My Three Sons. . . Livin' in Texas!: July 2009

3 peas in a pod

Austin, Braeden, and Rylee, just chillin' on the floor watching a movie. Too cute!

Day 1 of survival swimming lessons. This video doesn't give the real picture because I just couldn't video the first 10 minutes of lessons. Austin put up a fight when she was teaching him to float on his back, and kept getting water in his mouth and nose while yelling and crying. I was trying too hard to just smile from the side so that if he looked at me he would know I was fine with what was going on, which I was, but every Mommy wants to help their child when they seem to be struggling. I actually had to call my friend Susan during part of this to have her support (her daughter Addison had just finished the lessons a few weeks before). It was hard to watch, but I knew that he was in the best hands. Glendy has been teaching survival swimming for 40 years! She is a remarkable teacher, and says that her gift is from God, so she continues to do it to glorify Him. When you see Day 4, you realize just how much it is worth it!

Day 2, is much like day 1, but not nearly as much crying.

Day 3, Austin swims across the pool by himself. Amazing!

Day 4, Austin is jumping off the diving board! It is amazing that he has the skills to survive now in the water. I still have a lot more to do with him for the rest of the summer, but he has a fantastic start. I don't have video of Day 5 because it was spent with me in the water and Glendy teaching me how to work with him so that he can continue to gain confidence in the water. Survival swimming is just that, surviving in the water if you were to fall in. The goal is to learn to swim on their backs, get to the side, turn and grab on, and get out. Austin can do all of these things, but as with any other skill, he needs lots more practice before he can go swimming with others, so my job is to keep taking him at least 3 or 4 times a week to work on it.

This picture is from day 5, when I got to swim with him. I'd say he looks pretty happy, don't you think?

Mommy's birthday

For my birthday all three of my boys took me to an Astros game. It was great! I couldn't get Daddy to pose on the baseball, but the boys were willing to cooperate. The only bad thing we did was put Austin in his favorite t-shirt (pirate) when the Astros were playing the Pirates! Oops!

The Fourth of July

The Fourth of July started out great. We took Daddy's new toy out on the deer lease and drove it around looking for all sorts of animals. It was a blast while it lasted.

A few hours later this is where we ended our day. Notice there is a tail light missing (totally melted off). You can see the other light still there, just so you see the absolute melting that happened here. Polaris now has an official recall on this vehicle to repair/prevent this from happening again. Our melted tail light caused a fire that spread for 47 acres, coming within 200 yds. of homes. We put the fire out on the vehicle, and stomped out all of the grass fire under it, but then we looked back at where we had driven before to see the grass and land all on fire. We had to get our children out of there for their safety. We were praising God for keeping us safe and all of the firefighters as well. The reality of the situation and what could have happened sunk in as we were putting the boys to bed. Before that, we were just concerned with the land fire and people living near by. Praise God for watching over all of us.

The fire trucks showed up after we called them, and the boys loved seeing that. Needless to say, we didn't make it to any fireworks this year. We had enough excitement for the day.

All God's Living Things, part 2

The sunflowers have now all bloomed. I don't have a picture of the biggest one blooming, but you can see it here last week. It grew as tall as the window, and has a flower as big as Austin's head. This was fun to see them grow, but I have taken them all out as the bloom fades, because I don't want them to spread like crazy. Our pumpkin plant has 3 blooms on it, so we might have 3 pumpkins. We'll take pictures of them as they grow.

After we got home on the fourth of July, we had a butterfly that came out of it's chrysalis. Isn't it just beautiful. The other two haven't come out, and I am afraid they just might not. A few days ago the boys spotted more of these caterpillars on my lime tree, so we have started the process all over again with 3 more caterpillars. I don't know if I can do it again. It's a lot of work cleaning the cage (they really poop a lot!) and getting leaves every day for them. If more caterpillars show up after this, we'll see what happens.

Galveston Summer 2009

So we took a trip to Galveston and stayed in a beach house with some of Mommy's high school friends and their kids. It was a blast, and we are thinking of making it an annual trip. As you can see Austin has no fear of the water, so he wore his life jacket pretty much the entire time, and this was the absolute deepest he got while we were there. A shovel was in his hand the whole time we were at the beach so he could dig for hermit crabs, which he found! Mommy actually got really good at finding them too, and we had about 6 at one time, but we let them go.

Young love....Braeden and Mariana.

Young love part 2....Rylee and Austin.

What's gonna work? TEAMWORK! You can see the beautiful white house behind us that we stayed in. It was built in 2005, and didn't get destroyed during Hurricane Ike. The house on the left was the only other house near us, so we had a private beach. It was fantastic! We'll probably go back to the same house next year. It was very kid friendly, plastic plug covers on every outlet, plus lots of toys! Well worth the money.