Friday water painting

We enjoy doing art Friday afternoons, especially water painting. Ezekiel even joined in for the first time, and I think he did a decent job. 

Evalana reads Bible stories to her brothers

Fun with a one year old

Evalana and Ezekiel love playing together


And they love playing dollhouse together, but he wasn't in the mood when i went down with the video camera. We'll try again later on that one.

 

summer naps

Sometimes there's just so much to do in the summer evenings that we end up with some nappers in the afternoon.

writing with pudding

 

And the boys had a chocolate chip cookie

 

harvesting mahaffie wheat

Shoes

Ezekiel has been walking for a few months now, and he still didn't have any shoes. Evalana only has flip flops. And Lazarus has his grey rubber old navy shoes that he loves so much that he would not take them off for anything ever when we first got them. One went MIA while they were in Joplin a few weeks ago, so I just got more while they were on sale again, but he doesn't have any shoes for colder weather. Anyway, finally decided I should go shoe shopping. My mom offered to come along. I told her I didn't need her to, then pictured in my mind Ezekiel pulling boxes off the shelves, Lazarus running, dancing, and yelling, evalana complaining about shoes being too tight, and me trying to calculate prices and sales and seasons. And I told her we'd love to have her come. When we walked in, they measured the kids' feet and then put a sticker on them with their size. So helpful. And no wonder I couldn't get Ezekiel's feet into the shoes here--he's a 5 extra wide. Lazarus is 10 wide. And evalana is 1 1/2 wide, which they didn't have, so we went with 2W. Big feet around here! Then right away, the kids did exactly as I had guessed. So so glad to have help. Now they each have shoes! 

Ezekiel's favorite book

playing in the dirt

13 months

Ezekiel is 13 months and such a joy. Now that he has the walking thing down, he's working on talking. He likes to call Evalana "mama," so she tries to teach him her name, and sometimes he calls her "ana." Lazarus is "us." Mama and milk are both "meme." He's also really working on a lot of signs now (dad, thank you, more, all done, grandma). He usually takes about a 1-hour nap in the afternoon and then sleeps about 10pm-9am (vaughn summer schedule style). He really loves reading books. He sits and turns pages and looks at them himself, and he brings books to us to read to him. Evalana does a great job reading to him. He likes books that you can touch and feel, but his very favorite book, that he asks us to read over and over is Head to Toe.