Outer Banks Trip

Joseph playing

Painting fun

Pool fun

Random Reunion Pics

What Did you Do all Day?

A man came home from work and found his three children outside, still in their pajamas, playing in the mud, with empty food boxes and wrappers strewn all around the front yard. The door of his wife's car was open, as was the front door to the house and there was no sign of the dog.
Proceeding into the entry, he found an even bigger mess. A lamp had been knocked over, and the throw rug was wadded against one wall. In the front room the TV was loudly blaring a cartoon channel, and the family room was strewn with toys and various items of clothing.
In the kitchen, dishes filled the sink, breakfast food was spilled on the counter, the fridge door was open wide, dog food was spilled on the floor, a broken glass lay under the table, and a small pile of sand was spread by the back door. He quickly headed up the stairs, stepping over toys and more piles of clothes, looking for his wife. He was worried she might be ill, or that something serious had happened.
He was met with a small trickle of water as it made its way out of the bathroom door. As he peered inside he found wet towels, scumming soap and more toys strewn over the floor. Miles of toilet paper lay in a heap and toothpaste had been smeared over the mirror and walls.
As he rushed to the bedroom, he found his wife still curled up in bed in per pajamas, reading a novel. She looked up at him, smiled, and asked how his day went. He looked at her bewildered and asked, "What happened here today?" She again smiled and answered, "You know every day when you come home from work and you ask me what in the world I do all day?"

"Yes," was his incredulous reply.

She answered, "Well, today I didn't do it."

Enjoy the laugh!!

Bubbles

Family Pictures

Hula Hooping

Soccer

Rennie Refuge

Since our Carr family will be moving soon, we thought it would be a great idea to give each of our families something that they can enjoy while we're gone. For Ben's mom, we sneaked up to her place one Saturday and spent the whole day fixing her a land mark so people can find her place much easier. We got the whole family in on our secret so they'd keep Rose away from the house all day. Thankfully it worked out well, because it took way longer than we thought, plus we had to revise our initial plan a couple of times as time and space ran out on us. Check out the results!

Labor Day Stalder Reunion

After a stormy Sunday night, it was surprising to see bright, hot sun, cool breezes, and happy attitudes when we woke up on Monday. After a slow morning of sleeping in, we were ready to start our day off. We quickly packed up and headed up to Mom and Dad's. It was great! We started playing soccer at a local church field. Though the teams were lacking in people, it was totally fun. Joseph found out how much he loves to kick the ball, get in the middle of everything, and decided that he doesn't like water poured on his hot head to cool him down.

After a quick break of cooling off in the ice box...err rather the pool. It was a blast trying to get each other in the freezing pool, without getting in ourselves. Joseph even got in the pool and enjoyed it.

To warm up after the pool, we ate a typical Brazilian lunch: sausage and black bean soup on rice, fresh pineapple, jello salad, and a milkshake lemonade. To allow us time to digest our yummy, filling lunch, we decorated our T-shirts, and wrote Josh a letter out of sticky letters. It was a lot of fun, trying to spell as many words as we could without resorting to using a marker. However, we could only get so far, until all the vowels were gone. So Josh'll have a very brightly colored and funny letter to read when he gets it. This was also Joseph's nap time, so when we woke up right before our next activity, it was great timing!

Next up Botchie Ball. This was so much fun, though if you don't stretch before and after you play your arms, shoulders, and upper back muscles are SUPER DUPER sore. Travis won by far. Though each of us succeeded in botching up his high score. After a unanimous vote of moving onto dessert. Travis willingly accepted our vote of him as winner in favor of the food.

After a quickly disappearing dessert, we headed out to the Secret Garden for picture time. After a time, the youngest members of our family decided it was time for something new. We trouped onto the deck for some family unity games of hula hoop. First up was the human circle where we passed our bodies through two different hula hoops circling us in opposite directions. It was a lot of fun to see how quickly we could accomplish this task. After the Human circle, came Show Off Time. Which consisted of anyone who thought they could or rather everyone who couldn't hula hoop, prove that they couldn't hula hoop. That evolved into Dare Devil show down, to see who could run through the hoop before it fell. It was a great laugh!

After a rigorous ab workout, we decided to target our brain waves. Mom set up tissue paper for each of us, and using a collection of colored and scented bubbles, we painted our master pieces. It was a ton of fun! We painted the deck, our hands, fingers, feet, T-shirts, each other...we decided to stop before something terrible happened. It was really cool. The only sad part was Joseph really wanted to blow the bubbles, but we didn't want him to go home with a green, blue, red, or brown mouth. Poor kid, but Uncle Bart helped us out. He brought out normal colored bubbles, but special kinds. He bought some silicon bubbles so Joseph and all of us got to catch the bubbles, and try to wipe off the plastic leftovers from our hair, shirts, and shoes.

After a very long, fun, and hot day it was time to quit and eat some grub. Not literally, otherwise we'da...anyways. We were starving. So while the "Men folk" occupied themselves with some basket ball, I got to keep Joseph and Mom company while keeping Joseph from thinking about basket ball, since he was too young to join in. After dinner we had a wonderfully uplifting lesson from Mom, to put the finishing touches on such a GREAT day! She topped her meaningful lesson with a sweet surprise: Chocolate Fudge Brownie. It was the best ever!!

To see the full account of our day, look forward to the slide shows that are coming!