Here they are!

Technically, these were done as Dave's birthday present. His birthday isn't until the end of September, but frankly, that time of year is pretty iffy around here weather wise...as our wedding would so tell. No snow in 10 years on Thanksgiving weekend...except the year we got married, naturally.

All 5 kids together.

 

 

 

 Of course, getting these pictures done turned out to be more difficult than anticipated....as mentioned in the last two posts. Even more so one we got there. Trying to get pictures taken of the silliest, most active 3 yr old on the planet is no easy task, and he was buzzing like a bee that night! Despite that, I think we did manage to get some good pictures, I'm so pleased with how they turned out! I always have a sort of picture in my head as to what the end result might be like, and if it turns out even close, I'm happy!
 As anyone with siblings knows, it's not all roses growing up with brothers and sisters, especially with so many of them. We have a wide age range from oldest to youngest which can make for a unique situation in our home. The two littlest boys simply adore their big brother, a feeling he returns despite sometimes getting a little frustrated with them, but it was hard to get a good picture of the three of them together.

 I like J's attitude in the one below...so her lol!

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

The two girls are in the middle of a

love/hate relationship with each other at the moment, they are fighters. At the end of the day, they really do love each other and I don't know what they would do without the other, something I think one day they will figure out on their own...I hope. someday. They sure did like taking their picture together though!

 

 

 

I always like to try every few years to take a picture with each parent with some of the kids. I'd like to think somewhere in the future the kids will like to have a photo with just a few of us...call me crazy I guess. Again, it was way easier to get pictures with the girls than with the boys. Poor M was so patient! I was impressed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 Here is the real reason we had these pictures done; Grandma. Everyone just adores Dave's mom, and it's hard to imagine there ever being a world without her in it, but we realize one day, just like us all, there will be. What better way to appreciate Grandma than to get some photos done just to honour her. I hope she likes them as much as we do!

Of course through all of this, I can't stop singing the praises of our photographer Kristina. She is simply so talented and seems to really enjoy what she does. She is also extremely patient, something that suits her trade well.

Oh Jeshie. This pic to the left is him blowing raspberries into his sisters hair! It's been a bit of a thing for him lately.


If you notice that in most pictures Jesh is being held by someone, it's because we are attempting to physically pin him down so he will be IN the picture! Usually the job fell to Dave, but Grandma tried too.











Dave and his Mom <3

J and Grandma

 We call this one...Oh Jeshie!




Ash and Grandma

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

M and Grandma

S and Grandma



 

 Feels like just yesterday we met but also like we've been together forever!

We really love how the over/cast cloudy sky added to these pictures, what  a cool effect you couldn't plan/pay for if you wanted!

 Well, that's it for today! Way too late for this lady. I hope that one day these pictures serve the purpose for which they were intended, to give everyone some great memories of their family and all the people that are in it, and I hope you enjoy the pictures as much as we do!

Pictures

Any one who knows me knows that I'm pretty simple, I love to cook/bake, red wine, and my family. I also loooove pictures, taking them, looking through them, and having them taken of my family. I think documenting our everyday life as well as having actual professional pictures done is important. Especially since losing so many pictures of my older kids to our flood a few years ago, and the fact that I know how fast these kids are growing up and soon enough they will be moving out and starting their own adventures and we won't always have everyone together or be able to get pictures of all of us, I want to get real family pictures done of us whenever I can. I also want them to reflect our family as it is and what is going on in our lives at that particular time. The last time we had pictures done, we did them with my sisters family. This time, we had Grandma join us.

Dave comes across often as being a bit of a harda**, it only takes a little bit of scraping the surface to realize he's all bark, no bite lol.  He loves his family very much even if he's not always very good at verbalizing it.  Dave loves his mom to the moon and back and fact is, she's not getting any younger. He lost his dad some 20 yrs ago and due to fires and just life in general, he doesn't have many pictures of his dad. So as a very early birthday present, I hired a photographer to do some photos of all of us and Grandma.

Seems simple enough right? Not a chance.

Rather than wait until his birthday when the weather is much more unpredictable, we decided to do them at the end of July. Then life started to happen. First, it started with J, who got the black eye of all black eyes. She has this terrible habit, has been doing it since she was little, and silently stands behind you, I swear she doesn't even breathe. For such a loud kid, when she is behind you she just goes into stealth mode. So one day at the pool, she went into stealth mode, standing behind her very big brother while playing water basketball. For those who know J, the disparity between her height (she's very little) and her big brother (who's very big), is a lot. So as she stood behind him saying nothing, he brought his elbow back, and caught her right in the corner of her eye. Hard. It started turning black immediately. By the time she got home, she already had a good shiner going. By the next day, it looked like this:

Bad Blogger

Clearly I am a bad blogger. The reason I started this was so one day we could look back and see what was happening in our life...and life got in the way so I kept meaning to post but never doing it!! After yesterday's events I thought perhaps it was time to start posting now and again...

It was a typical day, I got up and went to work. It was a great day at work where I felt like I accomplished a lot, I love those days. Most people stick their noses up at the idea of working in a cold dairy/freezer but I really enjoy it. I have two staff members who are relatively new to my department and seeing them work together so well just made my day! The only part of my day that was un-typical was I left work early as I had started my day early to do some cleaning in my department, something that ended out serving me very well later on.

After getting home I was tired (having gotten up at 4am) so I sat on the couch for a bit, debating what to make for dinner and how to spend the rest of the day. The little boys are in a big 'mommy' phase and were 'resting' with me...aka climbing all over me with very bony elbowy cuddles lol. Just as I was looking at the clock thinking "I wonder where Matthias is, he should be getting home from the pool any minute now" my phone rang. I had barely answered when my sisters voice says - get to Blairmore, Matthias has been hit by a car.-

I grabbed my wallet and keys yelling to Seraiah she was in charge of the kids, only to realize as I am dialing Dave that I have grabbed the house phone not my cell...back in the house, get my cell, run back out to the car, and my friend Teri is on the phone telling me Matthias was hit in Blairmore, the ambulance is with him, do I need a ride. I probably should have said yes but I was already driving. I hang up with her and try to call Dave, he's not answering his phone so I call his boss....who probably thinks I am a crazy lunatic as I fumble for the words telling him to get Dave to meet me at the hospital. Dave finally calls me and I get him to send his mom to the house to be with the other kids.

We get to the hospital and find out the ambulance isn't even there yet! They got there just after us, and we wait. Gotta love that hurry up and wait. They let us know he is conscious, that's good. Once we are finally allowed in, poor kid is so upset. He's all scratched up and bleeding, his one finger looks like hamburger. They assess him, no apparent neck or back injuries, that's good! He is sent off for xrays of his collar bone which is looking very funky and his hamburgered finger to make sure it isn't crushed. The ambulance tech comes in and tells him it was good he was wearing his helmet or he would probably be on his way to Lethbridge or Calgary. So glad he wasn't being a stupid teenager in that moment and was wearing it!!!

The xrays come back and are ok, that's good news! The nurse starts cleaning up and getting the gravel out of the patches of road rash he has as we start putting together what happened between what Matthias was telling  us and what others saw. I guess he got hit in the crosswalk on the back side of his bike. The car ran over his bike, from what we were told he was knocked under the car but the tires missed him, but he was dragged briefly as the car stopped. He is so lucky it wasn't worse!! He's a little traumatized from it all and so so upset about his bicycle, which is totalled. Dave gave him that bike and we can't afford to replace it. (it's a 1200$ bike!) I would assume the guys insurance will eventually cover the bike, but he is supposed to leave for mountain biking camp in two weeks, a camp he will probably miss if we can't find him a bike in time, even one to borrow. It was going to be his first time going to camp for a week and he was so looking forward to it, heartbreakingly disappointed for him.

So the good news is Matthias is ok. He woke up this morning and is stiff as a board. We have to take him to the RCMP station today to make his official statement and follow up with the doc to make sure all is still well.

This also brings me to be so thankful for the small town that we live in, we knew he was hurt right away and we beat him to the hospital. We couldn't see him right away but he knew we were there. In a city we wouldn't have known for much longer. We had two phone calls and two people contact us via facebook right away to make sure we knew what was going on. Also, if I hadn't started work early that morning I would have been a half hour drive away, and of course Dave's boss who is also a friend who didn't hesitate to kick him off the job site and send him to the hospital right away!

Once we realized he was ok, then the fun started, the nurses and hospital staff visiting and joking with Matthias and the use of the injured finger which of course falls in the middle of his hand lol. The nurse remembered us from our terrible terrible June weekend four years ago. We made four trips to emerge that weekend, one with a hurt foot/leg, the next day with a dog bite, then a fish hook in the finger, and the next day all of us from a car accident where a guy ran a stop sign and pegged us off the highway. So clearly bad things happen in multiples for us.. this week it was Jaelle's horrible black eye and now Matthias getting hit by a car, I think we will stay home this weekend!!

Family Pictures

Not really a post...here are the pictures we had done :D

We really love how they turned out! See you Soon! ~J~

First Day of Kindergarten

Monday was Asher's first day of kindergarten and boy was he excited!! He popped out of bed in the morning demanding to know where his angry birds shirt was and started to get ready to go. He will go all day every Monday and Wednesday and every other Thursday, but the first day was only half a day. I took the day off work to go with him. Here's a few pictures:

 

Asher's teacher is Ms.Dixon and she is awesome with the kids. There are 11 kids in his class this year which is a great size I think. Thankfully Asher is very familliar with the school seeing as he has been going there for years! He is so happy to be at 'big school' this year with his older brother and sisters. I hope the rest of his year is as good as his first day :)

 

See you Soon! ~J~

Babysitting and Pictures

Life continues to be soo busy!! Last week was the start of school and Jaelle's birthday, which was in the last blog.
Saturday I ended out babysitting my sister's 3 kids. Heather ran to Lethbridge in the morning to grab the last few things needed for family pictures the next day...more on that to come, and then went to work directly upon her return, and Matt worked the whole day too. The kids came over before lunch, they spend so much time together they are really more like siblings than cousins. Most of the time this is a good thing but sometimes it means that there's lots of squabbling. I was trying to get our laundry monster tackled once and for all, plus being chauffeur to Matthias who was participating in a bottle drive for school that day for their sports program. They all did pretty good, there was minimal fighting, the older kids got done what they needed to, and  most importantly the day was left with everyone still sane lol! After lunch Seraiah took the 'older little kids' to the park which they enjoyed, she did a good job too! No one came home broken....correction, they all came home yeah! I let them all have a freezy when they got back which Jeshie naturally got all over himself, so I started running a bath for him, next thing I knew there were 4 kids in the tub! So they all got bathed up and the little little kids had a nap.  
 Dave was on the roof all day finally shingling the last section. When we did our addition, we chose to go with brown shingles, the old part of the house had grayish blue shingles, so we re shingled the old roof (and added venting which is never had) to match...well we ended out running out by 1/2 a bundle!! SO close, Dave did get it done that day, but had to run to Pincher Creek to get another bundle so he could get it done lol, none of the stores here in town had any of the right ones...although someone did suggest just getting a different colour for the last little section...thanks but no. So KFC it was for dinner!! We hardly ever go there, we like the food but the service at the store here in town is awful...something I am reminded of each time I go there. Not only were they over 20 minutes late with our food, but while I sat and waited I got to listen to the supervise verbally berate this young kid who seemed to be doing an ok job, have a loud and obnoxious conversation with his buddies that came in and give them free drinks, but once I got home I found out they couldn't even count out the right amount for what I paid for >( Once again, not impressed. We had a nice quiet end to our night though, watching a movie with the kids...the older kids chose to watch ALIVE on another tv, which they seemed to enjoy, and Jaelle, who was spending her birthday day with her Nana got home shortly before 9 to show us her new kicks and outfit.

Sunday was spent getting ready for our family pictures! We decided to go in on a photographer together, our family and Heather's family, and get some combined pics as well as each our own families...It's so much work to do this though!! We had our Sunday morning 'big breakfast' as a family like we normally do, then I started getting ready. I like to coordinate outfits, I think the pictures look better that way when no one person is standing out from the rest. So I got clothes together, ironed them. Made sure Jeshie went down early for a nap so he would be in a good mood. Got the older kids rotating through the shower and starting the girls hair... I love doing my girls hair nice however...you would think that at 10 and 11 yrs old they could sit still to get it done!! Nope, this is still not the case and really really frustrating!! It looked great once it was done as you can see above. By the time I got them done and ready, I had 1/2 hr left to get myself ready to go...Of course Dave spent the afternoon napping, grr. I threw my clothes and my face on as quick as I could, then tried to figure out something with my hair. Dave ended out helping me get that done, or at least partially done, and off we went, only 10 minutes late! We had a great spot picked out, with wicked views of the mountains, however smoke from the BC wildfire rolled in and we couldn't see any of it! We still ended out with some awesome pictures but one day, I will go there and get the mountain pictures I want and it won't snow (like it did for our wedding) or be smoky!! Maybe in the springtime we'll try again. So far we've only got a sneak peak of the pictures, but they look so amazing I can't wait to see the rest of them! I love love love having nice family pictures for my house and to give to family. I also love that we were able to get a big family picture together, maybe next time we'll be lucky enough to have my brother and his family and our sisters in it too?!

Here's a few pictures from babysitting on Saturday:

 

That's it for this post!! See you Soon!! ~J~

End of summer

This last weekend ended out being pretty busy for us...it was my first Saturday back to work since my vacation so naturally my alarm didn't go off that morning...I shot out of bed 15 minutes after I was supposed to be at work...awesome. I managed to get to work without getting a speeding ticket...which was a miracle, but it really threw my whole day for a loop. It was such a busy weekend it was hard to keep up. I got off work late since I started late, and Dave was gone for the night to DJ another wedding. The kids and I spent the evening sorting out and splitting up school supplies and having a late late supper.

Dave drove home the next morning and we met up with some new friends out at the lake. It ended out being fairly windy so fishing did not work out so well for us, but we had fun just being out there, having a BBQ; the kids all played together and we had a bit of time to visit which was nice. Jeshie kept making mud puddles to splash in, he loves to get dirty, and Asher was sure to make use of a tree seeing as I am a mean mother who never lets him pee outside lol.

After the lake we rented a few movies and spent the rest of the day lounging at home, something we don't do very often. Monday was a cleanup/make sure we're ready for school day. I also had to get ready for Jaelle's 10th birthday! I made her cake and rice crispy squares which she was bringing to her class. Tuesday was not only her birthday but also the first day of school which she was really excited about. I worked and she went to school for the day, then her uncle Matt and cousins, Grandma, and Aunt Mary came over for dinner. She chose to have a yummy supper of ham, pasta, and corn on the cob for supper. After dinner we had some cake and she opened her presents, by then we were all pooped!

 

I really do enjoy my kids birthdays and trying to make them feel extra special for a day, even if it is a lot of work!! We decided this year since the kids get presents from other people, that for J's birthday we got her something small (earring and an Angry Birds tshirt), that her gift from us would be dinner and a movie in the city one night. She liked that too :)

Between getting back into school routine, work, Jaelle's birthday activities, and Dave's birthday later this month, September should be pretty busy!! Does life ever slow down?? I don't think it does...still can't believe it's already the end of summer!

 

See you Soon!! ~J~