Tornado

For the first time in the three years I have lived in Lansing a tornado hit. The kids and I were having a great time painting the front room while listening to music. The rain and wind were pretty heavy but I didn't think too much about it, we get a lot of heavy rain and wind here, but then through the beat of the music I heard the faint sound of the tornado sirens and it wasn't the first Saturday of the month when they test them. It was the real 'get in your basement now' tornado siren! The bigger kids grabbed their travel buddy, Jennifer with Joseph, Adam with Rachel and me with the baby and we quickly went down to our basement and turned on the Lansing news. We sat riveted to the television as they reported high damaging winds, flooding, power outages, and cloud rotation in Lansing. We waited glued to the reporters every word and watched as the severe storm moved across the radar screen, then the confirmation, a tornado had touched down in Lansing only a few miles from my home. Later learned it was a F3 tornado. The last time a tornado that big hit Lansing was 1977.
Thank heavens there were no fatalities or serious injuries but roofs were taken off houses, tall metal polls that held business signs were bent clean over, a bill board had been torn off an sent flying through a restaurant window, and many large old trees were uprooted and some had crashed through homes.
What really amazed me, is when it was all over and we came upstairs, it was so quiet. There was no rain, wind, or noise. I never would have known, by how it looked at that moment, the weather had been so violent and had done so much damage to places not to far from where I live. My prayers are with all the families who have lost so much to all the Midwest storms.

What Are The Chances?

I can hardly believe it. Our three years in Michigan are almost over. It truely feels like it has just started. I will miss Michigan, the people here have been so great. I love the green and the squirrels but I do look forward to more sunshine. It is pretty cloudy in Michigan
I took Eric to the airport on Aug 19th. He began his LLM classes the very next day. He says Miami is HUGE. I am quite nervous about living there. I am deffinately a small town girl.
One of Jennifer's leaders at camp has a son in-law who is working on his LLM in tax at the University of Miami. He e-mailed us about a month ago introducing himself and we e-mailed back and forth for a while. His wife had offered some great advice on safe places to live and we were so thankful for the help. We didn't have any contact with them for a couple weeks because I was waiting for Eric to get to Florida so he could look at houses.
Eric's first day of school was pretty nerve racking for him. Miami does a lot of stuff different including parking at the University. Eric, being the out going guy he is thought he would start asking people how to park, without getting a ticket. The first person he asked was just as new and frazzled as Eric but the second man invited him to pull around and he would help him. The first words out of the strangers mouth was he could tell Eric was a fellow member of the Church. How he could tell that we still don't know but, get this, it ended up being the same man we had been e-mailing back and forth with--what are the chances. Eric felt pretty good and made an instant friend. Eric has had constant contact with this man since he got to Miami and now this wonderful family has invited him to stay with them while Eric works to find a home for us. I feel so blessed that Eric and this man were at the right place at the right time.
I look forward to Sept 1st when Eric flies back to Michigan to move us all to Florida and I can meet this family.

I feel so loved.

My son, Adam, who will be 12 at the end of August drew this picture for me. He knows how much I love pictures of Christ and this is one of my favorite paintings. He is now working on drawing the Salt Lake temple for me. I feel so loved.
It is wonderful to watch his progress in this area. He started out drawing Japanese animation and just recently decided to work on more life like drawings. I think it is pretty cool. He is also working on a picture of Mitt Romney for his dad. :)

BIG Squirrels!

The squirrels in Michigan have always amazed me, they are so huge. Being from Utah wildlife seems to be much smaller there. When we first moved to Michigan Adam saw a squirrel and thought it was a beaver, we all had a good laugh. We all love to watch the squirrels chase each other around the yard, jump tree to tree--never missing their target, and run effortlessly across the power lines. The squirrels have given us countless hours of entertainment.

Kids and Ducklings

We had a garage sale last Saturday and Adam found and caught a cute little duckling wattling close to our house. It was so cute and all the kids wanted to keep it but we couldn't because we are hopefully moving to Miami soon.
I felt some anxiety because I have heard some birds will not accept their baby if it has a humans sent on it so I felt very concerned about this baby duck because my kids had held it for a couple hours. Jennifer being the wonderful researcher she is got on the Internet and researched all we needed to know about ducklings. She found out the mother would take her baby back with no problems so Jennifer, Adam, and Rachel went to a pond, near our house, where there are quite a few ducks and their babies and let it go. They all had to check on the baby a couple times but were soon comforted enough to stay home.

Good Times

The past week has flown by. We have shown our house 4 times but unfortunately no one has shown interest in buying it.
Jennifer leaves for church youth camp tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. She always has so much fun at camp. She will be gone till Saturday. Next month she will be going to Youth Conference, she is very excited about that because this will be the first year she is old enough (14 years old) to go. I loved the theme, "Book of Mormon Adventure". I think it sounds like so much fun. It reminds me of some of the exciting book of mormon novels that LDS authors have written.
My family website idea is a great hit so far. The kids work on their sites almost everyday. Jennifer wants hers to be further along before she publishes it but Adam is publishing his work as he goes. It is quite interesting to sit back and see the things they are interested in. I really like it because I have had some great insights into their personalities.
Yesterday I started reading "Little House in the Big Woods" to Rachel. I thought it would be a fun book because of pioneer day in July. I was a little reluctant to start a long chapter book with her because she just turned five and I didn't think she would be able to sit long enough to enjoy it but I was wrong and am very happy I gave it a try because she loves it. We read one chapter yesterday and two today, the Little House on the Prairie books are pretty exciting. I even caught the two older kids listening a few times.
I thought it would be a fun activity to make butter in a jar out of whipping cream and home made bread. I remember when I was little making homemade butter and spreading it on bread for a fun pioneer activity.

Just Thinking

The kids are all in bed and now I can sit down and give this blogging a try. I have dabbled very lightly in blogging using my yahoo360 site but I think I will use this one to just talk about what life is like being me. Wife to a last semester law student who is going on for his specialty law degree (LLM) in sunny Florida this August. And home schooling mother of five, only three of them are school age.


Our house is on the market and waiting for someone to buy it. We are supposed to be moving to Florida the end of July so our house needs to sell FAST. I think I need to go back to Home Depot tomorrow and buy some more flowers to spruce up the yard, brighter colors this time, maybe pink. The other flowers I planted looked so cute in the flats but they were very little purple, blue and white flowers and they seem to blend in to much with the grass that butts up against them so back I go find brighter flowers to accent the others. This kind of thing is hard for me because I like more muted earth tones but muted tones look too drab with outside flowers. Oh well, The kids and I will have a great time planting more flowers. Rachel 5, and Joseph 3, get so exited for any chance to get their hands dirty and their feet wet. It will be fun!


For our home school summer project the kids and I are putting together a family web site. I am excited because it will give the kids a chance to learn how to use the Internet to post their interests on their own web site and maybe get some blogging in. I think our family back home will love to read about what the older kids (Jennifer 14, Adam 11,) are doing and what they are interested in. I also think it will be a great place to put lots of pictures of the three younger kids.