10 months

All I have to say, is that Maren is growing way too fast! Slow down kid, I'm trying to soak it all in!

Snow, Snow Go AWAY!!!!!

I wanted to cry this morning, okay I did cry when I saw the snow. I am so tired of it, and all I could think about were my poor flowers and my vegetable garden. Sigh. The scene from the movie A Christmas Story ran through my mind with the Bumpus hounds that ate the turkey. "there won't be any turkey casserole, turkey hash, turkey sandwiches and gallons of turkey soup, all of it gone!" I thought the same thing about my tomatoes, there will be no BLT's, no salsa, no spaghetti sauce, no fresh tomatoes to eat any time, all of it gone. Stupid snow!

In the pretty garden, the flowers are blooming

For mother's day, Ben dug out a new flower bed for me. Ever since we moved in, I have wanted another flower bed in front of our bay window. Ben hurt his back in the process and with 3 children who like to "help" It has taken much longer to get it done than I had hoped. Ben has taken a few days off of work to help get yard work done and finally on Friday afternoon, I finished my flower bed. I love it! Ben's dad found these cool old mining carts that once held coal on my brother-in-laws property. I filled it with bricks and dirt and planted flowers in it. I think it turned out really cute. I also planted flowers in front of my butterfly bush. I just need to add some bark to finish it all off, but all of the planting and such is done. Yeah!!!

Testing the sprinklers

Ben and I have been working hard on our yard. Friday afternoon Ben tested (drumroll please) our new automatic sprinklers to check for geysers. When we moved in there were sprinkler lines underground, but they didn't work and they weren't automatic. They were manual, which means you would have to get down on the ground and stick your hand in a dark, damp, slug infested box and turn each valve on one at a time to water the yard. It wasn't much fun, I know it's not as bad as dragging hose, but it was still bad, especially last year when I was pregnant and Ben was out of town. For Ben's birthday and my birthday, my parents gave us the valves and control box. Ben took some time off of work and got it all up and working, it's wonderful to just let the box control everything and wake up to a watered lawn. Thanks mom and dad! Anyway, with all of our work, we've driven the truck on the lawn a few times and wanted to make sure we didn't break anything. Friday Ben did one more test just to make sure that we hadn't broken any sprinklers, the girls were begging to run through the sprinklers. We said no, but they didn't listen. When the neighbor boys came out in their swimsuits, we lost out and had to let the girls put theirs on. After all of their begging, I think our girls only ran through once or twice. The little 2 year old next door kept running through the sprinklers and then over to me. He would say "that was fun" over and over again. I'm glad they could enjoy a few minutes of summer that day. As our gospel doctrine teacher said today "Did all of you enjoy the four seasons we experienced this last week?" I thought that was the perfect way to describe our weather as of late.

The fruits of our labors

It's more like the veggies of our labors. Ben and I decided to try our hand at making our own baby food. Ben did most of the work, he cooked a whole bunch of veggies and some chicken. My job was to puree and re-bag until we decided on a storage method. Well, as you can see by the pictures, we had a little problem. Ben stuck the mashed potatoes in a zipper top bag in the fridge. When he opened up the fridge again, the bag had opened and there were potatoes everywhere. It was a huge mess! Ben spent the next 10 minutes cleaning up while I pureed. We decided to just package the food in little zipper top bags and freeze it. It wasn't hard work, but it certainly was a little time consuming and we didn't get as much food as we thought. My thought is that I will try it again, because the homemade stuff certainly tastes better, but it is certainly time consuming and messy.