It Pays to Save :)

Remember the savings chart my sister made for our ten year old?  He's been diligently socking away his income all summer.  He's mowed lawns, worked around the house, and made wise choices.

A couple days ago his check from the fair came in the mail ... for a whopping $48 bucks!

 He passed two incentive marks along the way (prizes he gets every $30 of savings) and one of them contained 50 cents.

 Adding that to what he had meant he was just over $100!

 He had been saving up to buy a bow so he could practice his archery all year round, and just that day I had seen a used one posted locally online for a hundred bucks.  So we went to check it out.

Through some negotiating, he ended up buying the bow for $75, and also a hand release (kind of like a trigger for archery) for an additional $20.  The guy selling it hadn't realized the release was for youth when he purchased it 3 hours away for $75.  So for $95 he ended up with a bow, two arrows and an arrow holder (which came with it) and a hand release.  More than we had thought he could get.  And I had checked out the bow online and it is rated very high.  We're pretty proud of him for saving diligently, and I think you can see he's pretty pleased with the results.  Now he's saving up for tips for the arrows he won at the archery competition earlier this summer (they cost less than $15).  Oh, and while we were pricing the tips, we saw the packages of arrows like the ones he won for sale for $80.  So it was quite a win.  Now he is talking about saving up for a 3D target :)

See Dad, It Really Did Snow :)

 I talked to my Dad on the phone last weekend and mentioned that it had snowed in our mountains.  He was surprised, given the fact that he's roasting to death in Kentucky, where the heat index that day was 100 degrees.  So here's proof, and evidence that you guys better bring a jacket when you come :)

 It actually snowed much lower than it shows in the picture, but we had such heavy cloud cover that we couldn't see the mountains for several days.  The snow was all the way down as far as the trees go.

 It's been a crazy August.  We've had cool (very cool) temperatures - down into the 30's several nights, and lots of rain.  The ranchers have been trying to put up their hay, but I'm betting a lot of them lost a bunch of it due to the daily rains.  We almost never have fog like this, so it was pretty cool to see it one morning.

 The boys and I took my mother-in-law to Jackson Hole Tuesday for her doctor's visit.  The clouds were hanging really low then too.

  This afternoon rainstorm had the ten year old a little nervous.  He thought there was a tornado.  I love that his response to a possible tornado was to stand out on the deck.  Wow.  You can really tell we don't live in tornado country, can't you? (We never have them.)

It was fairly convincing apart from the fact that there was no rotation at all.

 I love watching storms :)  I have since I was a little girl living in Nebraska, where the thunder would just roll  and it was so loud.  My grandpa used to tell me somebody tipped over the tater wagon.  I loved that.  In my mind the tater wagon was a wheel barrow.  I never could get those rotten things to balance :)

 See how sunny it is in the other direction?  The storm in the pictures above had the sky to the west a dark grey color, but toward the east it was puffy white clouds in the sunshine.

We've had a couple nice days today and yesterday, but I hear the weekend is supposed to be cold and wet again.  Figures.  Oh well.  I'm enjoying the rain, and Fall was always my favorite season, and it feels like an extension of that already.

Hummingbirds and Stormy Weather

 We have a lot of hummingbirds now.

They're a lot of fun to watch.  They fight one another for the feeder, flying up and trying to jump on the other one, knocking them out of the sky.  It's very entertaining.  I've heard that they need to eat nonstop because of all the energy they burn.  Well, if they weren't so territorial, they could definitely get by with eating less.  They sure do burn a lot of energy bickering over a feeder that has more than enough food for everyone.

 These pictures are from when we first put up the feeder.  Now we also have hummingbirds that have bright gold colored necks - not yellow, but when the sun hits them they look like metallic gold.  They're beautiful.  These in the pictures are more green.

 We've sure had a lot of cool, rainy days.  It has rained fairly heavily most afternoons.  I love how cool it makes everything, but the ranchers aren't real happy with it since they're trying to put up hay at the moment.

Who says homeschoolers don't know how to socialize? HA. Just kidding.  The boys have made friends with the steers in the pasture next to our yard.  They all come running when the boys go to the fence.

Cutting Birds and Tape Mustachios

Boy have I been slacking on the blog.  Sorry about that.  We really have been up to a lot.  We had a week of Vacation Bible School at our church and it totally wiped me out and took every bit of free time I had.  So, here's some of what we've been up to, aside from VBS, which I didn't get many pictures of...

 I don't remember which day it was, but one morning, the five year old told me he wanted to cut out birds.  So I drew a couple and we cut them out.  He did all his own cutting on the one that looks like it's flying (I cut the one that looks like a sad little duck).  Neither were my best drawings - ha.  It was a quick, spur of the moment project.  After he cut his out, he decided we needed strings.

Then the boys flew the birds around the house and played with them for a long time.

 I did find them in some strange places later...

 The three year old cut the head off his bird.  I thought he was just liking to cut (since I cut his out for him, I figured he wanted in on the action.)  But when he had successfully decapitated his bird, he told me, "He's dead."

 Then the five year old decided he wanted to make a kite.  I was trying to figure out how to accurately cut out a kite shape, and he grabbed the paper and scissors and snipped off one edge perfectly.  I hadn't decided yet how I was going to do it, and he was done.  He wanted to draw a design on his kite too.

 Of course this project required more string...

Here's what he drew on it.  It's kind of abstract, but the shape that is tallest, on the left side is a guy - like a giant, very accurate head (complete with mustache if you look carefully) and hair, eye, and nose - kind of a profile, then long legs coming off his chin.  To the right is a ladder, going up to a nest with eggs in it.  But it's like those hidden 3D images.  You might have to stare at it awhile to find all that in it.  But that's what he told me it is, and I can see it now that he's pointed it out (and when you do eventually see it, it's pretty impressive).

 Mustaches have been quite popular around here lately.  He calls them mustachios, and used to confuse them with pistachios.

 He actually went out in public this way - to a few stores and around town, and he left it on the whole time.

 One of our stops was at the thrift store, where we found this fun dog bean bag.

 Keeping with the mustache theme, the five year old drew this.  I asked him what it was, and he told me it's Santa with his mustache being held up by balloons.  Pretty creative and hysterical, especially when you consider that we don't even do Santa here.

 My favorite mustachioed men ;)

 I just love the look on the three year old's face in this one.

And this one.  He wanted his mustache to match Daddy's.  I tried to get a good picture of them together, but his hand blocked Daddy's mustache.  Still cute though.  The ten year old missed out on all the tape mustache fun because he was at Bible camp that week.  I'm sure some of the stuff he did was equally as silly.