Our Garden

So as the days cool off and the summer winds down.... oh, wait. It's not even August yet. Tell that to the weather... my garden is just starting to look a little more like summer and less like spring. We've harvested a few beets, some baby bok choi, lettuce and even picked the first couple of beans yesterday. No peas, thanks to the endearing little creatures charmingly known as "dakrats" who managed to eat them all long before they got anywhere close to setting fruit. But still, the hard work is starting to look like it might pay off--if fall can just hold off for a couple more months.

 

Xander's bedroom

WARNING!!! XANDER DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING. PLEASE KEEP THE SECRET SO IT'LL BE A SURPRISE. THANKS

My older kids are down visiting their grandparents in Oklahoma and one of my projects this last week has been to update the kids bedrooms. Alex has been very sad lately that he "doesn't have colored walls" when everyone else does and he's also, he hem, getting a little tired of sleeping in a toddler bed. Plus, I need the mattress for Evelyn's crib.

So here we are, a week's worth of work.

1. Painted some of the walls a light green color:

From Xander's bedroom

Getting ready to start on the bed:

From Xander's bedroom

Bed started, first coat of the dark green paint:

From Xander's bedroom

From Xander's bedroom

Bed painted, second coat of green paint on walls:

From Xander's bedroom

From Xander's bedroom

From Xander's bedroom

Put the mattress on the bed, moved everything back into his room:

From Xander's bedroom

From Xander's bedroom

You can see I still need to build the rail for the bed, which will be put on separately and I "think" I'm going to attach a climbing cargo net to it as a ladder, which would fit with the jungle theme. I also need to find the duvet cover I bought for his comforter and decorate (yes I have plans for that white wall, other than holding all the Curious George decals while I painted) but for the most part, it's finished. Whew!! On to the next project....

Trip to Couer d'Alene

We drove out to Couer d'Alene earlier this summer and met up with some of my family there. It was so much fun and beautiful! On the way out, I drove alone with the kids and we made some fun stops. The Dakota Zoo, in Bismark was our first. Then we stopped at a park in Glendive, MT and spent the night in Billings, MT. The next day our stops were a carousol and park combination in Missoula and... ever so excited, a rest stop! Actually, it was pretty exciting since it was right on a river bank. And so beautiful in the mountains.

I have to say, too, that was the fatest carousel I've ever seen. Evelyn and I went on the first ride around, just sitting on the bench and I got motion sick. Alex looked absolutely terrified! But then he wanted to go again and had fun, while Evelyn and I sat on the sidelines and watched.


We got to the condo just a little bit after the rest of the family. The kids were super excited to be out of the car and went right down to the lake to play.


Hmmm... I think I'll spare you the rest for now.

Birthday Party

I'm so excited! I finally figured out how to select, resize and upload a bunch of pictures quickly using Picassa and their web albums. I have so many pictures from this summer and it's been weighing on my conscience but opening them one at a time, resizing and saving is just too much work.

This slideshow is from the kids birthday party about a week and a half ago. It was so much fun! We did a country fair them and invited several families. Not everyone could come, but I think we still ended up with 17 kids so it was pretty fun. We set up the waterslide and played "goodies in a haystack" where I kid pinata-type goodies in a pile of straw and let the kids have 1 min to look, starting with the littlest kids. It ended up taking even more time than I thought since afterwards they all dug through again... and again. Allison was even finding candy a couple of days later. I made Alex an ice cream cake, which was actually much easier than I expected. Just three layers of cake with two layers of ice cream in between. I used Wilton's whipped icing mix to frost it, since I thought that would hold up better in the freezer than regular buttercream.

I even included some extra pics of Evelyn and what was left of her cake. I got most of the best pictures at the end.

The Great Cake Smash of '09

We had a combined birthday party for Alex and Evelyn last Saturday. And yes, there are a lot more pictures from them. I'm kind of thinking that maybe I'm overcomplicating my life with the whole photography thing since now I know pictures can be improved AFTER you take them. Who would have thought, right? So instead of just posting them to the blog, I think "wait, I can fix that!" and then I spend forever editing photos only to realize that I don't like what I got after all or that maybe I made her skin too yellow in one or too magenta in another one. Or maybe the colors aren't saturated enough. I'm sincerely hoping that eventually something will just click and this will all become second nature. Until then, well, you get to see the pictures that I played with of Evelyn eating her cake. And, even if the light was horrible and every child at the party thought they had to be two inches from her face.... well, this is still the first child I've had who's REALLY, REALLY gotten into her first birthday cake. And it was fun.

My little toddler

I guess I officially don't have a baby anymore (although she'll still be my baby probably forever) since Evelyn turned one yesterday. I can't believe how quickly the time has gone. It seems like Allison took forever to be a year old and yet Evelyn is bigger every time I turn around. It couldn't possible be that I'm busier now with three kids than I was with one, could it? In honor of her birthday, I decided to take Evelyn out a do a "photo shoot" i.e. try to get pictures the way I would if I were a professional doing it all in one session. It's harder than it looks! I ended up putting her on a chair so that she'd stay in one place and put the chair in the shade of the trees, which worked pretty well. But still... hard. I'll never underestimate professional photographers again. I'm not 100% thrilled with these, but I think most of that is my post processing, and, still I still have the original RAW files, that can only get better, right?

Birthday party on Saturday!

We're combining the party for our two July birthdays. It totally snuck up on me, but I got the invitations made and handed out today. Now I just need to plant he party, yikes!

Happy Independence Day

Instead of our normal activity on the fourth: attending the town firework show, we went to the "local" fireworks show which consisted of a bunch of people from the base setting off their own fireworks just across the street from the base entrance. And, just for the record, it's really hard to take pictures in the dark while holding a toddler in the other arm.

The kids had a lot of fun. I thought Evelyn would be terrified, with fireworks going off all around her and quite a lot of noise. Instead, she'd laugh uproariously whenever there was a lot of noise or a particularly bright flash. I guess that's the product of being the younger sibling of two very
noisy children.

Allison and Xander both displayed their pyro side, although I'm not sure either of them particularly appreciated the loud noise. And the best part? We got home a whole hour before we would have driving to town. Always good when you are going to be attending church the next morning.

I just love this picture of Evelyn! My little independent spirit, perched at the top of our playhouse, giving me that little impish grin that just says, "I know I'm not really supposed to be up here."