Have You Tried It Yet?

For those of you who don't know, I started a new blog last week. You'll find the link on my sidebar. It's called "Tried It and Loved It!" It is a blog that showcases all the new recipes that I find, try and love, hence the clever title. Please come on over and take a look. There is a new recipe every weekday. Tuesday's recipe - Chocolate Chip Zucchini Cake. Yum. Once you've tried something, let me know if you loved it like I did. Happy eating!

It's Finally Finished!!!!!!!!!!

Ever since we found out we were pregnant with baby girl #3 we knew we would need a bunkbed for our two older girls if they were going to all coexist in the same bedroom. A few months after Annabelle was born Greg set to work to build one. Because of the proportions of the room we knew that it had to be kind of an all-in-one (1 bed that would accomodate the existing toddler bed, 9 drawer dresser, and lots of shelves). My amazingly talented wonderful terrific husband came up with the design and planned it all out. He has been working on it every chance he had since then. He would hit a snag and ponder for awhile on how to fix it and then plow forward. He is a little burnt out from it all. He swears next time he'll just build a bunkbed without shelves, drawers, etc. Now as Annabelle has just turned 18 months old, it is finally completed. I love it and the girls love it. Lorelei was begging to go to sleep last night. It was nice to have them all sleeping in their rightful places. By the way, Greg built the toddler bed too, about 3 years ago. I told you he was amazing!

Lorelei's 6th Birthday!

For Lorelei's 6th birthday she had her very first birthday party. We had a pool party, which is easy peasy for me. We had lots of fun, and had yummy food to eat. The shark watermelon was a big hit and so were the flip flop cookies. The cake was almost too cute to eat, but we did it anyway. :) I got the ideas for all of them on the internet, so I can't take any credit for them, but they were a lot of fun to make and eat.
I can't believe Lorelei is 6 and she's going to start 1st grade next week. She's such a lot of fun to have around. She's so creative and loves to design and make things. We love our pretty Lorelei!

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4th of July

I know I am a little behind, but here are some pictures from our 4th of July party. We had our good friends the Petersons over for a barbecue with messy but delicious hamburgers, a little water party, a few rockets shot in the air, a couple of sparklers and some ice cream cones. It was a lovely evening, one that complete wore all of us out.

Maddie and her "sweetheart" Olivia

Jacob designing his rocket

Lorelei looks like she'd been playing hard all day, which she had.

See we even wore Mark out.

Shooting off the rockets

Just before launching

These rockets went pretty far. See the girl with the red pants, she's out picking up her rocket. Not bad for paper rockets.

Omaha Children's Museum

One day while in Nebraska I decided to be extremely brave and take my four kids up to the Children's museum in Omaha because they had a dinosaur exhibit. I should have walked out after the first 2 minutes because it only got worse. Before we even got to the cashier's desk we had to wind our way through 100 kids who were with a summer camp. The noise was defeaning. After paying an exhorbitant amount of money to get us into the museum and the dinosaur exhibit, we made our way through another 200 kids upstairs to the dinosaurs. It was all I could do to keep my kids in sight amongst the other 300 people in a room the size of a cultural hall at church. The dinosaurs were cool, but most of the other educational funstuff was being overrun by hundreds of children. And none of them seemed to have parents. It was a total free-for-all. It was NUTS! After we worked our way through that we went downstairs to play on the normal stuff but there were just so many kids that I couldn't keep track of mine. There were giant kids that should not have been there, at least they shouldn't have been playing. One of them crushed Jacob's hand and it took me forever to calm him down. While I was trying to herd my kids into the Ball Emporium (which was only highlight of the whole trip)I stamped my feet and said half under my breath, "I hate this place." The person next to me gave me a crusty look, but it's true, I hated that place. We played in the ball place for quite awhile and then I told the kids it was time to go. I was a nervous, angry mom. As we passed the art area it looked as if a tornado had blown through and no one was bothering to clean up after it. It's never that way at the Lincoln Children's Museum. I finally got all the kids out to the van and buckled up and I sat there and just wanted to cry. What a mess! I was just glad that we all made it out altogether and in one piece. Maybe on a day when there was only a hundred people there it would have been better, but I would take the Lincoln Museum over the Omaha one any day of the week. I am getting anxious just typing this. We went over to my sister's apartment after to decompress and hang out. That was very pleasant. It's a good thing to, I shouldn't have been driving in my nervous condition.

These pictures when in the ball emporium. The kids would put the balls in all these vacuum pipes and the balls would collect in this big bin that would dump them all back out at once. The kids would collect underneath it waiting for it to fall. Jacob spent the whole time doing this.

My little pteranodons - Annabelle wouldn't put the suit on. Still cute, except as I went to help them out of the nest I tripped and bruised up my shin. I HATE THIS PLACE!

It took me forever to get Jacob this close to the TREX. It's robotic and moves his head and roars and opens his big mouth. A little too real for him. Finally he decided he could have his picture taken by it.

If you notice that none of them are looking at the camera it's because the T-Rex was directly behind me roaring. I love the look on Maddie's face.

Children's Museum

If someone was to ask me what it was that I missed most about Nebraska it would be 1st - My family, 2nd - the green fields, 3rd - The Lincoln Children's Museum, the most fabulous place on earth for little kids and their parents. We used to go there about once a week when we lived in Lincoln. It was a lot easier with only 1 or 2 kids, 4 was a bit crazy but still so much fun. Every town should have a children's museum like Lincoln's (we went to Omaha's on this trip too, but I DID NOT like it very much at all, a subject for another post). Here are some pictures of the kids enjoying themselves.

Summering Some More

What would summer be like if you didn't hang out with your family? Here are a few pictures of us (okay, the kids) hanging out with just a couple of their aunts, uncles and cousins. So much fun!

Uncle Gentle Giant with Miss B! Notice the sky behind us. This was an unusual summer day in Nebraska. It was barely 80 and getting ready to storm. My Dad bet me a banana split that the kids wouldn't stay in the pool for more than 10 minutes. They were in the water for 30 minutes, and my banana split was tasty.

Lorelei's sitting pretty

Jacob and Madalyn playing with a dragon...

Annabelle was less than thrilled about the tiny pool and all the big kids so she took shelter in the trampoline.

Cousin Lauren

Aunt Stephanie - I asked her daughter if there was a dinosaur behind me, trying to get her to look at the camera, Stephanie looked instead and it looks like she didn't believe me.

Cousin Randall and Aunt Kristie - We were lucky to have Kristie come and visit at the same time as us. Happy Sisters Reunion.

Miss Boo giving me a crusty look, I don't think she trusted me.

Uncle Jeff and Cousin McKenna having a good time

Annabelle with Uncle Jeff - This picture was taken on Father's Day after Greg had been gone for a week. Annabelle was obviously missing her daddy as she attached onto every father in the house (there were four).