One Front Tooth Gone, One to Go

Max lost one of his top front teeth. You can see how excited he was. It has been loose for a while and I was inspecting it and pulled on it a little and it came half way out. 2 minutes later Max twisted it out the rest of the way. A trip from the tooth fairy and he's 2 dollars richer. Which he will save because he just blew the rest of his money on Lego sets.
I'm sitting here after an early kid dinner in a semi quiet house, waiting for Doug to come home so we can go out to dinner. Max and Mer are reading books. Luke is babbling away finishing his endless meal. Jack is singing "No sleep till Brooklyn" while building "tree houses" out of big legos. Life is good.

Making the most of Summer

We are making the most of summer over here. I've been busy busy and haven't had time to blog. Here are some pictures of our busy week...
Monday...the perfect trip our county Zoo. We've been here a few times this summer and actually remembered the camera this time.
We met our friends Lily and Ella for some veterinarian pretend play...

And loved every second of the air conditioned sand pit full of animal bones.
It was a perfect day, a little cloudy with the chance of rain, with hardly any people and the water play area almost to ourselves.
It's much easier to watch 4 kids in water when there are only a few people. It made the zoo trip almost relaxing, almost.
That afternoon Mer tried out another recipe from her cookbook..."I Scream You Scream" Pie.

Tuesday...Swimming with our weekly pool playgroup, a trip to Rockledge to pick up my sewing machine from the shop (I've been without it for 6 weeks..ugh!), and a trip to the Library for movies to entertain the kids while I sew.
Wednesday...Summer Day camp at our house with Kristin, Alyssa, and Ryan. The girls spent the morning sewing doll blankets with me while Kristin entertained the boys in the wading pool and prepared lunch. When the blankets were done the kids decorated their own cakes.

We had a mountains of frosting and sprinkles...

And had a great time eating them as well.

Thursday & Friday...These days were a blur of playing, movies, lego building and sewing.
We took a couple of trips to Target for Max to lay down his birthday money for some much desired Star Wars lego sets.
Saturday...After two weeks of serious sewing and dabbling in paint, Meredith and I spent the day selling our wares at an Orlando farmer's market. Meredith painted wood medallion necklaces, and I made purses. We went with our friend Stephanie who does vinyl letter decor.

Meredith sold 2 necklaces and I sold 3 purses. It was fun but super hot and maybe not worth all the trouble. It is fun to be sewing again. Thank you Maria for letting me borrow your machine for the week before mine was finished. Now I have a few things to put on my blueSusan shop, if I can take time to post them.

More play pictures

As promised here are a few more play pictures. I tried to upload videos here and on youtube with no luck. Doug got to see the show Saturday. Max pulled his song off great with no gummy bears this time, and Mer was much more confident. It was such a great experience for them. I'm really glad we got the chance to participate this year. They are all still walking around singing the songs to it and Max even VOLUNTEERED to sing his song Grandma and grandpa Markos on the phone tonight.

Max the alien skier just before he sings his song

The Valley Girls

Max hair glowed on stage with the black lights. It was awesome!!

Here is post injury Jack and a shot of how Luke passed the time at the play.

What a day to be in a play

opening scene with black lights.

Mer and Max have been practicing for the last two weeks (MWF 9-noon) and tonight was the night of their play, US Geography. They did such a great job. They both have speaking and singing parts. Max is an alien skier singing a song about the Rocky mountains, and Mer is a Rockstar with a solo and a Valley Girl. They were thrilled at the opportunity to be in it and practiced very hard to be able to do a good job. It has been one busy day. We started off with play practice for a dress rehearsal this morning and came back with this evening for the first official showing with an audience (they have one more at 11:00 tomorrow). Everyone was supposed to be aliens so they spray painted their hair a little and Jack got some too. I think he is making a "tough" face.Their performances went great. They were a little nervous at first though. Of course Max had to sneak in a little mischief. As I was videoing him on a close up I noticed he had something stuck in his cheek that he kept fiddling with between lyrics of his song. When he came off stage he showed me what was in his mouth, a ton of half chewed gummy bears. He shoved a handful in his mouth just before he went on stage (I had been using them to keep Luke quiet as I helped backstage with the costume changes.) Max! Anyway, despite the mouthful of gummy bears he did pull off his act. I didn't get any good still pics of Max tonight, I'll have to try again tomorrow. Where was Doug to help out with Luke? Scout camp for the night, to return tomorrow morning before the 11:00 show.

The night continues... after the show they served ice cream. Some kids were running around in a side room of the church and Jack ran his face into a folding chair at full speed. He came at me with a face full of blood. As I took him and cleaned him up, to my serious dismay, I realized he'd split open a deep gash right under his lower lip. It was gaping open and even went into his lip a little. So yep I took him to get stitches. Ugh! Where's Doug? Oh yeah, Scout camp two hours away! Luckily everyone helped me out, my friend Maria took the rest of the kids, and Jack and I went to the ER to get his gash looked at. By the time they saw the cut, it had sucked itself together quite a bit and they opted to glue it. Which is probably good because Jack is a pretty calm kid but I could tell he wouldn't be able to hold it together if he had to get stitches. He was soooo tired. By then it was about 10 pm, and it had been a very long day. He just kept saying I wanted to go home. All in all it worked out okay. The whole ER trip took about 1 1/2 hours, Friday night and all. We picked up the kids from Maria's and were home by 11. Even though he was tired, Jack like having his own personal televion in his room. He watched Ricky Bobby race his car and a little Spongebob. (is it just me or is Spongebob on cable 24/7?) Everybody helped me out a ton and it worked out okay to not have Doug around. Thank you everyone!! So it's late and I need to sleep. I just needed to vent a little. Tune in soon for more play pictures.

No Longer Six

Leonardo officially declared it. Max is 7!!

The much anticipated day has finally come to a close. Festivities started yesterday with a breakfast run for donuts, followed by four hours of glorious swimming at his friend Sam's house.

Can you see how much frosting is on Luke??

Max woke up this morning and opened presents like it was Christmas.And then spent the next 2 hours assembling his new Lego power miner.
Ahh... success!!! and the bright white new sunday shirt he got for his birthday doesn't look too bad either.
After church and a dinner of his favorite "cruncher salad" (which almost didn't happened because I burned the "crunchers" luckily I found one more pkg way in the back of the pantry) he ate Ninja Turtle cake, with triple chocolate brownie ice cream.

Then we all had a ton of fun laughing at the movie "Bedtime Stories". What a great day. We love our feisty, creative, silly, curious, giggly, helpful Max!! Happy Birthday!

Some things to remember

Some things to remember.

• Luke said "whatever" Markos style Sunday night. We all busted a gut laughing.

• We found the hugest slug in our back yard last week. 1 1/2" x 2"- a lot of weird bugs in FL.

• Doug promises the kids an ice cream if they stay awake all night. The only rule is that they have to stay in their beds with the lights out. If he takes a picture of them asleep in the night, they lose. Of course the kids try and fail...always, but they can't resist the promise of an ice cream reward and Doug can't resist messing with them. I think that's one of the reasons Doug had kids, so he could mess with their minds.
• Quote of the day..."Bye, bye nose pickers!" shouted by Mer as she runs through the house in just her undies. How old is she? 9 you say?? I realize this doesn't paint her in the best light, but these kids do some funny things sometimes.

We celebrated the 4th with our annual bike parade and two nights of driveway fireworks.

Pampered Baby

Nothing like a warm bath to play in...

while sipping a cold banana smoothie after a day at the beach and a nice long nap. Oh the life of a baby.The kids have been sneaking into each other's bed at night lately. It's always a different combination, Max in with Jack, Jack with Mer, Mer with Max, etc. This was the cutest combo,
Doug woke Max up to move him to his bed and got this shot.