Now and Then --Miah

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Sweet and loving. He loves to swing and pretend to be spiderman. He will be 5 this summer, and will start school in the fall.

Now and Then --Katie

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The spoiled baby of the family. Just over 2 years old. Every day makes me laugh and smile.

Where we have been.

This is where we have been lately. We have had so much nice weather, so we go to the park as often as we can! These pictures are not quite a month old, and now the trees and grass are all green.

Kansas

When we left South Dakota we moved to Kansas. The prairie is beautiful. Kansas is beautiful. I wish I saw more of the prairie and less traffic, buildings, people, and houses. I was not meant to live in a highly populated area. Now the people in my "small" town would probably disagree with me saying highly populated, but to a woman that spent almost her entire adult life in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this is too much. I long to walk outside and see no one. To have my children play outside without 20 kids in my backyard......I sometimes just want peace and quiet and privacy. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so.
The one thing I LOVE about Kansas is the thunderstorms. Lots of them and they are magnificent here. I can't imagine what those poor people in he covered wagons thought when they came to settle this land. Now, we love thunderstorms in this family. A few of my children are a bit concerned that we'll be in a tornado when it storms, but they aren't in a panic or anything, yet. There have been a few stormy nights that everyone has slept on mom and dads floor. :)
The weirdest thing is that we don't have a basement, I mean how can you live in tornado alley and not have a basement??!!

Here, there, everywhere

I was born and raised in Michigan. Beautiful hills, water, and trees. Especially in the Upper Peninsula. We lived there for 12 years.
Then we moved to South Dakota for 15 months. It was so very different than what we were used to. The best thing about South Dakota is the sun shines all the time there. So nice. Michigan gets a lot of cloud cover. With the exception of the Western part of the state (Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands) Which by the way are phenomenal, the state is pretty flat, not a lot of trees.....Such wide open spaces. You can see forever. My favorite thing about Aberdeen (this is where we lived) besides our church family there ;) was this park. Wylie Park. It's awesome.
My kids talk about it all the time. It was only a few miles from our house. With the exception of the rides, it was free. It has a picnic area, a dozen or so large play structures throughout the several hundred acre park. A campground, Storybook land, The Land of Oz, mini golf, bumper boats, a small lake. We went out at least once a week.

A little of this, a little of that

Hello all! I have been wanting to post but haven't known what to write about. I was tagged by mykidsmom with a picture post and I really want to do it and will do it......once my husband fixes the picture issue we're having. Really, I will :) I've been on him for several weeks to get it done....but you can only ask and hint so much before you become a nag, lol. And being a nag is one thing I will not become. I'm sure my husband appreciates that!
I have been working a little more lately. Everyone I work with is talking about getting less hours, but I'm getting more it seems. I think it's because I was willing to learn the customer service desk(so many women there won't). Now someone has quit and I'm picking up her hours....Not really what I wanted but we need it right now.
The kids were thrilled yesterday when they woke up to several inches of snow. We haven't had any snow since Christmas, just wind. BLOWING BLOWING and BLOWING! We've had to hunt the neighborhood several times for our garbage can. I'm telling ya, that wind can blow across the prairie. It's a good thing they got out to play in it, because it's supposed to be 42 degrees today.
Homeschooling is going well. We haven't gotten to do a lot of the extra stuff that we normally do since I have been working. I feel so bad about it. At least they have lots of bonding time with daddy :)
Oh yeah, I had a moment of panic this morning. I was looking at the news online and saw where there was that peanut butter recall. We have some of those Austin crackers in the cupboard!!!I just bought them a few days ago thankfully. Freddy had eaten 2 packages of them, but they were the cheese ones. Thank God! I'm so thankful the kids hadn't had a chance to eat them. I haven't bought packaged snacks like that in sooo long, now I know why. The worse part of it was, Freddy was sick yesterday. So, of course I immediately think he has salmonella poisoning. But, he didn't have any of the symptoms. Poor kid, probably thought his mother was crazy. Those crackers are going straight to the trash can!

Library

The best thing about living here is the library system. We can go to about 8 or so different libraries with the same card. We are ALL bookworms. I don't have as much time to read now that I'm working but, come break time, you'll find me in the break room with a book in hand ;) We decided to check out a new library yesterday. It's about 8-10 minutes from our house. Cute little library, used to be a bank. They have a nice kids area, lots of puzzles, games and fun stuff. Not to mention different books! The kids had a great time and there was a guy from the newspaper interviewing the librarian about the library. He took some pics of the kids....who knows they might end up in the paper. All for the love of reading.