Today November 13th...

is the day where bloggers everywhere are joining together in a campaign to buy water for Christmas.

$10 will provide one person in Africa clean water for 10 years. It will literally change and possibly save a life. A mother. A child. A brother. A grandfather. We are rallying together for a cause. Clean water. One day. $10. Asking everyone to let this be their first gift. Let water, let life be their first gift of the season.

Click here to be directed to the secure donation site of the highly recognized, non-profit, charity: water. All donations are tax deductible, and 100% of your donation will go to clean water solutions in West Africa.

Please share this with everyone you know.

Shirts, Shirts and More Shirts

So I've been busy, really, really busy printing shirts. Yesterday I started printing on the newest shirts that came in and continued today. I said I'd post some pictures of the shirts for people that are interested in getting them so below you will see some options. I ordered a few youth sizes to see if the image would look too big or be just fine. The shirts look fine but youth sizes are bigger then I thought, both boys are wearing smalls in this picture and the shirts are too big for them.

Here are a few of the women's shirts, we are printing on pink, blue and green. All of the shirts are printed in dark brown ink. I have a medium green underneath the small blue so you can sort of see the difference in sizes.

The green sort of looks like mint chocolate chip ice cream, this one is an XL.
I had to cut my head off in this picture because I had a crazy expression on my face. If you are a taller person (I'm 5'9") the women's fit is a little on the short side. I'm modeling a small and it seems to fit fine until I lift my arms up. The unisex small is comparable in width but a bit longer then the women's fit.
Speaking of crazy expressions this might be what
I'm looking like as I blog all this.
Cute, right?

Fall Swimming

On the platform planning out the jump.

This picture is a little dark but he is acknowledging the judges.

(Always a good move for a high score.)
The jump, look at that form people!

I'm pretty sure he didn't stick his landing, he rarely does.

Water...

We have been busy working on setting up a fundraiser to help http://www.water4christmas.com/ Water4Christmas is working with http://www.charitywater.org/ (this is the same organization we raised money for Geremu's 2nd birthday last year). Charity: water is a non-profit organization that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. 100% of public donations directly fund water projects. This has been quite a process and has taken some time to get to the point we are at. We are lucky to have a supportive school district as well as friends & family that are willing to support the cause.

So here is what we are doing. We are making and selling t-shirts for $10.00 and putting all the profits towards building wells. We started to print the t-shirts last Friday and my students are so into all of this and they are learning a lot in the process. They look pretty darn spiffy if I should say so myself. They have the water4christmas logo on the front with a quote on the back along with the charity:water web site.

We are doing this because we have witnessed people drinking unsafe water and we have seen the long term affects that unsafe water has. We have read the statistics that unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all sickness and disease and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Everyday 4,500 mothers bury their children due to contaminated water. This lack of access to clean water is recognized as the leading cause of death in underdeveloped nations. And it just doesn't have to be. (For more information visit the websites mentioned above.)

So here is my HOT model you might notice he is growing a little something on his face. His department has declared this month "No-shave November" so I've declared this month "No-nooky November":)

My First Wordless Wednesday...

Great Granparent Visit

This past week we headed down to visit with Grandma Great. It was good to see her, it had been a while. I'm not exactly sure what's up with the look on Cullen's face in this picture but in all the other pictures Cullen had his arm around Geremu's neck and it was hard to see his face, so this is about as good as it gets.

We also went and saw Bob and Nita. Here Cullen is with Nita-baby!

I'm not so sure I would chubby-wubby a kid holding a scissors...

Cullen spent most of his night dressed as a "transformer". I'm pretty sure he doesn't even know what a transformer is but he knows his cousin dressed as one for Halloween.

Happy Halloween

This morning we woke-up and carved our pumpkins bright and early!Here Cullen is adding some details (hair) to his finished pumpkin. Geremu is in the background scaling Nick's body while Nick cleans off the pumpkin seeds.The boys spent the day playing outside while Nick worked on organizing the garage for winter. They were so excited to finally get their costumes on to "play trick-or-treat" tonight.
The boys stayed out for about 40 minutes then came home to eat dinner. After dinner Geremu wanted to head out again so I took him back out and Cullen stayed home to color and answer the door. Geremu would look at me and tell me to "run" if I was walking from one house to the next. He would get up to the door and yell trick-or-treat without knocking or ringing the doorbell. If a dog came to the door or started barking in the house Geremu would take off running from the house.

Once we got home Cullen decided he wanted to go back out for a few more houses so we headed back out. Cullen and Geremu had added pencils to their costumes and considered themselves kings despite the fact that they were still dressed as a firefighter and dragon... Below is how they would hold their pencils up when they yelled trick-or-treat at the people answering the door.