Working on t-shirt designs!

For Confirmation gifts I drew a few more saints and put them on t-shirts via Amazon.  

St. Alfred the Great

St. Thomas Aquinas

I've also drawn a St. Therese and a St. Monica recently.  

Uncropped

 

Over cropped

The Big 12

Isaac's birthday was the day before the movers brought over the furniture and we were finished moving everything we wanted to move ourselves.  We took the day to go to Mass and celebrate Isaac over at my sister's house for a family birthday party.  One of Isaac's grandmothers called and insisted on purchasing an ice cream cake for his birthday so that I wouldn't stress about making the cake.  It was a sweet gesture, and one that was greatly appreciated by all.  Isaac went online and got to pick out his cake from Baskin Robbins.  He chose everything from the flavor of ice cream down to the color of icing for the words.

After the fun party, we came home and watched his baby videos.  He had a ton of them and it took over an hour.  Our favorites were the "Freaky Feather Fear" one (age 2) and the "Heights and Fats" one (age 4).  

 I can't believe he's 12!! And he's almost as tall as me, just a few more inches to go.  His new privilege is riding in the front seat.  And we almost never go anywhere now, soooo...  He started upper school (7th grade) virtually three days after his birthday.

Trinity

 Trinity had been losing weight for a couple of months, but she is fifteen years old and had still been eating so we didn't worry too much about it.  After our move, however, she started eating less and less until it was nothing, and not much to show in the litter box.  Drew had just been switched onto the cat daily chore and just thought his job was the easiest.  There was no mess to scoop, no messes to sweep up, and the food didn't even need replacing.  It took us quite a few days to figure out she wasn't eating and it wasn't that Drew was just really on top of replacing her food and and scooping her messes.  By the time we noticed it, she was just skin, bones, and fur.  She was still moving around, but could no longer jump onto the beds.  Brian, ever the pathologist, thought she probably had cancer in her gut and this was the end for her.  As a last ditch effort, we got her canned cat food to see if we could get her to eat.  Brian anticipated that he would have to spoon feed her since she wasn't acting hungry.  He was really wrong about that because she devoured half of the can, so fast that we took it away and locked her in the bathroom, assuming that it was going to come right back up.  She kept it down and so after a while we gave her the other half and this went on and on for days, having many mini meals all day long.  It took another week before she began leaving presents in the litter box again.  Drew couldn't be happier.  :)

Her behavior changed as she began to eat.  She wouldn't leave my closet other than to go to the master bathroom and eat.  Now every time I go into my bathroom, she runs in and meows at me until I feed her.  I have been able to get her to eat soggy hard food in between times when I open a new can of wet food.  In the last two weeks, she has gained a lot of weight back and some of her strength has returned, but she is still confining herself to my closet and bathroom.  I call her the energizer cat, because she just keeps going ad going.  I'm still feeding her three or four times a day.

The only thing we can figure is that her mouth was hurting in some way and the hard food was too painful to eat so she was starving to death.

This was the day we got her the wet food.  She probably weighed half her usual 8 lbs if I had to guess.

And here are some throw back photos of Hannah and Trinity back in the kitten days.  I had a lot more time to take pictures back in those days.  :)  All these pictures were taken before or just soon after Genevieve was born, and all of them are in our home in upstate New York.

  

And can I just say the proverbial, "Where has the time gone?"  Although I love spending time with Hannah as a "grown" teen, I miss these days of chubby legs and sweet innocence too.

Moving is loud and exhausting!

On July 30th, we closed on our new house, just a few minutes down the road from our rental.  We love our new house!  It is right down the road from the pool and playground.  We can see them from the front yard.  It's a quieter neighborhood because it is a younger neighborhood with new construction going on in parts.  We are in a "bend" cul-de-sac, what I call a half cul-de-sac which is good for bike riding and learning.  

Bobby was listening to a story on Audible in our bed, obviously exhausted from packing, while his daddy worked at his desk.  Taken before the moving day.

The day after we closed we moved all our mattresses and clothes over to the new house with the pets too.  We started sleeping over there and making multiple daily trips to the old house to load the borrowed horse trailer, the van, and the "new to us" SUV that we bought used.  (Oops, I forgot to mention that on here!  We'll have to revisit this topic later.)  Brian scheduled the movers to come 10 days after closing.  This was so he could work from home as needed and make the move slowly.  The plan was not to overdo it, but each time he finished his goal for the day, he added on new things he wanted to bring over.  The movers ended up bringing way less than we thought they would over.  It saved us money, but we were getting in 14,000 steps a day and fell onto our mattresses each night completely spent.

Bob found the noise cancelling headphones and started wearing them around the house.  Was our moving too loud?

Everyone was dying to get our couch!  Isaac finally finished my fairy garden that he started at the beginning of the summer, and just in time for our new front garden.  This "garden" needs a lot of work, but it's just too hot right now.  I already bought tulip and hyacinth (for Genna, in memory of her bird) bulbs to plant with her after we weed it and fix it up in October.

He found rocks on our early summer walks and glued them onto the bottom of a half gallon carton with a door cut out.  He painted the rock to go with it.

My budding entomologist has found several geckos and anoles to occupy himself with in our new backyard.  This one he caught for me in the house and lost part of it's tail in the struggle.  Then he tried to take it outside only to have it run up his arm and "disappear."  He came back in saying maybe it was on his neck somewhere.  I found it on his back hanging out.  Drew was quite weirded out by the moving tail left behind in the house.  :)

The unpacker's throne!  Judah had the honor of mashing down the packing paper.

The first Saturday that we were in the house with furniture we started back up with Saturday chores.  My littlest vacuumer had lost his spunk and needed some help finishing this room because he wanted the nice carpet lines and couldn't keep them straight.  

Another Hike and a Big Haircut

We went on a hike with another big family early one morning shortly after Bob's birthday.  We had 10 kids altogether and some hikers asked us, "Where is your group from?"  Meaning, I supposed, what organization are we with.  I answered that we were "just two moms with their kids out for a hike."  

This was an old lookout tower, watching for the Comanche Indians.

Later in the week I took the boys to get haircuts at my salon.  Brian had agreed to go a little shorter for Drew than last time.  His idea and mine, I guess. were different.  Brian wasn't too happy I got rid of all the waves in the back that he still called curls, but I felt like it was not working anymore and way too hard to keep tidy looking.  This is a cute, trendy cut, and Drew loves it.  He kept telling me how long his neck was now.  :)

Judah's haircut was similiar to the way we've been getting it cut, and Bobby's was exactly the same baby curly hair style.