Milk and Cookie 2021

 

Gearing up for Milk and Cookies 2021 with this family picture on Thanksgiving. (Are we typical that all the girls are looking and smiling and the boys are not?) Continue below for our digital letter to share our adventures on and off this funny farm in 2021. We hope you have had as much joy as we have! 

Milk and Cookies 2020

For sure 2020 has been one for the books! It seemed like every month brought something new to learn how to deal with, but we have made it to the end and are here to tell about it. Check out the annual Milk and Cookies letter to see how we kept our glass over half full this year. We certainly hope you and your family find yourself the same. 

Milk and Cookies 2019

Another year has come and is almost gone as I remembered it was time for my annual holiday letter and I had not started it yet. I was also too tired and pregnant to argue with the other people in my house about a family picture in front of the Christmas tree so you will just have to enjoy the pictures at the end of the slides from our various family adventures throughout the year.

We hope this post finds you stuffed with fun, food, and family during this holiday season! 

A Sweet Surprise

Summer on this funny farm generally brings lazy mornings, farm chores, and afternoons in the swimming pool (or reading books poolside as you look up each time someone yells 'mom'). This summer has been much of the same AND we found out a sweet surprise that will add another tail to our funny farm!

Due to some symptoms that started to add together and seem familiar I decided to see the doctor and found out baby Kane #4 will be joining our funny farm at the end of December. Being 39 and pregnant after starting this family adventure thirteen years ago has been quite an adjustment for me to wrap my head around. So it has taken me awhile to let people know. Of course the growing human inside my stomach is starting to give itself away! So I have taken to Photoshop, Pic Collage, and Photofy to help pictures tell my story.

And to tell the three giggly girls we already have at home I decided to put together a little game. I knew I wanted the girls to have something to remember when we told them so I found some fun Cabbage Patch animals and animal forms from Play Dough to go along with the farm theme I was looking for. Then I created a word jumble with baby animal names using the cat, dog, rabbit, goat, sheep, and chicken animals I had found. When the girls had kitty, puppy, bunny, kid, lamb, and chick unscrambled they had letters to unscramble the word baby. I then gave them each two of the animals I had found along with the name of a group of those animals - clowder, pack, tribe, herd, flock, and brood and also an extra card with their names and a card that said sisters because I needed one more letter! As they matched the group of animals with the props they received a card with the name of the animal and one letter capitalized. In the end they had to unscramble the capital letters to spell the word sibling. When they put it together they had baby sibling and we showed them the ultrasound pictures.

It was so fun to watch them work together to match and unscramble the words and try to figure out what the heck they were doing this for. And I even noticed my middle G has the stuffed chick in her bed to sleep with each night. 

And since I chose not to find out the gender with the first three G girls I left this one up to Mark to decide when we went to the 20 week ultrasound....

Stay tuned to see how this sweet surprise shakes up the funny farm and takes us on some new adventures in growing great kiddos. 

Milk and Cookies 2018

Well - it is that time of year again! When I remember that I said I was going to try an blog more, but realized I have not posted since my Christmas letter from last year.

The cards were ordered, but never made it out last year and I have not even made the effort to fight my family to get around the Christmas tree for a picture this year. So I guess you will have to imagine how much we have changed in a year. I might try to gather everyone around the tree on Christmas Eve, but we will have to see how much Holiday Magic is flying around the house that night.

It didn't happen on Christmas Eve but we did get a picture with Mark and his cake on his birthday. 

Until then, check out these Google Slides as I try something new to share some highlights from our year. Hope all is well and warm with you this sweet holiday season.

Milk and Cookies 2018

Milk and Cookies 2017

Well I guess last year was an anomaly when it comes to Christmas cards as we just got around to taking the picture on the 21st of December this year. So I think cards might just have to be digital as well this year or maybe a little something to ring in your new year. We will have to see how this week after Christmas on a Monday goes.

The two big G's had some fun Black Friday shopping with their Aunt Michele and found these fun reindeer jammies for all three of them. They have had fun wearing them to school, dance, and cookie baking weekend (when the littlest G was warned about wearing a deer costume outside on opening deer season weekend) So we decided to have fun with these comfy PJ's in our annual around the Christmas tree family picture as well. Hope you enjoy!

Also enjoy the annual Milk and Cookies letter to see what we have all been up to this year. 

Heroes are remembered, legends never die...

The worst thing about life is that it ends. And last week my aunt and cousins faced the end of the life of a man that his daughter-in-law said best 'they just don't make them like him.'

Uncle Jim always had a smile and would always ask me how teaching was going. And he listened to me talk about students, classes, and salary issues with an open ear. He always wanted to know how milking was going on the farm and told Mark if he needed help he used to sling milk in canisters from the barn to the tank. 

That is just who Jim was - a friendly smile, an ear to listen, a sportsman, and a go-getter.  His obituary said he coached nearly every sport and I often heard about him helping many people in town and looking for the next thing to do. As I saw the posts roll out on Facebook and the comments continue to grow I could tell that everyone else knew this too. 

I posted in a few comments a quote from a poem by sportswriter Grantland Rice that was hanging in the gym when I worked at WDMS that I think says exactly what Jim was - 
"For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, He writes–not that you won or lost–but how you played the Game."

As a teacher of technology one of the first things I make sure students know is that what you put online is always online. But we also live in a day in age when more information is created online in a day than we used to receive in years, which makes information quick to get lost in the shuffle and harder to find. I saw these posts as a catch 22 - they will be great for my aunt and cousins to looks back when they need an extra reminder of how great Jim was, but just as life continues so does social media and the posts will be pushed to a memory. And I saw on a bench at the funeral home "When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure." So I felt the need to put all these special posts together in this blog as an easy to find way to remember. And the librarian in me is hoping to take all the screen shots and put them together in a book to share as well.

I know the memories will live on in your hearts and continue to grow in the traditions built by the family Jim and Sally raised up. And hopefully this post will help you remember what your hearts already knew, Jim was an amazing man who passed kindness on to ALL those lucky enough to know him.

Click here to see screen shots of posts from Facebook