Family Night

Last night we had a pretty good family home evening - we sang songs on our way to home depot, spent a good 30 minutes just pushing buttons on every Christmas toy/ornament at Lowes, and finished the night off with some Dairy Queen ice cream. Mmmm! But once the kids were in bed, it was time for work. I only spent 30 or so minutes on tiling, but this is what the floor ended up looking like in the bathroom at about 10:30 last night. Not too shabby.

Back to our house

So I've been painting a neighbor's house for the last two months as a small side job (to help cover some dental work I *get* to have done). It's been an...interesting experience. Some days it was so rewarding and enjoyable, and other days, I didn't know if there was anything I could hate more. Those days seemed to happen more as I started taking over seminary, mostly because I was getting up at like 4:30am, and going to paint around 9:30 after the kids were asleep. It got to a point where it seemed like it would never end... (do I hear violins playing for me?)

Well, then one day I turned off the paint sprayer and realized that every surface of that house had at least one coat of paint, and all of sudden it was fun again. Over 10,000 square feet of home had been painted with one or more of the 6 different paint colors or sheens, been taped with one or more of the 20 or so rolls of tape, or been sanded and repainted. So that's that. I'm out of there.

So now that all my tools are back home, and that major task is behind me? What do we do? Take a break? No way. It's time to start laying tile in our bathroom. We ripped up the lenolium this morning, so we're committed to this task, whether we're ready for it or not. We've been looking into it for a while, and unless we've dramatically underestimated the work required to knock this out, I think we're going to be able to complete this over the next week before heading to Kansas. I guess we'll know soon if this turns out to be another "house to paint." Anyhow, here's a few picture to enjoy.

Collin taking care of the concrete under the lenolium:

Abby and Collin on the tiles in our chosen pattern:

Oh, and after naps today, Abby and Amy made an apple pie. It was awesome.

Time stamp correction

I finally found the reason why my posts are always off by an hour or so. This was set to time stamp things with Pacific time - two hours earlier than here. It was like a huge light bulb turned on. So yes, I do get up early for Seminary, and go straight to work, however I do not get up at 3:16am. :)

For reading this email, enjoy a pic of the kiddos!


... and, for good measure, a picture of our neighbor's jackolantern...

Good morning!

Well I'm getting ready to head to seminary this morning, but thought I would post something quick so that you all can enjoy another video of the kids. They had a pretty awesome Halloween, and will be enjoying the candy from their walk around the neighborhood with Grandma and Gramps Phillippi for some time into the future. Anyhow, enjoy!

Long overdue update... sort of

So I'm just going to put out some quick updates for everyone. Hopefully this satisfies some of your curiosity as to what is happening in the Sheen household.

- Amy's currently 11 weeks along, so we are almost clear of the 1st trimester. Hoo wah!
- I'm no longer subbing for Amy's seminary class
- Amy's no longer teaching seminary
- I'm teaching seminary now. :)
- Painting a house should be easy.
- Abby's learning her letters really well - we love preschool teachers
- Collin loves jumping on our trampoline
- Abby can swing on her own now
- Collin loves Super-Why on PBS
- Collin still loves trains
- Abby's going to be a princess for Halloween

So there's a lot more that's gone on over the last several weeks, but I don't have any of the pictures here with me at work where I'm typing this out... Come to think of it, I'm really sure right now whether or not we've lost some pictures/video that we've taken - our camera won't power up right now so we're kind of out of luck right now as far as new pictures go. Hopefully between naps and other things this weekend I'll be able to update this page with some of the pics that we took before the camera went on the fritz.

Funny Faces

This evening we got home from a busy family home evening and sat down to eat some well deserved popsicles, and it was the perfect time to capture the video below. We hope you get a good laugh out of it - we sure did!

First Day of Pre-School (and etc.)

Wow. So this past month has been quite a roller coaster. Despite starting off the month with some bug that went around our family for about three weeks, we enjoyed a nice 5th anniversary at a sweet restaurant in Round Rock called the Main Street Grill (I would highly recommend it to all y'all.) We also caught the Bourne Ultimatum (another thing I would highly recommend if you haven't seen it yet.)

We also successfully completed a walking excursion in downtown Austin for the RedBull Flugtag. We walked right on down to the edge of the lake and found an open spot where there were some other kids for Abby and Collin to play with while we all watched these crazy contraptions dive into the water. One actually did fly for more than 2 seconds or so. :) On our way to find that perfect spot we passed a train that Collin got to watch for several minutes. It was only the second time he's been that close to a moving train, and was completely enthralled with it. We ended the night with some smoothies to cool off.

The rest of the month has really been spent getting Abby and Collin ready for preschool. Collin isn't attending any preschool yet, but he's been with Abby pretty much all day every day for the past two years, so it's a big change for him. We got Abby and Collin a bunch of new clothes, and Abby also got a outfit and backpack from Grandma and a matching lunch-sack. I think she is going to want her outfit to match her back pack now everyday! Her teacher is Ms. Sarah, and there are two Logans in her class. Uncle Tommy and Aunt Lydia also hooked Collin up with a sweet turtle backpack, so he's ready to go for next year.