Thumb Sucker?

My three beautiful girls

Natalie has really started to find her thumb lately but usually only right before she falls asleep and then looses it shortly after she falls asleep. I was not to terribly concerned because I have never been a huge fan of pacifiers, but I have been told by a few people, that it is not the best thing for their little mouths, I have also been told by a couple people that they sucked there thumb until kindergarten or 1st grade and never had a problem, so we will see what happens.


She always puts her two fingers up above her nose.

4-H Project (Moon)

This is Moon, Gideon's bottle calf for the year. She is a twin from our very first cow that we bought from our cousin that had her as a bottle calf. Anyway, the cow's name is Star (she is our only cow that has a name by the way.) so the kids decided to call her twins Sun and Moon, I thought that was pretty cute. So we are going on week three of getting up a half hour earlier in the morning to get her fed and then making sure she has a bottle for lunch and then after supper. She is teaching great responsibility and she is so cute!

Adalli loves to help feed her and she asks me all morning when we are going to go feed Moon, but once we get out there she is not quite sure about her so she usually stays on the outside of the fence and watches her. It probably makes her a little nervous because Moon will suck on anything that gets close to her and her and Addi stand at about the same height so Addi gets a tongue right in her face.

Adalli's 2 Year pics

Here are a few of Adalli's 2 year old pictures that Becky took for us.


Adalli is becoming such a big girl! She really likes pretty things like necklaces, dresses, earrings and glitter. She is almost always happy and sweet. She loves being a big sister to Natalie and feels so grown up when she can hang out with big sister Rachel.

Next to her daddy Adalli's true love is books of any kind! If you can't find her, you just need to look in the corner by the book shelf and there she is. It doesn't matter if there are pictures or not, she just makes up her own little language and tells the whole story.

Natalie and Allison Baptism

These pictures Becky took for our family. They turned out wonderful! Thank you very much Becky!

These are the pictures from my camera. Everything went very well, we did not have any major breakdowns or huge scenes in front of church :)We are truly blessed to be surrounded by five beautiful, amazing children from God!
Grandpa and little Natalie

Natalie is almost 4 months and Allison is 6 weeks old. It is so amazing how quickly they grow.

Paintballing

I just had to blog these pics. I think they are so cute! Uncle Ben, Dad, and Grandpa took the kids paint balling. They had so much fun and thanks to the life jackets didn't get to many bruises. They were all tough and we decided it needs to be an annual battle.

Finished Siding

It is official! Our siding is finished. Yay. Jeremiah and BJ worked very hard and took full advantage of the 50 degree temps and finished all the siding on the addition part of the house. It looks so much better than Tyvek and I am still glad I went with red. I will get pics of the south side just as soon as I can.

Buffalo Bill Museum

Buffalo Bill museum

We took a fun trip to Colorado two weeks ago and ended up in the hospital with RSV because the altitude was hard on poor Natalie so I did not get near the pictures I wanted. Everyone except me and the little girls were able to make it to The Stock Show and the rodeo. Before we headed home we stopped at Buffalo Bill's grave and museum. It was pretty interesting and the kids had a wonderful time in the kid area dressing up as cowboys and roping calves. We also learned that Buffalo Bill was born in Iowa but wanted to be buried on Look out Mountain north of Denver. I do have a few more pics so hopefully I will be able to get those on here soon.

My wonderful husband took me computer shopping in Des Moines on Saturday and we came home with a wonderful Mac computer and a faster internet connection. As of right now it is doing awesome. We are going to pray it stays that way!

It was a frustrating day yesterday! Johnathon, Natalie and I headed to Des Moines to have Best Buy hook my computer to a Verizon hot spot so that I could see if that was a better internet connection. Well after an hour and a half they told me that they (the Geek Squad) could not get my computer to pick up the hot spot and it would not accept my Kindle either. I asked them why it wouldn't and they told me that is was the Windows Vista program. So for a warning no matter how cheap a computer is NEVER get it with Vista on it.
Then my current internet provider came out to see if they could get it to at least let me upload pictures. They did their tests and all that they could do and found out that they have no way of helping me either.
So until I get a new computer I am afraid I am going to have to stop blogging because it just will not let me do much at all. We will be saving up and hopefully by the summer we will be able to find a different computer and get back to blogging, e-mails and such! I feel so sad that I am going to be one of those blogs in your favorites that has not been updated in a really long time! I have lived without internet before so we will do it again and use our time for something else:)

Our family hopes you all have a wonderful Christmas and blessed New Year! We will be sending out a letter updating you on our past year hopefully in January after a family picture is taken.

God Bless you all!

I was hoping if I tried earlier in the morning I would be able to get a better connection. No such luck and my internet "timed out" twice with no pictures. I will try again another day.

Natalie Mae Boender

Yay, my internet finally let me post one picture of Natalie. Of course this picture is a month and a half old now but that is okay. She is a very good baby and happy most of the time. She is a little fussy in the evenings but that is pretty normal for our little babies. She is growing every day and her cheeks are getting pretty round. We are truly blessed to have another healthy, precious baby in our family!


I will try to post some more tomorrow, because my internet seems to only allow one picture at a time and it usually takes over ten minutes to get one picture uploaded so we will see. Thank you for your patience. I am sorry it has taken so long!

Internet problems

I have some back to school pictures and some sweet corn chopping pictures that I have been trying to post this whole week and it has continued to not work.

So just so you all know my children are in school and I think for the most part fully enjoying it. Gideon comes home with quite a bit of homework so that has filled our evenings so far this week.

Hopefully soon I can get some pics uploaded for real proof.

Baling Hay

I love how you can make a picture look old by just playing with the color effect. The old tractor and bale picker upper fit this "old" picture perfectly.

Brad and BJ had someone that wanted to buy little square bales. So they hooked up the baler and asked Gideon if he could drive the tractor while they picked up and stacked the bales onto the hay wagon. Here is the pick up crew, BJ and Brad took turns driving the tractor and stacking and Rachel and Johnathon helped roll the bales to the spot on the wagon it needed to be.

There was around 150 bales in this field. Gideon did a great job and only got it plugged once, which was a great learning experience because he got to help unplug it. Now that is a scratchy hot job! This was a very hot day, it was good for our kiddos to experience a little taste of what Dad used to do every summer. It was a reminder to BJ of how it used to take three full days of throwing bales to toughen up your hands so that the hay and wire ties didn't hurt as bad, and it made us all thankful for round bales, skid loaders and air conditioned cabs.

Fair Fun

I brought my camera with great intentions to take lots of pictures of our county fair and my kiddos enjoying the animals, but it was hot and I was with the 4 children by myself which is just fine but it does not leave any extra hands or time to take fun pictures. So I was only able to snap a quick picture of Gideon and the pictures he entered. He did very well and got a 1st and Best of Show on his Luna moth picture and a 2nd on his picture of rain drops on the bbq cover with the trees in the background. He was so excited and is ready to start 4-H this fall to learn more about photography and maybe see his work at State Fair. He has also mentioned something about doing a bucket bottle calf as well. I grew up in 4-H in CO and I fully enjoyed the time I had and I feel I learned a lot through the experience so I am looking forward to being able to watch him go and grow thru this next year!


oops, I forgot to switch them so you will have to twist your head a little to see. Sorry :)

Checking Crops and Fixing Fence

This summer every chance we get we all hop on the Ranger and take a drive to check on the cows and calves and also see how the crops are coming along.
Adalli loves the Ranger rides, she didn't know what to think of the grass that almost went over her head in some places tho.
My amazing husband and his band of helpers as they try to figure out where the electric fence is grounded out.


This is a creek crossing that in this picture looks quiet and peaceful but come a fast thunderstorm and some pouring rain it becomes raging and moves the fence and whatever else is in its way, then goes back to a peaceful little stream and the cows just walk right underneath it and escape, so BJ and the boys have been working hard at finding things that the water can go thru but the cows can't.
Our small; but just right for us herd of cattle. I love working with cows and BJ does too but at this point of motherhood I am not as much help as I would like to be and BJ has a few other irons in the fire as well so we keep our herd at a manageable size until the boys get a little bit bigger and can chore and calve and all the other fun stuff that comes with having cattle.
The haze the cows seem to be in is actually road dust. I like to imagine it is a crisp cool morning and the little stream is warmer than the air, so it is creating this steam, but no, it is just rock road dust. Imaginations are a wonderful thing.

Boender Vacation

We just got back from a trip to Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park in southern, MO. I do not have very many pictures because it was so very hot that we spent most of the time in the water and I was very worried that my camera would get ruined because of the water and also the heat so I chased and counted kids lots more than I took pictures. Along the side of my blog you can click on any of the other Boender/Ochsner blogs and check out some of the wonderful pictures they were able to take!
This was the one day we got all the riding toys out and took them near the river. It was so hot (115 heat index) that you could not go more than a few minutes without getting back in the water to cool off.
Gideon had a great time catching all sorts of critters to put in his container. It ended up underneath a four-wheeler tire before I could get a picture of all the fun things he caught like little crawdads, a couple little minnows, some tadpoles and some baby catfish or bull heads. He was hoping to bring them home to his aquarium. I told him that they would not have made the hot trip home so it was better for them to stay in the river.
Here we are at Elephant Rocks State Park. It was full of these rounded rocks. The kiddos enjoyed climbing up, over and in between them.

BJ kept Addi on his back and she really enjoyed being up high! BJ was a trooper, it was getting very hot by the time we left the park!

Here Adalli is checking out a display at the Johnson's Shut Ins learning center. The rattle snake didn't seem to bother her at all. I am thankful that we did not run into any poisonous snakes.
Adalli didn't know what to think of the coyote, fox and bobcat furs that were out to feel she looked at them like something was missing.

We had a wonderful trip even though it was extremely hot and we had to walk up hill from the bathrooms and showers, the fellowship was a true blessing and I look forward to our next trip together sometime!

Thank you all for the help with kiddos, food and good times!