Catching up...

Happy September!  Wait, summer's over?!  How the heck did that happen?  Man I love summer, but I also love me some fall.  Cool nights, cozy sweaters, yummy soups, Grey's Anatomy.  Yeah fall's good stuff.  

I thought I'd take a minute to catch up here on the blog so, here's a bit of our August in pictures.  It was a fun filled month!  

Boys finished their library reading logs so, they got to pick out a free book...yay!  

Glow sticks and smores...perfect.

I fell in love with freezer cooking a few weeks ago.  I cannot believe I've never done it before.  Best idea ever!  

Oh my gosh, so remember those boys Vann and Chayce met while camping?  Well the older one, Bode, and Vann became pen pals!  I love this so much.  They've written each other 3 letters each so far.  Vann gets so excited to check the mail when he thinks a new one is on its way.  What I love about this the most is that it happened so organically...there was no planning on my part involved.  They made it happen and I hope they continue to be pen pals for a long time. 

A walk to the park so this little cutie can swing.  

Chayce and Mia are best buds :)

Just a boy and his sticks.  Love him!

My Chaycers and I.  He's such a goof!

My Sweets

Trampoline fun!

This little monkey could swing all day long!  He learned how to pump his legs so he literally swings for hours.  

And this one fell in love with sewing!  Out of the blue he asked me to teach him.  Well I don't sew so, I bought him a book and we hit up Hobby Lobby.  I plan to do another post about all the amazing things he's created so far!

Monkey in the middle at the pool.  

So the other night Ash got a mosquito bite above his eye on his forehead.  Well the next morning the poor thing couldn't even open his eye because it had swelled up so much.  Dumb mosquitos.  The left pic is right after he woke up...the right is a few hours later.
After some googling I decided to use fresh aloe to heal it up.  It took a few hours, but it worked and he could see again!  And it took the whole day for the swelling to completely go away, but I was so happy to find a natural way to help my Sweets.  

Hope you have a wonderful first day of September!  I'll be back soon with some of our schooling adventures this week :)

Ladybugs and Mosquito Bites

The kids made some ladybugs today and they turned out pretty cute!  

Vann painting the wings of his ladybug 

Chaycers painting his wings

Aren't those some cute ladybugs?!  Mia (top left), Nate (top right), Vann (bottom left) and Chayce (bottom right).

Speaking of bugs...the mosquitoes were terrible last night.  I even sprayed the boys down with bug spray and it didn't help.  As Chayce and I were watching Vann ride his bike after dinner, I swatted multiple mosquitoes off of him.  After about 10 minutes, I was done...back inside we go, away from those pesky bugs!  My little Chayce got a couple of really bad bites...and two of them were ones I swatted off of him, but the mosquitoes were too quick and got a little bite first...dam bugs!

One of those awful mosquitoes bit my baby's ear!!  Look how huge and swollen it is!  He also got bit twice on the forehead...one on his left side right above his eye and one on his right side by his hair line...you can kind of see them in the picture.  

He keeps touching it telling me...Mom it's really big!  Poor thing!

I tried a couple of natural ways to help the bites this morning so, I'm hoping when he wakes up after his nap they'll look a little better...we'll see.  I dissolved some baking soda in water and applied it to them for about 10 minutes.  Then I applied a little bit of tea tree oil to them...I hear that stuff fixes everything...so we will wait and see...fingers crossed!


Does anyone have any tricks up their sleeve for healing mosquito bites...especially when they get really swollen??