handsful

Marley: “Mom, when are you gonna blog again?”

Me:  “Well, I’ve really not taken any pictures lately.”

Marley:  “So, take some pictures.”

(grabbing camera)

Me:  “Okay”

Here’s Payton, trying desperately to avoid having his picture taken.

Ethan, also attempting to shield his face from the camera.

See the pic above?  No, me neither.  Marley deleted the one of herself, because she said she was “leaning all weird” in it.

Is anyone else seeing WHY the blog has been slow and lacking in pictures lately??  (by the way, Abbey was sick that day, so I didn’t attempt to get her picture!)

Let’s try the younger folk.

That’s more like it.  Put a camera near Lainey and she hits an instant pose/smile.  Nice, Lainey Lou.

Oh dear.  He’s in that phase where a camera means “ham it up”.  Goofy kid.

Let’s give Marley another try.

This is Jack, laying on the “poor, hungry puppy” face, hoping he’ll get a bite of pizza.  He knows Marley is a sucker for his sad face.

“MOM!  Take pictures of me!”

Lainey, doing her back walkover.  She’s been working very hard lately…tonight she was promoted to the  advanced tumbling class! Lainey had asked what skills she needed to master in order to move up, and she’s done NOTHING but worked on those this week.  It paid off.

And that, Marley is a blog post.  With pictures, no less.

Voila.

Gasp.

No pictures in this one.  Just wanted to jump on the blog and say hello.

Hello!  (waving)

And add a few of my thoughts…

First, I’m sorry you’re having to look at the SAME picture on the banner portion of the blog.  It’s been that same picture for over three years.  Dylan doesn’t even have his first leg, for pity sake, and he’s on his third!  But, WordPress doesn’t make it so easy to switch stuff like pics and fonts, which is a pain.  Our friend, Alan has been working to make this easier, and Randy promises me he’ll sit down with me to try and get a new pic up there.  I have hope…

If you read the last post, you got woozy watching Randy teetering on the top of our ladder.  You’ll be happy to know that he now has a 25′ extension ladder.  Problem solved.  As well as freshly replaced outside floodlights.

Guess what we have?  A bit of an infestation of fruit flies.  Eeek.  We thought we just had gnats at first, and wondered why so many were in our kitchen.  We now have several homemade traps filled with apple cider vinegar, topped with paper funnels.  Flies get in, can’t get out.  Hoping this takes care of it.  Any other ideas?

Randy took care of one of those pesky “list” things this weekend.  We’ve had a spot in our backyard that was constantly wet, no matter what the weather.  We were concerned that maybe a pipe leading to the garden sprinklers had busted or something.  Turns out, the previous owner was just a dimwit.  Attempting to divert drainage from the house to the backyard, he used pvc pipe, buried it only a few inches down, and then just left it open at the end.  The water was dumping from it and just saturating the ground, with nowhere for the excess water to go.  Randy, with some of the kids help, got it all fixed up so it drains downhill and into a gravel area (with a special drain thingy on the end).  Voila.  One honey-do DONE.

I’m in purge mode.  If it’s not nailed down and we’ve not used, worn, or played-with it in a while, it’s GONE.  Another criteria for my purge-fest…do I love it?  I hate clutter, having too much stuff around stresses me out.  Proof of this?  When I AM stressed, the first thing I do is straighten up, organize something, or re-arrange something.  Hey, it helps!  I’ve been taking gobs of stuff to charity drop-offs, kids consignment stores, and this weekend I’m taking a bunch of my “done with” clothing, bags, and jewelry to a women’s consignment event.  Yay for paring down and simplifying!

I’ve been cooking a lot lately.  Two of our favorites lately were Sweet Baby Rays crockpot bbq and cheesy potato soup.  Both were YUM and I’ve been told to make them again.  And, a lot.  No problem, they’re both really good and very economical.

I’m hoping to blog more often, I know I’ve been very lax about keeping up with it.  I think I’m just taking less pictures, which I have no good excuse for.  Gotta work on getting the pics off my camera, onto the computer, and then on the blog.  I’ll do better.

Well, It’s Sunday night, and I think I’ll go sit and watch TV with the family for a bit.  Before Monday shows up and the real-life of school, activities, and errands commences.

Night :)

Caught this guy hanging out on my coneflowers the other day…love his color.  Thankfully, he wasn’t eating the flowers.

Took this from the back deck.  The field gets cut one day, then a day or so later they bring in this funny tractor attachment that stirs it all up so it dries.  Another tractor comes next to push it into rows.  Finally, it’s baling day!  I love watching all this, if you can’t tell.

We had a few sunflowers this year, including this monster one (see the smaller ones beside?).  We harvested some of the seeds for next year, and will share the rest with the birds.

Think we need an extension ladder?  We’ve been needing to clean the spider webs from around the top windows for a while.  Today, Randy got creative with the tallest ladder we have, an extension pole, and a duster head.  Yes, it made me nervous to watch him.  Wondering about the tire?  We might use it for a tire swing.

Randy finished the mowing today.  This is down by our shop building, with the area in front where we have bonfires.  With as much land as we have, it can sometimes take a couple of days to get all the mowing done.  The boys usually help with another rider and a push mower, but they ditched him today for a day at an amusement park in Charlotte.

Walking back up towards the house.  We desperately need to add more gravel to our driveway.  And, see the very overgrown garden on the right?

And, there you have it.  A few random shots around our house.

I love it here.