August 2018

Max is starting to crawl and reach toys! This is one lucky boy with so many people who love him and cheer him on. 

Before school started we wanted to do one last 'fun' thing as a family. (Especially since Chris and I have been so occupied with getting the guesthouse finished, I've been feeling guilty for not doing more fun things with the kids this summer). We bought a punch of paint gel ball things and had a war. 

School starts! Alec is in 6th grade at a new school: Armstrong Middle School.  Charlie is in 4th and Gwen is in 3rd at Henderson Ward Stewart.  It felt so huge to be sending a kid to Middle school. Chris and I had a hard time just dropping him off at the curb and thought it was so cute how he just stood around with his friends, like a teenager or something. We drove through the drop off again to try and surreptitiously take a picture of him. He totally caught us.  

Freddy, Max and I are now buddies during the day.  Freddy is full of energy. 

Alec started playing saxophone this year! Band is a huge thing here in the South and Alec did really well on the instrument try out day, where he played a bunch of instruments to see how easily making sounds on the different reeds/mouthpieces were. He did a good job with the bassoon which is not typical and so we thought thats the one he'd get assigned but it turns out he was given the Sax. How fun!

We bought a car! Chris' old '96 Honda Accord bit the dust and would've cost more to repair it than it was worth.  The AC hadn't worked for years, and the clutch and/or transmission was shot. As it was the mechanic who looked at it offered to take it for $500. So we needed to buy a new car and tried to find the cheapest, reliable car, without much history. We found a barely used Toyota Yaris and bought it, it was around $11,000 and got the loan with such good terms we didn't have to put any cash down. It was weird to drive away in a new car without having paid anything yet. 

During Max's nap I try to have my scripture study. Freddy doesn't like to play or really be alone. So he'll sit right by me and 'read' books. He usually falls asleep pretty fast. 

Alec really wanted to go to this community event that one of his teachers told the class about. It was supposed to have so many FREE things: Free hotdogs, free prizes, free video game trailer, free tshirts etc. Chris can hardly turn down free tshirts, so we looked the event up on the internet and discovered that theres an old NBA player Travis Outlaw who's from Starkville that puts on this community event every year for his home town so we arranged our Saturday to go. We drove up to McKee Park and immediately felt out of place. We were the only white people out of hundreds.  We didn't want our kids to think the color of our skin should make one bit of difference so we parked and got out like there was no problem, but man oh man, did I feel uncomfortable. I wondered if this was how new people at church felt and I gained new insight and appreciation for minorities.  Everyone was super nice to us and included the kids in all the games without a blink of an eye. In fact my kids won a lot of prizes for the races. They didn't have other kids Freddy's age who wanted to enter the foot race, so they put him in with the next oldest group and gave him a head start and he still beat them! Chris enjoyed competing in the football throwing contest and others without caring that he was the only adult. haha  

Max, Freddy and I started going to "The Homestead." Its a community center that focuses on nature. We pay to be members and get to go to their preschool/homeschool weekly meetings where we often do a craft or activity. We learned how to make 5 minute Artisan Bread this time. Freddy LOVES it.