Six.

He is six.  The first little man of the Guild household is six.  I look at him and am in awe... even more this year than ever before.  He asks crazy questions: "how do the golf ball pickers know when there is a ball to pick up?  Is there a sensor in the bottom kind of like a door has a sensor and knows when to open?"  To which this momma answers, "I have no idea, but it would be fun to find out."  I use that answer often.

We celebrated my boy on Saturday and Sunday... more on that to come.  And a little bit about him at six.

Apple picking

I mentioned that I might be wanting to buy an apple orchard... this was precipitated by our lovely visit to this orchard.  It is a short drive from our house, and we had a grand time picking and eating lots of apples.  And, if we had an orchard, we could have a nifty tractor and trailer like this: the boys would think they were in heaven.  Jake and Josh and my two boys climbed trees and picked apples and were sufficiently worn out by the time we left.

Gem of a Place

I'm not much of a deal finder, but I bought a two for one deal for this pumpkin patch a while back.  The man of the house took the afternoon off of work and we all ventured to this lovely place.  It was awesome!  Hardly anyone there, tons of fun things to play on, tons and tons of pumpkins in the patch and ready to be picked.

I possibly want to buy a pumpkin farm/apple orchard and be a farmer.  We would also plant sunflowers and lots of green beans.  Oh yes, and berries and pears.  For now, I'm a city gal, but one can dream.

Summer Creations

It is clearly fall, however, I just downloaded several photos from the summer.  They were too fun to not post... We made cars to race.  With wood, dowels, washers, pipe cleaners and a GLUE GUN.  I still remember when my dear Aunt Kathy bought me my first glue gun.  It is a magnificent gadget and my boys absolutely agreed.  I am not crafty but I do like to play and a glue gun is a great tool for playing.

 The cars weren't extremely fast, but they did maneuver down the driveway and it was great fun to fiddle and try to make them faster.

The next project was prompted by the book, Food for Thought.  We made creations out of food.  My only guideline was that we had to eat the food when we were done playing with it.

 Watermelon ship

 Zucchini cars with a mushroom man and a cucumber man driving

My dad always laughed that I played a lot.  Even when most children are done "playing".  I still play (as a mid-thirties gal), now it just seems a bit more legitimate because I have these two gems with whom to play.  I hear people lamenting that they wish they could just enjoy the moment a bit more with their kiddos and not worry about getting things done.  I seem to have the opposite problem.  It would be good if sometimes I stopped smelling the roses so much and really focused on the laundry or the dusting.  However, playing with food and glue guns will probably always be more of a draw for me than Pledge or Tide.

September stuff

We attended a baseball game recently.  The boys' favorite part of the game was the cotton candy.  And, we even had good seats to view the game.

 Jonathan loves to goof around with the menagerie you see behind him in our garage.

Littlest man is having fun learning to do some flag football.  

Big Ol' Family Reunion

This summer my dad's side of the family gathered in my hometown to laugh and spend time together.  My dad has five siblings, four of them still living.  The family is scattered all over the midwest and western states so it was great fun to see so many of them.  Some that I hadn't seen in so many years that I had lost count.    See if you can find my dad's two brothers.  When my uncles would visit us people used to always mistake them for my dad.

Pens, Lightbulbs and Gardens

Sometimes life throws a few random lemons... I dropped a pen down the lint trap of the dryer and it got stuck in the fan.  We tried to fix it and ended up with screws everywhere, the pen stuck farther down and no working dryer.  Repair man called.  The next morning Jamie was changing a larger lightbulb in the pantry area and it shattered everywhere.  We had to pitch the toaster because there were glass shards everywhere and it was impossible to remove them and it was smelling very strangely when we I tested it.  The clean-up for a broken lightbulb in the pantry takes hours.  This was all in the craziness of last week as we prepared for a home study visit, had a kindergarten fundraiser, started our small group for church and organized a large workday for our neighbor's garden.  We are thankful for a new week and a little less chaos.

 Before all of the maladies of the week, we bought a hummingbird feeder and the boys have had the grandest time watching the feeder and waiting anxiously for visits by the little birds.

 Our neighbor... in front of her beloved yard that we were working hard to restore.

The boys loved working in our neighbor's yard and it was such a fun thing to participate with 20+ neighbors to help out.