Back to Work

Good news! Mark has been cleared by his doctor to go back to full duty again at work! He was able to start last week, and his knee has been feeling great - no pain, no limitations, no problems! Praise God!

In the craziness of getting back to work, though, he ended up working 96 hours in the last 6 days. Now he get's to be home for 2 days, then he'll go back Saturday for another 48-hour shift. The kids are readjusting to having Daddy gone again, but they'll get back on track after a few weeks and it should be easier. Needless to say, we just put the kids down for a nap, so... guess where Daddy is!

Good night!

Too many options

"Can I have one of those English braids...or is it Spanish braids today? Oh..I mean a French one?"

Thanks to our good friend Anna for being able to decipher the many cultures of Jadyn and somehow even get it to stay in all day!

Excuse #312 to eat a cookie

Said in the best, big-girl, sure-of-herself voice she could come up with:

"I'm a pretty princess, Mommy...and every pretty princess needs a cookie!"

(If that is the case, I am sure I can find some dress up clothes that I can wear at least once a day!)

The Carlson's

We were blessed to be able to spend a few days with some good friends from college last week - Chad, Cindy, Andrew, and Nicholas are up in town from New Orleans! We had a great time together, and the girls were especially excited to have some boys almost the exact same age as them to share the house with for a few days. We played outside lots, went to the park, rode bikes, played inside, went swimming, and just had a great time.

Thanks for squeezing us into your crazy-busy schedule! We had a blast!

Mariner's Game

Sunday the 20th was "Firefighter's Day at the Mariners". Half-price tickets and free hats - we had a great time! The only downer of the afternoon was when Karina was dancing so excitedly to the music in front of her seat and did a nose-dive into the empty seat one row below us! She was a little shaken, but fortunately there were about 100 firefighters sitting in our section checking to make sure whe was allright!

Brandy's Visit

Julie's best friend Brandy came to visit earlier this month for a few weeks with her boys Toby and Levi.

Some of our activities:

lots of swimming in the front yard in the mini-pool,

eating homemade ice cream,

going to Tuesday morning play-group at Miss Teri's house,

playing with all the toys in the house,

celebrating Toby's 3rd birthday,

going to another friend's birthday party,

watching a few movies,

visiting Mark's firehouse,

and playing Settlers of Catan every night after the kids were in bed!!!

For more pictures, visit our family photo page...

4th of July Fun!

We had a great time with our friends, family and neighbors. I think that in total we had about 13 adults and 11 kids join together at the culdesac on our street. We had spaghetti dinner complete with everything you could need and plenty of dessert to keep all the little ones entertained, too. It was a fun, relaxing time that went on until after 11:00 pm.

(Pictures have been posted at Foree Family Photos)

A little storm...

We have had a couple of amazing storms at our house over the last few days. This was taken from our porch last night! Look for more pictures coming soon...

Here are some more. We were heading to bed around 9:30 when we looked out the front window and notice the storm. Mark got the camera, tinkered with the lighting settings a bit, and set it on continuous photo mode - a fast action, 2 frame per second ability. You can't exactly predict when the lightning is going to hit, so he guessed as good as he could and went to work.

The storm was incredible! Lightning literally flashed about every 5-15 seconds. As it pulled over our house, you heard the wind whipping up with great intensity, the hairs on my arm stood up, and the rain and hail began pelting and flooding the streets in mere seconds. It was awesome! All told, it lasted about 30-40 ninutes, eventually passing right over us.

When all was done, we literally had over 1600 photos to weed through and pulled out some great ones. After an hour of deleting 1575 dark images of the night sky, we had about 25-30 incredible shots. Here are some of our favorites:

This is right before a lightning strike, but shows how dark the sky was when the lightning wasn't flashing.

And here are the shots: