hmm, If I were a loaf of bread, I would be....

a hot, freshly baked loaf of cinnamon sugar swirl bread. if I was from great harvest... cinnamon chip. yumm.

It's not that I don't have anything to do these days. If you have talked to me recently you know I have anything but time on my hands... but I just couldn't start summer vacation right without spending the day baking bread with Anson, watching Tanner perform magic tricks, watching the boys paint and dancing around the living room with Ella, and the boys. Life is good... I wish all my moments could be spent like this.

While I look at this picture the smell of the bread is wafting in from the kitchen... it's calling my name... mmm... gotta go!

The Shu Crew in the news...

So if you don't get the paper this was on the back page of the front section of the Tribune today... pretty neat, huh?! I will be uploading more pictures soon of this years race... and possibly a glance back in time. It was perfect weather and I even knocked a bit more than 6 minutes off my time. Good times... good times.

things mothers do...

So, not moments ago Anson, my 4 year old said, "I put wipes in the furnace." He stated this quite matter of factly, no fear of getting in trouble or what else may come of his statement. (this surprised me a little, especially since we have had long discussions about NEVER putting anything down the furnace vents.)

Now lets flash back at least a week ago, when I came into my front room to find at a million wipes pulled out and strewn across the floor... someone had some fun, and I know who, Ella, my one year old. Her favorite pass time? Wipe distribution.

I quickly picked them up and shoved them in a ziploc bag for later use... I'm not going to throw out a million perfectly good wipes! The next day I was searching EVERYWHERE for those wipes, any wipes with no luck, so I trucked down to the basement to recover some wipes from the costco supply...

Now flash back to present...
Anson, "I put wipes in the furnace."
Dacia, "why?! you need to get those out"
Anson, "But I can't reach, mom"
Dacia, "You need to try"

Alas he couldn't get them, so I am now on the floor reaching my hand into the cavernous vent that leads to our heat source... oh, I found the wipes... yea that bag of wipes that had vanished... umm, something rattles... I reach around blindly to grab whatever toy has accompanied the wipes. I pull out a cheerio, a lego... who knows what else... then my hand brushes against something soft. I quickly retract my hand and shake my head. Grimacing I grab one of the million ziploc baggie wipes... I briefly think about ignoring the fact that there is another foreign substance/object in my vent and going about my day... but I know that I can't. I am a mother and that is one of my long list of responsibilities... cleaning up gunk. Well I cover my hand with a wipe (as if it could fully protect me from whatever I might encounter) and I reach back into the abyss. I search relentlessly for whatever it was, when all of a sudden it is rediscovered. I envelop it in the protective wipe and pull it out of the vent...

I look down to see that I have caught a....

melted chocolate bar... with peanuts to be exact. Eew gross. Gross, but definitely not the worst thing I could have found. My 4 year old says "what's that... poop?" Luckily it wasn't... or a diaper or a rodent... or many other things that I would have been completely disgusted and sickened by.

Oh the things mothers do...

pigtails anyone?

who says you have to have a lot of hair to have pigtails? well, Ella is proof that even if you are practically bald... if you are cute you can pull off just about anything... especially if you are 1.

many blessings...

Mother's day weekend brought the Shumate cousins over from Spokane... these guys sure love each other! When they are all together it makes for a very loud house... but they have so much fun together! From the left hand side...
Grandpa Shumate holding Gwyn, Reagan, Kelsey, Grandma Shumate holding Ella, Anson and Tanner. What a wild bunch!

Happy Birthday Gabriella!

Okay, so it's been almost a month since Ella's 1st birthday... yes, we did have a party for her on her birthday... I'm not that bad! But getting some cute pictures up on the blog... not really my top priority these days. She is as cute as ever these days! Even though she definitely doesn't talk as much as Anson did at this age (I swear he was born reading an encyclopedia sometimes) you know EXACTLY what she wants... she has such a personality! Plus it helps that she knows some signs... her 3 favorite being eat, more and please... which she is doing all 3 constantly. And I'm not even joking about that. I swear that girl eats her weight in food every day... yet still so petite... if only I could say it was hereditary from her mothers side... I don't have that luxury.

Well I sure love that girl! She is definitely a spit fire and always keeps us laughing... or running... or both. Hmmm, now that I think about it... I wonder what side of the family that comes from... hmm.