Rachel's Apron

For my sister's birthday last month I made her a cute little apron. The only reason I'm really posting it right now is because I really want to put something nice on top of that post below. I don't want to look at that bug any longer.

I love this apron. I wore it around before I mailed it off to her along with a pair of pajama bottoms that I intended for myself but were just meant for her.
This pattern is from the book Weekend Sewing, which I LOVE.

Disgusting Bug (or what's left of him)

Check out what we found today. What really bothers me is that this bug is alive....and he's getting bigger.....

Pictures a' la Brendan and Wyatt

I had to bribe the children with use of the camera in order for them to agree on a nature walk tonight without the bicycles. (I had already spent the morning running after them on my feet while they zoomed too far down the road without me!)
So no bikes this evening, but a handful of great pictures....of bikes no less! :)






I was allowed to take this one.

An Animal Post

We went to the zoo today. We have a memebership so we go often. I just can't not take pictures. At least I only post them every once in a while. On this trip, Wyatt took a ride on the pony. Brendan was too afraid of the little thing (he's gotten kind of funny about things like that). Most of the animals were sleeping...as usual. Still....fun.

4th of July Fun

Some friends came over yesterday to help us celebrate the 4th (us with no family nearby) and we decided our backyard should be a campground. It worked pretty well. Nothin' like plenty of room!

Our campground!

This was the boys first experience with fireworks. The smoke bombs were a big hit!

And the snakes....which the boys decided didn't look like snakes at all. :)

There were sparklers, too, but I was the one lighting them and making sure no children caught on fire...so no pictures. :(

....................................this picture is totally blurry, but totally cracks me up!

Our 3rd of July in PA

If I couldn't be at Mason Lake, enjoying all the festivities there with my family...this was the next best thing. We had a fun, full day "camping", if you will.
We actually didn't sleep in the tent though, because we are having some friends over to camp for the 4th and we didn't want over-tired kids. But we did just about everything else.

I'll let the millions of pictures speak for themselves.
Busy start to the weekend!



Fun in the tent waiting for Dad to get home from work!



Baseball, of course




What the heck is Brennie doing?.....Bathroom break? hmmmmm







More catching of fireflies (or lightening bugs....whatever you want to call them)


The campfire

Our House

We have a problem. We have a little, tiny living room and a huge couch...and a pretty big TV in a big piece of furniture. It all looked minuscule in our gigantic living room in Arizona, but here...it's a different story. Monday, Rand and I cleaned all day. Cleaning, for me, means rearranging a lot of times. So now we have 2 couches!



We have a similar problem in the boys' room. Small room, large furniture. If you remember, we took the lower bunk out of the room last winter and the boys have been sharing the upper bunk together. As I predicted when it got warm, they weren't going to like it so much. We've been dealing with "touching feet" and "not enough air" from the fan reaching them way up there.
So rearrange we did!

Now they are sleeping together on the lower bed. Go figure!

And to finish a couple other lingering projects I finally got curtains for our bedroom windows. Can you imagine!?? I had the worst time trying to decide whether or not to get new bedding, make new bedding, make curtains and what kind and what color, that they remained bare for this long!!! Enough is enough! Simple, white and more importantly COVERED!



I have a stack of cool prints by an artist from Olympia (Nikki McClure) that have moved from Arizona to here and have never had frames. Now a few have frames. FINALLY!


And last but not least....Happy Anniversary to my wonderful hubby. We've had some ups and downs and a lot of adventure the last 9 years and come out on the other side better and stronger. I have to admit, I'm pretty darn happy. Looking forward to the unknown future with our known God and eachother.

Summer Storm

The amount of rain we have had this summer so far (and I am counting May) is absolutely ridiculous! I was wondering how I was going to keep up with the watering of my garden, being that it is in the far back corner of our yard and we have no hose that even comes close. Worry not! Mother nature has watered my garden plenty!! I think I've only hauled a watering can out there maybe 4 or 5 times....today being one of them. If I would have known the forecast I would have known that today would be unnecessary for watering by me as well!
The garden is going bazerk and I cannot keep up with the pruning, weeding, thinning of the garden by any means. I am going to tackle it something serious tomorrow if the weather permits, but it is like a jungle out there!!!

This big mess just so happens to be carrots!


Green Beans


Lettuce and more lettuce

And more beans

Cucumber and Peas


Lillies


And Sweet Peas....my all time favorite


Right after I took these pictures we had the biggest summer storm. Black clouds, wind, rain, lightening, thunder. Crazy.
I found Rand relaxing on the front porch....his favorite place to be when it's storming...doing one or two of his favorite things.




So we all hung out and watched the storm. I left early to blog about it. :)





Sammy was a little scared.....but that's what Wyatt is for! :)

Nana's Designs

While on my short blogging hiatus, I have been spending some time helping my mom out. My mom, as I have mentioned before, is quite crafty. She does the basics: sewing, quilting, knitting, crocheting. But she also does a lot of other things like painting, making pottery, weaving, glass melting (whatever you call that!), etc. You can imagine she has a lot of equipment!
For quite a while, there has been talk about her selling some of her creations...especially her quilts which are quite spectacular (she would insert something negative here)! Perhaps you can relate, but selling your own things can sometimes be quite a hurdle to get over. Someone can always do it better, and why would anyone buy your crafts (this is a bad attitute we are working on. :) )?? However, again and again people want to buy her things. She has sold quilts, woven scarves and recently some dolls and baby headbands.
So I've been helping her put together a site that will help her show her work. We used a blog since there are so many tools already in place with blogs and I know the ins and outs of blogger pretty well. Right now she just has dolls and baby headbands listed, but soon she will have quilts and probably other things too!
I think it's pretty cool. Check it out!
Introducing NanasDesigns.

There you go, Mom! Now it's public. :)

Fireflies

I took a little blogging hiatus! It wasn't planned. We got busy and my battery charger for my camera disappeared.

I took a few pictures of fireflies the other night. Since we don't have any on the West coast....at least none of the places I have ever lived...thought some of you might like to know what they look like! :)
Obviously, it is not easy to take pictures of fireflies. They come out at dusk/dark and they fly. Their "glow" is really more like a spark. So they are twinkling all over the place....only for a split second. Catching them when it is dark is really fun because their light goes out and you have to try and find them. We have bazillions of them around our house and especially in the front yard for some reason. We catch them and collect as many as we can in our bug catcher. They don't really light up when they aren't flying, so it's kind of disappointing to be carrying around this entire container of them and none of them are glowing. When we're done we open the lid and they all crawl to the top and fly away. It's been our evening routine and the kids' favorite excuse to stay up late!
Here are the bugs!

This is what they look like when they aren't flying


you can see the underside of one on the inside of the container. See how his little rear-end is white-ish? That's the part that glows!
Now you know. :)