Yes, I buy birthday presents from garage sales

Happy Birthday to my sweet little 2-year-old! Here is Elisabeth enjoying her birthday presents

new shoes!

kitchen set

My Little Ponies

Playing with food and plates

My mom made her this darling Tu-tu!

What a great big brother to open her presents for her!! Sit back, Elisabeth, you can count on Rychen to do all the work for you.
Cute dress from Grandma Jones
...and also a book

She had a fun birthday. After opening presents, we went to a family reunion at Rychen's grandparent's house, swam in the pool, and enjoyed the sunshine!

Tri-For-Life Triathalon

My first triathalon was a great experience. It was really fun except for the exercising parts. But of course it was all worth it and felt great!

Juicing up before leaving the house

Really crammed in the car, with my bike across the back seat!








Swam 500 meters in about 12 1/2 minutes
















Transition 1 (from pool to bike)























Biking was harder than I prepared for. I felt like a little volkswagon bug getting passed by a bunch of Ferrarris. In other words, I paid $75 for my old mountain bike, and not $2,000 for a speedy little Tri Bike. And the course was very, very, very boring!! The 12 miles took me about 55 minutes.

So at this point I was just a wee bit tired, so I walked some of the 5K, timed about 30 minutes for the run portion, and got 1 hour 45 minutes overall.

Here I am with Renetta Fredericks who is pretty much the triathlete role model of our stake. So I was honored to do a few minutes with her.

...and I don't know why my blog post got all weird but I am done, so it's just gonna have to look like this!

Rychen Parker's first race

Rychen ran the Bush Park Cross-country Series 500 meter last Thursday. He had a great time, and he didn't come in last. Next week he wants to do the longer race. We'll see!

My Photography

I want some nice pictures of the kids to scrapbook, so I took Elisabeth on the front lawn to have my first try at photography. It's something I have always wanted to learn. I could really use a nicer camera but here's my best effort on our $79 model

A Boy & His Lion

Yesterday we had a scare with our little Lion, but we are happy to announce that he is safe and healthy now, with lots of life left in him!

It was time to go to bed, time for the same routine every night... Rychen: "Where's Lion?" Dad: "I'll go get him, you stay in bed!"

But then Dad didn't come back.

Lion was nowhere to be found.

Where did we last have him? We all looked. But no Lion. We made a deal to sleep without him while we parents kept looking. But he didn't turn up.

This morning as we were talking over where we last had him, it occured to us that Rychen had brought Lion shopping with us yesterday, but Lion didn't make it home. And then, "A-ha!" Must have been at the thrift store when we ran back to grab a puzzle, but ended up loading our arms full of random junk (such as a complete set of Dairy Queen BLAZERS collectible glasses from 1994!) instead, leaving our most Prized Possession behind!

So of course we had to trek all the way back to St. Paul's to find Lion. I had no idea what odds we had of finding him. I mean, you can't exactly call up a thrift store asking if anybody has turned in a well-worn stuffed animal. With our luck, Lion was probably tucked into a new kid's bed after fetching an unbeatable price.

Well then, I guess our luck has changed. Our sweet Lion was safe and sound, with all the other stuffed animals for sale.

Thank Goodness nobody else wants the filthy, stinky thing.

Hooray for DIY!

Seems like all I read on blogs nowadays is how people are having fun buying cheap, old furniture and refurbishing it! So Rychen and I are giving it a shot. Today I found a couple great bookshelves for $3. They didn't look half bad as-is, but I had the spectacular idea to paint them with our leftover accent paint from the kitchen! Now our living area looks so coordinating and cozy! We just need to get matching sheers for the front windows now.

This just shows the kitchen walls in the same paint color.

Finished product!! Now doesn't that just make you want to curl up and read a book?

Long Time Comin'

FINALLY I have a BEDROOM!!

That is, a room without children's beds or children's things, just MY THINGS!

My bedroom contains 5 things.

(1) a bed

(2) a closet with my clothes

(3) my nightstand with my books
(4) bookshelf with my books

(5) *new addition* my stamping table!!!!!!

We've also been mulling over where to put our school stuff, since workbooks and watermelon don't really mix. It took some tinkering around in our little 3-bedroom house. But now we've rearranged the computer room to be a home to Rychen P's work also. This works great--now we can both sit at our desks and I can help him as I am busy on the computer with my own projects.

(sorry, not yet cleaned up!)

Human Body Lesson & Art

We've been reading books about the human body lately. So when we were at Costco and I happened to spy these huge sheets of cardboard, did I hesitate? Nope! I didn't let the fact that I was already pushing a 170-lb. shopping cart stop me, neither the fact that we were all exhausted from our errands and Elisabeth was already crying. When you see an opportunity and catch a vision, you gotta snatch it up! Even if it means balancing these things on top of toilet paper and watermelons, all the way through the warehouse store, to the very end of the parking lot. You gotta do what you gotta do!

We traced both Rychen and Elisabeth. On Elisabeth's body, we drew organs, bones, muscles, and blood vessels, explaining each one.


...on Rychen's body, I told him he could do whatever he wanted.

Naturally, he chose to paint!

What a beautiful, colorful body! (you can tell he did the left side first and then got lazy. ha!)

...and check out these glittery fingernails!

Learning is so much fun!