Fish and Chips Story — The Story of Us

It’s amazing the things in life we take for granted or get to easily to easily excited over. Yesterday Alora came frantically running into the office to ask where her My Little Pony book was. She needed it urgently, she told me. I pointed to the corner of the office where all the new Christmas books are stacked awaiting a home. She scrambled over to the pile and dug out the thick pink book and started wildly flipping pages. She kept muttering to herself “Where is that page, I know it’s in here!” Finally, she proudly waltzes up to me with her Melissa and Doug wooden ice cream cone set in one hand and holds up the My Little Pony book in the other, to what seems to me a random page and says “Look mom! I’m holding the same ice cream cone Minty is sharing with Rainbow Dash.” Low and behold in this story the ponies were sharing a double scoop vanilla and chocolate ice cream cone and Alora proudly produced her cone in her hand and they were identical. She then asked if i would like to share a “lick” with her.

In anyone else’s life this would seem trivial, but in my life I see this as a small beaming moment when she has memory recognition, math patterns and a sharing heart. I’m glad a took a few moments away from my “computer time” to share it with her.

Well Christmas and all it’s glory is uploaded in pictures in the gallery, head on over and check ‘em out!

Well after much slacking on the website now begins the new year with new resolutions. One of this year’s resolutions is to keep up on Fish and Chips and update all the wonderful things our family is doing and learning. This year Jason and I are working together to look at everything through “Christ-colored” glasses. In our family that means dedicating more time to reading the Bible, Praying the Word of God and spending our time as a family, truly as a family.

29 all over again, You are finally younger than ME!!!

Love Jason and the Girls

Well it’s Officially August! Which means we are a week into our year round homeschooling with Alora and Zoë is trucking right along in life. We just got over a large scare, Zo had hand, foot and mouth disease. (Sounds gross doesn’t it? Well it is.) For about 5 days she had 103 plus temperature, followed by a full body rash and large sores in her throat and mouth. This would be painful in anyone, but put it in a 15 month old body it’s horrible. Now it could have been much worse 1) she could have had massive fluid filled sores on her feet and hands too, but she didn’t 2) she could have been absolutely unbearable with all the pain and misery, but she wasn’t. Truthfully, Jason and I let the fever go for 2 1/2 days thinking it would go down, because she was acting like nothing was wrong. When I took her into the dr.’s off the physician’s assistant said she just had a fever, lungs ears and heart checked out fine. It wasn’t until the dr. came in and looked at her throat and noticed just the beginnings of a miniscule rash on her arm that he knew it was hand foot and mouth disease. He said “Most kids who have this are so miserable they do nothing but scream for 10 days!” Because folks here’s the kicker, it’s a virus! That means nothing that medicine has created can stop this from taking it’s course. The prescription: ibuprofen for pain, fluids and sleep. That’s it so 5 days with 103 plus temp (that’s after the ibuprofen), throat sores for 7 days and 10 days later a little rash left, but no longer contagious. Zoë is a trooper! She was just a little cuddly and wanted to sleep, no screaming fussing or mussing.

So that is how we spent the last half of July homeschooling and with hand foot and mouth disease. As for the rest of the month we celebrated the fourth of July with a family reunion and some backyard fireworks and kept our cool on the hot days of the month by playing in the sprinklers.

check out our pics in the gallery to see all the excitement.

So you know the summer is flying by when someone asks how old Zoë is and you say a year.  They say 12 months and you say no, but i’m not sure how many months. That is the tragedy of a second child. When the other person looks at you and says, April 29th right? I say yes and they say she turned 15 months yesterday. OOPS! Time is flying by and moments are becoming a blur.

This summer has been jam packed with trips to the zoo, cosi, trips to both nana and pap’s houses, library time and play dates. Zoë has lots of vocabulary words (daddy, hi, bye, sissy, momma, baby,,, etc), she refuses to be fed (she must only feed herself, unless it’s something really yummy like ice cream to which she will submit to eating off of a spoon that someone feeds her), walks everywhere, climbs every step and has no fear of anything around her. But she truly loves her sissy, I think she wants to be just like her when she grows up. As Pap Fisher says ” I’ve never seen two kids more alike, that are cut out of the same stone.”

It’s official I’m 1

I kiss

I wave

I say hi and bye

I blow kisses

I high 5

I WALK

Every year my mom and dad’s church host a fishing derby at a local pond. They stock it with over 900 fish! And every year Alora’s cousin Corbin goes and every year Alora hears about it and begs to go fishing with cousin Corbin. So this year I planned a WV weekend getaway to nana and pap’s around the fishing derby.

Alora had a blast! Now granted she didn’t catch any fish, and was bored in 0.2 seconds, but it’s all about the cute pictures right?

On Friday before the derby we went to the pond and got to see it being stocked, buckets and buckets of fish being thrown into the pond. Alora even got to stick her hand in and feel one. Then afterwards we went to WalMart and bought her a barbie fishing pole, net and tackle box! When we got home we then promptly filled the tackle box with cheerios,”we have to be prepared for tomorrow Nana!” says Alora.

On the big day of the fishing derby we roll out of bed at 6:30 and get the girls up and dressed (for the 32 degree weather outside). Once we get there it’s a glorious day, cold at first but then starts to warm up quickly. Alora’s age group is the first to have there turn at the pond, ages 3-5. She gets her little pole out and Pap puts the bobber and bait on and she casts it out, waits for 3 seconds and asks “Where’s my fish?” Needless to say with the hour that she had, she got 3 to 4 bites all of which grabbed the bait and ran.

Now even though we without fish it was still a fun day because there were still slides, swings, games and face paint to be tackled! We even convinced Nana to put glitter spray in her hair to match Alora’s purple!

Jason and I were struggling with not giving into Easter bunnies and candy galore, but still having a spring basket and explaining the true meaning of the holiday. So how do you do that? With a salt mountain and stick figures of course. Jason found a post talking about a book from John and Noel Piper called Treasuring God in Our Traditions. It speaks of how to keep God in everything we do. The post explained how to make a flour and salt mountain (like how you used to make salt maps for science projects as a kid) a cross out of sticks and stick people out of pipe cleaner. You make the mountain on Thursday. On Friday before Easter you walk Jesus up the mountain with the cross and hang Him on the cross and “bury” Him in the mountain. Saturday you check and see the guards are still there and the stone is still in front of the tomb. Then, Sunday before Alora woke up we moved away the stone and “hid” Jesus so that the tomb was empty. When she woke up she came to see the mountain and she searched to find Jesus and saw that the guards were “stunned” and the Mary’s were there to take care of Him. It was amazing to hear Alora say “Jesus Lives, He’s Alive!” At that moment you know the point got across.

So here’s a quick preview of our Easter in pictures:

“the Jesus Mountain”, her Easter shower head (yes it’s the one thing she wanted!), dyeing easter eggs, and last but not least eating the chocolate Easter bunnies and savoring every moment, right before we got dolled up for church!