Day Out With Thomas

The day after James' birthday party, James went on a special train ride in Durango with his mommy. They had lots of fun seeing Thomas in person, looking at the all the trains in the gift shop (James had his mommy go in there multiple times that day!) and playing with new "friends" at the Thomas train tables on display. We had a wonderful time celebrating James' big day with Thomas!

Flooding

It is hard to imagine that it has already been one year since we packed up in Indiana and moved to New Mexico. This has been a crazy summer in terms of the weather here in the Four Corners area. We have had several weeks of 70%+ humidity which is unheard of here in this desert climate. All of this extended humidity has led to rain and lots of it. We have had so much rain in the last several weeks that the Navajo Nation just issued a State of Emergency due to numerous flash floods. An elderly Navajo woman was killed when the roof (made of logs and mud) of her traditional hogan collapsed due to all the rain. Please pray for the Navajo people as they rejoice about all the moisture but are in danger due to the heavy amounts of rain that come at one time.

School is about to start again. Farmington Schools start on August 16th with teachers' first day on August 11th. The kids will go to a Christian preschool in Farmington. James is now officially potty trained (hooray!!) so he will be going to preschool with Lily just in a younger classroom. Krista is really excited about this. Krista will continue to work part-time as a speech-therapist at the Farmington public schools which will work out well taking the kids to preschool in Farmington on the days that she works.

James turned 3!

It is hard to believe that our baby turned three in June. Can't believe it! He celebrated his birthday 3 times. We celebrated it once when Nana and Papa visited NM in May then again with Grandpa, Grandma, Auntie Sarah and Joshie in June and then officially the week of his actual birthday with his new friends in Shiprock and Farmington. We went to a play place called Big Bounce in Farmington that has lots of big self-inflated play toys. The kids all had a blast with pizza, cake and ice cream. Now we have to convince him that he can only celebrate his birthday once when he turns 4. Hopefully he will forget how many times he celebrated it this year!

New friends

We have started a play group with another family here in Shiprock who lives several houses down from us. They have three boys - the oldest is one month older than Lily and the second oldest is one month older than James (how cool!). Their youngest is about 3 months old. Lily is intrigued at times with the baby. Yesterday, another little girl who is almost 4 and lives with her family here in the medical housing joined the boys and their mom. Lily loved the "girl" power and pushed her entire Tinkerbell toy chest outside to join the boys with train play. James loves to go to their house as well since they have different Thomas train toys there. It's like a Thomas paradise for him. The hard part is convincing him when it is time to back to our house. We are really blessed to have several families who also live here with children close in our age to our own!!

Spring time in Shiprock

Hopefully we are finally past the winter weather here. The rivers are surprisingly high as we have had lots of winter snow and rain for this region. We had several unusually long cold spells in December and January but hopefully those days are over. The spring sandstorms are upon us now. We had the worst one yet two weeks ago since we have been here. Winds got up to about 60 miles per hour for about 24 hours. We have just finished up cleaning all the sand around the windows and doors. We had another one this week but not nearly as bad and long lasting. There are lots of green plants and Lily even found a tulip that popped up in our back yard. She was very excited about it. The trees have all started to bloom and we have some "grass" growing in our front yard that looks sort of like clover. We are watering it to see how long we can make it last. :) We are going to try to plant some grass (grass native to this area) merely to see if we can hold the dirt down and get the fire ants from colonizing in our yard.

We are excited to announce some progress in potty training for James. He can go potty on the toilet but still has accidents frequently. He is quite proud of himself when he does go potty on the toilet but doesn't have "time" to stop his play when needed leading to frequent accidents. We make him stop periodically which is a little painful for him at first but we are getting there happy to say.

Lily and James are growing so fast and their conversations are so funny at times. Lily was having a difficult time last night with "life" in general and complained she couldn't do something because she was too little. James looked over at her with big, concerned eyes and said "Aww, you're little." as if to affirm her in her time of trouble. You just had to be there - it was hilarious. James is talking up a storm and shows everyone - I mean everyone including total strangers at the grocery store - his trains if they are with him.