Dec. 25th, 2014 - Feb. 13th, 2015

Hi Everyone!


Christmas seems like a distant memory by now, but for the sake of consistency, here's a quick re-cap...

 We spent Christmas day this with the three Shoemaker brothers as the rest of the Shoe Fam was out of town. Scott, Blake and Will here. It's funny, but it doesn't seem all that long ago that Scott and Will were Blake's size. Now look at them, all grown up!

 Being that there were seven guys and only one girl, we had a very "Manly" Christmas. Complete with steak, potatoes, and a shooting contest.

 Me and Owen watching from a safe distance. Owen is rather worried about these earplug things in his ears.

 Owen even had his own gun. :)

We got to have Scott around for over two whole weeks during the holidays. The boys gave him a good roughing up.

 We spent the next few days after Christmas at the Fox's opening presents, staying up late, and eating way too much. Overall, had a great Christmas and are so thankful for a loving family.



Since Christmas, we have said good bye to Scott again as he headed back to the Great Lakes and Will as he went back to Virginia. We've been getting back into the school routine and started out a new year with new goals and things to look forward to.

Seth loves to draw monsters, superheros and dinosaurs. In one of his school assignments, he was studying the letter U and had to draw a picture of "us", as in, our family. Here's his depiction of our happy clan. Oh, that's him on the left. The one with only one leg. :)

Owen testing out the new baby bassinet. Hopefully, he won't be too distraught when he learns that someone else will actually be the real baby in the house come June.

Owen and I got the opportunity to go give Aunt Kate, Uncle Noah, Cousin Roger and the new baby, Cousin Bryce in Kansas.

 Owen thought he was pretty big stuff getting to go on a real airplane with Mommy.

 Baby Bryce! He's soooo sweet!

 Roger, Kate and Owen

 Aren't they sweet?

Kate and I thought it would be SUCH a good idea for me to bring Owen so that he and Roger could occupy themselves playing happily while she and I talked uninterrupted for hours on end.   Well, what do you get when you mix a sweet, mild mannered, newly-not-only-child-anymore two year old with a rambunctious, youngest-of-three-boys two year old? Poor Roger didn't know what to think of Owen! And I got to see a new side of Owen when he was no longer the littlest one in the house. It was kind of like the Precious Moments child meets Dennis the Menace on steroids. Here is a picture of Owen giving Roger a goodbye "hug" which was more like a kiss-hug-tackle. Sigh.... Most of their interactions had to be followed up with "Careful Owen!" or "Owen, don't grab Roger's toys". Lol, the poor things didn't have the most harmonious of times together like Kate and I had envisioned, but at least we can laugh about it now. Right, Kate? :-P

I had a great time visiting Kate and her family and seeing their new home located outside of Kansas City. They have done an "extreme makeover" to their house and it looks so nice!

Jonathan's four month post at Fort Bragg came to an end last week so our weekend tradition of having him visit came to an end. We spent our last weekend together before he headed back to Fort Meade in Maryland. The boys have loved having Uncle Jonathan around to play with!

My Little Stinker is turning two years old in a few weeks. Can you believe it?! He has been starting to talk in sentences much more lately. We can understand most of what he says. 

In other news...

Scott is no longer pursuing the BUDS training and has transferred to a military linguistics school in California to study Arabic. It's a fairly difficult school to get into, but he did well on the entrance exam and was accepted in. We're really proud of him! He will be there for the next year or shorter depending on how quickly he picks up the language.

Owen will be turning two in a few weeks!

I'm now 24 weeks pregnant and things are looking great so far. We had a routine ultrasound a few weeks ago, but decided we want to wait and let the gender be a surprise. The boys, however, say that it's going to be a boy because "the baby in the picture didn't have any hair". :) We'll see. I have a strange feeling that this one is not going to be a boy though. :) We are getting more and more excited as the weeks are counting down!

Funnies...

While Scott was still in pre-BUDS training, the boys were praying for him every morning after breakfast that God would help him avoid getting injured. Somehow it got translated into Seth praying. "God, please help Scott not to have any energy today. Amen." :)

We got to go on a field trip with other homeschoolers in our county to the local police and fire station. You can imagine how elated the boys were! They were completely mesmerized. On the way home I was asking the boys whether or not they would be scared of a fireman if he ever had to come to our house. Apparently, the fire station sometimes has trouble with children being afraid of the firefighter in all his gear and tend to try and hide from them. Seth said, "No. Maybe if we had a lot of fires at our house, the fireman could stay a while and babysit us."   :) I'm sure they wouldn't mind babysitting in their spare time. 

Seth is learning the letter D this week and we are studying about dinosaurs. They boys have been learning their names and how big they were and are quite fascinated by them. Well, the other day Blake states matter-of-factly, "Mom, you are like a brontosaurus. Look how much the bed sinks down when you sit on it!"  :)  Great. 



Hope you all are doing well! I'm hoping my next update won't be so long from now. We have been recuperating this week from a two-week stent of the stomach flu and then the cold. Fun times! But, it looks like we are finally turning the corner and on the mend! 

Love to you all!

Kari, Micah, Blake, Seth, Owen, and Baby