V-A-C-A-T-I-0-N!!!!

We celebrated our 10th anniversary in July. Mike suprised me with a trip to Puerto Rico! He had already taken care of securing his parents to watch the kids for 4 days. What a great suprise! We are so thankful to his parents for their willingness to watch the kids, and grateful to the kids' PCAs for stepping up to take extra shifts so that Bob and Lynn would have enough help! Here are just a few of the many, many pictures we took.

Our hotel had 4 pools - this is two of them. One was on the upper level and ran down a waterfall type thing into the other.

Mike sitting on our bed - nice view, huh?!

One of the other pools, called the eternity pool. If you don't feel like being bashed by the waves of the ocean but still want to swim and see it, this was the best place to be.


View from our window looking to the right.

View from our window looking to the left.

Walking on the pier that you can see from our window.

"I got my toes in the water, toes in the sand ..." (Kenny Chesney)

We took one day to go into Old San Juan shopping and seeing the sights. This is pretty much what all the streets look like. We had planned to only stay at the beach, since we were only there 2 full days. We're very thankful our friends Michelle and Lenny advised us to go into town one of the days. Thanks guys!

In Old San Juan we were excited to go to Casa Blanca, where Ponce de Leon lived, and it's now a museum. We walked there to find a sign that said "Closed for Renovations." Oh well! It was a nice walk!

Some shots from Fort San Cristobal - this was a wonderful place to visit!

Dinner at the hotel the night we arrived.
I love this angle, taken at Fort San Cristobal.

Weekend Vacation

The kids and I have been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder series this summer, so for a weekend vacation we packed everyone up and headed to Walnut Grove, MN for The Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant. We camped, went to the pageant, and spent a day touring the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum and then driving around the town and just outside of the town to see the historical sites. It was a lot of fun, but by the end of the second day, Ato T had had enough. After about 30 seizures or so, we packed up early and headed home. It was a lot of fun while it lasted!

Skipping rocks with dad by the lake.



This is the closest I could come to a picture of all three of them in or near the covered wagon at the museum.

In front of the mantle that was used on the "Little House on the Prairie" show.

Miss O's favorite museum piece was a replica of Laura's doll, Charlotte.

Ready for school in the one-room schoolhouse replica.

In the "naughty seat" in the one-room schoolhouse replica.

Inside the sod house replica - it was much smaller than I had ever pictured in my head.

I had to bribe Miss I to sit on this fake horse for me to take a picture.

It was a hot day, and took a bit of convincing to get the girls to pose for this picture. Ato T was off with daddy, being held and walked around, because he was having a pretty tough day.

At the site of the dugout the Ingalls family lived in when they first moved to Walnut Grove.

We stayed at a great campground - Schreir's on Lake Shetek.

We really loved this campground!

Our little ice snitcher!

Just before we decided to pack up and head home.

5 minutes into the drive home - the girls slept the whole way (3 1/2 hours), and Ato T looked like this pretty much the whole way home.

The entire way home, we watched some pretty scary clouds, praying we didn't have to drive through any of the many storms surrounding us. We made it the entire way home without even a drop of rain. This beautiful rainbow was visible for us for at least 30 minutes, and at one point we could see the beginning and end of it.

When we arrived home, we found we had missed a number of tornadoes that had been near where we were driving, and we got home just after a strong storm had rolled though our neighborhood. No damage was done to our home. Praise God for his protection!

The Garden

Our garden has expanded this year! The kids are enjoying the work that goes along with it, and they are enjoying all the vegetables, too! I've never seen two little girls be so excited to eat vegetables! It's really been a treat to watch God produce such wonderful food for us to eat, and to watch the girls get so excited about the work of a garden!

I took these pictures about a month ago, and the garden is now completely overgrown, not with weeds, but with the fruits of our labor. Meals at our house now consist of mainly vegetables.

Summer of fun!

I have officially labeled this the Summer of Fun! Between the 2 kids with services, we have 3 PCAs this summer, and only 2 afternoons during the week that we don't have a PCA scheduled for Ato T. That means mommy and the kids can do a lot more together this summer! I do feel that I'm perfectly capable of going places with all three kids on my own. However, it does take at least twice the energy that it would take me if I had typical kids. That means that when I go places alone with them, I am more tired and need more rest to "recover." This summer with all the help I have, I don't need the recover time, and we are able to go do fun things together more often. Here's a picture of all the kids and two of our PCAs, Jenny and Teelet at the bird show at the MN Zoo.

Glasses

Ato T got his first pair of glasses about 2 weeks ago, and it's going really well. He tried to take them off twice when we first put them on. I told him no, and he hasn't bothered them since. What a guy! The glasses are fantastic. They're one solid piece of plastic, sot the frames can't be broken. If they get bent out of shape, all we have to do is run them under hot water and bend them back into place. They're called Miraflex, and they are definitely the way to go with kids like Ato T!