My Hobby

For about the past year I've been entering online contests.  I haven't won anything big or life altering...but I do win enough to justify the time spent filling out all of the online forms.

The kids and I enjoyed these chocolate covered strawberries which arrived in the mail courtesy of 1-800 Baskets. Yum!

Another Harvest...

The kids loved this little caterpillar...they just didn't like that he was eating one of our tomatoes.  (Which doesn't make sense since neither one of them eats tomatoes.)  I "rescued" the caterpillar from the tomato and Brandon safely deposited him back into the dirt.

 And I hope it's not too obvious...but someone is getting really bored with the harvest pictures.

Honeydew

Fresh honeydew melon from our garden.  Surprisingly the kids didn't care for it sliced.  But they devoured it after I blended it up with a banana and froze it into popsicles!

Rainbow

As Kimberly's 8th birthday party was coming to an end this beautiful rainbow appeared in Grandma's backyard.

Summer Fun

I gave the kids balance bikes this past summer.  The kids used them a handful of times and still don't know how to ride a bike.  We'll have to work on it next summer.  They did look adorable in their new bunny bike helmets though.

 Cucumber, tomato and pepper harvest.

 Peeking out of the doorway.

New Blog!

The old blog, jt-akachan.blogspot.com is still up but the memory in my photo album is full so I'm unable to upload new pictures.  So I (with the help of my friend Lori) created a new blog for all of the kids' photos, video clips, funny stories and more.

I have not posted anything since April, but I have been taking tons of pictures.  So I'll be going back through the pictures I've taken since then (nearly a 1,000!), select the best ones and post them here over the next few weeks.  I'll date each post to correlate with the approximate time the photos were actually taken (since I like everything to be in order.)

Don't forget to leave a comment every once in awhile!  It's nice to know who's keeping up with Brandon & Emmalyn.

Fun at the Park!

Thanks to Auntie Lori (and some really happy kids) we got some great pictures at the park.

Silly Kids

I took these pictures of Brandon and I in a matter of minutes.  I love all of his silly facial expressions!

 And Emmalyn happily played in a storage bin that was randomly sitting outside.

State Fair

My friend Lori joined the kids and I on our annual State Fair adventure.  We had awesome weather for August...we went on a cool Friday night.  Here we are visiting the cows.  (BTW - no one was pooped on this year in the cow barn!) 

 And the big slide.  I rode with Emmalyn...

 And Auntie Lori rode with Brandon.

 They both loved the slide.

 The kids had a great time climbing on these tractors...they also let us take a few pictures as well.

The Dells

I always try to get a picture of the four cousins together.  Sometimes they turn out decent.  I think this one turned out pretty good.  They're all sitting still.  We can see all of their faces.  Two of them are smiling.  And there's no tears!  I'll still keep trying to get four smiling faces.

 Brandon and Kimberly got to drive their own race cars!

 Pretty Emmalyn by the flowers.

 The kids enjoyed the amusement park at Mt. Olympus so much we barely went swimming.  (The weather was a little cool and rainy.)

 Entertaining themselves on the way home.