Nathaniel's birthday

Being as, for the third time, we were moving around Nathaniel's birthday, we decided to celebrate it a week or so early. Which turned out to be a good thing because on his actual birthday we signed papers on our rental in Grants Pass and it was kind of a chaotic day.  So about a week and a half before we had the great-grandmas and grandma and grandpa over for dinner and cake and ice cream before we really got packing.  Hard to believe that he is seven already!!

I found an Angry Bird t-shirt (not that he needed more t-shirts) in his FAVORITE COLOR.

Grandma Lorrayne crocheted him a loony bird tooth pillow...hopefully he'll start losing some teeth pretty soon!  He's like Joshua in that department...Joshua was almost 8 before he lost his first tooth.

Reading one of his cards...he loves to read.

Angry Bird game for the computer from Grandma and Grandpa

This kid is hard on backpacks!!  This is his third one in 4 years I think. Skylanders is quite the favorite in the house :)
But he's still using the Cars 2 lunchbox that came with last year's backpack.

He requested a Finn McMissile cake this year.  So with the help of a coloring book picture and someone else on Pinterest that had had my same idea of altering the Lightning McQueen cake pan I already had, I made Finn.

Guess he looks good enough to eat :)

Blowing out the candles...Grace is there ready to help if needed.

Up to something...

First picture in our new house!!  Grandma and Grandpa brought a load of our stuff up for us the day we FINALLY were able to get in to our house. They got him a cake on the way up so he had a cake on his actual birthday too!

This is Nathaniel...silly goofy cute kid! We've missed this Nathaniel the past few weeks as he has been battling double ear infections and strep throat as well as adjusting to new school and everything else. But we're starting to see this Nathaniel coming back :)

This and that from the past few weeks.

I just downloaded some pictures off of Joshua's camera - most of which I took.

Summer has been crazy - one of these years it is actually going to be nice and relaxing and slow...ha, ha, ha.

Anyway, here are some things from the past couple of weeks...

This is the front of our house in Ft Jones...it is where we have lived for just a few days shy of one year. We really have liked this house, had a great landlady and neighbors. The house is currently being painted so I sent the boys out one day to take some pictures before...so we could remember what it looked like most of the time we lived in it. The faux shutters had been taken down for repainting already, however. I'll take a picture again when it is all repainted...so we can remember how our house looked the last couple of weeks we lived in it before we moved again.

Grace has wanted to have a tea party with a friend for months. Poor kid, it just hasn't happened. She drags her brothers into it every once in awhile (think Mrs. Nesbitt from Toy Story - well, she doesn't make them dress up)
This is how I found her one afternoon - she was feeding her teddy bears. She has quite the array of food there for them.
Ignore the disaster - between her room being so dang hot during the day that I haven't wanted to clean it, to being gone and now packing to move - it has gotten scary.

Grace and her teddy bear babies!

What better thing to see - all three kids, curled up in the living room reading books!! One benefit of the wretched smoke from the wildfires in our area and in Southern Oregon - can't play outside so we might as well just stay in and read :)

Miss Grace the other day - stretched out coloring so nicely. Can't remember what the boys were doing, but she colored undisturbed for quite awhile.

My most recent project - baby blanket and matching hat - crocheted. Started the blanket when we went to Woodland in June...finished it on our way back from Woodland in July. Made the hat last week - they have matching trim :) Either to sell or for the next family member that has a baby girl ;)

Sunbeam Grace in her new dress from Uncle Ken and Aunt Liliana in Tennessee. It came in the mail the other day and she had to wear it to church today.

The following pictures are a teaser...we had a Primary activity a couple of weeks ago that gave the kids a teeny idea of what it is like to be a missionary. The got their mission calls in the mail and got tags (I got to make those). I hope to make a separate post about that.  See if you can guess - by where they are pointing on the map - where they each got their calls too. We told them that if they were really to go there we would 1) pick Grace up when she was finished 2) maybe pick up Nathaniel when he was finished and 3) pray really hard that Joshua would come home in one piece :)

The Elder Lees :)

Okay...where did the last few months go?

We've had  a lot happening since I last posted...Nathaniel got his tonsils out, Brian got into the RN program, we moved, tball and little league started up, Joshua turned 10...yes, that's right, we moved. We found a trailer (small, but three bedroom and 2 bathrooms) that we could afford to rent right next door to the elementary school (and across the street from the grocery store, which is across another street from the library...and the post office is less than a block away...we're centrally located!) and have been living here just over a month. We're unpacked and mostly settled, but have to reorganize our storage unit since not everything will fit. I've had to relearn how to cook on a gas stove (only other time I did it was on my mission in Spain 15+ (gulp) years ago).  So eventually I'll get pictures up and posted of our so exciting life, but for now here are just a few pictures of the kids that I took in the spring for my parents to take down to my grandparents in Arizona.