Happy Birthday, Sherry!

Day Trip!

On a spontaneous whim, we decided to take the family on a daytrip to mountains to see the fall colors. Believe it or not, we had never done this before! We drove up to Brevard, NC and wandered around downtown. We visited the ‘Coolest Toy Store on the Planet’, a Christmas store, and a fudge shop, yum! After lunch, we drove over to Pisgah National Forest and visited three of the waterfalls there. I even brought my tripod so we could get a family photo.

Then we headed back towards home and stopped at Caesar’s Head State Park. Here we got to see a beautiful vista of the fall colors right before sunset. The kid's enjoyed climbing all over the rocks and visiting 'The Devil's Kitchen'. It was beautiful and we had a wonderful day!

Fall Festival

Here are a couple pics of my kiddo’s at the Fall Festival held by New Heights Baptist Church. They are just down the road from us and do a great job. They have free popcorn, cotton candy, funnel cakes, hotdogs, chips, lemonade, roasted marshmallows, games, prizes, hayride and inflatable rides. They do this every year and it’s all free! This year they even gave every child a free stuffed animal!

A Fresh Take on an Old Hobby

I have to admit that one of the reasons for my lack of blogging, is that I’ve got a new hobby! Actually, it’s an old hobby reworked. I’ve been scrapbooking for about 12 years now. I used to scrap every Friday night at my local scrapbook store, but it closed almost a year ago and since then I’ve had very few opportunities to scrap. I don’t have the space for it at home and my church group only gets together once a month. Also, I’ve been losing my ‘mojo’. I needed something new and fresh, that I could do more easily at home. I found it!

A couple months ago when I went to my church scrap night, I had injured my back. I asked a friend to lift my heaviest bag out of the van for me but then I put everything else on my own shoulders. Yeah, stupid. Anyway, my back seized up and I almost ended up on the ground. It took half an hour for the muscles in my back to relax. As I was sitting there in a painful, awkward position, one of my friends arrived with her scrapbook stuff…a laptop. I had toyed with the idea of trying digital scrapping, but hadn’t yet been motivated enough to figure out how to start…until that night. I don’t have a laptop yet, but I do have photoshop on my computer at home, so I started to learn how to use it for digital scrapping. I found out that there are so many places on the web that you can download FREE digital kits. I was like a kid in a candy store! I love it! I enjoy scrapping again.

My church group had been planning our first scrap retreat. It was coming up in late October. So I worked on getting a good portfolio of kits and had it all organized. When the retreat came, all I had to bring was my computer! There were 3 other digital scrappers there besides myself. It’s a new age of scrapping! (my behemoth monitor did look a little silly next to their laptops, but I didn’t care!) We had 17 people at the retreat and we had a great time. I can’t wait to go again next year. Eventually, I’ll have a laptop….

Here are a few of the digi-pages I’ve created. I’m still learning:

If My Son Was President

My ten year old son had to write a paper this weekend about what he'd do as President of the United States. Here it is:

If I Was da Prez

If I was President, I would reduce the amount of trash in landfills by encouraging people to recycle more. I will also hire some people to plant about one million more trees because people have cut down trees and do not replace them.

I would try to help all endangered species by making poaching illegal. But I will not make hunting illegal if it is done for survival. Animals used to be everywhere but since we arrived, animal populations have been decreasing due to pollution and poaching.

One thing I know kids will love: I will BAN HOMEWORK!

I would be famous for eating the most fudge in one day. I would tell scientists to make me a flying monkey. I would ride my monkey all day long. I would also get Lego sets for free! My office would be surrounded by Lego sets. If I had children, they would play with the Lego sets.

I will also paint the White House gold.

What He Said

Wow, end of September. Hmm. Blog much? Let’s see, where did I leave off…

Back to School! Yay!
Roan started Kindergarten this year.

He was a little nervous which is actually unlike him, but Dean had recently begun teaching him to read this past summer and somehow Roan got it into his head that he had to know how to read in order to go to Kindergarten! He did that with Tae Kwon Do, too. He’s been watching his big brother for years and begging to go. So, this year I signed him up and his response was, ‘But I don’t know Tae Kwon Do!” Good times.

I’m in the process of job hunting now that all kids are in school. I think I might be a substitute teacher. I want to have the same schedule as the kids including holidays, etc. and this is one way to make that happen.

The biggest most frustrating news in our lives right now is the soap opera with our van. 2 ½ weeks ago Dean ran the Blue Ridge Parkway 200 miles relay. This was his 3rd year. He loves it. It ends in Asheville. He then flew out of the Asheville Airport to Connecticut for his Aunt’s surprise 80th birthday party. He flew back into Charlotte Airport where I picked him up. On the way back home, about 48 miles out of town, our transmission blew! It took 2 hrs for the tow truck to arrive. I will try to make a very long frustrating story short. Basically, our van (a HONDA no less) is only about 8 years old with 120,000 miles. The transmission that just blew? It was the THIRD one. So we tow the van in, and they try to tell us that WE are going to pay for our FOURTH transmission in eight years. Do tell. So Dean has been ‘negotiating’ with them for 2 weeks, and finally gave them the go ahead after getting them down from $3700 to $490. Really they should be paying 100%. Anyway, on top of the $490 we are also paying for towing and about 4 or 5 days of rental cars. Now they keep telling us the van will be ready then calling back saying they found something else wrong. Yesterday they said they found ‘xyz’ wrong but they’d eat the cost. I asked Dean if they’d like ketchup with that. Supposedly we are to finally get the van back this morning after almost 3 weeks. Here’s hoping…

The weekend that Dean was out of town, Roan celebrated his 6th birthday. Since Dean wasn’t there we scheduled his party for the following weekend. However, on his actual Big Day, he brought a giant Yoda cookie to school. He LOVED that!

He party was, of course, Star Wars. He had several friends come. He was very excited. HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROAN!

ROAN QUOTE: Roan’s been saying stuff that reminds me he’s growing up like ‘My bad’, and ‘hold that thought’. Also, he’s been trying to expand his vocabulary. He has noticed that Kai and Alyssa are praised when they use good words. So the other day, he was upset over some legos he was building. When I told him to calm down, he said, “I’m just really frustrated right now.” He came home from school the other day and told me he’d learned two new words that day, hibernation and exclamation point. He was very proud.