their name, and ate more marshmallows and M&Ms than I thought was possible for ten year old girls. 

Really, they had so much fun as evident by the picture below.  Extra points if you can find all nine girls.

Eve had a rather exciting birthday. It started with the Halloween Parade at school, then a short day from school, then a Witches Tea with the neighborhood girls. Finally she had a small family celebration with a peanut butter chocolate pie- so yummy. Eve has great taste. 

Christian had to travel for work over her birthday so Eve lucked out and had a second birthday celebration. Yup, that's right she got to pick a second round of favorite meals and then have yet another special treat. This time she chose chocolate cupcakes. 

We are so proud of our artistic girl. Eve really has great talent in art and we are proud that she takes the time to develop them and share them with her siblings. Eve is a fabulous big sister she loves to play pretend with Matty and read to him. She enjoys so many things and has a big heart, recently she knitted three hats and crocheted one scarf to send to an orphanage in Kenya. We are so lucky to have her in our lives. 

Happy Birthday Eve

Happy Halloween

 Happy Halloween!!! I remember Halloween growing up and really it was just Halloween anything happened. Now it is a month long celebration, not that my kids seem to mind and I am just happy we get more than one use out of the costumes.

We did have a few Halloween activities packed in this week and it started with a Halloween party. Even Matty had fun making spooky pumpkin patches. He was so proud he made the "dirt", added the cookies, and placed the pumpkins.

 The cousin party was fun. We had two Olafs, Two Annas, Two Elsas, and a Jedi. I would like to point out that they are all owned by Disney now so I feel that they all fit together. But yes Frozen mania had entered our house. The kids decided six months ago what they wanted to be. We tried to show them other costumes and they stuck firm. Laine did change her mind but by then the costumes had been ordered so it was too late to change. It all worked out though, and they looked cute.

The Halloween Parade was fun this year. Matty was so excited to see his brother that he tackle hugged him in line. He was very upset that he couldn't go with him through the line. 

We carved our pumpkins, this year using templates. I loved it. So easy and awesome. 

Halloween means trick or treating to grandparents, we visited five this year. The kids loved it and I think the grandparents enjoyed it too. 

So happy Halloween from our Frozen clan to yours. 

Oh and if anyone needs any candy, come visit. I'll trade you the peanut butter cups for Bottle Caps. 

All aboard the reading train

A couple of summers ago I was trying to find a way to motivate my kids for summer reading, my kids usually don't need much motivation to read every day but I wanted to give them a loftier goal so we set a meeting and they kids set how many books to read. We didn't reach the goal but I guess the kids loved it because they asked if we could do it again this year. 

 We sat down and had another meeting and the kids decided that they could read 100 books between June 1st and September 1st. I thought it was a bit much but they were convinced they could do it.
We had a slow start and come June 30th with 16 books read I was pretty sure that we were not going to make it.

 The kids had fun though and come August, even knowing that they wouldn't hit the goal, asked if they could continue until we ran out of trains.

Due to James finding that his favorite series of books (Beast Quest) had published another 30 novels, we hit 100 novels by September 28th.

It was a fun experiment and one I am sure we will try again. 

Harvest Time

So earlier this year I wrote about our garden expansion. When I wrote and posted pictures then little did I know the bountiful harvest that we would start pulling from this little bit of land.

We had a garden full of squashes, berries, carrots, beets, parsnips, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, pumpkins, cucumbers, and more items I just can't remember right now. We have been blessed with a great harvest, our one pumpkin vine alone produced about eight pumpkins.  It has been a fabulous garden and we've enjoyed much of the produce. 

This is a picture of part of the garden after we had pulled about half of what was growing.in those boxes, yup we are well blessed.

One item that we tried this year was cabbage. We are not big cabbage eaters and the only reason we tried it was Eve was given one at school as part of a project, so we planted it to see. We don't have the best track record with cabbages. Laine was given a cabbage a couple of years ago for a school project and we killed it in a week. I wasn't expecting much of Eve's but it surprised me.

 Having never grown cabbage successfully we weren't quite sure when to pull it so finally in August we decided to take that baby out...we might have waited too long.

Half of the cabbage looked great, the other half was molding. Eve was still proud of what she had grown and we decided that if nothing else, those leaves make some awesome hats.

With all the harvest it has meant that my weekdays are spent canning all the produce we can't eat. So far I have canned pickles, watermelon jelly, jalapeno jelly, raspberry zucchini jelly, peach zucchini jelly, tomato sauce, and tomato soup.   Still on the menu beets, more sauce oh and a few more batches of frozen parsnips and carrots.  I feel like a pioneer woman here. 

So the garden this year was a success, we love the produce and the added space. Already we have plans for next year, items to plant, new spots for growing, and more canning ahead.