Budding Artist & Home Decor

 Jordan is an artist.  She wakes up and draws.

She draws in the car with her doodle pad on the way to school and on the way home.

She draws when she gets home from school. 

 She draws in the bath!

She draws in my classroom at school!

 She has a dry erase board upstairs where she is constantly drawing and erasing.

She draws before bed.  There are markers and paper on the kitchen table all the time.  We never put them away.   Recently she has discovered SCOTCH TAPE.  This is the result.

How to Feed a Stingray

This summer we traveled to Kemah, TX for a Mommy and Jordan adventure.  There was a wonderful stingray exhibit on the boardwalk.  You could buy trays of shrimp, then you were set free to follow instructions for feeding the animals from posters on the walls.

Feeding a Stingray
1.  Keeping fingers tucked under, place shrimp between middle and ring finger
3.  Place hand under the water up against the wall with shrimp sticking out
4.  Let stingray swim up and suck it from between your fingers
( Don't think that is exactly how it was written, but that is what I remember)

What we discovered: 

Stingrays are hungry

They feel slimy on the top

They will swim right up over the edge and flap around getting you soaked

Grown men and women are afraid to stick their hands into that water and will run away screaming when the stingrays hop up and flap around (wish we had gotten videos of the screaming)

After watching Jordan feed the rays a grown man gave Jordan his tray of shrimp (after paying $6) because he was too frightened to feed the stingrays

More that we discovered:

Stingrays have a mouth on their underside
In order to get food from you they hop up with their scary mouth showing and make this awful slurping noise as they try to suck the shrimp from your tray.

Stingrays have teeth.

(Jordan got her poor little finger sucked into the mouth of a stingray, and he drew blood) She persevered!  She continued to amaze all nearby as she fearlessly helped everyone empty their shrimp trays.  She gave up on sticking her hand under and waited till the hungry stingrays hopped up and flapped around, slurping, and she would slide the shrimp across the top of the wall into the scary teeth-filled mouths.

What a great show!  I highly encourage this activity.

We left wet, smelly, tired.

I couldn't stop smiling.

Family Photos

This is one the only family photos we have (minus Sharon, don't know if one exists with every one of us).  We are all looking at the camera and smiling.  Dad is not frowning or turned around with his back to the camera (he thought that was funny, we would not know until the picture came out).  How did Nana get us all to smile! Dad had probably just snuck a cigarette!  After this,  I am sure we piled into our Pinto? or Buick?  loaded with Nana's ham and roast beef sandwiches, cokes, and snacks and watched Nana (who refused to be in a photo without her lipstick) wave from her porch with tissues in her hand until we turned the corner.  I love this picture!

We are at Nana's house in Abilene.  We traveled there once a year, usually for Thanksgiving or Christmas.  This was probably the last time we ever went there together

Things I never thought that I would see

Jordan has now ridden a camel twice.  Apparently, around here, it is fun to bring a camel to Fall Festivals and charge money for rides.  Pretty funny animals.

Toy Story Mania

We have gone absolutely Toy Story crazy at our house:  we have all three movies, little figurines, costumes, candy, pajamas, coloring books, posters, story books, bucket 'o army guys, Leapster game, school supplies, and this HUGE slinky dog.

Jordan dressed as Sarge and Daddy dressed as MR.Potato head for Halloween

We stuck Potato Head pieces into a tortilla and a hot do to recreate scenes from the latest movie
Glad they are all really good movies!

New Family Members

I would like to introduce you to the newest members of our family: Crash and Nuke, sweet, orange boys that we adopted.  They are very playful.  Nuke loves bedtime and Crash loves feathers.  They BOTH love tearing around the house on weekend mornings.  Jordan takes very good care of them, too.  She feeds them and attempts to clean the litter box.  We have already spent too much money on toys, treats, and cat hotel/bed.  They have each demolished two sets of collars.  It must have taken hours of licking to make them look like that.  They are going to be huge, and we will be cleaning up a lot of cat hair.  What have we gotten ourselves into?

I have dropped all knitting projects to make catnip toys!

Really, Hours!!!

Catnip fish!