Garden projects

True confession time. I recently started following a 'build it yourself woodworking' blog that has utterly captured my attention. I love to read this blog and dream about future items I'd love to make. My first two projects will be a picnic table for our kids and a bench for our porches. For some reason, using a drill and a saw give me a great sense of power - they empower me. Yep...corny but there it is.

My father showed my husband some raised planter beds he'd made. Yessiree, my dad had his garden already planted in March, in his mini-green house raised beds. Well, my husband was inspired. Now, my husband is great at many things, but he's never really built anything, and he doesn't especially enjoy such projects. However, yesterday he made a trip to the lumber store, came home and began his own raised beds project.

 

Really, it was quite difficult for me to be missing out on all of the fun. I just wanted to head outside and start having fun with those tools, but I refrained as I knew we would probably have differing opinions on how to do it and end up in an argument. (We rarely argue, but when we do, it always seems to be when we are working on projects together. Typically, one of us has read the assembly instructions and the other doesn't feel like they need the instructions..then it gets a little um, 'warm'.) So, I stayed inside and created pumpkin cinnamon rolls for the neighbors, and then finally talked him into starting up the tiller for me. I then went to, preparing our garden for it's new raised bed.

 

We decided we might as well plant our plants now and let them start growing outside rather than in, and so the girls and I ran up to Home Depot where we found heavy duty plastic (and several other exciting toys).

We headed back home and started to plant. A neighbor happened to stop by and begged to help plant a few of the 'plantitas', and then he decided he wanted to till the rest of our garden while my husband fertilized all of our plants and I pruned our backyard plants and trees.

 

Here's our project - complete. We can't wait to see how things grow and how this works. We look forward to reduced weeding and a fantastic garden full of veggies this year! I am super proud of my husband's project. He did such a great job and while he didn't necessarily love doing it, he's pretty happy about it being complete and that he actually did it!

 

Home Projects

I know - I'm not sure who really is interested in my house and whether or not it is really clean, but for posterity's sake, I thought I'd post a few photos of my latest projects.

About a month ago we started our garden starts. While in the past I've completely turned our front room upside down, moving sofas and hauling tables up or down the stairs, this year I was inspired to use a baker's rack that I've had in storage. I especially LOVE that my front room was relatively unaffected, and the baker's rack has worked perfectly!

 

I spent most of last week cleaning. I don't love cleaning, but no one else in my house is prone to it either. I'd gotten buried in some quilts and projects in the past couple of months and things had gotten a little out of control. On Thursday I decided to re-arrange some furniture and here's our new look in our front room. (I think this also doubles as a photo of our new furniture from last summer that I never posted).

 

The furniture re-arrangement was actually prompted by some lost library books - which prompted the top to bottom cleaning. My last resort was to search through our coat closet. At least, that's what it has been called. The shelves have been laden with everything from medicine, cleaning supplies, extra light bulbs, shoe polish and the flag. I'm sure you can imagine what was on the floor. In the past I've hung up small coat hangers and hooks for my kids and their backpacks...which haven't really worked - everything somehow always ended up on the floor. I started to clean out the closet on Thursday morning and once emptied, proceeded to wash the walls. Then I got the steel wool and scrubbed off all of the scuffs and more permanent stuff. Then, I took off the closet doors and got out the spackling mud. I patched all of the holes from previous endeavors and then re-painted the closet. I moved the boots box and all of the coats and snow pants down to our basement where I hung up another hanger for the kid's extra jackets.
I decided that I liked the doors off look and so I moved a bench from the front room into the closet and turned the area into a mud room.

 

After that, I re-organized our hats/mittens/gloves over the door organizer and figured out how to permanently affix it so that it doesn't come off and slid it into a corner of the mud area.
Soon, I'll reorganize all of the music that lives within the bench so that we can use it for our winter gear next year.

 

Denver Rockies game

Last week I had the opportunity to take my girls to a Denver Rockies game. Unfortunately, we forgot our camera, and so we had to take our pictures with my cell phone.

We opted for the $4 tickets because they were in our price range and headed up to the nosebleed section. As we got there, one of the workers offered us an upgrade and moved us to the lower level - right off of center field - it was great!

Here are the girls in our new seats

 

Later, they let us move down to the fifth row to watch the remainder of the game. At one point, one of the players threw a ball to us. It hit my chest, rolled down my arm and dropped to the ground. A young man from the second row dived after it and kept the ball. We were a little disappointed since we felt like the ball was ours (since I'd stopped it's trajectory and taken one for the team). However as possession is 90% of the battle, we realized that we'd lost.

A few minutes later, the crowd around us started to cheer and we saw that a sweet woman from the first row had stood up and was headed our way with a baseball she'd previously caught in her hand. I was thrilled that she got a standing ovation from the people around us as she gave us a ball for the girls. We were impressed with her compassion and kindness...and elated to have a game ball!
Here we are later in the evening.

 

The Rockies won the New York Mets 11-3. It was a great game and evening!!

Museum

My husband had a conference which was out of town last week. THe girls and I decided to go as well. We spent one of the days at a science and natural history museum.

They have a fantastic kid's lab where they can do scientific experiments. Here are my 'mad' scientists!
We experimented, getting to see their cells from their mouth. They also gave chemicals (caffeine and sleeping pills) to a micro-scopic single celled organism and got to observe and record the changes and effects. It was fascinating!

 

As we were cruising through, we happened upon someone who asked if we wanted to check out some brains. What a pick up line! This too was fascinating. The girls got to hold and touch some sheep brains which had been donated to the museum from a slaughter house. They learned about the different lobes, the olfactory areas of the brain and how they work. Our daughter was also invited to cut the brain in half so that they could examine the inside of the brain. That was the closest that I've ever been to brains and I definitely learned tons. It was pretty amazing.

 

 

 

Birthday photos

It is true. We keep feeding and watering them and they just don't stop growing! I can't believe how old this kid is!
Here are some photos from her recent birthday

Breakfast - her request of Johnnie's famous (heart stopping) french toast

 

We had dinner, played a game, went out and flew a kite and came back in for cake.

 

We invited two friends and her sister to join us at the pool for an afternoon

 

 

Jack o lanterns and Easter

Here are some recent photos from our lives.
Our daughter enjoying her strawberry smoothie and hard boiled eggs Easter morning.

 

Our super cool, psychadelic Easter eggs

 

This child just keeps losing teeth. She's now got a jack o'lantern smile!

 

Repairman blues

I'm cranky today. Debating whether I should really blog and air it or not. However, this is life. Some days are better than others, and while I COULD sugar coat everything - what would be the point?

Just for the record - if you are an appliance repairman company, it would be a good idea to actually set up appointments beforehand rather than saying, "Monday". Monday came and I had no idea when they were actually coming - I even called at 7:35 am so that I could possibly get an idea, but they couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone and they are spending most of the day out of the area at more important repairs.

Is one supposed to blithely spend their entire day waiting for the repairman to appear? Who has time like that? Ridiculous. Now since I can't be here when it is finally convenient for them, they can't come until Friday.

I'd say waiting two weeks to get my broken stove & oven repaired is not acceptable. That's why I paid for the extended warranty. There was no clause that it would take forever.

Moving on, we celebrated my daughters birthday last week and kind of partied all week! Friday we headed to a cousin's house for a birthday celebration (his). Saturday, we came back home and put up a new trampoline, had a swimming pool birthday party, and then one of our guests invited us all to their house that evening for a bonfire.

Photos will be forthcoming.

He Lives

He Lives

Project finished!

We had the opprotunity to see some of our close friends be sealed together as a family in the Salt Lake Temple last week. I made them a wall hanging with the date to commemorate the occasion.
Here's my finished product.

 

What's for dinner?

Once again, I decided to duplicate my recipe blog's last posting so I could share last night's dinner with everyone. I actually fooled my youngest daughter with the spaghetti. In the end, it was pretty fun!

I used the meatloaf recipe from Feet of Meat for our 'cupcakes' and cooked it in muffin tins. We then frosted our cupcakes with mashed potatoes. We had our cupcakes as our dinner entree.

 

We had spaghetti and meatballs for dessert

 

Our spaghetti was composed of a slice of angel food cake centered on a plate, then covered with small strands of buttercream frosting. The entire concoction was then covered with a sauce made of blended fresh strawberries and a touch of sugar.

Our meatballs were actually 'chocolate no bake cookies' that were rolled into balls before the completely cooled.

Note - I don't recommend the butter cream frosting noodles with angel food cake - I'd try another type of cake next time. Next year I will experiment with whipping cream for the frosting. It will have to be light, yet stiff enough to come out as strands and hold it's shape. Luckily, I have a whole year to work on that!

April Fool's Day Link

Yes, I know - I'm a little lame sometimes, but last year AFTER april fool's day I came across a blog with a really cute idea for April fool's day and I was bummed that I hadn't been a little more creative (someone in my house doesn't think that cold water poured on them in the shower is very creative - or funny for that matter, but that's a different story I guess).

So - here's a link if anyone wants to pull together something cute for their family for April Fool's Day - even though I already posted (yes, as well) on my recipe blog.

Happy April Fool's Day Ya'll!

More Moab

Here are a few last pictures of the Negro Bill's hike.

 

 

 

That's it! Spring Break was nice - we got a little nice weather (once we traveled out to find it), got haircuts, the girls worked on sewing projects, visited with family and friends, and we are now happy to be back home for the next several months. We've been out of town for 3 of the last five weeks for various reasons, but are ready to get back to normal.

Today the kids are back in school and we are going to plant our garden tonight (indoors) for Family Home Evening and start working on some big home projects!

Moab

We spent some time in Moab, Utah and decided to go for a hike. While Arches National Park is one of our all time favorite places (there's just something about those red rocks that we love!) last year our friends recommended the Negro Bill's hike outside of Arches. While last year we hiked it in May and the spring colors were much brighter (the cacti were in bloom), we still enjoyed the warm sunshine, and dousing our feet as we crossed over the river five or six times. For our first hike of the year it was just fantastic to be outside in the sun!

 

 

 

 

Misc. Photos

Last week we decided to take down the broken trampoline.

This is how us shorties get the jobs done!

 

 

Here is our family on top of the conference center last week - note my cool gang signs :)

 

Our kid's favorite thing in SLC is always the fountain outside the conference center. There is a huge fountain on top of the building which cascades in levels down to ground level. Our kids have an undying fascination of this fountain/waterfall. No SLC trip is complete until they've splashed their hands in the water!

 

More SLC photos

Center of the Universe - don't we all think we are? Here's the center of SLC

 

We stopped for lunch in the Nauvoo Cafe and ran into my sister-in-law and nephew who were there on a 'date'. It was great to see them!

 

After the sealing on our way to the car