This blog has a title!!

Just wanted to say I figured out how to do titles.

Happy President's Day!!

Here are pictures of Ira's room. We closed in the loft and made a little room out of it. It actually turned out a little larger than we expected. (Well, we measured it and knew exactly how big it would be, but it FEELS larger than we expected it to feel.) It is perfect for Ira, and now is a typical 9 year old boy's room (namely, a disaster area). We put one of those extra TV's in there that we had accumulated, with the promise of a DVD player in the future for when Ira doesn't want to watch Scooby Doo or Little Einsteins with the rest of the kids. (He's into Hogan's Heroes... the other kids not so much.) My favorite part of the room itself is the desk. It fit into this nook that was in there, just perfectly. Ira uses it to do Lego projects, and the model dragon he's currently building, and anything BUT his actual homework. My favorite part of this POST, however, is his rule sheet. You can't read it, but waaay down in the bottom right corner is a rule that says "Salute when coming in." (I just realized that Ira has a rule that says "Do not play with my knives." DON'T worry, anyone who was worried by that. Ira got a pocketknife from his Primary teacher (and our current home teacher) that is engraved with his name. (SOOO cool!) He doesn't have a big collection or a Bowie knife or anything. :-)

Ira's RULES
This is the view from the window towards the door



Ira's desk. You can see his Lego cruiser there...

Ira's bed. Actually not too disastrous looking there....

HAIR it is.....

Two of our boys had hair adventures this week. Tommy got a hold of scissors at the other place and did THIS to his hair:

I don't know if you can tell just how butchered it was from those pictures. It was BAD. SO, Dad got out the clippers, because he had cut it down to the skin in some places, and buzzed Tommy's head. I cried. Well, almost. I've been trying to grow out their hair for so long, and the other person has been leaving it alone for the most part, and then this. Tommy likes having his head buzzed. Great. Here's my bald son :-) Aaron did a good job, first he gave him a mohawk, and then shaved it.

First is the mohawk, and to the right is the full buzz. Sigh...........................

So, Ira also had a hair thing. Because today was only a 2 hour day at school, he asked me to do a "faux hawk".... he is very straight-laced when it comes to his hair, so this was a big step forward. He told me before that having spiked hair would "ruin his rep"--- okay, 1) he is 9. He doesn't have a rep. And 2)what rep does he have? A rep for boring hair? Anyway, I was proud. He looks really dapper. He is gonna be a ladyKILLA when he gets a little older. Well, if he stops doing goofy poses like this, he will:

Here he is being normal. Love this kid. I need to take him to get a cut though. Aunt Debbie will do it right.

I really wish I knew how to put titles onto my posts. Anyone???
Okay, here are more pictures. We pulled out some of the plants we had when we bought the house, they were big and clunky and ugly. We replaced a very poor-looking lantana in front of the garage door with some flowers, and We dug out a huge bush that blocked our window, and put in some trellises (trelli?) with snail vine. The kids and Aaron planted a bunch of wildflower seed in under the snail vine a few weeks ago, which is just starting to sprout up. You can see (in the picture below), our hibiscus bushes on the east side of our front yard. It has been nice to have plants and trees that WE picked. Our next step (or one of them) is removing all the rock in front and planting grass.

We went to the Home Depot kids' workshops a few months ago and loved it so much we invited the Nathan and Tiffany Williamses to join us. Now we have a sleepover the night before and all get up bright and early to do our crafts. Here are some photos (it's a slide show).

Catching up........... again.....

I've gotta tell you, I, your humble post-writer, have been so dang busy that I STILL haven't had a chance to post. I've started a new semester at GCC, it's just 2 classes but there's a lot of writing. One of them is a hybrid so I have to actually show up once in a while (which never was my strong suit as my dear friend Charity can attest). Anyway, work and the kids and continuing to make this house into our home, have kept me personally pretty busy. My darling husband put pictures onto my laptop so that I can post them here, but there are a LOT of them.

Ira is in guitar lessons. He's so cute, he's practicing like he's supposed to and everything! He has to practice twice as much as other kids, because there's no way in h e double hockey sticks his guitar is going to the other place, it would be destroyed in about 30 seconds- So he has to make up for lost time here. He's a trooper though, and he enjoys being able to make music on the thing. He'll either be my little rock star, or my little country singer..... he's like me, pretty eclectic in his music taste. He loves Trace Adkins and Josh Turner (I can't believe I let him listen to Honky Tonk Badonkadonk..... you have to remember I'm a new mom who never had to worry about lyrics before......)... anyway, he also loves My Chemical Romance, Linkin Park, and Evanescence.... and his grandpa Rees' plays really old (like OLD MAN) country music, and Ira likes that too. He got a little MP3 for Christmas from Santa and he's got a long list of requests for me to add on there. I've gotta say, he's such a stud, I can't wait to hang out with him every week. He's my partner in crime, musically speaking, and he is always so helpful and kind with the kids. Now that he has his own room, he at least gets a little privacy and some space and security to put out his Legos and build stuff. He built his Star Wars Cruiser that he got over a year ago. It was quite the project, but what he really needed was to not have little brother feet and hands all over it, so he finished it. It looks pretty darn awesome. Maybe I have a picture of that here. Okay, I'm gonna try and post a few pictures, and then I have to go to bed because it's 1130 and I have to get up at 6. I may be a sissy but I need 8 hours!

Here are a few pictures of our trees. The single sideways one is our Tipu tree, or as Ira calls it, our "freaking huge tree" (it's not huge, but it will be someday.) Then there are our honeysuckle bushes down our side wall that we share with the neighbors who have very high-jumping doggies, and then there are two shots of the whole yard, one from the back yard, and one from the door to the house. Anyway, we love our trees, and I'm already far enough behind that I need to post where the apple and peach trees are BLOOOOMING!!! Yeah!!