Just another month in the Bowie house

It's not that I have a boring life but that it's just isn't all that interesting when I decide to post. Guess I could start with catching you up from my last post.

Several things have happened that I'd like to share.

Erin has ran her first 1 mile race. On March 14th, she, along with her fellow students in the running club at Magness Creek, participated in the Little Rockers Marathon. Though she didn't run the whole thing, she did get away from the TV and participated. She really has enjoyed running club this year and her Daddy is so very excited that he has decided that he would start running with her. Not a lot of running has been done yet, so don't be looking for them in the next Marathon, but who knows.

I don't know if I mentioned it before but in January Emily took the Duke Tip Explorer ACT test. This is offered to GT students as a challenge and a gage as to where they are at an early age. We received her test scores finally and out of a possible total composit score of 25, Emily scored 20. She made a perfect score in one part of the English and a 99% on the second part of the English.

Marty and I are so blessed to have two wonderful students.

The girls and I finally talked Marty into a new dog. On Saturday the 4th of April, we went to the Cabot City Animal Shelter and adopted a 4 month old German Shepard/Boxer mix. The girls named her Ginger and she is one sweet pup. She is an indoor/outdoor dog at the moment and is doing very well. She has learned to sit and not doing to bad on the house breaking. The biggest obstacle is her and Snowbelle. They will come to terms soon enough but it does get interesting if someone accidently lets go of Ginger's leash and Snowbelle is in the same room.

My junior troop has finished it's Bronze Award. WaaHoo. This is a big first step for them and has been a small chore this years due to some lack of planning on my part, but it is now done and all the girls will be receiving their Bronze pin on May 17th from the council.

Emily and Erin will both be bridging to the next level of scouts this year. Emily is becoming a Cadette and Erin is becoming a Junior. It is amazing to me at how much they love scouts. It is so much fun watching them and listening to them as they explore new things through scouts.

Well, Emily and Chip Bredfield and family are moving to Arkansas. On May 15th they will arrive from Germany. Chip and Emily were just here to find a house and their prayers were answered as they are now owners of a beautiful house on the south side of town. My only dislike of the house is it's location (the south side of town) but it is gorgous. My girls are so excited about them getting that house because it has an awesome playhouse that came with it and there is talk of a pool. We keep telling Emily and Erin that it isn't their house but Chip and Emily may be finding themselves with 6 daughters insted of 4. LOL. Sorry Chip.

I got to see Tiffany!!!!!! It was a whirl wind visit but I got to see and hug and chat with Tiffany. It's amazing at how fast that visit went by. She is looking good and the kids have grown sooooo much. Alexis is 2 or 3" taller then Emily. Course we knew she would be tall but gees. I've got a really good photo of Emily and Alexis going through Emily's yearbook from last year. I'll post it soon.

We had a wonderful Good Friday service on our church property. Some 50+ people were there and the service was awesome. The Men's Ministry did a fabulous job cleaning up the property for the service and though somewhat cold, the fire was perfect.

Happy Birthday Baby Girl

My baby is 8 today. I just can't believe that it has been 8 years since the day this precious child came into my life. She was happy, healthy and a ray of sunshine and she still is today. She is a thoughtful, selfless child. She always seems to put others first and just loves to give things to people who mean something to her. She likes bugs and flowers and biking and cuddling. She is my cuddle child. She swarms a lot but she just loves to cuddle.

I didn't get to spend the day with her like I wanted to. I have found that with the end of school, Memorial Weekend and Mother's day, May is a very, very busy month and if you happen to have birthday in that month it's almost impossible to get a birthday party scheduled. So like most of our month, other things took president today. That makes me very sad. My beautiful, precious child spent the day at church and then at a friends where she wrecked her bike and skinned her arm and leg up. I wasn't even there to hold her when she cried.

She did get to have her birthday party last night though. She had a swimming party at the local indoor pool. She was so excited because she got 7 new webkinz and now she has more than her sister. I don't have her pictures handy to post but will get them up soon. She has grown so much in 8 years.

My baby!!!

She blogs!!!!

Well now that March has come and gone and April is almost too, thought it would be a good time to catch you up. Not that anyone reads this anyway, but here goes.

Severe Weather

We have had record severe weather here in Arkansas. Snow at the first of March, then rain that caused flooding and then tornadoes that came way too close to home and then more rain and more flooding.

I am trying to figure out how to get my old camcorder hooked up so I can share the video I shot of the Arkansas River. It is absolutely amazing to see the river completely out of it's banks. I drove over to our construction site by the White River and was just in total awe of the magnitude of water. You have to see it to believe it. I saw it and still can't wrap my mind around it. It's actually a good thing that our project is stopped for litigation because that site is under water.

The tornadoes where a little too close for comfort and too many of my friends were even closer then I like. There was officially 10 come through from one wall cloud. I just consider it one that just kept touching down but they call it 10 separate ones. Marty and I were watching TiVo TV so we were behind on the warnings that were coming out. We had just caught up with real time when we really started looking at the path projections. I don't usually get worked up about storms (guess I've been through too many that were nothing) so we don't normally even do more then just watch the broadcast but for some reason we both felt that we needed to get up and get dressed for the weather. So we did and we even got the girls out of their beds and put them in ours. I've NEVER done that. (They slept through it though.) About that time, the phones started ringing. First Mom, because it had just past her and she knew it was projected at us. While I was talking with Mom, John called Marty's phone. I called Stacey because they are just down the street from us and if it was coming our way it had to pass them first. Her family went next door then to a neighbors storm cellar so I didn't have to worry about her. Marty called his mom while I talked to Stacey. She said that it wasn't bad there because it had gone east of them. Christine called me after I got off the phone with Stacey. They were doing well but they were concerned. Their power went out while we were on the phone. We had lost satellite but we still have an air wave TV in the kitchen so we could still see the news plus Marty has his ham radio license. So I stayed on the phone with her. The tornado turned and took the path it had taken when it wiped out Cabot in the 70's. Which was a lot closer to Christine than to us. Like I said too close. They didn't have any damage but there was lots of damage around the city park/pool off of Richie Lane. Needless to say we didn't get much sleep that night. I was on the phone calling friends to check on them.

Later I found out I had friends even closer then I knew: Laura, Melanie, Mr. & Mrs. Merritt, Ronnie & TJ.

It did a lot of damage to the baseball field at Sylvan Hills and my old high school, Sylvan Hills High.

Emily

The other things that have been happening is that Emily has started singing with the Praise Band at church on Sundays. She is really good and is starting to not look scared to be up there. Again if I can get through some technical challenges I'll post some video of her.

She decided that she wanted to do a talent show, so she looked in the paper and found the "Babies and Children's ABCExpo". She was very serious about it and kept reminding us what date and that she really wanted to go. So we took her. She performed Hannah Montana's "Rock Star" for the audition. They only took the top 10 talents for the show. She didn't make the show but she was great about it. She did well but it was her first audition and there were many of the "pageant/talent show" kids that were there also. Who knows, we maybe doing it again.

She is working hard at the moment on getting ready for her second piano recital. She is working on 4 pieces. I don't know the day of the recital yet but will be posting about it soon.

Erin

Little Miss Sunshine is working hard at school. She is still struggling with reading and writing. So if you get a letter from her, would you please be her pen pal? She doesn't like story writing so we are trying to let her write letters to friend telling about her life to get her to practice. She just finished benchmark testing at school and said that it was easy, so lets hope we're moving in the right direction. I do think the glasses have helped though.

Church

We have our first annual Easter Egg hunt and it was a huge success. I got to do the planning this year but I hope to have someone serve as Family Events coordinator and take that off my plate. We had it at a new members home and it was fabulous. They have huge yard out in the country. It worked out great except that it was really wet from loads of rain that we have been getting. Didn't dampen any ones spirits though and we all had a fabulous egg hunt for over 1500 eggs.

On Palm Sunday, the kids started the service with a parade of palm branches then stole the show with a performance of two songs. It was so wonderful to see the kids sing "Come to Jesus" and "Get Up, Get Up". Again, if I can get the technology worked out, I know where a video of it is.


There is more but I guess I can try to type that soon.