Early morning conversations

My children always tend to wake up bright eyed and bushy-tailed with their brains turned on and ready to go. A couple of examples from this morning:

• John asked Sara how much 10 + 10 equaled. Sara replied 20. John then proceeded to count his fingers and toes knowing that he had ten of each and responded "Yep, you are right Sara. It does equal 20." Evidently John follows Ronald Reagan's policy of "trust but verify".
• I asked Joe this morning if the dishwasher was one word or two. (I was making out a chore chart for the girls and my brain wasn't turned on yet.) Joe said "one". Ashley, who was joining us for breakfast, responded "Yep, daddy is right. It is one word." I naively raised my eyebrows and sarcastically said "Well, thank you Ashley" Ashley responded very graciously and gently "Well, mom, in the play kitchen in Mrs. Richards room there was a toy dishwasher and it was spelled as one word on the toy." Ooops! Why do I always forget she has her dad's memory? And how in the world am I going to keep up with them?

Memorial Day

We had to nix our Horn family Memorial Day weekend tradition of welcoming in summer by camping out in the backyard--it rained and they were calling for storms. So instead we cleaned the house--great team work!--and then visited a local state park. Here's some pictures from today:

our navigator

Is there one owl or two, dad?

hangin' out with the buffalo

Have you ever been this close to a buffalo? I wasn't even using a zoom lense on my camera. You could hear them pulling on grass and eating it.

Awe, mom, can't we go see the foxes now? Do you have to take more pictures?

The 58' slide--look mom, no hands!

It was a decent substitute for camping, but if it ever warms up we have promised a make-up camp-out session in the backyard. The firewood is ready to go.

The big dig

Our house has five bedrooms but the two in the basement don't have egress windows or escape windows (which is what I like to call them). So our weekend project was to dig the holes so we could put the windows in. We started on Saturday. Here are some before pictures:

Ashley's old window

Sara's old window

After I took the pictures we began to dig outside of Sara's window. Well, actually Joe began to dig. I had to go to the store and get myself a shovel that would work. I got a short handled "camp" shovel which Joe made fun of--"girly" shovel is what he called it which I thought fitting since I am a girl. Anyway, after I got myself a shovel I also began to dig. And the kids got their plastic yellow shovels out and began to dig as well. And we dug and dug and dug and dug and dug. This is what it looked like at lunch:

It was soon after lunch that Joe began changing the digging depth on me. First it was four feet for a certain point. Then it was four feet from a lower point. Then suddenly it became five feet. Then after we got to five feet he informed me that we had to dig out the sides of the hole as well so they could actually fastened the window well into the cement block. My thought at the time "Won't the dirt just hold it in????!!!!" So we dug out the sides and just when I thought I couldn't ever lift my arms again, we were done with one window. Not sure when the next one is going to get dug out. I need to be able to lift my arms again.... Here's the "after" pictures of the hole outside Sara's room. We are going to have someone come and help put the window in. Which makes me wonder why we didn't have someone come and help us dig the hole....

I had some other, better pictures of the hole but somehow they got erased off my camera. This is just a picture of one of the sides that we had to dig out. But the hole is still there so tomorrow I'll take some more pictures of the hole and share them with you. I'm sure you can't wait, but you have to understand that I am pretty proud of this hole.

2007-2008 School Year

The girls had a great year of school. Thursday we went and picked up report cards and they were both delighted that they had been promoted to the next grade. (I was too!) It is always amazing to me how much they can progress in a year's time. Here's my now 1st grader and 2nd grader with their kindergarten and 1st grade teachers.

Mrs. Richards and Ashley

Sara and Mrs. Pacha