411 The Walters Bunch

Okay. It has been really hard for us to get use to regular school days after such a great Christmas break.  The kids have started a homeschool PE class, which the two youngest really love, but that A has decided she doesn't really care for, though I can't really blame her.....if I kept getting pegged in the face during dodge ball I probably wouldn't like it either. However, if she doesn't participate in the class she gets to go jogging with me and apparently dodge ball is the lesser of two evils.             I received a fit bit for Christmas and I have to say it is way harder to get my 10000 steps than I thought. We walk the dog almost a mile and a half everyday and unless it happens to be my jogging days I am still doing laps around my house trying to get that stupid thing to buzz that I have reached that elusive number for that day. The dog has decided I am crazy and no longer follows me through my random laps through the house.  It annoys me ...

We took the camper over to my in laws for a couple of nights so we could celebrate Christmas and also my nephew's birthday. It is nice because they have a large slab with hook ups for both our camper and their fifth wheel. It is also covered which really helps in inclement weather.  The dog is still learning her manners while we camp, but maybe one day when she's older she will behave better. You never know what you get with shelter dogs, but for the most part she is really good.....at least with us and with no other animals around. We finally got her DNA results back. Wow, we were all WAY off on guessing her lineage. We had thought pit bull, grey hound, Rhodesian ridgeback, with maybe a little maltese thrown in, given her love of freaking out over little white fluffy dogs.Oh, no! She is from a pure breed cattle dog line on one side and the other side has a wonderfully long lineage of mutt, mostly chow. I'm thinking the gate was left open and ooops. This may explain her fix...

Wow. Have we been busy this past two weeks. I am really big on making a gift for family for Christmas. We also buy store bought things, but I like to make at least one thing that shows I thought about them for awhile. This year my eldest daughter also thought of something she could make too. I won't ruin the surprise by saying what we made since we have not celebrated with everyone yet, but know we thought of you and I really put my back into it. Seriously, I killed my back, but I think they turned out nice and hopefully everyone likes them! After we finished making our gifts,  we went to Grand Prairie to see the lights. Since we were by the national cemetery for DFW, we went to visit Papaw and put some flowers on his grave. Almost a year later, it was still very emotional.  We had fun at the lights festival. Because of all the flooding this year about 25% was literally underwater.  We still enjoyed the lights and the rides. This is no joke the fastest carasel I have ev...

It is finally here....Christmas break. I am so ready for a break...umm I mean the kids are so ready for their break.  We have big plans on doing all sorts of Christmas fun.  We have already been to see ICE at the Gaylord and watched the LIVE play, which was the WIZ this year, and decided not to go to Bethlehem Revisited. Well, we really wanted to go to Bethlehem Revisited, which is a really neat live reenactment of what life was really like in Bethlehem the night the baby Jesus was born. They set up the entire town complete with housing, stables, and market to look exactly like it should have over 2000 years ago. You even see Caesar's guards on patrol. We just couldn't bring ourselves to drive the 3 hr round trip drive so soon after we just got back from such a long trip, but we will definitely try to go next year. It was really neat last time we went and we would love to go again. We plan on enjoying building our gingerbread houses, watching lots of Christmas movies, and look...

Had a lot of fun at the Gaylord's Ice exhibit. We did it. We took three kids and one crazy out of control dog on a 1300 mile round trip excursion to visit family in Kearney, NB. We travel a lot, but this was our first trip with an animal. We usually leave our animals at home and hire someone to care for them, but our new shelter dog is beyond clingy and I couldn't even ask family to deal with that! We did discover she travels much better locked in her kennel than out loose with us. We took the Navigator and the third row just barely accommodated her kennel with room for one kid left over. Being able to freely get in and out of the car without psyco dog tearing everything up was great. The trip up was cold, but sunny and with limited stops took about 11.5 hours. We were treated to a snowstorm just in time for Thanksgiving. We spent great quality time with our family and had a blast watching 3D movies on their new movie projector. Our dog wasn't too bad and it helped th...

D and his dad working. We had an enjoyable weekend this week. We headed out to what use to be the country, but is rapidly becoming developed, to visit with my husband's parents  and to get some help working on our SUV. Our SUV is about 16 years old, but only has 95,000 miles on it! We are in the process of making sure it is ready for a road trip. We normally take the truck, but decided the extra space on such a long trip would be appreciated, plus the dog crate fits in the last row so she will NOT be able to bounce around on all of us. Since my Father In Law was a mechanic for years we enlisted his expertise in doing brake work and the door lock. Unfortunately, he couldn't fix the door lock so we will take that to our mechanic to finish, but they did spend the entire day working on the brakes. It was a beautiful thing to watch father and son work side by side. While they worked on the brakes, I installed the new seat cover......which was a pain, but they look way better.  ...