Back to School for 2010-2011!

The summer months flew by around the Moss house. With all the weekly trips to the pool, camping trips, & a few trips to Wilmington squeezed in, the time just passed in the blink of an eye. Jackson was ever so proud to say all summer that he was going to be a first grader. He was ready to go back, for sure. Here he is on the morning of his first day of FIRST GRADE!And showing off the new bookbag (which better last more than a year this time! I bit the bullet & ordered one from LLBean this year!)This year (in a dramatically different manner than last year....) he only needed me to walk him in the first day. Whew! He let me get a good photo with his (very cute) teacher, Mrs. Ellis....We buttered her up by sending this in on the first day.... (this photo doesn't show it, but i also added some chocolate!!)
Jackson started on Wednesday the 25th, and every single day (including the weekend), Eli asked if it was his day to go to school. He told me all summer long that he wanted to go to school, in fact! So, on orientation day to meet his new teacher for preschool, he was a chatter box all morning. Of course, as soon as we got to the class, he clammed up & was totally mute. Figures! Here he is on his first day back at FBC Preschool on the following Tuesday, the 31st.... (He had to wait almost a whole week to start after Jackson....it like to have killed him!)
And here he is in the classroom with his teacher, Ms. Claudia. (prounounced by Eli: "Cwodia")We also buttered her up with a little goodie bag. Her's didn't have a calculator, just a hersheys bar & some kisses. Her label read: "This is going to be a SWEET year!" I forgot to take a photo in all the craziness of that morning! But Eli is holding it in his hand in the above picture!

The boys are getting so big & i hope they have a wonderful school year!

An evening at the beach....

During the last camping trip of the summer, we headed with Aunt Marie & Uncle Jeremy to Wilmington. We don't usually camp here because my family is there & why pay for a place to stay & vacation at "home?" We wanted to go back to Kerr Lake or to New Bern but both those campgrounds were booked. Soooo, with the beach available in Wilmington, we headed there for a full week of camping.
To say it started off disastrous would be an understatement. We were literally over it & everyone was ready to go home by the 3rd day (which in the years & years of camping, has never happened!), but thankfully things turned around in time to save the trip. Since things were a little rocky to start, I realized later that I only took a few pictures other than the one day we made it out to the beach. We packed some snacks & headed out in the late afternoon to hopefully save ourselves from the summer crowd, overwhelming heat index, & mounds of reapplied sunscreen!
We should have done this every night & we would have had a better vacation because the kids LOVED it!

An older kid who was a little ways down on the beach dug a huge trench. When he left to go home, the boys swarmed it like bees to a hive!Is there anything better than little toes in the wet sand??I had to force the boys to sit still long enough to get a few frame worthy shots... but i managed to get a few, i think!We wish we had gotten in a few more beach trips this year, but maybe next year! Because we are ready for FALL!

Surprise Gift!

Rebecca came home from Wilmington one weekend earlier in the summer & told me Mama had sent something to me....
Little did i know (or would EVER expect) what a great gift it was going to be! A sewing machine!
I was pretty thrilled because i had been borrowing Rebecca's to learn on & now i had my very own....
My mom said she got a good basic one that should be good for a beginner. I couldn't help but get tickled at the box: "The natural choice for new sewers." Yeah.... that is definitely ME! And my first project on this baby?! I made a cute little shirt for Eli. I used a zig zag stitch for the first time & i sewed along a curve for the first time. It is supposed to look messy & fringed too. And because i didn't know if it was going to look decent i didn't want to go buy fabric. Sooooo..... i went into Randy's closet & pulled out a pair of old boxer shorts that shrunk in the wash (that's the wave fabric) & then pulled out an old red t-shirt of his from the goodwill pile. Voila- now i had a little piece of red for the bottom! I all it "upcycling"...... Eli likes it, I like it... all is well! Here is a tutorial for the shirt if you are interested: HERE.

2 and counting....

Yep... we've lost another tooth! That makes it 2 & counting... 2 bucks & 2 teeth so far for the big guy. And if it hadn't been for Aunt Becca, this one would have been lost at the pool! What does the tooth fairy do then!?

And check out that tooth that had already come in behind the loose one.... yikes! Luckily, it has already straightened itself up almost entirely!

VBS: Joseph's Journey

{The Pharoah.....}

Randy & I were family leaders at VBS this year. Whew! It was tiring! The theme was Joseph's Journey: From prison to palace & all the costumes & stations were themed based off Egypt. There was a marketplace where the kids got to visit each place (like brickmaking, barbershop/salon, food shop, enbalming station, jewelry making, etc). The kids really had a wonderful time. We had Kaleb over to stay the night one night with us & we took him each night. This was my first experience getting 3 boys up & ready in the morning all by myself!
Each night we had "family time" where we told the story for the evening & there was an object lesson each night about how God gives us hope & a future. Eli was thrilled to be in his Daddy's "family".
Our family name was the Pithoms. And as luck would have it, our family was literally all family with the exception of little Riley. He was so stinkin' cute too!

We visited Joseph each night too... The first night he was in prison (& i hate that i didn't get a photo because it was an AWESOME set up built into the basement of the church building. Can we say, creepy?!) Then each night after, he was in the palace....The kids got their names printed in Heiroglyphics..... which was pretty cool....And the brickmaking was eye opening. I can't imagine how the Hebrew slaves in Egpyt had the patience to make each brick in such a time consuming way. THere were outdoor games to keep the kids cool....

And I think Jackson's favorite activity was making this headband. He still wears it.... in public...However, the biggest hit of all was the food shop. Oh, Eli was in heaven!!
And i have to admit that it was very yummy. I went out that week & bought my very own bag of pomegranite seeds! Yummy!

It was a very busy & time consuming week, but the kids had so much fun & learned so much that it was so very worth it! Until next year.....

Hot Rocks

So, i dropped the ball on updating pictures every week for our crafty summer. However, we did do plenty of them! Here is an easy one that the boys enjoyed: I had them each go out in the yard & gather up a pile of rocks each. Then i placed them in the oven to heat them up for about 15 minutes (i think!) & then gave them crayons. The rocks melt the crayon as they draw on them, making beautiful rocks! Eli had a harder time wtih his because he was paranoid about getting burned (which did happen, as luck would have it!), but he still ended up enjoying the project...
They turned out pretty cool i thought! And i got the idea here at eighteen 25.

Where to begin?

I am so far behind on blogging that i don't even know where to begin. Sooo, i will recap the summer for you! It was a busy one with trips every week to the big pool (where i actually didn't get a single picture! Gasp!) as well as some trips to Wilmington to see the grandparents. There was plenty of pool time at Nanny's though & by the end of the summer, the kids were little fish! Jackson has been super confident in the water since last summer, but this year, Eli began to catch up some!


This summer, we also went to see Toy Story 3, where i bawled my eyes out at the end. Something about Andy going off to college & giving his toys away really hit me hard! Rebecca told me i was a nutjob, but i told her that after seeing Toy Story 1 & 2 a GAZILLION times with the boys, that i was just a tiny bit emotionally invested with the characters. Can't help it! Here are the kids after the movie.... We set off sparklers this year & watched the neighbors fireworks at Nanny's over the 4th of July..... I still can't believe that my boys actually held a sparkler.... that was a huge milestone because they are timid about these kind of things!


We got a LOT of good cousin time in with Emma & Leah... It was a great summer! I can't believe that in 2 days, Jackson will be starting 1st grade! Our summer just flew by!