Raise Your Hand if You're Ready for School!

First Day of School

Today is a big day! Lincoln started a Mother's Day Out preschool class twice a week and dad is taking his first college course. Here they both are proudly carrying the backpacks together. When we were driving up to the school for Lincoln he said, "that's it mom! That's the one for me." He hadn't ever been there, but I guess he felt like it was the right place. We all got out of the car and he turned to me with his little backpack and said, "mom, it's MY school. You're not coming." I told him I would help him find his class and get him all set up and I guess he thought that was ok. He was ready to just figure it out from there I guess! He's so excited and I am too.

Crazy Rain, Crazy Church

We had at least 6 inches of rain here last night and there were lots of flooding problems. We heard on the news this morning that if you didn't have to go anywhere you should just stay home. They recommended going to the later services of church. We had some problems in our own ward. The bishop's home flooded and another family who just moved yesterday had flooding in the garage where all of their boxes are. The bishop wasn't at church and one of his counselor's was sick, so it was just the one young counselor there trying to make everything work. He announced what song we were going to sing and then looked around and said, "well... our music people aren't here today...." I volunteered to play the piano and another sister stood up to lead. There was only one of the three speakers, so we had a short sacrament meeting and then they sent us all home to go and call the families we are assigned to. I hope that everyone got the help that they needed. We checked on a lot of people and didn't find anyone we could do much for. Hopefully everyone is recovering ok. Here is a picture of how full our pond is. This was taken in the afternoon, before church it was over the dock. Usually I can stand below the dock without ducking.

Cousin Camp

I've had this plan to have a cousin camp for a while, but since Josh and Bethany were in town I decided to just schedule it and do it! Since everyone's into Webkinz right now we made that the theme and we had a great time playing the "live" versions of a bunch of the kids favorite online games.



Some of the games we did were:

Wacky Zingoz (bat a stuffed animal as far across the room as you can)

Supermodelz (dress up in crazy outfits and show it off to the judges)

Where's Wacky (memory)

Hungry Hog (great maze John made out of tape on the floor with cheetos and carrots)

Gem Hunt (find the ring pops by looking under plastic cups around the room)

Chef's Challenge (make your own pizza and ice cream)

Candy Bash 2 (catch candy in a sombrero)

Candy Bash (pinata) - most popular, I believe!



I'm hoping to make cousin camp a tradition that the kids will grow up doing every year. As they get older they can be longer, but at this stage the 3 hour block pretty much wiped us all out!

More Family Reunion Fun

We had another fun family gathering last weekend in Broken Arrow at Paul and Sue's house. It started out as Kathy and Kevin wanting to vist, so John thought he'd come then too, so Grandma and Grandpa wanted to be there, so Ruth and Jay came.... so it was a REAL party with all of us Madisons/Poyners too! Sue's sister Janet and her husband were nice enough to let us stay with them as the group was too large for one house. We did learn from the experience that Lincoln is allergic to cats. Good to know for next time, but they were more than gracious to us and we sure appreciated them.



Our trip started off a little crazy with a "short cut" to the turnpike on back country road since we are already so far east of the city. This would normally have been a pretty good plan, but the road was under construction and we made it all the way to a hill just above the turnpike where we had a great view of how we couldn't get there. We had to backtrack and take a bunch more country roads to the next big town where there was another entrance. Thanks to cell phones and a dad willing to look up how to get us there! Our short cut ended up adding an hour to our trip. Oh well.... always an adventure! Lincoln stayed awake the whole time, entertaining himself by making up crazy pretend sandwiches and passing them up to us for a taste test. The most popular was always one with skunk in it, which dad would give the official yuck noise too.



We played lots of Webkinz at Paul and Sue's and all adopted new pets (THANKS SUE!). I learned some tips and found some new things to "need" as I got a tour of Sue's Webkinz palace. We played a few offline games too (wouldn't be a Madison gathering without that!) and mostly relaxed and ate lots of yummy food. We had a tour of the Blue Bell ice cream factory, pretty interesting, and a yummy taste test at the end. There was also a visit to the Aquarium. My favorite part was a giant shark tank that you can walk through. The kids kind of sped through that part, but I still enjoyed it. I alway like seeing the glow-in-the-dark jellyfish too. They're fascinating.



Lincoln had a great time with his cousins (what is the official name for your own cousin's kids?)and is still talking about them a lot. He said he wants to make sure that Josh and Bethany come to his birthday party. Jackson mostly followed the dog around... "hot dog, hot dog, hot dog..." We did eventually get him to say "boo" (the dog's name). Boo was a good sport about having a little follower, sometimes two.



Before we left we had a big feast at Jeff and Janet's. The set up the sprinklers for the kids to run in and had bubbles to blow. We all had a great time, and there was enough food to feed us all 3 or 4 times over! Luckily the trip home was much less eventful.