Penn State Chics Dig Nerds

Dad came up today to help us dig up all of our potatoes.  It was rather wet, but the forecast does not look like it will be any better any time soon.  We dug up red potatoes, white potatoes, and sweet potatoes. The kids, especially Natalee were a really big help.  For some reason, Brady kept wanting to throw in tomatoes instead of potatoes.  I think he was getting confused by the similar words.  Plus, he got side tracked by the worms.  He kept wanting to throw the potatoes.  I guess they looked like a ball?   Eventually, I did get him convinced to find the potatoes in the dirt and put them in the crate.  Natalee helped picking up, digging, and washing the potatoes.  Later on in the digging, Natalee took over the potato digging fork.  By the end of it, she was really tired!   Since the dirt was wet, it took all of her might to pull the dirt up.  She was quite proud of her good help. What really pleased me was ...

It's hard to see his injury here.  He has a bruise in a straight line clear across his nose.  By this point the bruise was turning yellow/green.  On Friday, we were heading outside to take Meg for a walk.  I had to return to the kitchen to get Meg's leash.  Meanwhile, Brady decided to get ready and get in the stroller's back seat.  The only problem was that Natalee was not sitting in the front yet (and I was not holding onto the stroller).  So, the stroller tipped backwards.  His nose hit the metal bar on the back of the seat.  Needless to say, we had a big crying spell.  And, rightly so!  It swelled immediately, but did not bleed hardly at all.  I think I was lucky on that one.  I could tell almost immediately that it was going to bruise eventually.  By Friday evening at the football game, it started to turn purple.  He has one straight line bruise the whole way across his nose.  I just realized that I...

 We got to see the Huskies in action this past Friday evening when they visited Huntingdon.  Derek is #63 for the Huskies.  The Huskies won really badly, 41-6.  Really, the game was "over" on the fourth play of the game.      Natalee was thrilled because a cheerleader gave her a Huskies t-shirt.  I guess it pays to be cute with pigtails!  Too bad the shirt was a really big XL shirt.  She was still happy that she could give it to her pappy to wear.  We had arranged a surprise birthday announcement over the PA system.  It was my mom's birthday.  We were disappointed because the announcer was not talking directly into the microphone.  Nobody could hear him!

 This summer I have felt like I have been constantly washing dirty feet.  I sure don't mind, though!  However, even though it has been quite a bit cooler this week, they still want to run around in their bare feet. Natalee's feet were particularly dirty on this day. They love to make each other laugh :) Brady injured his nose pretty badly today.  I'll have to take more pictures later because I can tell that it is going to get increasingly purple as the day goes on.  Poor little guy!

I took these pictures way back in July, but I forgot to show them to you.  These are Natalee's four year old pictures (at least some of them). I adore this picture, I'm just not quite sure where it fits in with the rest! She's growing up!

Jesse and I were fortunate to be given tickets to the football game on Saturday.  After Natalee's soccer game, we quickly took off for State College.  Unfortunately, we missed the first quarter, which was the only time that PSU actually moved the ball on offense and scored. Here is PSU, moving the ball to this point and then committing a turn over on the next play. It was a white out game.  It was so white, that you cannot see the students waving their white pompoms here.  It also meant that the red Alabama shirts stuck out a lot. Jesse and I, in row 64.  Yikes!  Please excuse my hat head.  It was very sunny up until this point.  Sun was nice.  We were not used to seeing it after a week straight of rain! Ugly final score. On our way to score some food at a tailgate party! Even though it was a poorly played game, it was still fun to spend an evening with Jesse.

This year, Natalee decided to play soccer.  She is in the league for 4 year olds through Kindergarten.  It is 4 on 4, with no goalie.   In other words, the league of organized chaos :)  Our team only had 3 practices  prior to the game due to last week's rain. We had one child on the other team (who shall remain nameless) who two times excitedly ran off of the sidelines when he was not supposed to, and scored a goal.  I think he saw the ball go by and forgot that he was not currently in the game! Natalee is enjoying playing immensely.  She was so proud when other people came to watch her play. There she is, #8.  She decide to choose that number after I told her that I used to have that number for high school softball.  Since I am the coach, I picked up all of the t-shirts.  Therefore, Natalee had the pick of numbers!  It was warm.  I had one player who kept complaining about being hot, which I had to laugh about.  ...

Yesterday, it quit raining for a little bit.  We took advantage and played outside for a while. While other areas in Central PA had flooding, we are fortunate to live far enough away from the Juniata River and all of the creeks in this area.  Our house is situated so that runoff goes away from our house.  Our little "river" started yesterday, but it did not nearly reach the levels that we have seen in the past. Nonetheless, the kids enjoyed our small river even though it had receded by the time we went outside. A worm, of course!

For multiple reasons, I have opted to hold preschool activities at home this year.  Last week we started to hold preschool several days a week.  Although,  I was looking to have preschool for 2-3 days per week, Natalee wants have preschool every morning so far!  Needless to say Natalee has been enjoying sitting down to learn.  I think she is relishing having more one on one time. Brady has been joining in some of the activities as well.  I figure he may learn some things from our preschool as well.  What concentration he has!  Today, we practiced writing the letter "A".  One of our "A" words was alligator.  So, we made an alligator out of the letter "A".  You can see that Brady put the alligators teeth all over the place! Natalee's finished letter "A" alligator.  I could not locate Brady's alligator to take a picture of it, but you can see it fairly well in the first picture.