July Photos

The older boys came with me to help make the mailbox our own.  Welcome to the Vander Deen's!

View of the house from the driveway

A panoramic view of the property from the corner - so much space for the boys to roam

This picture catches my throat a bit.  They had a great summer exploring together

 A view back to the house from the side yard.  These early July pictures look quite scrubby to me and make me realize how much work we've done since then cleaning up branches and "stuff" around the place. 

The view of the sky has been an incredible gift this summer.  I have probably taken way too many pictures, but the nice thing about digital is that I can take as many as I want.  It's just so beautiful!

"All Creatures Great and Small"  has often come to my mind this summer, with the kids (particularly Aaron) discovering all kinds of creatures.  After this first pictures, Aaron ran into the house declaring that this was the best house EVER because of all the toads he was finding.  I am certain that this is the most excitement the toads have seen in their lifetime.  

And a little tiny one

Not just toads, we have frogs too

Spectacular view from the living room - no neighbours right across the street

 Sarah came with her boys shortly after we moved in.  That's a lot of boys in a row!

Another view of the sky - better get used to them.  I often think of the iconic Windows Desktop when the skies are blue like this

Paint-The-Kitchen day arrived!  It was SOOO nice to paint over that crazy orange! 

An After-picture.  It felt so much more like home!

 Must have been a pretty tiring grocery trip.  I think I probably felt pretty much the same.

Lots of wildlife around - this woodpecker hit a window in the sunroom and spent some time being "oohed" and "aahed" over by a few boys before being placed back in a tree.  

 Opa VD came over shortly after we moved and we had a fun game of Uno together

A Before-shot of the living room.  We had already removed the divider that was beside the door in preparation for painting.  The awesome brown shag carpet is still here, and will be replaced at some point when the levels of (1) Being Sick of It and (2) Finances coincide.  

An After-shot.  I'm so happy with the results! 

So these boys were playing Hatch From the Spider Egg.  Here they are still maturing in their eggs, and shortly after they would hatch and go running around the house all crazy-like.  Just another day in our household. 

When we were preparing to move, I arranged with Canada Post for our mail to be forwarded for a certain amount of time.  I was quite "amused" to receive this letter at our new place from Canada Post - it had to be redirected.  Shouldn't they have our new address already?    

One-year-old, meet Newborn!  The SMan twins William and Sadie arrived near the end of July and we went to visit them and their happy parents in the hospital.  It was a short visit because we had all four kids with us, but so nice to see the little ones and their Mom and Dad, healthy and well.  Really, who is rude enough to visit new parents of twins with four young boys in tow?  Yeah, that would be us.  But so cute!  How could we resist!!! 

A baby for each of us to cuddle!

It was a week of Baby-Waiting, and we stayed at my parents for about a week while we awaited the arrival of Danielle and Timothy's little one.  We spent some time searching for geocaches - one close to Dad and Moms. 

Oma reading with the kids

We were treated to a few fancy breakfasts while there! 

One morning we went to visit with Uncle Chuck and Aunt Carol and had lunch with them.  It was nice to visit and have the kids meet them - they enjoyed reading with Aunt Carol! 

Picture all together

We went for a hike and found a few geocaches near a waterfall that Mike and I spent some time at during our dating years.  What a gorgeous location!

My boys!

I really like this picture - fording the stream

Such vibrancy

Nate and I hung out for a bit on the trail while Mike and the older two searched for a cache in a difficult location

Beauty all around

And our creature-seeker strikes again!  

Hi Mr. Toad

We went to the park with the DeV's while waiting for Baby to make an appearance.  Timothy and Mike were making sure that all the park equipment was up to par, to be sure it was safe before Baby DeV has to use it.  

We enjoyed a great dinner, then dropped the boys off at Mom and Dad M's place and returned for a night of chatting and baby-gender-prediction-testing

I'm not sure how this particular test turned out, but I do remember that after all the tests were done we had a tie for boy/girl.

 At Rehoboth on a Sunday morning, snuggling with two 5-day-old precious twins!  It takes a bit of coordination to hold two little ones at the same time, and I salute their parents and their juggling abilities! 

We took a trip to Ikea to pick up a few things for the new place, and found this cutie in with the stuffed animals

All three have arrived!  We welcomed little Martha and celebrated with her brand-new parents

Close-up of some bark from one of the trees in the yard.  The Lord has an amazing paintbrush

Another sky picture - a few different kinds of clouds in one shot

This ominous-looking thunderstorm came rolling in over the fields.  It looks like it would have some dangerous rotation in it, but the lines just moved across us, not swirling at all.  It was incredible to watch

On the way home from an early morning trip to the ER with Stephen, I stopped to capture this breathtaking scene over the Delaware valley.  It was so beautiful it felt surreal. 

The kids are excited about climbing trees

 Typical for Nate - at least one article of clothing on backwards, if not everything.

 This picture makes us chuckle - two boys up high and Aaron having a fit on a lower branch

June Photos

So after some fiddling around with cords and settings and folders and the like, I was finally able to move most of the pictures from my phone to the computer (cue round of applause, thank you).  I think I'll continue with the original plan of month-by-month posts, although I'm a little overwhelmed by how many pictures I need to comb through!

Four sweet little boys sitting down at the table to have an after-school snack together.  

Having races at the bus stop waiting for Peter to come home

Cousins having a pre-meet-and-greet.  This was June 19, so all three had a little over a month left to cook before we could meet them!

Nate having fun running through the sprinkler on a hot day... the adults are having fun laughing at his too-big-shorts that keep falling down

Working with trucks, shovels, buckets, and pine needles/leaves kept these boys busy for a long time on our driveway.  Little Stephen is looking on from the living room window, dreaming of the day when he can join them!

Me too!  Me too!  He was just pulling himself up to standing at this point and very pleased to be able to look out the window

We celebrated Stephen's first birthday at Mom and Dad M's place.  It was Father's Day weekend again, so we were treated to the airshow, which has always been something special about where they live.  I especially appreciate it now that I'm not feeling the need to study for exams when fighter jets or the Snow Birds are screaming overhead.  Happy birthday to our littlest guy!  

Boxes, boxes and more boxes in the living room.  Packing up a house is a really big job, never mind the prospect of leaving a community behind where you feel very much at home.  Looking back on these packing and moving pictures is painful for me - don't get me wrong, I know we are in a good place now, but I really, really miss where we were and the people we were close to.  However, I definitely don't miss the chaos of those months. 

 A snapshot of the kitchen, getting less and less convenient as the days went by as more and more things got packed up.  I had purchased a few notebooks for the boys to draw or colour or write in so that we wouldn't have so many papers floating all over the place.  This was such a fantastic idea - those notebooks are so fun to flip through and see what inspires their creativity at this stage in their lives. 

And then we got possession of the new house!  We decided to get the bedrooms painted and re-carpeted before moving day so that we wouldn't have to move that furniture around afterwards to get those jobs done.  It was a lot of work late into the night, and we were very thankful to have Mom and Dad M's help with the task.  The memories of this day are also bittersweet.  We were woken up early in the morning with the news that my Grandma (Dad's mom) had passed away.  She was 91 and had been struggling with her health in the weeks leading up to her graduation to glory.  She was the last remaining grandparent on my side of the family, and she will be missed.  Memories that quickly come to mind are Grandma's laugh, her competitive Scrabble skills, the Purple Party, playing pool and square dancing.  I have a picture of her scraping wallpaper off the walls of our first house shortly after we moved in - she had a good amount of spunk and although we had many good-natured laughs about her doughy pancakes, she was a sweet lady with a good heart.  Dad and Mom left for British Columbia early the next week to attend the funeral and spend some time with the family. 

This room almost required sunglasses when we first got the house - it was getting around to World Cup time so perhaps the vibrant Dutch Orange in the older boys' room was somewhat appropriate, but to be truthful we're only soccer fans at World Cup time, so to keep the orange would have been a little silly.  It was so much more calming once the room had been transformed to a cool grey with a blue accent wall.  

Dad cut the grass while we were painting, and thought he ran over a rabbit in the lawn.  Turns out he actually ran over his favorite Grundy Lake hat, and we had a good chuckle over it!  Dad was a little sad about losing his hat though. 

Ahhhh, that's better.  Carpet is installed, painting is done in the bedrooms, and the eyes no longer hurt from the brightness!

A few weeks later we conquered the orange kitchen, but this is the pre-painted, pre-moved-in state.  It wasn't quite as vibrant as the bedroom, but there were too many different shades of this-and-that going on in here. 

We woke up early on Move-In day to make our way back to St. Catharines one last time to pack up the house.  Looking at this picture makes me want a coffee really badly.  

We rented the largest U-Haul that you can drive without a trucker's license.  We thought initially that it was way too big, but as the truck-packing progressed, we started to get quite worried that there was no way things were going to fit in.  At one point in the late afternoon Mike was on the phone trying to find a trailer to pull behind us, but all the rental locations were closing for the day.  The men who helped us load up were absolutely amazing at packing everything with maximum efficiency, and with a few family vans loaded up and one friend's pick-up truck, the job got done.  I was very thankful for an extremely pleasant day weather-wise - a blessing that can easily be overlooked, but loading up a truck in the rain would have been miserable. 

A hive of activity at the house.  I didn't do a tally of how many people were there to help us out, but we really, really appreciated all the willing helpers who came out to lend us a hand.  They did such a wonderful job, and in a way it was one last send-off from our church community.  I have to admit I am having a hard time looking through these photos and reflecting on them - this was an extremely emotional time and it brings it all back again so vividly.  

One last photo of the backyard.  There were many good times had here: children playing in the huge sandbox, watching Port Dalhousie fireworks from the deck, family get-togethers, construction projects, BBQs with friends.  

We drove, probably not so safely in our sleep-deprived state (there's only so much that coffee can do) back to our new home that evening and parked the truck in the driveway with all our worldly possessions.  In the morning, a crew of men from the church and school community arrived to help us unload the truck and move things into their approximate place in our new home.  It was a hive of activity, and we greatly appreciated having so much help from familiar and not-so-familiar faces.  It was a reassuring initial welcome from this new group of people who we are slowly getting to know better.  And that brings us to the end of June!