Loving Life

I've spent the last two days outdoors doing garden/yard work.  On Tuesday, I caught up in my yard with weeding my garden, mowing the lawn, cutting out volunteer trees where they don't belong, and other small chores I hadn't gotten around to doing.  It took most of the day.  I was tired.  Yesterday, I caught up at my mom's garden.  Half of it was not weedy due to heavy mulching.  The other half was amazingly weedy.  It took me four hours to clean that up and finish staking the tomatoes.  After supper, I spent several hours at garden #3 attacking the weeds there.  I am about 70% done there, but went home early due to tiredness and irriation at the approximately 3,485 mosquitoes that decided I looked like a good supper.  Needless to say, my body is tired and in need of a rest.  Today will be a low key day where I get caught up on indoor, less active duties.  I am slowly picking up my running again.  I didn't even try running this morning as my legs felt pretty dead fro

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you may remember this post  where I found a little note written on the wall in the girls room.  It was cute and I was amused, though made sure to not let Ana know how much it made me smile.  While we were doing the Great Room Clean this past week, I found that the little note written on the wall had been updated. Now Dad won't feel left out.  And there's a sparkly jewel sticker to help decorate it.  A small distance from this wall decoration is another one. This one might be from Abby.  I think I'll have to have a small chat with the girls as the hand written wall decorations have multiplied from the last time I saw them.  I am okay with the other way they have decorated their walls.  They play "school" and Abby gets graded on her various artwork.  Most of them are given an A+, but some go as low as a C-.  I am pretty bad at the whole decoration thing.  I did not inherit my mother's capabilities to take random thi

Hi again!  I had a nice post the other day and when I went to publish it, it disappeared, never to be found again.  I didn't feel like typing everything again, so I didn't.  Therefore a little longer than usual from my last post.  Sorry for those who check regularly for updates (Mom).  Anyway, we had a busy week last week.  We had out of town guests staying in our house Thursday-Saturday.  They stayed in the kids' rooms, which meant I had to find the floors and beds up there.  The kids and I worked quite hard and made things look quite lovely up there.  I'm quite pleased with ourselves.  I got to spend three days with my lovely friend Kim .  She's 32 weeks pregnant and in better shape than me - a bit depressing.  : )  We went on a long walk together Saturday morning and I told her to set the pace and distance.  We ended up walking 7 miles at a 15 min/mile pace.  I'm crazy impressed.  But she has also already run two half-marathons during this pregnancy, and ran

I had a great weekend full of all sorts of fun things.  Spent yesterday at my parents house once we got home from church.  We celebrated Father's Day there along with my Grandpa's 89th birthday.  I didn't get a picture of the birthday boy, but I did get a picture of my ever adorable grandma along with my absolutely gorgeous sister.  Table ping pong is back!  We upgraded at the end of last year from using books as paddles to having official ping pong paddles.  However this year, only one paddle can be found.  David lets Ana have that while he uses a book.  Abby decided to help out with a bigger paddle and tried to use the white board to help.  They all thought it was pretty hilarious.  David ran a 5K race on Friday.  He did better than he did in his last one.  He ran the whole way without any walking.  He was happy with himself and even happier to find out he won his age group (not too many 9-13 year olds want to run a 5K - he was the only one).  He was delighted with his go

Today is Ana's 8th birthday!   We've had a good day so far.  A couple of weeks ago when I asked Ana was she was interested in getting for her birthday, she suggested getting her ears pierced.  Aaron and I talked it over and decided that we would allow that.  In both of our families of origin, we (girls) had to wait until they were in 6th grade or age 12 to get our ears pierced.  Neither one of us was sure why that rule was instated - maybe because it's sort of a permanent thing for older kids?  Anyway, we decided given Ana's great delight in sparkly things that we would be happy to indulge her in this. Here she is sitting in the chair excitedly/nervously waiting for it to happen.  She's clutching her new kitty from Grandma Cindy and Grandpa Keith.  They went out yesterday with her to celebrate.  She got to spend the night at their house too. Finished product!  She didn't cry, though she did say it hurt more than she expected. Side view.  She chose the June birt

We dropped Ana off at an overnight camp yesterday morning.  Since then, the house has been unnaturally quiet.  It appears that Ana is the bridge in our family as she is either playing with David or playing with Abby, or playing with all three.  David and Abby get along just fine and will sometimes play together without Ana, but they don't have quite as much in common due to the larger age gap.  It is very endearing to see David play down at Abby's level sometimes when he's in the mood.  But he is currently engrossed in books this week.  He started reading the Harry Potter series 6 days ago.  He is now in book 5.  I have to occasionally make him stop reading to go and move some muscles every now and then.  We pick Ana up tonight.  We're all looking forward to seeing her again and hope she had a great time.  She loved it last year, once she got over her initial burst of emotion when we came to get her.  She cried nearly inconsolably last year for about a half hour when

Thirteen years ago today, I got married.  I'm still very happy about this decision and consider it one of the best ones I've ever made.  I didn't imagine that I would be even more in love with Aaron today than I was on my wedding day.  I was pretty in love with him that day, but it seems like a pale comparison to today.  Here we are freshly married - aren't we cute? So before you all start gagging on the sentimental sap oozing from me, I'll quit.  But I want you to know how grateful and thankful I am to have this man in my life.  He's awesome and I love him! To celebrate our anniversary, we went on a date last night.  Yea!  We ended up in Muscatine which is a fair drive away.  We walked along the Mississippi for awhile, sat and people watched, snuggled happily together, and ended up at a fabulous little restaurant called Salvatore's.  It's a little authentic Italian pizzeria that serves more than pizza.  AMAZING!  I'm pretty sure that I consumed abo

Something happened to me yesterday that has never happened to me before in my adult life.  I ran out of things to plant in my garden spaces.  I currently have three gardens.  I'm tempted to take a fourth, but I'm pretty sure that will stretch me a little too thin (I keep telling myself that).  I have my own little garden at my house and I filled that up awhile ago.  I also am helping a woman down the street from me with her garden.  She's travelling all this month and will be gone here and there throughout the rest of the summer, so in exchange for taking care of her garden, I got some more space and get to enjoy the produce of what she's already planted.  I am also in charge of the garden at my mom's house.  So I had some glorious space to plant all sorts of things there.  I had a work day over there yesterday and got it all weeded and finished planting things.  I planted the things I had available to plant there and then I looked around and saw a strange thing: I

I had a delightful picking of strawberries yesterday.  I had enough to make a fresh strawberry pie and still have some leftovers.  It was so exciting to make it from strawberries I didn't have to buy.  I was going to take a picture of my lovely pie, but I couldn't wait long enough for it to set up properly and dug into it while it was still kind of runny.  It still tasted delicious even if it didn't look as pretty. I suffer from a syndrome in the summer that I call "summer stomach".  Summer stomach happens to me when the weather turns warm.  At that point, food no longer has a huge appeal to me.  Well, let me correct myself, most foods hold no appeal and cooking becomes more of a chore instead of a way to relax.  I usually only want to eat certain foods when the weather turns warm.  Those are: melons, strawberries, corn on the cob and salads.  I could very happily subsist on only those items all summer long.  Unfortunately, I am the only one in my family who gets

Again, I apologize for my lack of presence.  Seems to be a theme here lately.  I've been busy with summer fun going on.  Here's a little smattering of what we are now beginning to enjoy.  I planted a strawberry patch last year and they are bearing well this year now.  I'm excited.  I love strawberries and have wanted my own little patch for the last 20 years of my life.  I am finally getting that dream, though my patch is about 1/10 the size of what I wish it could be.  But I'll take what happiness I get. We've been busy with ball season now for the month of June.  Both David and Ana have two games each week.  Sometimes they overlap so we are only at the ball fields twice a week.  Other weeks, they will not overlap and at all and we'll be in fields four nights a week.  Makes for a busy week and also a bit hard to get proper suppers on the table.  But it's only for a month, the kids enjoy it, and I kind of like it too, though I am not at all sad when the sea