Moody Blue Monday...

This morning Damian made Brooklyn oatmeal for breakfast. It is his special recipe and all the kids love it...not me. :-) He takes quick oats, adds enough water to cover the oats, nukes it in the microwave for 30 seconds, then sprinkles with semi-sweet chocolate chips.

This PARTICULAR morning he made a SMILEY face out of the chocolate chips...all HIS idea...totally something a MOM would do, but this was ALL him! It was so cute, that I told him I wanted to take a picture of Brooklyn with her cheery bowl of oatmeal when she got up to the bar to eat it.

Can you guess how LOVELY our morning was??

Ag Education

Today we hosted a group approximately 50 people from eleven different states on an agriculture tour with Kansas Farm Bureau. Damian and his brother Dallas are both very passionate about agriculture and take every opportunity to educate anyone that has a desire to learn about the subject. Damian shared about our hay and row crop production as well as the equipment we use. Dallas explained how the cattle operation works and about the practice and benefits of burning pasture in the early Spring.

My job was to bake lots of cookies and brownies and keep our dogs, Milo and Maisy, from being a nuisance. If anyone likes wildflowers, this is a great time to pick maximillus sunflowers and they look beautiful in a vase. An added benefit of hosting something like this is that it motivates Damian to clean up around the yard and get rid of the junk that has been accumulating around the out buildings! :-) We have been privileged the last few years to have similar groups visit including Todd Thiart and his staff as well as a group of producers from the Netherland's on a tour with Agco. Here are some pictures of Damian doing his thing!




























This is my mom and dad and they were such a HUGE help today. My dad works for Prairie Land John Deere and they provided the pop and water that we iced down in the bed of the Ranger...it makes a GREAT cooler! He helped arrange things for our guests and took pictures. My mom helped me get the snacks around and arrange the table. She also ran into town to pick up Brooklyn after preschool and took her to the Big M Steakhouse (aka McDonald's) for lunch, which was a special treat for her. I'm so lucky that my parents live close enough to help out and be a part of special things in our lives like this!

This is a picture of Damian and I with the current Miss Idaho. Her platform centers around promoting agriculture and she is such a sweetheart! It was such a beautiful day and things couldn't have gone any better!

What Damian does for FUN...

Damian's favorite bedtime snack after a long day in the field is a bag of microwave popcorn and a can of pop...usually Dr. Thunder (but that's a whole other debate). He has a long running contest to see how FEW old maids he can end up with when he gets to the bottom of the bag. His success rate increased greatly when we got our new microwave, but his long standing record has been 8...until now!

Count carefully and you will see that there are only SIX old maids left in the bag! He was incredibly proud and the first thing he said was, "That's probably blog worthy, isn't it?" SO, because I love my husband and love showing you how goofy he is even MORE, I am blogging his latest accomplishment! HA He is such a statistical guy that it cracks me up! This is the same man that said if he had realized they baled 984 bales in one day, he wouldn't have quit until they had baled 16 more bales, so they could say they baled 1,000 in 1 day! That was two years ago and I'm sure if you asked him he could tell you what day, what field and the model numbers of the equipment used as well.

He truly has an incredible memory when it comes to numbers and agriculture. If only there was a way to train his brain to remember to take out the trash, rinse his dishes after he eats and put his dirty clothes in the hamper, then I'd have it made! :-)

A Surprise Harvest

Last year a good friend of ours had the cutest little pumpkins for us to decorate at her sons birthday party. The kids thought it was great fun and they set them out on the front porch for decoration. Well, they sat there a LONG time, in fact they set there well into the winter. At some point Damian decided they weren't pretty anymore and dumped them into the flowerbed between the sidewalk and the garage. We hope to do some landscaping there yet this fall, but to this point nothing grows there but weeds. Anyway, this Spring as the weeds started to grow up, Damian went out to spray them and noticed this growing. He told me it looked like a pumpkin vine, so we left it to see what would happen. As we got some rain and sunshine our little vine began to grow...
and

GROW

and

GROW...



Eventually our 'little' pumpkin vine grew all along the flowerbed and around the corner. This doesn't even depict it in it's full glory, before I finally had had enough the vine had covered the sidewalk and grown out into the yard! When I mowed over the weekend I sent the kids out to bring in the harvest and cut out the vine. (They thought this was GREAT FUN because they got to haul the vines out to the burn pile with Garrett's 4 wheeler.)




Aren't these the cutest little pumpkins ever?? I don't know why we got the green, bumpy gourds too, but Garrett thinks they are really cool. Since our Accidental Garden turned out so well, we might try the REAL THING next year!

Brooklyn's First Day of School...

Well, the BIG day finally came!! Brooklyn has been dying to start preschool and has been especially anxious since her big brother and sisters started several weeks ago. We picked out school supplies and a new, pink princess backpack. I TRIED to convince her to wait because I had seen a really cute monkey backpack at Target, but NO...it had to be THIS one! One thing about Miss B...she has her own sense of style and is not easily persuaded to take my advice.

For example, she has FINALLY decided that she likes to wear dresses, but ONLY if she can wear her pink Chuck Jones high tops or her white, pink and black Sketcher tennis shoes. So, when we shopped for clothes for fall I made sure EVERYTHING would go with PINK. And, YES, she wears her shoes of choice even with her dresses to church.

You might also notice that my precious girl is NOT wearing her glasses. Well, they have been MIA for about 3 weeks now, which has been very frustrating for me. I just refused to believe that they would not be found EVENTUALLY and I certainly did NOT want to spend the money to buy a new pair. Well, bless her heart, she found them in her dress up drawer in her bedroom earlier tonight! Yay!!
This is the traditional picture that all my kids take at some point while attending First Baptist Preschool. The BIG bear that helps you measure how tall you are getting.















This is Brooklyn's teacher, Miss Nettie. She wasn't here when my other kiddos were in preschool, but she seems really nice and Brooklyn just LOVES her!













The first week they were only scheduled to attend for ONE hour on ONE day. Brooklyn insisted that this just wasn't long enough, but as you can see she was pooped by the time we got home and had lunch. She fell asleep before I could even get her tucked into bed for her nap.












What will I be doing for 5 hours each week while Miss B is in school you ask?? WHATEVER I WANT!! Of course there will be plenty of errands to run and I hope to get in lots of exercise. Somehow I don't think the transition to kindergarten will be quite so easy...at least for me!