Today was my daughter Faith’s birthday, she turned six and they all wanted to go to Chuck e cheese for the party. So we went and they enjoyed the pizza and playing the games and also playing in the tube and slide play area. They were even able to get their pictures taken with Chuck e Cheese.
I remember as a kid going there all of the time and playing ski-ball to win the tickets. It was so much fun, and now I can share the same joy I had with my children.
It is that time of year again when the girls were able to get their school pictures taken. It is amazing how much they have changed, you will be able to see the difference from the last ones I posted on here about a year ago, go to tthis post to check them out –> http://circuitvapor.powweb.com/mountsfamily/wordpress/?p=66
Please enjoy and we feel that they turned out very well.
If any of you follow me on an of my social network sites you will notice I always use the same avatar which is me in my black fedora hat and my Boston U shirt. The cool thing about that photo is that it looks professional to a certain degree. It wasn’t even planned and the pose was just a random pose.
I gave my ten year old daughter my digital camera when I was picking her up at school so she could show her friends and take some pictures around the play ground while we were waiting for her other sisters to come out. I just happened to be leaning against a fence keeping a close eye on her especially with my $500 camera and she came over to me and told me to smile. So I complied and just gave her a quick smirk.
The photo she took of me just playing around turned out to be a really good photo with the green tree in the background and the redbrick. It seemed that all of the colors were perfectly blended and I was like WOW! When I saw the photo and have bee using it ever since until I can get a better one.
So I would like to say thank you to my daughter for taking such a great photo of me and capturing me in a natural element that looks very professional. Maybe some day she will love photography as much as I do.
I have included the picture in case you have never seen it before.
The longer my girls go to school and the older they get the more I realize how fast kids are growing up today. It scares me because I have a 7 and 10 year old talking about sex and kissing and using words that I never knew existed until I was in Jr. High.
The question is where are they learning this stuff? Is it TV, older siblings, the parents? If you really look at the world around us the answer would have to be society in general which consists of everything and everyone. Everywhere you look there is sex, looking sexy, driving a sexy cars, sexy music showing skin. How is it possible for kids to grow up and not know about it unless you stick them in a bubble and don’t expose them to the world at all.
I now that I cannot do that, but I do have the power to be an example for them at home and teach them what is right and wrong, listen to them when they want to tell me what their friends are telling them so I can explain to them the truth about love and their bodies are not to be exposed for popularity because when they do that they are not honoring themselves but showing people that they have no respect for themselves.
I know the norm is “To Show It Off” but my questions is what will it get you. Will you earn ‘real’ respect and popularity because people respect you for your integrity, or will you get fake respect because you are going along with the crowd and pleasing them but lose it if you don’t.
True respect and honor come from discipline and self control. Who would you rather have at your side when it truly mattered? Someone who goes along with the crowd and has no idea who they really are, or a person who takes the reigns and leads and knows where they are going and who they are?
This is what I am trying to teach my children that no matter what it is better to have one friend who likes you for who you really are and keep your honor then to have a hundred friends who you cannot count on when you really need help.
Life is hard why make it harder by pressuring these kids to grow up faster then they should. Let your kids enjoy playing with toys and make believing they are super heroes because they can never get that back once they forget it.
When I was growing up as a kid the greatest memories I have at Christmas time are the decorations that my grandmother would strategically place around the house to make it look so festive and fun. Out of all of the decorations that run through my head like a slide show, I can remember the cool looking nutcrackers she had.
Since I have been married which has been 16 years I have never bought my own nutcrackers to decorate for the holidays and I always felt there was something missing. So this year I asked my wife to get me a couple of them at Kohls where she works. The awesome wife that she is got me two really cool looking ones, then I bought one at Michaels Craft Store. Christmas morning I was shocked and surprised to find an Irish style nutcracker in my gifts from my wife and I loved him. (He is the one pictured on the left in the photo.)
That same day, and I had to laugh when the day was over, my mother gave me a gift that turned out to be the king style nutcracker (The one on the right in the photo.) So I ended up with 6 nutcrackers this year after having zero and I started to really think about how cool they were and also started pricing them online which there are literally thousands of different types of them.
I saw one on nutcrackers.com that was a Thomas Kinkade Santa which was really cool, but was priced at $480, a little to rich for my blood. So I will stick with the $10-$30 ones and I will collect them every year which will be a new tradition for me, and someday I will be able to pass them on to my girls so they can carry on the tradition.
If you would like to know the origin of the Nutcracker and why they were made check out this site http://www.articlesbase.com/art-and-entertainment-articles/wooden-nutcracker-history-627828.html for a history of the origins. You will be very happy and quite interested in the story behind them.
Hey all of you tea lovers out there! If you are like me (Which is scary to think of 
) you love tea and love to try different kinds. The main reason we drink tea is to stay healthy and to allow our body and mind to be at one with each other. Some of you may not know that much about tea and are always trying to find trustworthy sites giving information on the best teas out there.
Well my friend Tyler Gillies
pictured below created a blog especially for tea lovers with reviews of different teas, links to the best tea sites and news about the tea world. You can visit his blog at http://www.everyonelovestea.com/ and I also have his feed on this page to the right under the section called ‘Everyone Loves Tea’ So please go check him out I red his page every day.
I was messing around with Photoshop and I decided to learn how to make clones of myself in photos which there is a lot involved to get it perfect but it was fun. My older daughter Mikayla liked it so much, she was like “How did you do that, can you do me?” So I took some photos of her in different poses and cloned her. It turned out pretty good seeing that it was my second time.
It has been a while since I have updated this blog but in my defense it has been very busy and hectic around the house with there being no school, and Paula my wife being pregnant.
Well our 5th addition to the family came this past Friday, July 30, 2009. She was born at 9:43 A.M. and was a beautiful 8 pounds 3 oz baby girl names Abigail Nicole.
My wife is so happy that the process is over with so that she can get back to a normal life and do the things she couldn’t when she was pregnant. We are very happy to have such a healthy and large family. There will never be a dull day at our house and I can never say that I am bored. I will include a picture of the little one at the end of this post.
Here is a link to our album so you can see more photos and videos.
My wife and I have started to get my 2 older daughters involved in house work and chores. For each hour of work they do they get that amount of time playing their favorite game, or watching TV or what ever the like to do. It is quite funny to see them work together doing the dishes. My ten year old hates to put her hands in the dirty water (An OCD thing) and my other 7 year old gets water all over her self when she rinses them.
I am very thankful though that they are learning to work together to get something done, because I know it is very difficult to get kids to do anything but because they know the more time they put in the more time they get doing what they love. It is really teaching them that a little hard work pays off and you also feel good when you are done because you have accomplished something constructive.
I will miss the help when they are old enough to leave, but am cherishing every minute now.
I woke up this morning from the sound of laughing and giggling coming from the bathroom. I have found that no matter how late I put the girls to bed they are always up before eight in the morning, I just don’t understand it.
Well, because they get up before me or my wife they have a habit of taking advantage of the situation and get into things in the kitchen like the Kraft Parmesan cheese, the powdered kind that you would put on your pasta. (For some reason they think it is food to eat) I find it all over the floor in the kitchen, but this time they wanted to have the party in the bathroom, so they decided to take a brand new can of my wife’s skin so soft shaving cream and spray it all over the floor and then proceeded to smear it all over the walls.
Just in case you were wondering my five year old and seven year old were the ones committing the crime. Unfortunately I did not get any pictures because I was so furious that I had to wake up and spend ten minutes on my hands and knees cleaning the floor and walls.
As I thought about what happened I had to smile, because I know that one day I will wake up to an empty house with no laughing or giggling coming from he bathroom, just the sound of my wife sawing logs till 11:00 A.M. I will have no more cheesy messes to clean up or spend my mornings telling someone why it is wrong to pour water down the air vents. They did not do any damage that could not be undone, and the house smelled like watermelon for the rest of the day which was nice.
So I have to think about how I react to my kids when they do something that we know they shouldn’t be doing, but to them they are just enjoying life and having fun. I think we as adults should take a lesson from this, and have more fun in life because it will be gone before we know it and the things that we thought mattered or were such a big deal will not be in the face of eternity.
Please share some of your experiences with me.
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