Can we have do-overs?

Yes, God works all things together for the good of those who love Him, but sometimes it seems like it would be nice to get do-overs. Christmas has been weird for us this year. We spent Christmas trying to get to Montana. We started at about 11:00 Christmas morning, made it to Quincy and started hearing funny things coming from our engine (after a week-and-a-half of trying to get the thing running). So we pulled in to our own local Rivendell (Don't they call it something like "the last homey place" or something?) which is what we consider the Hawes house to be. After lingering there for a bit and finding much kindness and warmth, we continued on.
Eventually the funny noises stopped, praise God, and the van was fine. The weather, however, was less than cheerful. It was a bit scary, actually. At 5:00pm we rolled into Post Falls and noticed they hadn't even plowed anything but the interstate. We were barely able to get around the roads and parking lots without chains.
Anyway, we had Christmas dinner at a Flying Js and ended up camping out in the hotel across the street. Rejoicing comes in the morning--we had great weather the next day and were able to make an easy trip the rest of the way to Ronan. Usually the whole drive from home to Ronan takes about sevenish hours.
We celebrated with my parents and my elder brother's family, but my younger brother's stocking was left on it's peg, as he is still in Iraq. We did get to talk to him on the phone, though. All in all a good day, was Friday.
Saturday we had a big family gathering, the kind that flood your memories of Christmas past. The men mad a great sled run using the hill with the pile of ploughed snow on top. Lily was in her element! She was flying down fearlessly in no time! Ella's a bit more cautious (sp?). Sadly, caution doesn't always prevent accidents. Poor little Ella got her leg stuck under the sled and broke it. We took her to the ER on Saturday night and got a half cast, she'll have a full one put on some day this week. Welchs--something you can appreciate--every member of our family has now had their own ER trip! We've just never been to the same ER twice. Oh, I take that back. Lily and Bob both went to the one in Port Townsend.
So, it's late, I'm spent and my mind has long since drifted to dwell on the sadder side of this holiday, but rejoicing will come in the morning.

Some funnies

Many of you have already heard these, but I wanted to get them down while I am thinking about them.
The girls and I were eating lunch the other day and Ella said, "Mom, sniff your nose!" So I made a little sniffing sound. Ella responded with, "No, sniff bigger like this (big sniff)." So I made a bigger sniff after which Ella cheerfully said, "Did you smell that? I piffeled (tooted)."

Also, Ella likes to pretend she is various characters. If she has on a dress she is a princess. If she has on pants, she's Prince Phillip. When she wears her black leotard, she's usually a kitty. Except when she goes to the bathroom--she's never a character when she has to use the bathroom, then she's just Ella. The other day she told Daddy, "I'm being a kitty! Except when I pick my nose, then I'm a girl."

I'm on a roll

Thought I'd put up one more post while I'm at it.
Lily likes to take pictures. Here's one she took of me. I like how tall I look from the perspective of a small five-year-old











Ella took this one of Lily, I think.










Looks like Dessa's food was sneaking up on her.













Bob's birthday surprise (the man with the baby). What a great friend.



Here's some Christmas cheer, as well. The girls get their own tree in their room. Dessa has already pulled it over on herself about three times. It doesn't seem to hurt her, but she does get a little upset. Hey, there are two more new posts under this one! Lookie!

We had a great Thanksgiving

I know we're well past thanksgiving, but I wanted to share some pictures from Thanksgiving. Thanks so much to the Appels for the lovely stay and fantastic dinner! We stayed in their vacation rental cabin for two nights with some good friends. It was such a pleasant time.





The view in the morning from the front deck. The cool foggy-looking one is actually just my breath.







Living room and lovely couple
(non-permanent fixtures)








Kitchen, Loft family room, Master bedroom (babysitter, chef, and mess not included as a part of vacation rental package)

Oh, I don't know

Just thought I'd stick some stuff up. I'm going to try to put a video of Odessa playing Peek-a-boo with her legs. Just beware that it will probably take a bit of time to load. Let me know if it seems strange to put this on the web. It is cute, though.




I have a picture of the dress we got Ella for Christmas:









The girls were having their first fingerpainting experience, paint brushes included (they weren't too excited about the finger part).

Family Photos!

We did it! Or rather, Joy did it. Thanks Joy for the great pics! We had our family pictures done this Saturday. It was a bit chilly, but that sort of thing doesn't show up in the pictures. Poor Dessa was tired (from keeping us up all night) but otherwise it went quite well. Plus we got to meet another member of our community of whom we had heard much.

hair cut

Here are a few pictures of the hair cuts.
Dessa keeps pushing the keyboard away, so I'm going to quit now.

Spicy True Love

At the table the other day, Lily and Ella were doing a little glitter work and pretending they were icing cakes or something. Lily was squeezing the glitter tube and said, "I'm going to add a little spicy true love!" Ha! I'd change our blog from X Corner to "Spicy True Love" if I didn't think that would bring in the wrong sort of attention. Maybe I will anyway. Any Votes? I can't think of a better way to describe our marriage! Leave me a comment and let me know what you think; Should we change our blog to "Spicy True Love" or leave it "X corner?"

Here are some pictures from this fall





I don't know why those are so small.

Here are some others, more recently taken. Dessa fell asleep watching a movie. The girls are all dressed in pink for Reformation Sunday and the three in their make-shift Halloween costumes. Later I will post a couple pics of the hair cuts I gave them this week.

Maybe I should put up some pictures

Here are some pictures of our trip to Bend. We stopped at the Redmond Air Center where Bob did his rookie training for smokejumping. Our family is standing outside one of the planes Bob has jumped out of. The second picture is in the chute well, where they hang and check the chutes. The girls loved this room because Bruce (our tour guide) could make the chutes go up and down in the tower. The third pic is inside the plane. The girls found a funny funnel thing with a hose on it attached to the wall and as they were going for a hands-on inspection, Bruce jumped in front of them and said, "no, no, no... You don't want to touch that!" Can you guess what it was?














Here is our really great hotel room.

Something funny

Bob and I had a conversation that went like this:
Jenn: "Thanks for loving me. I'm pretty unlovely a lot of the time--you do a good job loving me anyway."
Bob: "That's why men are visual."

Mike

My brother, Mike, who is a Marine was deployed to Iraq a couple of weeks ago. Please be praying for his safety. The girls and I had a conversation about him that went like this:

Ella: “Mom, can Uncle Mike come with Grammie this time?”

Mom: “No, He’s in Iraq, far, far away.”

Ella: “Did he take an airplane?”

Mom: “Yes.”

E: “Is he somewhere dangerous?”

M: “Yes, he’s in a war. It would be good to pray for him whenever we think of him. We can pray for him right now. Would you like to do it?”

E: “Sure. But you say the “Heavenly Father.”

M: “Ok. Heavenly Father…”

E: pause

M: “Are you going to pray?”

E: Nods. Pause. “Oh! Let’s start all over!”

M: “Heavenly Father…”

E. pause

M. “Are you praying?”

E. “I want you to say ‘Uncle Mike.’”

M. “Maybe you should try doing the whole thing by yourself. I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

E. “Ok. But everybody be quiet. Mom, go look at the stove. Don’t close your eyes.” Whispering: “Heavenly Father…(to Mom) But you can keep doing things. Maybe look at the flowers. That would be a good surprise for you. Lily, you have to be quiet.”

Lily: “I want to talk to Dessa and say , ‘shh.’”

E: “Dessa can make noise. I’m OK with that.”

M: “If you don’t want anyone to hear you, you could say it in your head.”

E: “Ok, but I’m not going to pray for our snack. That’s too weird.”

M: Growing impatient, finally realizes that if she were a disinterested bystander, this would be pretty funny. Goes to computer to type, on the way hears:

E: “Heavenly Father…wait, I’m going to eat a couple of marshmallows first.”

A few minutes later…

E: “Mom, I prayed for Uncle Mike AND our snack! Two things.”

So, Mike, if you get the chance to read this, you are in our thoughts, prayers and conversations often! We love you!

It's been a while

It's been over a month now since I updated last, so I though I'd leave at least a little note. Bob did get the secretary job permanently, so we are very excited about that! He has year-round work now and we are finding that there are several changes that will happen because that change, in a good way. It's funny how you get used to your way of living and just do things accordingly, then things change and you realize that your habits have to change too. Most of our changes make things less complicated. We don't have to save up money for winter expenses since he will have a solid paycheck for the whole year, which is a relief.
Bob still really enjoys his job. Every day he comes home and says, "I love my job." And everyone at work loves him. It's a wonderful thing for a man to be respected and appreciated in his work, and it's a wonderful thing for a wife to see that he is.
Odessa made her first two-word sentence two days ago; "Bye Dad." so cute. We've finally gotten her to stop playing in the toilet. HEY! Did I even mention she's walking now!!! She's been walking beautifully since mid-August. She's quite balanced, too. I think all that extra waiting was so that she would be ready to pop right up and not have any hard falls--because she hasn't.
Lily gave us a laugh the other day. We have been trying to get her to stop sucking her fingers (at least when she's not in bed). We were driving home in the dark and we could hear the little sucking noises so Bob said, "Lily, fingers!" There was a big smacking noise as she pulled them out of her mouth and said, "You can't see, Dad! It's too dark!"
We've had a couple of birthdays in the house. Lily's five now and Ella's four (she can have gum!) We had some great birthdays. For Lily's birthday, we made a special "pool" cake and rode a little kid-sized train at the park and went to the library, amidst opening lots of presents. For Ella's birthday, we opened lots of presents, had a cake and had special visitors from MT. Grandma and Grandpa Wolf and Uncle LeRoy and Ethan came to celebrate. One present the girls got was the each "found a little lost pet" outside in the yard to care for. Unfortunately, mom got pets that weren't as tough as she thought. Dad had to glue them a few times until finally Ella's poor kitty got sat on by Dad "like a mother hen" as Lily says.
In between birthdays, we went to our church's family camp, which was really fun. The girls were in their element. The big girls came and took them out to play constantly so Lily and Ella had more freedom than they are used to. Dessa is also quite a favorite among the big girls in our church, so she had someone walking her all day.
The girls started choir last week. Ella is loving it, Lily wasn't so excited last week, but this week the teacher brought treats and Lily knew she wouldn't get any if she didn't participate, so she did everything well and was rewarded. She even enjoyed it once she decided to.
Our current big project is working on erecting a shed some friends gave us. The Madsons are demolishing their cute, unusable back yard and creating a usable play space for their children, and in the process they needed to get rid of a shed. We needed a shed, so they just gave it to us. It's such a nice shed, too. Bob is building a floor for it, and we're hoping to get the shed up this coming weekend.
Well, that's all for now.

Pics of the lake

So here are the promised pictures. We got a new camcorder in MT, so that was the memory-capturer of choice for this trip. So I only got about six still photos in MT. Oops.
These are of Bob's family's cabin on Seely Lake. What a great couple of days we spent there!
Lori-I apologize for not stopping in at your house. I spent a lot of time bing thoughtless on that trip, and that was a result. It didn't occur to me. I'm sorry. We were sorry we just missed you at the cabin, too. Would have been fun to play together.
Does anyone else who uses this blog site know how to coordinate the pictures with the text?

We're back!

We're happy to be back home! We had a crazy but great time in MT (pictures and details to follow, some day). Those of you who know me well know that I'm not too good at making phone calls, but I do pick up the phone if rings! Please call and fill me in on your lives!!

Funny link

For what it's worth (and that's not much), I found this little article for gee-wiz. It's about how your high school experience may have affected your career. See if it rings true for you here.

According to the surveys they took, having been a cheerleader I should be a very happy in my corporate vice president role. Sounds like it worked for me!
have a great weekend.

A few more pics

We are headed to MT for a week (two for us girls). I just wanted to post a few more pictures before we go. I had to show you Dessa's new favorite pass-time; wearing everybody's shoes on her hands. She does it all the time! Pretty funny. Bob's job is going well, he really enjoys it. Still hoping he gets hired in August, we'll see. He was explaining his job to the kids and told them he works as a secretary. Ella said, "A SUCKERTARY! Will you bring us suckers?" Lily said, "That's a pretty silly job, Dad." We have a nice little blackberry patch in our back yard, which the girls love to harvest. Summer is good!

A time to buy, a time to sell...

...and a time to thank the Lord you can afford the house you're in. We've taken our house off the market, due to a lot of changes in economy and circumstance since we listed. Plus, we're tired living like we don't live here. We think now will be a good time to work on saving and reducing debt rather than increasing debt whilst everything else increases in price. So anyway, another season in life over with. We are excited to live our days and organize our work according to our family needs rather than focusing on selling the house. We're sorry to miss out on that great house we were looking at, but we really weren't getting very far with selling our house any way. Perhaps this is God's way of keeping us from getting in too deep. At least listing the house has helped us get some work done and much needed organization, so we're thankful for that. Now it almost feels like buying the house all over again--I can re-arrange and make things work for us in new ways.
Dessa is getting tooth #3, top front as well as taking her first solo steps. Exciting times!
I found more of Odessa's outside photo shoot Red dress
Also, here's some pictures:

The usual

Dessa had her pictures taken outside last week. I don't know if they are all up yet, but I'll post what I can find.
poppies
Ok, that's all I found. I bet there will be more in the next few days.
Bob has been really enjoying his job, and getting kudos from people of distinction about his professional and cheerful attitude. So we still have hope of him securing the position this fall, please keep praying.
We had a wonderful play outside today, lovely weather with no wind. A nice change. We are hoping to go to the waterslides tomorrow, so we'll see if that takes place. We've decided that buying a digital camcorder is now an emergency, as our girls' cuteness is not being properly recorded. One thing among many we need to get recorded is Odessa's new shoe fetish. She has a favorite pair she very carefully puts her little fists into and clobbers around the house with them on her hands.
Ok, that's all for now.

Happy June!

Bob started his new job today. Ha! Sorry for those who we have not yet informed of this change. He has a temporary "high-speed" secretary job at the Forest Service Supervisors Office. He has it now as a "detail," but if they like him and no one that is vastly more qualified applies in a couple of months, he'll likely fill the position. It's year-round, 8-4:30, and cuts at least 40 minutes off his commute. He has weekends off, and no chance of overtime. Plus it's a pay-grade higher, possibly two. Bob would very much like to keep this position, so those of our friends who pray, please do so! It would mean we could make plans and be likely to keep them, go camping, not have to have a summer of being apart, etc. So that's exciting.
Also, I have more pictures of Odessa from her last photo shoot.
yellow sun dress
pink sun top
warm dress
rose dress
eyelet dress
pink hat

birthday

I had a fantastic birthday yesterday. Bob surprised me for the first time in our marriage! We have a hard time not telling each other everything, so to surprise each other is a big deal. He got up and got ready for work like usual, put on work clothes and packed a lunch and headed out. He came back about two hours later with a hair cut, my errands run and presents wrapped and in hand. He had taken the day off! It was definitely a part atmosphere after that. The girls wondered where the cake was, though. We’ll probably do that today. We still haven’t done a cake for Odessa, so we’ll do a double.

The rest of the day was great, too. Bob took the girls with him to Costco to do my grocery shopping and dropped me off at the mall. Then we took the girls to a friend’s house and went out for Italian. What a great evening! I didn’t have to cook for the girls first before going out. He thinks of everything.

Today it’s back to life as usual, but after a great day like that, it’s not disappointing.

Odessa is holding my hands and taking steps now, those huge, careful steps babies do at first, so cute.

Lily told me a story the other day. She said, “When I had a bad dream, there was fire in Odessa’s tummy and it came out her nose so I told Dad to take her back to the store and get a regular baby. We named her Odessa.” Maybe we should lay off reading “Saint George and the Dragon” for a while.

Well, it’s 8:30 AM and I haven’t changed Odessa’s diaper yet, so I guess I should do that.

a few pics

Well, when I wrote the last post, I thought the worst was over. Maybe it was, but it didn't get better just then. I got the flu right after that and Bob was out of town. And the car died. Fortunately, we have a great church family here--a friend came and jumped the car, someone brought me soup one day and another friend came over Thursday and helped with the kids and dishes, which was essential at that point because I couldn't leave the bathroom. But just then, Bob came home and had worked four ten hour days, so he had a three-day weekend. I spent Friday in bed, dreaming of all the things I was going to eat when I wasn't so tired. Then by Saturday, except for being a little tired, I was completely better. So then I ate all those things I had been dreaming about.
Last Sunday we had a showing, and the people who came through liked this house the best of what they'd seen, except they thought the yard was too small. We keep thinking that maybe they will change their mind, since you sometimes have to change your ideals if you can't find the ideal thing. The house we want is still on the market. So we'll keep trying.
Dessa had her photo shoot yesterday. She was a crack-up! I think she had as much fun as we did. She seemed a bit bewildered at first, but she saw me taking the tags off a dress, and she got very excited, like now she remembered where she was. Of course I gave her a tag. There were about five women at one point all playing peek-aboo. Bob says I'm a supermodel now, too. You can see my jeans in some of the pictures. Ha! here are some links:
velvet dress
green bubble
sunsuit
pink set