Restful weekend

I can't believe I am even going to confess this on the world wide web, but from the time I got home Friday night after work until I left for work this morning I only stepped foot outside one time.  That was only to go as far as my garage.

We had a very restful weekend.  I did not pick up my camera one time so I have no new photos to put on my blog. 

The girls were sick most of last week.  They both started running fevers Monday evening and lasted most of the week.  Aubree's fever finally broke Friday morning and Jenae's finally broke on Saturday morning.  I thought we should lay low and stay close to home and just try to get them over the crud. 

Kyle helped Brian & Corrine Duba move on Saturday morning and then helped Chip with the cattle in the afternoon.  Saturday night was the annual Chambers Fireman Prime Rib supper.  Kyle went in, but the girls and I stayed home.  I did not think it would be right to go in to town when Jenae had missed most of the week of school and that morning was the first that she had woke up with no fever.  Jenae was NOT happy that we did not get to go in for "crime rib"  She has called prime rib "crime rib" ever since she was a little girl. 
Hope was nice enough to drop off a prime rib dinner at our house on her way home for the girls and I to enjoy.  It was really good.

Sunday Kyle went into church.  I really hated to miss it, I knew the Preacher was starting a new series on marriage this week.  Both girls had such nasty sounding coughs that to take them to Church would have been a little disruptive. 

I spent much of the weekend working on Jenae's digital scrapbook.  Hope has got me started on doing digital scrap books and I am having a lot of fun with them.  I am working on Jenae's one year book. It has been fun to take a trip down memory lane in putting the book together.  It is crazy to me how young we all looked 7 years ago!

It is looking like the weather is going to be decent.  It should be in the 30's and 40's all week.  We are all happy to see the first of March tomorrow!

Bit by the flu bug!

My poor little girls have been home with fevers most of the week.  They started running temps on Monday night and have not been able to get over it yet.  Influenza B is making its way through the Chambers schools and it looks like we got it! 

Bless my father in law's heart, he kept the girls at his house on Tuesday.  We were really short handed at work and me missing the day was not much of an option.  I was so thankful he was able to help us out.  There are not many Grandpa's that would be willing to take on such a task!  I think they got a lot of cuddle time with the puppies.  I guess Aubree thought she should check one of the puppies temps and stuck her thermometer in the puppies mouth.  Jenae was not thrilled to see Aubree do that and had to call me at work to report what Aubree had done.  Aubree also apparently broke a couple toy horses.  She was a real fireball that day.  It is like the sickness turned her into a wild woman!

I was able to be home with them yesterday so that was nice.  We spent the day laying around and being very lazy.  It was nice to have a day that we did not have much going on so we could be lazy.

Kyle made it home last night about 8:00.  The girls were so happy to have him home!  He had been gone for 3 weeks.  It will be so nice to have him around for awhile. 

It is back to winter and they are calling for snow all weekend.  Calving has officially begun on the Whitaker Ranch so I imagine that Chip is happy to have Kyle home too!  The first 2 calves were born today :-)

A day on the ranch.

Today we got to help Chip vaccinate the heifers.  It was a great day work cattle I think it was almost 50 degrees again.  Hope &  I got demoted from riding.  Chip thought he and  Jenae could get them rounded up just fine.  All in all the project went well with no major problems.  

Marilyn kept Aubree & Trey and fixed dinner for all of us.  The kids got a chance to ride a little bit after dinner. 

It sounds like our nice weather is going to be changing.   We are currently in an ice storm warning from midnight to night  until noon tomorrow.  It seems hard to believe since the sun is still shinning.  Hopefully they are wrong and the storm will miss us.





Chip & Jenae rounding up the cattle.





Chip & Jenae riding.




Puppy love!  Aubree and a puppy.




Jenae giving Trey a ride on Beauty.




Jenae working on her trick riding.




Jenae doing one of her dismounts.



Aubree riding Beauty in her dress!!!

A great day for a ride!

I came home from work yesterday and found the girls riding with Chip.  They were all having a great time.  Aubree was riding with her pink mud boots and no socks.  The boots kept falling off and she would be trotting around barefoot.  She was really enjoying "going fast"  as she would say.  Beauty was feeling pretty good and even bucked a little bit with Aubree and Aubree just squeezed tight with her little legs and rode through it. 

Jenae wanted to run the barrels so Grandpa got them set up for her.  Speedster looked like he was feeling pretty good too!

It was 50 degrees and no wind.  A very nice day!

Jenae, Aubree & Chip riding around.

Chip & Aubree all smiles!

Chip taking Aubree around the barrels.

Jenae rounding the 3rd barrel on Speedster.

The 2011 melt down!!

Well we have had the best weather that I can ever remember having in February.  The last several days it has been in the 60's!!  We have all been enjoying this welcome break.  The snow has pretty much all melted and formed ponds as Jenae would say!  The last couple of days the frost has come out of the ground and most of the "ponds" have disappeared.  We were able to go out and enjoy the excess water.  Aubree who has to change her clothes every time she gets a drop of water on them was totally soaked & smiling the whole time. 

The puppies are growing everyday.  Hopefully this weekend I can get some good pictures of them.  The girls have been waiting for their eyes to open and yesterday one of them started to open their eyes.  Jenae is so excited! 



Aubree loves getting her hands dirty!!!

 Jenae and her classmate Elli have birthdays 2 days apart.  Elli's Mom and I had a party for the girls last Saturday.  They had so much fun!! 

Playing musical chairs.

Making pizzas

Elli & Jenae with their cake. 

An interesting day at the ranch!!

Aubree got to spend the day with Grandpa Chip today.  Hope & Trey were over for a lot of the day.  Hope sent me an email recapping part of the day.

 I copy & pasted this from her email

Both kids were in the house, we ate lunch, and then of course more puppy time.  Trey is getting into EVERYthing today.  Aubree had 6 puppies out in living room on the dog bed while Lucy was outside.  Trey went over and picked up a puppy, dropped it back on the pile of puppies, and then started to step down on "Lexi"...all while I was sitting right there watching and supervising!  I was trying to stop him from one form of roughhouse at the same time he was committing the next.  Anyway, Aubree was sure Lexi was hurt.  I was trying to keep Trey corraled and out of yet another cupboard, meanwhile Aubree disappears and soon we have a yelping puppy.  I quickly went & found where the yelping was coming from, and lo' and behold, she had dear little Lexi in the bathroom sink running cold water over her!  I bundled wet Lexi up in a towel and when I got out to the living room I asked Aubree why she had done that.  I knew she wasn't being naughty and that she thought she was doing something the puppy needed.  Well she told me that Trey had hurt the puppy and she was trying to help Lexi feel better with the cold water.  I wasn't getting it, but I said I wasn't mad at her and that she wasn't in trouble, but explained how that is not something we do with puppies ever again.  She was fine with everything.  Well just a little bit ago Aubree was back to fussing over Lexi, how she was really hurt bad from Trey stepping on her back (injured Lexi is fast asleep on the floor), and Bree said how Mommy sometimes puts an icepack on her when she gets hurt, so she thought we should get an ice pack for Lexi.  So that explains the cold water therapy.  :)

It sounds like it was an eventful day and I am still laughing about all that went on.  Chip took Trey & Aubree into the Feed Store and they stopped by Duba's then they went with him to hay some of the cattle.  It is hard to beat a day of Grandpa Daycare!!!

We are looking forward to a great weekend.  The weather is supposed to finally get nice.  Tuesday was a high of 5 degrees for the day and by Sunday they are calling for almost 50 degrees!!!  It is going to be so nice.  I am looking forward to spending some time outside this weekend! 

I hope you all have a fabulous weekend!

Jenae's Birthday Part 3

Even though we have been celebrating Jenae's birthday all week, I was glad Jenae's birthday fell on a Wednesday so I could go and eat lunch with her and take treats to her class.  We had a good day.  After Jenae got home from school we did some reading and then got her ready for AWANA.  Before  I took her into town we had to go see the puppies.  Oh did I mention in we had puppies!!!  Lucy and Buster have had their 2nd litter of pups, 9 puppies!!!!!  They are so cute!!! 

I took Jenae out for supper before Awana.  We went to the Chambers's Main Street Cafe.  I do love small towns!  The waitress said to us when we walked in "Jenae, I hear it is your birthday today!"   They were having their burger and fries night. I told the waitress that we would share a cheeseburger and fry so that we would have room for dessert.  The burger was huge and we were not even able to eat the whole thing between the 2 of us.  When the waitress brought the dessert made an announcement to the entire restaurant "Everyone....today is Jenae's 7th Birthday we are all going to sing happy birthday to her"  Jenae was smiling from ear to ear.   The local grocery happened to be eating there the same time and quickly ran over to the grocery store.  She came back with a big princess balloon and a bag of M&M's. 

After Awana she came home to 2 messages on the answering machine for her.  One was her cousins Bryan, Reece & Caden singing happy birthday to her & the other one was from my aunt.  She felt very special with all of the nice things people had done thought out the day.  I guess I should mention that she won the birthday club that was on KBRX in the morning.  That started her day off right! 

My parents brought Aubree back to me last night.  I am not sure if she was really ready to come home or not.  She had a great time at my parents house despite getting the stomach flu.  Monday night she ended up getting sick.  Bless my mom's heart for taking good care of her while she was under the weather.  She bounced back quickly and is feeling great now. 

Jenae has been pretty mopey with Kyle being gone over her birthday.  At nights she gets sad and kind of grumpy.  Chip & Marilyn gave Jenae a box of US State cards for her birthday.  They are neat cards with fun little facts about each state on them. Last night Jenae was feeling really sorry for herself that her Daddy was not home for her birthday I told her look though the cards and find how many different State's she has been in on trips that she has got to go with Kyle on.  It turns out that my little 7 year old has been to 19 states in her young life!!  I tried to explain to her that I know it is hard to have Dad gone so much, but it is because Dad does what he does that we get to do a lot of really fun things and travel to a lot of places that we would not get to do if he did not rodeo.  She changed her tune pretty quickly and decided that things maybe things were not so bad! 

Jenae's Birthday Part 2

My parents and my siblings along with their spouses and kids all came out Sunday to help Jenae celebrate her birthday. It was a lot of fun and there is never a dull moment when we are all together. The kids played and played and played! It seemed like the day went really fast. It was nice that everyone was able to make it out. They were calling for snow on Sunday so I was a little doubtful if we were going to be able to have her party or not. Luckily the snow did not amount to much.
Aubree went home with my parents for a few days. She was excited to go. I asked her “are you sure you don’t want to just stay home with Mommy? Won’t you miss me?” She quickly replied “no I want to go to Grandpa and Grandma’s house. No I will not miss you but I will miss Jenae” It made me feel bad to think that she would not miss me, but on the other hand it made me feel good to hear her say she would miss Jenae. Jeane was happy to hear that Aubree was going to miss her. We had to call Aubree Sunday night just so Jenae could talk to her. When Jenae was done talking I tried to chat with her for a couple minutes and she pushed the phone away and didn’t want to talk!
I do miss Aubree, but Jenae and I have had fun having the one on one time. It seems I do not get much quality time with Jenae now that she is in school. Aubree and I have our Wednesday’s when Jenae is at school that we get to have our one on one time. In my quality time with Jenae she has told me that she wants to live at home forever and I am perfectly fine with that! I told her she can take collage classes online and continue to live at home as long as she wants! Something tells me in the next 10 years she will change her mind!
It is really cold out today. It was 11 below zero this morning with a wind chill of 30 below zero. Tomorrow is supposed to be cold, but then we are in for a warm up of the mid 40’s by Friday. We are all looking forward to that!
Tomorrow is Jenae’s actual birthday. Wow time flies!! I am going to go eat lunch with her at school tomorrow and then take treats to her class room after lunch. Hopefully I will be able to meet up with my parents to get Aubree back. It should be another busy day!


Jenae and the Forre cousins!

Jenae with her cake that my Mom made.

Cooper, Brooke, Kellen & Aubree having fun at the kids table.

Jenae hitting the pinata.

The kids picking up candy from the pinata. They had a lot of fun gathering all the goodies!

Jenae and her new coat she got for her birthday.

Jenae opening her gifts.

Lacey helping Riley hit the pinata.

Brooke playing babies.

Allyx hanging out!

Tyson hitting the pinata.

Jenae's Birthday Party Part 1

We started Jenae’s week long birthday celebrations on Friday. My little girl is going to be 7 and she is turning into such a little lady.
I am going to just blog about her Friday party in this post and will blog about the rest of the weekend in another post. Hopefully I will get the rest of the weekend posted by tomorrow.
We were planning to have Chip, Marilyn, Ben, Hope & Trey over for Jenae’s birthday party on Saturday. Jenae wanted pizza for her party so I was going to make a homemade pizza and chicken alfredo. Well some things came up and it was not going to work out the best to have the party on Saturday so last minute we changed things around and decided to have the party Friday night instead. I knew being a work all day that I would not have time to go home and fix supper. I opted to pick up a couple pizzas in O’Neill and took them home. It was a really fun evening. Jenae was a little on the tired side, but not Aubree & Trey. They were going strong all night and really enjoying the party :-)
After supper we sat down and started to watch Secretariat . It was pretty late and everyone was tired and ready to go home. Marilyn left the movie for us to finish watching. Jenae fell fast asleep after our company left, but Aubree was still wound up so she and I stayed up for the whole movie. Needless to say none of us were moving real fast Saturday morning





Jenae by her birthday sign that Marilyn made for her. Jenae loves her sign!

Jenae, Aubree & Trey at the birthday party.

Aubree helping Jenae open her gifts.

Jenae is old enought to read her cards now. She read every word of her card from Grandpa and Grammy.

Trey was all smiles! I can not figure out why I can not get this pictuer to be bigger, but for some reason my blog is making is small! It was such a cute pictuer I wanted on my blog.

Aubree being so silly!!! She was such a ham that night!

I love this picture of the 3 kids! They are all so happy!

Cake time! Jenae enjoying her cake!

Trey & Aubree having a grand time at the party!

Jenae was so tired!!

Aubree thought her toys would enjoy watching Secretariat with her.

Jenae relaxing after her big night & watching Secretariat.