Happy Birthday Poppa!

Happy April Fool's Day, and a very Happy Birthday to Poppa Cougle!! We love you!!

(I made several posts late last night, so scroll down if you didn't see them yet!)

Easter, Birthday & our church

Well, our plans for a well posed Easter picture in the front of the sanctuary didn't exactly turn out. :) Oh, well... they're still cute!

I have just posted pictures of our church here in Vandalia, more Easter morning pictures of the older girls, and pictures from Abbi's birthday, so make sure you scroll down through all of them.

Ooops!! I just realized that I never posted any birthday pictures of Emmi back in February! Sorry! Here's one of Emmi and Braden celebrating their 9th & 8th birthdays together. We will miss having Braden to celebrate with next February! (I'll put additional birthday pix from Emmi and Abbi & some misc. on my Picasaweb page.)

Vandalia Nazarene Church

Here's a few pictures of our church.

The girls especially love the playground. :)

Easter Dresses... :)

Abbi was really proud of her bunny egg. :)

Kezzi looked really cute until she started pouting...

Again with the bunny egg... :)

Happy 7th Birthday, Abbi!!

Abbi's birthday was March 19th. I thought I'd better get some pictures up before Kezzi's birthday, which is sneaking up on us!

She chose a triple chocolate cake for her birthday. YUM!

Welcome to Ohio!

We've survived our first Ohio blizzard! We got about a foot of snow, and church services for tomorrow have been cancelled.

For those of you who don't yet know, we have just moved to Vandalia, Ohio, where Josh is the senior pastor at Vandalia Nazarene Church. We just moved last week, and tomorrow would have been Josh's second Sunday service. Things are going really well, and the church here has been great to us. We were sad to leave Choctaw, though. Our friends there are awesome! We'll miss them a lot.



The girls got to play out in the snow today. I didn't make it out in time to get a picture of Abbi, but here are pictures of the rest of them for you to enjoy. Be sure to play the video at the end!!

I'm not sure if Evi liked her first taste of snow!

Video of Kezzi and Evi in the snow!

Finally... Vacation & Halloween Pics!

I've finally posted our San Antonio & Halloween pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/hollene. I also included an album of Evi being cheesy in a cheerleader outfit.

You can see a little preview of the vacation pictures in my new slideshow right over there ==>, but there are tons of them, so go to my Picasa Web page!

For those of you who haven't heard the sad news, our little Queequeg was hit by a car a couple of weeks ago. We will miss him, but we're happy that he got to live a long happy life with us!

Well, enjoy the new pictures!

Oh, and a very Happy Birthday to Pop!! We love you!

New photos online

I posted 4 new albums the other day...

• July 4th


• Evi's first birthday (July 18th)


• Rock the Desert - The whole family went to Odessa, TX with a group of our teens to a Christian music festival. The whole family stayed in a tent. It was lots of fun, but I didn't take very many pictures. Kezzi took some of these.


• Nana, Poppa & Uncle David come to visit - They were here this past weekend. (8/18 & 19)

These are all at my PicassaWeb site - http://picasaweb.google.com/hollene . If you have tried to go there from the link to the right, it was listed incorrectly. I have fixed it, and you should be able to see all my pictures now. Please tell me if something on my site isn't working, so I can change it. :)

Sorry, I still haven't downloaded birthday pics, but I had something silly to share.

We went to Quizno's last night. Abbi picked a sesame seed off her sub and said, "I'm going to take this home so I can plant a bread tree!"

Hee hee! :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EVI!!

Today is Evi's first birthday! It hardly seems possible that a year has passed.

We are super busy (as usual!) today. The girls have Kids' College classes, then we go to church, so Evi's birthday celebration will probably be a late night one! I hope to post pictures tomorrow. Check back then! Until then... here's a couple of oldies but goodies.

Flood, the IRS and Skin!

Water, water everywhere!

I was pretty angry late Monday night to find a big puddle under our table. I was sure that the dog had peed (again!). I opened the garage door to put her to bed, and was quite shocked to find a small pond where I had left the garage! It was storming, and we have just had so much rain over the last month, the ground can't take any more. Every corner of our 2 car garage was wet. The puddle under the table inside the house was the result of the water seeping under the threshold and the laminate flooring. It then came up through the seams & caused the puddle.

I used the ShopVac to suck up 40 gallons of water. :P Josh got our girls' little swimming pool, and started bailing water into it to keep it from going into the garage. We were up until about 3:30AM trying to deal with it. Tuesday, we ended up renting a storage unit, and moving all the stuff we stored in the garage. (well... the salvagable stuff.) I'm not sure how well the floor will dry out.

Then, today I opened a piece of mail that literally upset my stomach. The IRS. Aaaagghh! It was a letter to inform me that there was an error on my income tax return, and that we owed an additional $2500! I panicked and called right away. After 1 hour and 40 minutes on the phone (with 3 different representatives), we got it straightened out, I think. They told me that there wasn't an error, that I didn't owe more money, and that they'd put it in the system. We'll see if they send another bill next month.

On a happier note, I bought Ted Dekker's latest, Skin at Sam's Club today for $12.88!

Too late to be up! Going to bed now.

As you can see, I've been messing around with my layout. Let me know what you think. I'm not sure if I'll keep this one or not....

Happy 4th of July!!

An actual blog entry!

I've been reading a lot of blogs lately, mostly blogs of moms across the US who I don't even know. It has kinda inspired me to actually blog more regularly, but I don't have much confidence in my ablity to keep up with that! :P

Anyway, I wanted to share a funny story from the other day. Abbi came running in to tattle. She said that Kezzi had bitten her, so I went to investigate.

"Kezzi, did you bite Abbi?"

"Not with my sharp teeth..."

Oh, boy!

I put a couple hundred photos on my picassaweb page tonight. They're from our trip to IL in May... long overdue (thanks, Aunt Marge, for the reminder!). They are spread out in 3 folders, and are arranged chronologically, so skip back past the ballet pictures, and Evi's.

I'm hoping to post again within the week.... then again... don't hold your breath!

All of us girls with Grandma Betty