"The Whirlwind" - warning: long post

It feels good to be back on blogger!! It's been so long since I've been able to enjoy reading updates on my friends and family and sharing about what our family has been up to. I could have shared so much along the way... but to catch up on everything now would be impossible, too much has happened since my last post (May 14th!) . So... I will share bits and pieces of the whirlwind, but apologize in advance for the length of this update. That's what happens when you go a whole month without posting! :) So.....

Ciara graduated on May 16th and it was a great day! Her reception was really nice and we were blessed to have so much family there to help us celebrate. Here are a few photos of the graduate:

Mama steals a photo with the grad before the ceremony

Diploma in hand... she's a happy girl!

Our family at the reception

Ciara and her cake

Most of our out of town relatives left Sunday afternoon, then on Wednesday night my uncle and cousins from Nebraska came for a visit as they passed through on their way to Colorado. It was fun catching up with them, and I'm so disappointed that I didn't even get a picture of the adorable twins, Parker and Sienna. Guess I was too busy to think about it! ha ha.

Memorial weekend Luke and Brandon went golfing with a couple of my uncles and had a good time. The girls went shopping with Grandma Barbie. Well... Luke was running errands around town and called to announce that "there are the cutest puppies in front of the Orscheln Store." Oh geesh, do we need a puppy? So he tells me all about them and convinces me to go over and look at them. CUTE CUTE CUTE. This litter of pups was an accident and it was obvious that the owner could barely take care of the parents of these pups much less the 10 new arrivals that were 8 weeks old. Blue Heeler/Doberman mix. We chose a female. The thought process on the new pup was that our big outside dog, Trixie (the australian shepherd/border collie) needed a companion. She always looks so lonely and we thought a puppy would bring new meaning to her life and someone to snuggle with and play with. Enter "Snickers".

Just after we brought Snickers home, the big day finally rolled around - the day that I would transfer ownership of my Soap business. On May 27th the new owner came down from Colorado Springs to do some training. We trained Wed, Thurs, and Friday. We really did have a lot of fun. Jessica is a wonderful person and I feel like this was more than a business deal... I made a good friend! :) At the end of the day on Friday we began packing everything up. Digital scale, stick blender, oils, butters, fragrances. WHEW! There was a lot of stuff!! I put in close to 40 hours in 3 days down in the soap shop, but it was worth it. Luke and the kids helped me carry all those boxes up the stairs and into the garage so it would be ready to load when the new owners got here with the U-Haul. We had some fantastic team work going. I packed up the final items from the store room and we hauled it all out. We took a few pix along the way to document this huge life change.


Silly fun in the soap shop - I took this picture of us :)

The new owners pack their first internet order


The family is ready to go!


Going, going, GONE!

I am truly enjoying the freedom of not being the boss and making all the decisions. I find myself more relaxed and my home cleaner. The family is even being fed more organized meals, which I think they're enjoying. :) We turned the soap shop into a hobby room and it looks great. We're looking forward to hours of fun down there scrap booking and whatever else we feel like. Hey, maybe I'll finally get that quilt made for our bed that I bought the fabric for 3 months ago! :)

Back to the Snickers story... it turns out that Trixie didn't view Snickers as a companion, but rather a nuisance. She was jealous that we paid attention to Snickers - and while she did play with (tolerate) the puppy some... she mostly just ran off to do her own thing as usual and left the puppy barking/whining - which of course got the little indoor dog, Sugar, barking and whining. UGH. Things weren't working out. So, we got lucky and were able to move Snickers to the farm with my little cousins. She will be loved there, no doubt and seems to be very happy.

So what's next? I have interviewed for a part time administrative assistant position at FHSU, and should find out in the next few days if I'm employed. :) Luke is performing the wedding ceremony for my cousin and her fiance' this coming Saturday, so we will be at an out of town wedding. It's always fun to be with family, so that should be a good time! What's really special is that Jessica was our little miniature bride at OUR wedding. Oh how the time flies!! Then... on June 24th our family leaves for a MUCH needed vacation. We will drive to Denver and fly into Los Angelos. Spending some time in San Diego and LA... then finishing the trip by taking in the Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado and staying the nite in Castle Rock, nearby. Sunday we'll drive home and I'll have more to share! Can't wait. But until then... we'll enjoy our new 20 foot above ground pool. I'll leave you with one last photo until next time. Hope you're enjoying your summer too! :)

On to State!

Brandon and Ciara take 1st place in IDA
at MCL Forensics tournament on March 9th!

IDA is "improvised duet acting". When the kids get to the tournament, they have to "draw". They are drawing for person, place and situation and then they have 30 minutes to think up a story with a plot, name the characters and then perform a skit in front of judges that is a minimum of 4 minutes and a maximum of 7 minutes. This process happens 3 times at the tournament - then they find out if they've qualified for finals - which means they are guaranteed to place and receive a medal. Only 1st and 2nd place can qualify for state. I was so proud of the two of them. The thing is... they've been acting, putting on plays, making videos and doing silly stuff together since they were old enough to speak so they make a dynamic duo! :)

State Forensics will be in Topeka on May 2nd and we're looking forward to being there to see them perform. Whatever the outcome, their parents are VERY VERY PROUD!

Oh yes, our children have a flair for the dramatic! ;)

Jinny's Year End

YUCK. I hate year end. I have to go through all my reciepts and catch up all the book work that I didn't have time to do for the last umpteen months because I was too busy in the soap shop. Worst of all is that it's inventory and tax time. This year I had to take inventory in my shop and at my top selling retail location in Hays. Ciara made it a little less painful as she owed me 3 hours for the Christmas moolah she borrowed against her paycheck. Then I hauled her into town and fed her supper and took her shopping to bribe her into helping me at the store. :) It worked out pretty good. As luck would have it... my sales in this store were nearly triple what they've been in past months, so that means that 1. I am very happy to get a fat check and 2. Inventory was really easy to take there because it was so depleted. YAY!!!! :)

This year we have to have our taxes done early because we have a meeting at Ciara's school (in JANUARY!) for Financial Aid stuff for college. *SIGH* I feel squeezed. Having a high school senior is exhausting. I never realized how much there is to do. We've got the Senior Pix, ACT registration deadlines and test dates, scholarship application deadlines, cap and gown meetings.... the list goes on! I would have to proudly admit that I'm embracing this season of life and am excited for Ciara to move onto college. High School hasn't really been her "thing". I truly think that it's because of her Christian perspective on life. It's hard to be Godly when you're surrounded by people that swear, get drunk, do drugs, sleep around.... etc. I realize that this is no different than the a good portion of the rest of the world, but at least when she's in college she will have the ability to choose who to socialize with, not to mention that the "friend pool" is much deeper with there being 10,000 students at Ft. Hays and less than 100 students at her school. She has friends, but still... there are challenges. She's done quite well for herself this year though and has had a 4.0 GPA most of the first semester. There was the little incident where she was partnered for a huge group project in civics where the other 2 kids were below average students - thus preseting a huge challenge for her to get a good grade, I hate to say that they drug her down with them and it took her a really long time to pull that grade back up. I loathe stuff like that, the only thing worse is a teacher that keeps the whole class in from recess because one child was being a clown or acting up. Ciara vows that she is learning from these things and will not handle her class in such a way when she becomes a teacher. I'm so proud of her!!

So... Luke's brother and family were planning on coming down for New Year's Eve and day... but sadly, their kids were still sick. New Year's Day Luke got sick with flu type stuff and has been sick for 3 days. My parents both had flu symptoms yesterday and the nite before as well. UGH! :( No fun!! Luke has had such body aches and monster headaches too. He did wake up this morning saying he feels better... so I'm cautioning him to take it easy and not overdo it. Seems like whenever I'm sick and try to do too much I end up right back where I left off. I just woke Ciara up and she is complaining of being tired and having a bad headache. Oh boy... here we go!

I'll go into Hays today to pick up Brandon from church. They had an overnite youth thing... when I dropped him off there were about 3 other boys there so far. I've been praying for years for a close friend for him. A David and Jonathon type of friendship. Someone he is close to and loves and can relate to and have things in common with. He's never had a best friend - not since kindergarten. It's hard for a mom to watch her kids go through life searching for TRUE friendship. I'm hoping that he's connecting with the kids there. It would be nice if he had a friend that called and invited him to over or to go do something fun. The guys he's "friends" with now aren't really friends at all. They're flaky. Not a good kinda flaky like pie crust but flaky like... "you're only good enough to hang out with if my usual posse isn't around". Breaks my heart. He is close to his cousin, Robbie and I'm thankful for that. They have fun together, and try to get together to do stuff and hang out. I just want my kids to have a full, meaningful life, and meaninful relationships. Prayer is the key... because I can't make all of the rest happen for them. I sometimes wonder if we wouldn't have been better off sending our kids to a bigger Hays school??

So... enough rambling for today. The point is... once again... 2008 is OVER. I couldn't be more glad.

Yeah, this is how I roll...

So, I'm adding all the new Christmas products to my webpage at jinnycrickets.com. Just mindin' my own business, thinking about how I want to list the product descriptions and prices, etc. and along comes little Shoogie-Woogie-poo-kins. (That's for you, Morgan!) ha ha. Anyhoo... she is older now, almost 10 months and like any independent, stubborn "child" she has decided that she will let you know when SHE wants to be held, which is usually only when she is very tired. So she keeps wanting to be held and I can't resist the sweet, little fuzzy baby so I pick her up and start huggin' on her. She does this thing when she's tired where she crawls up on my shoulder and likes to lay across my whole chest and rest her head on my shoulder. It's actually really adorable, but that makes it pretty tough to work on the computer. Finally I put her down on my lap and got her settled in there and she was sleeping. I guess once she was zonked I didn't think much more about her being on my lap, I mean I felt her fuzzy face on my hand and her adjusting herself, but then I couldn't press the space bar. So then I figure out why...


Take a look at Shoogs!

Oh my goodness, too cute, and check out her little "wave-do" she has goin' on there with the bangs. :) I couldn't resist so I had to snap a few pix. She just kept sleeping.






What a little angel. Do you think she might possibly be part of my time management problem? Hmm.... Nah! :)

Vikings and ladybugs and bunnies... OH MY!

So... the kids had their costume dance Friday nite at school and it was pretty fun gettin' all dressed up. Once Brandon and Ciara were ready, I got Shoogie dressed and we took some photos to commemorate the fun before heading next door to Grandma's to show off our costumes. The kids were vikings:


And Shoogie was a ladybug



Trixie even got in on the fun... she was a bunny




Here are a few more fun photos from the evening











My kids have always loved to dress up... Halloween is just a good excuse to take their "getups" out in public. :) Hope you gotta kick out of the pix.

Homecoming Slideshow 2008

If you wanna see the photos bigger... click on this link to go straight to the slide show, the photos are easier to see. Enjoy! :) Bigger photo slideshow

Homecoming...Hoorah.

Drained. That's how I feel after a week of homecoming festivities. You can tell I haven't had much time lately... it's been about 10 days since I even had a few minutes to sit down and blog! It began the weekend before with impromptu float building supervision. I went to drop Brandon off at the freshmen float and discovered there weren't enough parent volunteers. Well, you know how that goes... I wound up making a special trip to Hays for spray paint and helping them build the float saturday and sunday. It looked pretty good and they got 3rd place, beating out the Juniors - so I guess they did a decent job. The theme this year was "Rockin' the reservation". They played the Hoxie Indians. [that's why you'll see Brandon in indian garb in the slideshow :)]They dressed up all week for spirit week. It was sorta fun. Here's what they did: (Slideshow to follow)

Monday: Hawaiian Day
Tuesday: Disney Character Day
Wednesday: College Team Day
Thursday: Fake an Injury Day
Friday: Orange & Black Day

The kids had a good time dressing up and both had dates for the dance and according to the pictures their friends are posting on facebook... had a great time. :) Even though it was fun, I have to say I'm glad it's over. I'm exhausted! My work has been insane lately, but I won't complain since being busy is always better than not having any work - since no work = no moolah. ha ha. So the slide show you see is full of pix of the kids enjoying homecoming week. Hope you'll be amused, I know I was! ;)

P.S. Brandon's date was picked up after the photos were taken at Ciara's friend's house, so unfortunately we don't have any of her. I guess I better get used to that with Brandon since he's the one picking up dates now instead of being picked up... I'll probably never have pictures of him with a date unless they're taken by the school. :(