So life has been slipping by at a very rapid pace and I have found myself struggling to keep up with the blog. This is not fair to little Peyton since I captured all of Jenna's moments, yet it is a product of Peyton as she has been keeping me on my toes.

Since my last post, we have adjusted to Josh taking on his new role with Stanley Black & Decker, which resulted in much more travel.

Jenna finished her first year at Discovery Village Preschool and was home with Peyton & me all summer.

My Brother's family, my folks and I planted a 30 foot by 100 foot garden on my folks' property. We planted 3 types of lettuce, radishes, brussel sprouts, okra, bell peppers, banana peppers, squash, zucchini, acorn squash, butternut squash, Japanese eggplant, corn, 59 tomato plants, 2 types of cucumbers, cantaloupe, and watermelon. The garden was HUGE and a lot of work as the weeds were out of control!!! We had great success with some crops, failed with others, but enjoyed a great harvest of vegetables! We learned that we really like roasted butternut squash and eggplant. I learned that a radish picked right out of the ground is 100 times more potent than one from the grocery. We learned a great way to saute okra so it does not get slimy. I learned that I can make pickles!!! In fact I have over 50 pints of dill/bread and butter pickles and 18 quarts of Kosher dill pickles down in the basement cabinets (that doesn't include all that were passed on to my folks, brothers family and friends).


Josh and I traveled to Southern California in June for my cousins Shane's graduation, but mainly for a vacation for just the two of us. The girls stayed with their Grandma and Grandpa Cowley in NJ. Everyone had a blast!

Our niece Brianna finished her first year of kindergarten and was going to spend the summer hanging out with my folks on the farm. So to make things more fun for all of the cousins, we spent a lot of time down there too so the girls could play. We also had Brianna come spend a couple of days a week at our house too. I'll definitely have to post pictures of all of our fun times.

Pete and Deb came down for a visit and we discovered that we can rent pontoon boats on Lake Norman! We spent an entire day out on the lake boating around, swimming, and tubing. It was an amazing day and definitely worth doing again.

Now we are getting back into the routine of Jenna going to preschool again as she has now started in the 4 year old classroom at Discovery Village. She has had a blast, but it has been hard for Peyton who walks around saying, "I want Jenna. Mommy, I want Jenna." Hopefully soon we will be able to get Peyton into a part time daycare so she can go to school too.

I will try to post pictures soon from all of our summer adventures.

A little broken hearted tonight

My heart aches tonight, even though I know that the ultimate healing has occurred. My Grandpa Ed passed away tonight at 5 pm my time and 2 pm in Oregon. My mom let me know that it was a peaceful passing, that my Aunt Barbara told him it was okay, that he could go and see his folks, his brother and his sister. She left to go to the bathroom and when she returned he had passed. I say that it is the ultimate healing as he has been living with dementia for awhile now and has been on oxygen. He hasn't really been "present" for some time now.

My heart aches as I wish I had seen more of him these last few years. It had been too long since I had seen him and now I won't get the chance to see him now. So please bear with me as I shed some tears and remember an amazing man...

I think I deserve a raise.

We are about to end a very long week of Jenna not having pre-school, Josh being out of town on business, and my folks being in Florida on a vacation. That has left me with both kids, by myself, with no outside help.

Monday we played with friends and I ended up watching 2 of the neighbors' kids in the evening since the parents had an appointment. (That gave me 4 kids to juggle.)

Tuesday we went over to our neighborhood friend's house to swim in their heated pool. That was fun but it is tiring on your own playing pass interference with Peyton as she runs around the pool. Jenna however is fearless with her swimmies on and jumps from the side, slides down the side and goes non stop!

Wednesday we had exterminators come out to the house to spray for bugs and we ended up just playing in our driveway with bubbles and a kiddie pool.

Thursday we ran errands and then all of our neighborhood friends came over to play since it was raining. What a zoo it was with everyone running around screaming.

Today (Friday) we have been playing with play dough, doing puzzles and I have swept the deck since we have been covered in pollen, swept the front porch, changed the light bulbs in both garage door openers and the burnt out lights on the garage ceiling. Plus I vacuumed all of the cobwebs off of the garage ceiling and swept it out. The girls will go down for a nap soon and I am spent.

Thank goodness it's almost the weekend!

Hanging with the girls

Lately I have been spending a lot of time with the girls. Josh has been traveling more for work and with his new position he will be traveling even more. The best thing we do to get through this is to have structure to our days and just trying to find fun things to do. We do craft projects, jump in the bounce house, play dress up, watch movies and hopefully Spring will be here full time so we can play outside more. Last week we had a sunny but brisk day, so we had a picnic at the neighborhood park and then played at the playground with our neighborhood friends. This resulted in a 3 hour power nap by the girls, which was awesome!!! There's nothing better than playing outside.

In mentioning the bounce house, we set it up in the basement so the girls can bounce off steam. They took a quick break to "pose" for this picture! Peyton is fearless in this and bounds headfirst down the slide. This has taught me to ensure there is a foam pad at the base so we don't have any ouchies!

There's nothing quite as fun as eating a blue raspberry laffy taffy that turns your tongue blue!!! Jenna kept running back and forth showing her mommy and daddy her blue tongue. At one point she even tried to lick daddy!

I don't think I could have imagined Peyton wanting to dress up at this age but she gets the biggest kick out of wearing her big sister's dress-up clothes. Here she is sporting the Snow White look. The only accessories missing were the ring, satin apple purse, and ribbon necklace. Not quite sure where those things are at the moment.

Next she wanted to wear the Cinderella outfit. Too funny and as with the previous outfit she is just missing the ring. I have a feeling all of the dress up accessories got put into the satin purse and have been put into a "safe" place that even I cannot find them at the moment!

Wow I cannot believe how fast time is flying by. I can't believe it has been over 2 months since I posted something. I guess I have gotten caught up in finishing each day that I hadn't realized how many of those days had past. Let's see what has been going on...

The first weekend in January a group of my sorority sisters and their families came to celebrate 2010 at our house. There were 9 kids all under the age of 4 staying here: Bennett Sanborn (3), Jenna (3), Ava Morris(now 3), Henry Phillips(2), Caroline Harkness(1 1/2), Noah Sanborn(1), Maddie Morris(1), Peyton (1), and Grace Phillips(now 4 mo.). We laughed about how much things had changed when every time you turned around there was a little one under foot. It is so amazing to me that we all still make the effort to get together even after all the years and changes in life.

Here's Jenna and her gal pal Bennett playing dress up as two little princesses!

Next we have Jenna, Bennett, and Ava who were having a blast playing with the little couch.

Then we have the only group shot we could semi-manage which shows Peyton, Bennett, Henry, Jenna, Ava, and the back of Caroline's head. They were watching cartoons and once they realized we were going to start taking pictures, chaos broke out.

Then came Peyton's first birthday. We invited our neighborhood gang and my folks for "cake & cocktails" to have fun spending time together and let the kids play. Yet another crazy time with a lot of kids running around. It was so much fun watching Peyton have her first taste of sugar and boy did she enjoy it. The video is hilarious and at one point you can watch her just bend down and take a huge bite out of the icing. By the point of this picture though she had had enough and was ready for her "triple b": bath, bottle, bed. You can almost see her saying, "I am done get this off of me!!!"

The next day Peyton had the best time playing with all of the balloons we had decorated with. She also got the biggest kick out of the punch balloons we had given the kids because she could hold the rubber band straps and run with them! This picture is hilarious as it shows not only her joy but the amount of static she created with them and her hair.

At the end of January we had a "huge" snow storm hit our area. I say huge because we don't get a lot of snow in this area and it doesn't last long. It started snowing on a Friday night, so we got Jenna bundled up and went outside to play in the snow, make snow angels, and have fun. By the morning we had 5-6 inches on the ground. Keep in mind what it looked like outside and this is what Jenna came down stairs wearing in the morning:

Apparently the freezing cold outside did not bother her at all since this is what she was determined to wear. However, she did not want to go outside at all that day. I guess she had enough of the cold and wet on Friday night. By Sunday we had convinced her to go outside to play with our neighborhood friends. A couple of the kids had inner tubes and we soon discovered that our backyard is AWESOME for sledding/tubing down. You have the first hill then you hit a ridge and get another hill down the back side of the house.

My favorite moment was when Josh decided he had had enough of watching the kids doing all of the tubing and he had to give it a shot. I think the kids were shocked and excited that he actually did it, since the other dads don't usually play with the kids. He takes off, then you see them chase after him, and then they all celebrate that he made it the whole way!

In mid-February, Grandpa Pete, Grandma Deb, and Great-Grandma Betty came down from NJ for a visit. Josh and Pete went down to Daytona, FL for the NASCAR races, while the girls all hung out in NC for the week. It was so special to get to spent the time with Deb and Gram. The girls loved having them around and it was special getting to watch the bond grow even more with everyone. Unfortunately snow brought the trip to an end as they had to head home a day early due to a "clipper" that was headed towards NJ and they needed to get home prior to the snow coming again.

Now we are in March and I am ready for sun and warmer weather. That will mean we get to play more outside with all of our friends. Playing outside in the fresh air results in sleepy girls which brings long naps...like the 3 hour one the girls took today which let me make this post!

Christmas 2009 in Ohio

Christmas tradition for us, is to drive back to Wilmington, Ohio to spend the holiday with my Dad's family. The trip should only take about 7 hours for us. On our drive this year we had one funny mishap. Josh was driving and having a very important work phone call while I was sitting in the back between Jenna and Peyton who were watching a movie on the drop-down tv. After awhile I look out the window and I was surprised to see an airstrip that had been built for a small town along our route. Then a little later I notice that there was a lot more commercial shopping places in the area than there had ever been. Finally I asked Josh if we were on I-77N...unfortunately we were not on that road but on I-85S. We had missed the turn off and had traveled almost and hour out of our way. Oh well, it made the trip longer, but it's a funny story!



This year there were 25 of us who stayed at my Nana's house...all sharing the 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath house. While quarters were cramped, we managed to make it work. Christmas Eve the extended family all got together to spend time together and celebrate. Here we are all dressed up.




This year was our niece Kandice's first birthday. The night we arrived we all celebrated with her by eating Donato's pizza and having cake. She had fun with the icing once she got over the stickiness of it!

This is my Nana, Shirley, the matriarch of our family. It never ceases to amaze me that she keeps her cool the entire time our family comes and turns her house upside-down. She is also unbelievably generous to all of us. I claim to manage chaos with my kids, maybe I learned it from watching her.






Before bed on Christmas Eve, Aunt Sara took Daniel and Jenna outside to sprinkle the reindeer food they had each made at their preschools. Jenna's had pink sprinkles in it, while Daniel's had green sprinkles!





The older kids had just set out a plate of cookies and milk for Santa and were posing for pictures. The 2 babies were already asleep, but these four cousins were excited!!!








Then it was Christmas morning and here they are waiting for the green light to go down stairs. It is tradition to wait to make sure that everyone is awake and downstairs as a family before we go into the family room. There are numerous pictures in this same place showing different generations waiting here for the same thing! This group has it easy...I remember when I was little we had to wait for my great grandparents to drive over and eat breakfast before we could cross this line.



After 30 years of holding the little kids back in the kitchen so they didn't see the Christmas surprises, my brother rigged up a sheet to block the view. I think I heard someone say...Why didn't we think of this before!







Wow...look what is down here!!!









Peyton and her cousin Kandice both got Lion walkers from Santa. Here they are test riding them together!









Here is little Tinkerbell...I mean Jenna. One of Jenna's gifts was the new movie Tinkerbell and the Lost Treasure along with a Tinkerbell dress-up outfit, which she wanted to wear around the house.











Little Peyton had the best time playing, but was a buster when it came to warming up to folks. Aunt Kitty was smart and held Peyton while giving her yogurt bites. After that they were buds!



We made it home safely on Saturday with no problems and were definitely glad to be sleeping in our beds. When I think back to the whole trips, I am grateful that my whole family still makes the effort to get together. I am thankful for traditions long established that are still practiced. I am thankful and grateful I am married to a man who puts up with all of this. I know it isn't relaxing for him at all, but he does it because he loves me and loves seeing our kids have fun. I am excited that our daughters get to play with all of their cousins and have fun, even when they don't get to be together that often. At the end of the day I feel very blessed for all that I have and for all of the loved ones in my live. Merry Christmas to all and here's to a great 2010!

The Cowley girls

I mentioned how Peyton was walking and she is!!! Every day her confidence grows and she walks more without falling. I finally went and picked my camera up from a friend's house this week and was able to capture the girls in action again.

Here is little Peyton strutting her stuff!

This week Jenna had a Gingerbread Open House at her school. My mom watched Peyton so that Jenna and I could go together. It was so nice getting to spend some one-on-one time with my little girl. Here's Jenna doing a craft project with her friend Sean who also lives in our neighborhood. Have I mentioned that Jenna LOVES to do craft projects!

After our craft project we got to decorate gingerbread men and other cookies followed by snack time. It was so much fun watching little Jenna be creative and introduce me to friends who were also there. She is growing up so fast!

Sisters gotta hug!

Jenna strikes a pose while pretending to be the mommy. Notice how she is wearing my watch.