Shooting

We went to shoot at the Rittger's again over Thanksgiving, and this time Jim came along too. Ethan (from our trip to Canada, and a relative of the Rittger's) came to shoot also. Ethan uses a replica muzzle loader??? I think this is correct. Maybe it is not a replica. Just think, old-time looking gun. :) He was loading his gun and Suzy asked him to pose for a picture. When he turned to look at us he was holding his bullet in his teeth and it looks like he has a bunch of teeth missing! Very funny. Notice that Jim doesn't look at all like he was having fun. :)

Guatemalan Food Night

We routinely have Guatemalan Food Night, where Amber and Bill get together and decide on the menu, go shopping, and then cook us all supper. This GFN we had chicken that had been cooked in peppers, onions and cream (VERY good), dobladas (think Latino crab rangoon) and Amber made dessert, a raisin custard with cinnamon sprinkled on it. It was all very delicious. The next day I used some of the chicken leftovers and made some rice to go with it. It was kinda like a spicy Chinese dish.

Basketball

Amber is in a Jr. WNBA league right now until the middle of December. She has games every Saturday and she is loving the activity. She is actually pretty good and so far has managed to score most of the points each game. Now, I'm not sure if that is because she is a ball hog, she has talent, or the other team is just that bad.
Anyhow, here is a post of her inbounding the basketball to her teammates.

Magical Times

Sara's post made me think back to this summer to what I would agree was a wonderful vacation.
This is a picture of probably my favorite night of the whole trip. Bill and I decided that we would be crazy, even with four kids and we would spend our last night at Disney as late as we could. So Friday night, we stayed at the Magic Kingdom until 1:30 AM and rode any ride that our kids wanted to, as many times as we could. That way they couldn't say that we didn't get to do something they wanted. It was a lot of fun, and not something we would have planned to do, but it is a great memory for us and our kids. Before we left the park at 1:30 AM... we had to eat ice cream. That was an adventure for Bill and Addie. Addie wanted daddy to lick around her cone to stop the dripping, but when he took the cone he suddenly had to sneeze (quite violently I may add) and this caused the ice cream to fall off the cone!! Of course dad had to go find another cone. I think he actually just walked back to the store with his cone and got it in a dish and then gave it to her like it was new. And she never knew otherwise. :) Good memories!

Smashing Pumpkins

Suzy had a golden pumpkin in her house. It was a decoration. But when we came to shoot, she decided that it was going bad and that we should shoot at it. Amber hit the pumpkin 4 out of 6 tries. Then Bill decided to finish it off. It was lots of fun, but very loud.

Finally some pictures

I finally have pictures of us shooting out at the Rittger's farm. We were all there, minus Ashley, because she was with Sara, I think...
So here are some photos of Bill and Katie and Amber shooting. Bill shot the 12 and 20 gauge, Katie shot the 20 gauge, and Amber shot the 22.

Oh my swear!

Well Jennifer reminded me to post about this. It is really quite funny.
Addie was riding home from preschool the other day and talking to herself. I heard her say, Oh my God, and so I interrupted her to mentioned that mommy and daddy don't like to say that because it isn't a nice way to talk about God. It is called swearing. I didn't make a big deal about it, and she was fine with what I said. I told her that we can say Oh my goodness, or something like that. So she rides for a little longer, thinking about this. And then she says to me, Mommy, how about I say, Oh my swear??
I had a hard time not laughing outright, and then told her no, I think we will just say Oh my goodness. :)
Funny, funny!

A hunting we will go...

We went out to Larry and Suzy Rittger's tonight to shoot some guns. I think that some people that know us would be surprised to hear that we did that, maybe because we don't look the "hunting" part. But actually, it was loads of fun. Bill went out to get some practice in before December when he and some of the Rittger guys (and in-laws) go deer hunting. So Bill started out shooting with a 12-gauge and worked his way down to the 20-gauge. Eventually I got to take a turn and I decided to just use the 20-gauge. It didn't look like it had as much kick-back as the 12-gauge. I hit all three of my targets! :) Bill and Larry and Matt did a lot more shooting then, and before supper Amber decided that she wanted to try and shoot a pumpkin that Suzy had provided. So Amber used the 22 (think, like a bb gun, only a little bigger). She did really well and managed to hit the pumpkin 4 out of 6 times. Bill went back to the 12-gauge at the end of the evening and did really well after practicing for the afternoon. Maybe in December he will get a buck and we can mount the head and have deer sausage!!
And, I do have pictures, but they are on Suzy's camera, so hopefully she can email them to me and I will post them later. It was a lot of fun!

Garage Update

Okay, really quick. Here is what the garage looks like at this point. They are going to re-shingle the whole garage, old and new so that everything matches. Hopefully things will get moving again soon. They had to stop for a few days and finish another project.

Addie's Birthday

Okay,
So turning four was a really good day. Addie informed me that she was four and she wouldn't be crying anymore. :) That didn't last too long. She had a great time helping pick out what kind of cake she wanted and how to decorate it. She picked out Diego cake toppers and the Happy Birthday candles. She also put everything on, so if you wonder why the Diego's aren't spread out very well, that is why.

We had a special supper that she picked out: grilled chicken, french fries, corn and rolls. Very YELLOW!

Ahh, the modern world...

It is good to be back again. Our computer was running kinda slow lately and doing a couple of odd things. Nothing that would indicate imminent meltdown, mind you. So we decided to upgrade our system to Leopard OS X and in the process froze the computer. At one point a screen came up saying that there was a "fatal hardware error". That doesn't sound good. What's worse, when I called Apple to talk with tech assistance, the guy on the other end of the line said, "that is so funny. I have never had it say THAT before." Oh yeah, it was hilarious... After we had tried a couple of things he told me that our hard drive was dead and would need to be replaced. But he thought that we could get some things off the computer if we hooked it up to a firewire cable. Now, this is after we had tried a couple of "regular" ways of getting on the computer. The apple guy left me with the computer stuck on a funky screen that had an icon that floated around. On the way to Cedar Falls to drop off the computer to get repaired, the computer screen went black (I obviously had to unplug it from the wall) and turned off. This was the kiss of death.
The guys at the repair shop wrote on the ticket "attempt to recover data from hard drive". He asked me if there was anything I really needed off the computer. All I could do was smile. I mean, really, what do you think?? Nope, absolutely nothing on there that I need. I mean its just a computer, who really keeps things on it, right??? :)
When I called today to see how things were they told me that nothing could be saved, but they had replaced the hard drive for me and it turned out to not be as bad as I was thinking $$. So now I am starting from scratch with email, documents, everything. The worst part was that Bill lost all of his football stuff off the computer. We did find a lot of things on his flash drive, so hopefully that will turn out to be not so bad.
Well, anyhow. It is all over now, and hopefully things will settle down. :) (Wishful thinking)

Computer

Okay, a really quick post from school. Our computer at home has died, so I won't be posting for a little while. Hopefully we will be up and running later this week.
Until then...

Addie's Hair

Well, Addie's hair drives me crazy. It never looks good, even when you TRY to make it look good. It never stays that way. So...I permed it. She did very well and sat through the whole thing. Only a few tears because it smelled bad. :) But then we were fine. At least with it curly and wild it looks a little better than straight, curly, wavy, kinky and wild!
It does look really cute too. Her sisters really like it.

Garage

We almost have a roof. This is where we are at in the process.