Baby-Sitting

Good afternoon! It's quiet around here right now, so I decided it'd be a good time to blog.

As you know, Rachel Martin went to the ER Sunday morning with severe chest pains. The doctors in Atlantic diagnosed it as a mild heart attack and life flighted her to Creighton University where she's been since. The condition was worse than they first thought, so the doctors kept her longer for observation. She gets out tomorrow (Friday).

We've had their children everyday this week but yesterday. It has been a good growing experience for the Martins and our family! Having toddlers around all day is definitely a new experience, but we've been enjoying it! :)

Anyway, here's some pictures of different activities that we've done...

These first seven pictures are from before the Martin children. :)

Tree Lily 

This is my poor three yr old tree lily. It is planted out front by the steps. Whenever we played Four-square out on the patio, someone was just bound to knock the ball over the railing and crush lilies. Finally, this year, we put the taboo on playing Four-square on the patio, and my flowers were able to bloom! :)

We all wanted ice cream one day, and not having any, settled on smoothies.

Abi threw strawberries, bananas, orange and lime icies.

Dishing it out!

Finished product

YUMMY!!!

 Swimming with the Martin children

Rhoda & Ruthanna

KK and Joel were making themselves pleasantly (or might I say, uncomfortably) sandy. :)

Brie brought Kate along.

Playing in the sand.

Brie left Kate to watch Rhoda. Kate actually did a really good job!

Gracie has been doing so well in the water! She could hardly swim last year, but she's been swimming like a pro this year!

Sam, well, he's gotten lots better, but he still can't quite swim yet.

After the other children saw Joel & KK, they had to roll in the sand too!

Ruthanna, "swimming"

Joel and Kate

Rhoda loved the water! I don't think she was scared at all... that can be good or bad...

KK put sand deliberately on his face, but Brie was running out of the lake, tripped and fell face first in the sand. Yuck!

See Ben dumping a fist full of sand down KK's shirt?

Sand... Everywhere!

We couldn't keep Rhoda away from the water, so Brie suggested that we tie her up to Kate's leash. :)

Jonathan took her for a walk... :) It didn't last very long.

Drying off

The next day, KK took charge of Rhoda for Abi and I since we had a lot of work to get done. At nap time, he read to the little girls for quite awhile. Both girls slept for nearly three hours that day!

Sammy and Jonathan playing together.

Tomorrow, we head out to Holdrege for Josiah Smith and Joanna Ott's wedding. Stay tuned if you want to see pictures of the next Grice event! :)

Church Work Day

Saturday was a busy day here at Glory! Leon and Edward were planning a work day at church and Bob and Annabelle's.

Edward was heading up a crew at Brandt's, scraping old peeling paint off the siding in preparation for repainting it. Leon took charge of the crews working at church. One crew worked on the back roof fixing some siding and stuff while another crew replaced the front overhanging roof.

I'm still kicking myself that I didn't even think to bring the camera for pictures. Arg!!! I need to get more in the habit of carrying the camera places as if it were my purse. :) So, sorry, no pictures for this post...

The guys got a lot done at church, but didn't quite finish it all. I'm not sure what all got done at Brandt's, but I don't think it was much. Poor Edward had mostly little people as his crew. 

I stayed at church and cleaned. It had needed a good cleaning for a long time! I went around knocking cobwebs down, dusting, sweeping, mopping, etc. By the time I went home I was pretty wiped out. After such a long busy week, I was almost falling asleep while driving home. :)

Sorry this is such a short post! I wish there was more to write about. I'll try to get more pictures this week. :)

Homeschool Picnic~ June 29th

Sammy was mowing with sun glasses. He was really cute!

These next several pictures are the day before the picnic. Abi was in charge of planning relay races. Since one of the races involved hula-hoops, we had to get several. Everyone enjoyed playing with them before hand. :)

Mom was making Tammy Strong's coffee cake. 

Emmie's famous macaroni salad. :)

Coffee cake

Shells for the mac salad.

Getting lunch amidst the mess.

Asiatic lilies out front.

Practicing the hula-hoop pass.

You pass the hula-hoop over your body to the next person while everyone holds hands. It's a lot of fun!

These are bike ramps that the boys put up all around the house.

Another ramp down the front patio stairs. (This one is scary!) 

Onto the deck and the last ramp goes off at the far end.

KK and Ben riding around.

Sally has successfully smashed several of my daylilies. She's been chained up in exile the past couple weeks .

Sammy spray painted the mailbox yellow for Mom. :)

Hula-hooping around the neck? Ouch!

Picnic Day!

Down at the ball field practicing. We had the picnic at the park in Stanton.

Ryan

2nd base

Outfielders

I'm not really sure what the elastic around the bottom of his pant legs was for...

Leon was the picnic organizer. He's lining us all up in age order to count out the two teams.

All in line now! Don as the oldest and Jonathan as the youngest. 

Leon's counting down the teams... 1-2-1-2...

Team 2 is on the left and team 1 is on the right. I was on team 2.

Team 1 was up to bat first while team 2 was in the outfield.

Team 2

Team 2 did really well on the first round.

Team 2 up to bat! It was so cute watching the little people bat. :)

Our team did awful in the first inning.

Leon's boys kept him well supplied with water. Oh, yeah, Leon was the pitcher throughout the entire game.

Here's wimpy up to bat. :)

We need a pitcher, not a belly itcher! Leon got a phone call while pitching, and answered it Zook style. :)

Short intermission between games. This is team 1.

Go team 2!

Me as outfielder.

Daddy as short stop. He joined our team after awhile. We were glad for that as our team needed some help!

We had to stop the ball game for lunch.

Rhoda :)

Back at the ball field! Josh and Ben were having a duel with bats.

Waiting...

Team 1 did pretty bad on the first half of the 3rd inning with 7 outs, but somewhere around 3 or 4 home runs... Even though our team (team 2) didn't do too bad, we ended up loosing 29-25. We went down with a fight, though!

Back up at the pavilion, Leon started the relay races with the rope pull.

Josh was the longest champion. Nobody could knock him off!

Dad against Josh...

Caleb and Brie

Spectators

Tanya with her babies.

Sam

Ry

KK

Sam is doing the hula-hoop (he's really good at it!), Matthias jumping through a hula-hoop, KK jumping rope. :)

Anthony

Matthias, Ben and KK were doing them around their necks...

For the first relay, we put a big bowl of popcorn at the far end in a lawn chair. We separated boys against girls. You had to run with a Dixie cup to the bowl of popcorn, scoop up a cupful with one hand, run back and dump it into the bowl at the beginning of your team, and pass the cup to the next person. 

Racing for the popcorn bowl!

Racing back!

Marcus was so cute! In order to make sure that he didn't use two hands, he kept the one hand tucked behind his back. :)

Mom and Ryan racing back with full cups of popcorn.

Aunt Carol and Timmy

Laughing as we get back in line.

The final test! The boys won... Too bad... :)

We didn't get pictures of the next relay. Each person had to blow up a balloon. Once everyone was ready, we had to run, one person from each team, up to where Dad was sitting, stomp on the balloon to pop it, pick the pieces up, then run back and drop the pieces at the beginning of the line. The boys won that one too.

Getting ready for the next relay.

Dad explaining how to play it.

Each team got a couple plastic forks and a canning jar ring. We had to hold the fork between our toes and pass the canning ring to the next person's fork.

Boys team

Here they go!

It got really tense for awhile there!

Last one!

Hoorah! We win!

The boys lost with a good attitude. :)

Dad and Leon demonstrating the next relay, the hula-hoop pass. :)

On your mark, get set...

Ruthanna and Amy

Go!

You had to squirm through the hula-hoop while holding hands and pass it to the next person.

The boys would just lift the little boys through. :)

Almost there...

We win!

Marty, observing. (And munching... :))

We played this relay three times, the boys winning once and the girls winning twice.

They're staring in disbelief as we win again. :)

Victory the second time!

Amy

Don was kinda tired...

Playing "school"

In line for "school"

Marcus just loves Amy... the feelings are mutual. :)

The church in Stanton was beautiful! It would be perfect for a wedding or something...

Chatting in the dugout at the ball field

It rained twice, the first time it didn't last too long, but the second time, most of us got stuck in the one dugout. It rained hard! We got so wet! It barely stopped long enough for us to run up to the pavilion.

Packing up... Leon got cold, so draped himself Indian style in a blanket. :)

We were all tired and sunburned, but very happy! I wish you could've been there! We missed you a lot...