Redneck Christmas Parade

Saturday morning the kids and I went to the Redneck Christmas Parade in Bawcomville. You might remember the video I posted a week or so ago.

 

Dakota took a ton of pictures and I tried to go through and pick a few, but that few turned into way too many. You can click on the full album and see the ones I picked. There was way more photos, but I didn’t figure you all would want to see every four wheeler or lawnmower that went by.

Most floats threw candy, some threw stuffed animals or beads, one float threw rocks.  I loved it!

 

 

Here are a few pictures.

This one had a sign that read: Bawcomville Yacht Club

Some used the excuse of the parade to let their freak flag fly.

I liked this float, well it was a wrecker truck with this car on the bed of the truck. Reminds me of an old Christmas movie where the family goes out and cuts down a tree and bringing it home to decorate.

Don’t be fooled to think these guys just did this for the parade. This is the norm in Bawcomville!

Yes, there was a power wheel vehicle in the parade. I wonder if she made the whole block before the battery ran down?

This float had a big sign that read “Santa’s dropping a load” Then on the back was Santa peaking out of the outhouse. He has toilet paper in his hand.

What a fun morning!

Bawcomville Christmas

This would be funny if it wasn't true! I can't believe Bawcomville is on the internet. We have no shame!

Happy, happy holidays from Bawcomville!

Lots happening, just haven't blogged

We really do have a lot of stuff going on in our lives. I sometimes feel so down I feel like I don't have anything to blog about, but I know that's not true, there is always something going on here.

I've had a few bad days in a row and it has been a struggle to do things that I needed to get done. I don't know what I'd do if it weren't for Dakota. He is such a big help to me. He has always been like that. Lately though Elijah has stepped up and even ask "is there anything you need me to do?" Dakota is a great example to Elijah.
I'm so blessed!

Tomorrow we will be going to Jackson MS to pick up a homeschool friend from California. KK (her name is Kayla too) is going to be spending 11 days with us. Her mom, Tina, and I have been friends on the internet for 12 years, but we've never met. We are excited to have KK come visit us. I hope she can put up with us for 11 days!

The blog challenge... I don't think Elijah has blogged any this month. Dakota has some, but I'm not sure how much, but I WILL win, even if I have to put up 20 post on the 30th! LOL

fruit basket

Galatians 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Dear Lord,
Dump the fruit basket on me!

BIG NEWS at the Miller house tonight!

You may recall a post a few months back about our sock basket! The basket we all dreaded and avoided as much as possible.

Tonight something got in to me and I decided to tackle that basket! It took a while but we now have an empty sock basket. This basket may not be empty again for another year or two so I wanted to be sure to take a picture of it empty to share.


Now here is some interesting news. I folded two and half pairs of Dakota's socks out of that whole basket. He later went back through Jody's pile and found some he could claim.
Elijah had 97 pairs of socks! Yes, 97, I'm not kidding, I wouldn't kid about socks!
Jody had the next biggest pile, then me and then poor Dakota with his two pair and a single.

I guess socks will be on the shopping list for Dakota.

Shake for Sara Rose

Tonight Dakota and I went and got a shake for Sara's sake.

We are praising God for the good reports Jarrod has been posting about baby Sara Rose.
http://sararoseh.blogspot.com/

Please continue to keep the Hawthorne family in your prayers.

Winner!

Congratulations MyDogsRule you have won a copy of The Relaxed Home School by Mary Hood.

Send me your mailing address and I'll get this book in the mail to you.

Thanks for playing.

Name this picture!

Do you want to win a copy of The Relaxed Home School by Mary Hood?




I've never done a give a way on my blog before, but I thought this would be fun.

Name this picture. Come up with a catchy caption for this photo and leave me a comment.

On Monday we will put all the names from the comments in a drawing and see who wins. I will then post the winner and ask them to email me their mailing address so I can send their book to them.

About the picture: Our homeschool group uses a church for co-op and this is in one of the rooms. We got the biggest kick out of this and had fun making jokes about it.

So come on and leave me a comment, you may win!

I'm here.

I'm here, I've been sick for a couple of weeks now and haven't felt like posting. Elijah has been taking his turn at not feeling well too. Now Jody has decided to join in on this sinus fun.

A few weeks back we had a huge rummage sale at a friend's house. I took 11 loads of stuff over and we had the sale for two days. I still can't believe how much money I made.
$1,285!!! I kid you not!


We had tons of stuff. I never did get all my stuff set out. When the sale was over I still had stuff in bags and boxes that no one even looked at.

I sold a wooden train table and train stuff for $60, Betty Luken's bible felt for $50, a TV for $10, puppets for $15, duplos for $30, a toy Home Depot work bench with all the plastic tools for $25 and a Sega game system for $30. That's all the big items I can think of. Most everything was .25 cents to $2.

I had a lot of fun making deals with people. We were giving stuff away left and right too.

I had 9 huge boxes of junk toys, this man was digging through them. I told him he could have all 9 boxes for $10. He said "why would you do that?" I said "so I don't have to take it home."
He gave me $10 and went to make room in his truck. We loaded all 9 boxes up with STUFF and they were over flowing by the time he was ready to load them.

A van load from a group home of adults came and it was so much fun loading them up with stuffed animals. They each had $3 to spend so we would see what they liked and gather it up and say $3 for the bag. They were so tickled!

This one lady was pulling baby bottles out of this big toys r us bag, she had about 10 bottles picked out. I told her it was $2 for the whole bag. She asked how much they were each. I told her $1 each or $2 for the bag. She took the whole bag.

I had this big bag of syringes and this man wanted 4 of them. I told him the whole bag was free, but he insisted he only wanted 4 so I told him ... you either take the whole bag for free or they are $1 each. He took the whole bag.

This one man came up on a electric wheel chair scooter thing. He said he liked music so Dakota found every cassette and cd we had and put in his box tied to the back of his chair. We also gave him a pair of crutches.

I'd tell people $5 for everything on that table. They would take it and then I'd fill the table up again. It was a fun two days, but rummage sales are a lot of hard work!

Once we got home from that we had to get ready for the CHA used book sale. I made $387 off that.

We had planned to take a family vacation with the money, but Dakota had worked so hard I wanted to bless him, so I bought him a new camera that he is very pleased with.

I've pretty much been sick since the book sale.

This bugs me!

I hate how Christian homeschooling women will get on message boards and tell everything about their husband that annoys them. Then other Christian homeschooling women will reply back that they should leave him.

Leave him, get out now is the advice they give just from hearing one side of this story. How many marriages have Christian homeschooling moms had a hand in breaking up!

Let me tell you I could write a whole page about everything Jody does that gets on my nerves, but he could probably write two pages about me.

DSL!!!

If you felt the earth shaking, it was not an earthquake, it was the Miller's jumping up and down with excitement over DSL!

We have had dial up since 1996. I feel we had a fast dial up, we usually connected at around 50.6 vs the 21.2 most people connect at, but it was still dial up! Forget watching a video or uploading a picture without resizing it to down to 20 percent.

I decided to test out DSL, see if I still need to resize EVERY picture I put on my blog. NOPE, all these random pictures loaded just fine and all at one time too.
Too bad I only have a few pictures on my laptop. BEWARE I have a ton of pictures on my desktop that I can upload later! I'll probably do a bunch of back post that I never posted because I didn't have time to resize pictures.


Elijah building a marble run taller then himself.



My brother, Cody Joe and myself!




Cody Joe on his birthday after a morning duck hunt with a duck he killed. The duck is about half frozen since it was so cold. That's why it is holding it's head up like that, it's dead.



Dakota sitting on the bear at the zoo. He did not go to the zoo with his shoes off! After he was up there I took his shoe off and rolled up his pant leg.

First Day Of Spring

Today was a perfect day to head to the zoo with some friends. The weather was beautiful!

We strolled around the zoo for a few hours then went to the river and had lunch.

Here is Elijah and his buddy sitting at the river visiting.




Elijah with another buddy at the zoo.

Dakota took this picture. Even though I don't like flowers, I think it is a good picture.

I missed LOST!

Jody and I went to a meeting at the church we have Thursday co-op at. They were voting if we could return for next school year. I am happy to report we will be allowed to return. :)

I had asked Dakota to try to get the VCR to record LOST for me.

After the meeting Jody and I decided to go have a date and then go visit his mom in the hospital.

I called Dakota just minutes before LOST was coming on to see if he got the VCR to record. He couldn't get it to and thinks it has something to do with the converter box. I was about to panic.
I told him to go get the video recorder and video it. HE THOUGHT I WAS JOKING!!!

This morning I was so happy to learn that my friend, Juliann, has it on VHS and will let me borrow it. It's all I can do to keep from driving out to her house, on the other side of the world from me, to get it. I'm not sure I can wait until I see her next Wednesday. I guess this way she knows for sure that I'm coming to Wednesday co-op next week! LOL

NO LOST!

I just don't understand this. What could possibly be so important that it would keep LOST from coming on?

Deadbeat Blogger!

I've been called a deadbeat blogger a few times now, so I'm really going to try to do better.
I was on a roll but then co-op started and our life got so busy. We were only home one day a week most weeks and we tried to fit some school in if we were not too worn out. The co-op semester ended in November and we have been taking turns being sick and then all decided to be sick at the same time. We are finally better and I'm ready to blog. I do want to go back and finish the post on Elijah's disease so I will catch up with that. I have a lot of other catch up post coming also.

Hurricane Gustav!

We did not expect Hurricane Gustav to cause such problems for us. I guess we expected some rain and some mild wind. I really expected it to die down before it reached us.

The strong winds started Monday evening and the rain started over night.
We lost power Monday evening, but it was back on by 9pm. We were so thankful for it to come back on.

At times the wind sounded like it was ripping our roof off the house.
It rained and rained.

Many homes here were without power for days. Trees were fallen over all over the place.
I know many families had damage to their homes so please keep them in your prayers.

Here are some pictures around our house that I took on Thursday.

This is our road.


This is also on our road.



This is a 4 foot fence on our road.



This is a cow pasture, usually full of cows.



Here are all the cows huddled together on a little island. The roof was torn off the little feed shed.



This is Miller Road.


This family is used to boating in and out whenever we have hard rains.




This family was probably wishing they had a boat.

This family built and ark!

Praise God, the water is going down and I will be able to get out soon.

Memory Cross

Have ya'll took a peek at the Memory Cross link I added to the side bar of my blog?

This tool is amazing!

One of my goals for this upcoming school year is for our family to learn bible verses. While I was searching for something we could use I came across Memory Cross.
I was mesmerized by these cards.

I ordered a sample pack and turned right back around and ordered us the Bible verse family pack #1 and family pack # 2.

I LOVE these cards. I'm sitting here with a stack of them on my desk and I can't put em down.
Elijah also has one in his hands.

This company gives a 100% money back guarantee! They can do that because there is no way anyone can not be totally happy with these cards.

They also have story cards for coloring Bible stories and printed Valentine, Easter and Halloween cards. Great stuff for VBS too.

This is just too cool not to take a peek at.

http://www.memorycross.com/cmd.php?af=797888

Let me know what you think about them.

I'm BACK!

It has been a busy wild end of the year. From April on we have been super busy.

I kept telling myself we would slow down when June hit.

I have not had time to blog. I've wanted to so bad, and when I have had a few minutes it wasn't enough time to resize pictures to upload. We have dial up so pictures have to be resized or it would take forever to upload anything.

Dakota and I even stopped at the library one day (they have wireless) to upload all the pictures on our SD cards to our Photobucket accounts and we found out their internet is no faster then ours. So we left.

Now that June has hit we have slowed down. I wanted to slow down, but I wanted it to be my choice, but now I've came to a stand still or should I say a sit still. I can barely even move around my house.

With gas prices being so high we decided we wouldn't try to go anywhere this summer, we decided to buy the kids a pool and stay home.

This picture is not our pool, but one like we bought. Ours is 18' x 4'.

So we put the pool up and on the first day we got in I jumped in and twisted my knee.

When I hit the bottom I did the splits and felt my knee instantly. I have been in so much pain!

Yes, you can see right there on the pool it does say No Jumping or Diving!

I tell everyone I'm a teacher and I teach by example so I was just showing my kids what not to do.

I'm hobbling around the house with a cane. Thank goodness for drugs!

It's drving me crazy not to be able to do whatever I want.

I want to back up to April with my blogging and blog about all the wonderful things that have kept us so busy.

I'm back and with pictures!

SNOW in LOUISIANA!

What is this stuff falling from the sky?
Yes, this is a VERY rare thing.

We had a little snow this morning. It melted as soon as it hit the ground, but it was pretty to see it falling.

I wish we could have went out and ran around with it falling on us, but I'm not letting these kids out of the house.

Here is a funny about the snow. Our homeschool group's SCI/SS Fair is today and one of the student's project is about why it doesn't snow in Louisiana. The Fair is today and it's snowing!

Jumping into the blogging world

I love to read blogs and have wanted to blog about our homeschool and life adventures for some time now. I had started a blog and can't remember the username and password to get back in it.
As I sit here at the hospital bored out of my mind I decided to start up a blog again. so this is the day I jump into the blogging world.

I'm going to copy and paste my entries from the old blog to this one. I'm sure I'll have to get my 16 year old son to help me get this going. Dakota is the computer guru in our family.

I think I want my blog red, white and blue because those are the colors of our school room.

I'm a BLOGGER!!!