Wildflowers

Planting a lawn has been a challenge to say the least, but one of the things I love most about our property is this patch of wildflowers. Claire loves to go down and pick the flowers and there is nothing she loves more than having her picture taken!

SUNRIVER

This year was our 9th? annual sunriver trip. As usual it was fabulous and we lucked out with some AMAZING weather. Our trip was extended a few days longer due to the death of my uncle Jim from Bend. Jim spent most of his life in a nursing home after he was in a logging accident when he was younger. We grew up visiting him in a nursing home. It was a sad day for my grandpa (jim was his only child) but I imagine Jim is so happy in heaven!

The rest of the trip was amazing. We had perfect weather, we swam everyday, rode bikes and played tennis. Our tennis fun was cut a little short when my brother in law Garrick tore his achilles and was down for the count. He ended up getting surgery and is recovering from that.

According to my sister, when all is said and done he should be better than ever and hopefully will play us again next year!
Claire rode her first "big girl bike" on this trip. She LOVED it and wanted to ride everywhere.
The kids loved playing bingo together. Besides that, i'm not sure what else they did, I hardly ever saw them. (jk...sort of)

I went on my first white water rafting trip. My only complaint was that it was too short!! I loved it though.
Not much I can say about this one...
The boys taking a break from one of their bike rides.
:ast but not least, Brent's solution to not having a bike rack? DUCT TAPE. yes he duct taped

our bikes to the top of the van and it worked beautifully. He's such a macgyver type. It was yet another fun filled trip!

house projects

People often comment on the amount of work required to have some "land." I definately agree, it's a lot of work, but we are loving every minute of it. The last month has been spent trying to get a lawn to grow. Much harder in the idaho panhandle than in Oregon's Willamette valley! Brent has been working on building the kids a playset. This picture was taken in the beginning stages. It's looking pretty good now, we even snagged a free slide from my sis-in-law who happened to have one. Brent and I build a little rock retaining wall by hand and i'm working on a cobblestone path. Every day the kids have to fill me a bucket of rocks and every day or so I try to spend an hour on the path. Im sure it will take me all summer to finish. But that's what's happening around our place right now!

Maybe you can take sewing lessons?

My latest projects...let's just say I was not too successful. I bought a lot of fabric to make some roman shades for the windows in the picture below. They were a pretty pintucked white fabric, I followed the instructions carefully, put up the first one and it looked horrible. It fell all kiddywompas and looked horrible. So in frustration I made some "valances" for now. Brent tried to be helpful and said things like "I'm sure we can make them work" and "maybe you could take sewing lessons." Hmmmmm.... Thanks for trying honey.....

So I gave up on the sewing project and turned to something i'm actually semi-decent at. I cut out some vinyl for the space above the t.v. I'm happy with how it turned out. I added more to the swirls on the bottom picture (just in case you are super observant and noticed they are different.)

Subway art

Now that we are mostly settled in, i've started trying to spruce things up a bit. I've seen these subway signs online and thought it would be fun to try and make one. It was a p.a.i.n. to make and a lot of the words are crooked, but that's what gives it character, right? However crooked it turned out, I still love it. All of the words represent our family in some way.

I received a new calling today, 1st counselor in the RS presidency. I haven't been in relief society since we've been married...almost 12 years. But I am actually really excited. The RS president is really cool and I'm excited to serve and get to know that ladies!

A star in the making

Malia was pretty excited when she tried out for the school play and landed the part of Wendy in "Peter Pan." Mom was pretty excited that all rehearsals took place during music, (during school hours) Malia even had a solo, which she rocked, of course. It was the cutest play and Malia remembered all of her lines. We were pretty dang proud of her!

She is blessed with my rosy cheeks. :)

Better late than never

I was looking back on my 2010 blog posts and realized that I never posted any pictures from Jacob's baptism. I want to have these pictures put into our yearly book, so I figure it's better late than never right? Jacob was baptized in Spokane with lots of family around to celebrate the day with him!

What a good looking bunch....

Now that Jacob is 8 he's started getting involved in scouts. Scouting is like a whole foreign world to me. When I go to meetings I have no idea what they are talking about half of the time. They have their own special lingo. I guess that's what happens when you have 4 sisters and a brother who just wasn't that into scouting.