Beach Photos

I was really hoping to get a wonderful picture of the kids all together in one picture with cute picture perfect smiles, eyes open & no hair in the face. Well it did not happen :(. Oh well. The ones below are still great!

Philip being handsome!
Kids in their sunglasses.

Philly & Ashers--love this picture of them.

Poor Sydney. The sun was so bright it hurt her eyes. We tried to move her around but she could not keep her eye open.

Goodbye beach! Hope to see you soon!

Philip turns 12

Happy 12th Birthday Philip! We are so proud of you & the young man you are becoming!

Our summer beach trip

After the Space Center, we headed to the beach. It was a nice relief from our 100+ degree drought weather. We had no plans for the week except building sandcastles, hanging out at the pool & eating snack food! Our resort had two pools that we could hang out & easy beach access. The kids saw "real" dolphins (I guess the ones at Sea World are not real??!!) a couple of times. We all wanted to stay longer but we needed to get back to reality. Looking forward to going back next summer!

Sydney hanging out in the lazy river pool.
My guys.

Philip could of stayed at the beach all day building stuff.

After dinner beach walk

Ashlyn's goal of the trip--being buried under the sand!

Being lazy at the pool.

Our usual vacation picture--the only one of us together!

The girls fell asleep on our harbor tour.

Awesome sand castle guys!

Love Sydney's expression in this picture.

Sydney "surfin" with Philip!

NASA Space Center

The big kids LOVE anything having to do with space. We have watched the movie Apollo 13 too many times to count. All of us enjoyed the Space Center. Inside it had activities for all ages geared around space & then outside you could see first hand space shuttle, rockets, etc. I recommend this space center for a day trip if you are in their area.

Love this picture because Sydney is trying to figure out how to get her fingers underneath the plexi glass so she can push all of those buttons!
Kinda makes you feel very small! This area was just awesome.

Mission Control Center!

19 months home

Sydney has been home for 19 months now. Finally Sydney has been with us longer than any other foster family or her orphanage. Sydney still asks us about 20 times a day where she is going. Kinda makes my heart sad for her. We have noticed a change in Sydney's behavior in a good way. She wants hugs & kisses, tells knock-knock jokes, loves her brother & sister, talks all of the time, etc. Our family is truly blessed by this little beauty.

We LoVe the lake!

One of our favorite things to do in the summer is go to the lake! Texas panhandle is in a severe drought so our local lakes are drying up. Praying we receive rain very soon!

Sydney floating in the lake.

Syd playing in the sand.

Philly! FYI--this is not his normal life jacket.

PJ wake boarding.

My boys--love them!

Ashlyn Grace soaking up the sun.

Ashlyn working on wake boarding. Love that PJ is in the background.

PJ & his wife (that would be me!)

What have we been doing the last 6 months

Obviously I have not been blogging! Can not believe how long it has been since my last post. "Vinyard Five" is doing great & enjoying the summer. Posting a few pictures from the last couple of months.

Sweet Sydney. We sent this picture to her two foster families in China. They did not respond back this time.
Philly & Syd hanging out in the not so hot tub!

Celebrating 13 years of marriage.

Ashers looking beautiful. Love the vest she paired with the dress.

Syd also looking beautiful. Love that my girls wanted to have the same dress.

Last day of school for the kids. Goodbye 6th grade/2nd grade/3 year old MDOs!

Being silly--which they do a lot of together!

Showing off her 2nd place medal--UIL Creative Writing. So proud of Ashlyn Grace!

Ashlyn Grace turned 8!

Where did the time go? I can not believe that Ashers is 8! I think we celebrated her birthday for over a week (might get that from her mommy :)!). We had a wonderful party at an art store in our town with her close friends & siblings plus some other fun activities. We love you Ashlyn Grace!

Beauty!

Sydney was so stinkin' excited to go to Ashlyn's birthday party! Philip had fun even though he thought he was too old to hang out with 8 year olds!

Birthday Girl!

Hamming it up for the camera & friends.

Update on our house

We are six weeks out from our house fire. The house is still not finished :(. We can see the end (sometimes it is very blurry) but it feels like this fire re-do is becoming never ending. Bright side--we are able to use our house like almost normal. The non bright side--not a lot of work going on at the Vinyard house!!!!! (please note my irritation by my exclamation marks!)

The next paragraphs will probably be boring to most--feel free to skip!:
What I'm loving about this "new" room--the wall color & flooring! PJ & I were planning on painting this room eventually so I already had a paint color picked out. I love the paint colors in the Pottery Barn magazine! Our contractor/guy in charge of our house suggested a brown glaze on top of the paint. LOVE IT!
I really like to have matching carpet when rooms meet up. Our living rooms adjoin each other. Insurance company only gave us a carpet allowance for the "fire" room & our master bedroom. We decided to use a wood tile (which really looks like wood but easier to clean) around the room & hallway and then have carpet in the middle of the room. I think it is worth it to spend extra money on a really great carpet pad!

We are hoping that our wood burning stove will be correctly installed this week & the rest of my clothes will be returned. But we have been thinking that for the last two weeks!

New wood burning stove & wood tile.

Not a great picture but you can see the room!

So we had a fire....

So we had a fire in our house a little over two weeks ago. Never thought anything like that would happen but it did! Thankfully, PJ was home with the kids when the fire started. PJ was able to get the kids out & nobody was harmed in any way.
The firemen were awesome! They said if you are going to have a house fire than this is the kind to have. The fire started in our woodburing stove in the family room & spread to the attic. Thank you to the firemen for saving our house! Also, thank you to our family & friends that have helped out (doing our smokey laundry, cleaning up right after the fire, neighbors taking our kids into their house, feeding us, keeping our kids, listening to me whine about not having clothes, loaning me clothes, texting, emailing, praying, keeping us sane, etc). Love you guys!
Also, thank you to the cleaning guys that made our house not smell like we had a fire! I really did not believe it was possible in the "fire" room. But we do not smell any smoke or anything from the fire right now.

I don't even remember taking this picture on my phone? This must of been right after I pulled up.
What the house looked like when we were able to come back in. PJ moved all of the furniture away from the fire when it broke out. We think all of it will be fine.

Right after the fire.

This is now being replaced!

Insulation from our attic!

I was not trying to be "cool" with this picture! I could only come in the rooms so far--so I just took random pictures.

New ceiling going up & smokey wood coming out! Will post new pictures when the room is complete. Probably about two weeks out for it to be complete.