Borah's and Breakfasts.

This week went fast.

Andy & the ballon snake he made!

One day the alarm clock got messed up and we didn' t wake up until the time Wayne and Andy usually leave. Wayne had to leave for a meeting and Andy had to hitch a ride with Shellhammer's.





On Tuesday Tracy and I had a "Breakfast Bake Off". We made tons and tons of egg and bacon and hash-brown muffins, "Idaho sunrise" muffins, "Big Texas Bites," quiche and cheesy egg bakes. The medicine I am on makes me quite nauseous and difficult to cook a protein rich breakfast that I need to keep my blood sugar stable. The thought was that if the items were already made and froze then it would be easy to microwave them and eat them to ward off the nauseousness. Tracy was gracious enough to be willing to brave my kitchen and come help me do a Breakfast Bake Off. I will post it to Kandi's Kitchen Keepers this week.

My breakfasts baked and packaged, ready for the freezer; somewhere around 150 servings.

Luke wanted to remind us that he's still 2 this week by acting out and making some quality messes when he didn't get his way, almost in a vindictive type of way. He gets really angry when you make him get dressed and when he is told no. One of these times this week he was put in his room for peeing on the floor because he was to defiant to sit like he was supposed to while on the potty While in his room found a stamper that we are not sure how it got in there in the first place. He took it apart and proceeded to color the walls, his firetruck bed, his dresser, his toy box, his shelves and his McQueen rug he is borrowing from his brother. What a turd. Then he resorted back to biting over the weekend while there were more kids here and he had to share his brothers. We have zero tolerance for this and he go this first taste of tabasco (suggested consequence of parents of biters). We don't anticipate another bite anytime soon.

Dayna & Luke playing horsie.

Dayna & Zach wrestling Wayne. 

 Friday Andy and Dayna Borah came up for the weekend. Always a good time. We don't get to see them as much as we would like. There are few friends in life of whom you can go long periods of time without seeing and fall right back into where you left off like no time has passed. Andy is one of them to us.

 
We were going to head to the Lowe's build and row clinic and the children's fair in Rapid but awoke to around 6" of snow and it coming down prertty good with a slight breeze. In the end we decided not to go and to wait until Sunday to hit the new Sam's Club.
On Sunday when I went to check the times for the children's fair we discovered we had the wrong weekend. The plan was then to catch Rango at the theater in Sturgis... then come to find out Google had failed me and the theater it had listed for Sturgis was actually Sturgis, MI and the theater in Sturgis had closed. It was looking like it was not our weekend. To top it off the snow is supposed to continue until Thursday.

Watching Johnny Test on my
Blackberry at Sam's Club
while we update our
business membership
& get our pick & pull's

Andy had a king looking crown &
Zach had one w/ horns
so they played bull
& bullfighter all night. 

We decided to go ahead and go to Sam's Club and hit the Rapid Theater even though it is more expensive. We watched Gnomeo & Juliet then ate at Buffalo Wild Wings. That's some good stuff there.

That wraps the week up.

Ornery Lil Leprechauns

Last Sunday was sooo busy I nearly didn't get this posted before the next Sunday rolls in. 

A wee bit o' Irish Blessings for you!

Wayne began his Driver's Ed courses which he ended up with 65 students before they finally capped it. He teaches 30 classroom hours 10 ties on Fridays for 3 hours each before taking each of the 5 students out for 6 hours of drive time each. This is 390 hours in the car with 7th, 8th and 9th graders. I suggested we up the life insurance first but Mark Rude hasn't called us back yet ;-) I am very nervous for him. They tried to get the old driver's ed teacher to help out but he wasn't interested apparently because we never heard back from the district that this would happen. The boys and I will be taking  2+ week vaca to NE in June so Wayne can hit the driving hours hard.

Shamrock Treats

We recently had Andy's student led spring conferences. He is doing well. He enjoys Math like his dad and hopes to teach it as well as coach football and wrestling when he grows up. They had a mini math fair set up in the lunch room during conferences for everyone to go play games and see the kindergarten math curriculum in a sort. It was fun and we had our picture taken so maybe it will end up somewhere. 

Lil' Broncs took on another daycare's kids while she closed for a week, then at the beginning of this week she announced she will be closing and taking another daycare teacher from the town with her to run the country club. SCORE! We are starting advertising next week and have made some changes to hopefully accommodate to those who are in need of care. There is rumor a 3rd daycare may close next month as well. While this is not the best timing for us, we decided it is a once in a lifetime shot and could boost income above where it was at while at the district so we are going to go for it.

Pot 'O Gold

We had a St. Patrick's Day Party on the 17th and the 18th as there was different kids each day. Ms. Danya (Foote) came Friday with Hunter to help us out while I had an appointment in Rapid. We made special shamrock treats, made leprechauns, played shamrock shamrock who has the shamrock, and shamrock shamrock leprechaun, dressed up as leprechauns and irishmen, read St. Pat's books and had "Pot 'o Gold" for lunch. It was a good time. The boys decided to act like ornery little leprechauns too by making some quality messes to clean up. 

On another positive business note, our Market America continues to expand as well. We keep finding more and more products to try and fall in love with and the cash back for the things we order online is adding up. Our favorite still remains the store pickup feature at Sam's Club. We are set to pick up April's groceries this weekend and 4 of the 5 of us won't even have to get out of the van for the 5 minute wait. We sill can't believe how much time this leaves for us to do more enjoyable things like Lowe's Build and Grow Clinic and the Kid's Fair both in this weekend's Rapid Agenda. We are looking forward to Uncle Dee and Dayna (Borah) coming up later this afternoon to join us for the weekend too.

It was nice for a couple days last week while the lamb visited before it got scared and ran to hide. We went out and hung swings and put the bench from Uncle Jim and Aunt Liz out and made a plan for the landscaping for this spring. We can't wait! We also had a high school teacher's open house at Raba's and game night with the Shellhammer's. Always fun, but the men pooped out early so Tracy and I snuck out and went hot tubbing ....ahahahahaha. It was much needed. 








Catch ya in a couple days......

A taste of SPRING!

End of week, off deck

Start of week, deck

We can use the grill! You should have smelled all of them going!

This week the temps have been holding in the mid to upper 50’s and look to continue this way through the next week! What a rare treat for mid March! It has been a few ears since the snow started to melt this early. It makes for a soupy mucky mess outside but feels good on your face.

 

To enjoy we have been going on walks and splashing puddles with our galoshes for the letter “G” and riding our bikes, big wheels and scooters.

Playing House w/ Logan & Luke

At Lil’ Broncs we had some new friends from Gillette come play on Monday. Their names were Logan and Lukas and they are the grandkids of our next-door neighbors and they also live across the street from our friends, the Lents, in Gillette and do MOPS with some other friends from Gillette. Our next door neighbors are also Wayne’s 4^th cousins, so b marriage the boys would have been 5^th or 6^th cousins? Not sure, but they were fun! Logan is 4 like Zach and Luke is 2 like Luke. They just thought this was soooo cool. We hope they come back and play soon.

We made the 3 Billy Goats Gruff for letter G this week along with our galoshes fun. Zach and Luke came up with creative “tents” for naptime. Andy got to spend the night with his best friend Devin Friday while the rest of us had a movie party.

 On Saturday I had an all day conference for Market America while the boys hung out with Dad. I met some neat people and learned some valuable things about business owning and about some amazing products exclusive to our business and some that are just more preferable through it. 

Give me a call I will hook you up!

We have spoiled ourselves with some yummy meals this week, which you can read about and get the recipes for HERE.

We are looking forward to checkup’s, more friends at preschool and a St. Patty’s Day party next week and Wayne, AKA Mr. Holland, starts DRIVER’S ED next Friday during Intersession. Maybe we’ll even get a picnic in before a spring blizzard catches up with us?

Andy doing subtraction on sidewalk

Until next week…..

Luke and his babies.

Playing w/ Math Manipulatives

tractor

Luke's favorite attire.

rollerblades

Wayne's Idea of SMART: standing atop pool ladder as actual ladder while hanging insulation and OSB in garage!

Winter Marches on....

March in the tundra never ceases to roll in with a roar. We have had nearly every form of precipitation and moisture this week and as I type there are big beautiful flakes swirling down from the foggy sky. One must not live here and be so naive to think March starts spring. I would prefer to continue to look at the white opposed to brown anyhow.

WE ARE WRESTLE FREE!!!!

What a milestone! We have had supper every night together and made some other simple back to norm changes.

It was “F” week and Read Across America week for us at Lil’ Broncs. We made frogs and learned what things start with F and the sound it makes, then Tuesday we celebrated Dr. Seuss’ birthday by watching The Cat in the Hat Knows a lot About That, reading Dr. Seuss books, coloring scenes from the books, making hats like the cat’s and drawing cat noses and whiskers on our faces to make ourselves cats. We also played “Find F’s” went fishing and had Parents as Teachers come. She did the Denver screening on Luke. He impressed us by using all the blocks to make a tower (only needed to use 8), copying images and learning the concept friend. These were all above age milestones for him.

LUKE IS DIAPER FREE!!! We cannot go so far to say that we are 100% potty trained though, but after 8 months of nudeness and needing diapers to mingle in general society, we are able to wear underwear for our days (though he still prefers the freedom of nudeness). However after only a 30% rate for night dryness we went back to pull-ups. We are so close.

Zach has been obsessed with the cardboard building blocks this week and shows amazing creativity with them. The boys really like taking turns building and wrecking huge masterpieces. Zach also has something up with his eyes.

Andy’s stacking cups he ordered from school came in and he has been attempting speed stacking which support a correlation between hand/eye and cognition. Ultimately it should help his reading skills which are quite impressive in the first place. ANDY CAN READ!!!!!!! He has a growing list of 20-some simple books he has mastered. It is so exciting to experience. His longest book he has mastered has been The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss which he read on the document camera to his class at school as a celebration of mastery.

Andy started riding the bus after school this week. Zach, Luke and I had been picking him up but this became a problem as the number of drop ins at the preschool is continually on the rise and there have been some communication delays with the messaging system at the school that cause problems in transportation. After a compromise we decided riding the bus to hang out with Dad would be best even though it meant around a half an hour on the bus. He seems to be enjoying the extra socialization time and being able to play on the computers when Wayne has homework help after school. He even gets a snack there!

Andy's bear pancake at Perkins

This weekend we went to Gillette and built Home Depot race cars at their kids build it program. I also presented Market America and my presentation was interrupted twice by other entrepreneurs trying to promote their products to us (so naturally I did so in return).  I learned Brothers Coffee is a hot spot for showings and meetings. We got to visit family and see how big our nieces were getting and eat real sushi, a rare treat for us, at our favorite Chinese restaurant. We had hoped to make the Mardi Gras Deadwood parade but took a little too long eating supper and getting going, though temps were only in the teens up there and likely it would have been miserable to listen to meatless Zach wine the entire time.

Sunday we did our monthly grocery shopping spending 5 minutes in Sam’s Club (AWESOME; didn’t have to put up with the boys’ breakdowns), still amazed by this order pickup feature for groceries. We also ate at Dickey’s BBQ Pit in Rapid City which has just joined my top 10. LOVED it! I was able to have a brisket sandwich, my beloved cesar salad, onion tangles (or any 2 sides off a long list), a huge pickle, ice cream and a 32oz iced tea all for less than $10!

That pretty much sums up the week.