I Hate Jam!

But I love Jelly. Jam just has too many little slimey bits in it. And I hate biting into the seeds. Yesterday at the grocery store I found that strawberries were only $1/lb so I called my mom for a jelly recipe. It said I could get about 3 1/2 cups of juice out of 8 lbs of strawberries, which would make 6 pints of jelly. So I bought 8 lbs of strawberries. When I got home I found that I only got the $1/lb on 4 of the 8 lbs, the rest were $4/lb. Still cheaper than buying really hard to find Strawberry Jelly. Especially since I ended up getting nearly 10 cups of juice and was able to make a batch of jelly, a quart of syrup and still have enough juice to make another batch of jelly. I just need to buy another box of pectin. Today was a relatively cool day. It was 76 when I got up and is still only 83 at noon. It worked out pretty well. Way more fun and fullfilling to make it myself than search for it in the stores. And so yummy!

Shopping

This is what I bought yesterday, 5 minutes after I got it home.


Oh, you can't tell what it is, well it WAS a 2 cup measuring cup. The red is the lines on it.
My sweet little Hyrum decided he wanted to see what it was and pulled the bag off of the counter. This is probably the worst part of having tile floors.

Girl's Night Out

Last night our ward had a girl's night out salon/spa because this weekend was the father/son campout. We did our nails and had facials, had snacks... girl stuff. Josi was so excited to go. As soon as Ben got home she was in the garage telling him what we were doing and that it was just for girls, no boys! At the end we had a Project Runway style fashion show. We broke into 5 teams and each team got 2 bags of items that we had to create 2 outfits with.

Josi was one of the models. She fits better into a garbage sack than any of the adults did. Here is in the middle of the design process. This was a face she was pulling all night long. She had gotten laughs the first few times, and like any 4 year old, she kept hamming it up. Our bag consisted of garbage sacks, tissue paper, double sided tape, toilet paper, clothes pins, ribbon, yarn, hawaiian leis, and safety pins.

Part of our team was a lady that I met while we owned our video store. I hadn't seen her since we sold the store, but she was there last night. I was really good to see her again. She and I worked on this dress together.

There is Josi 5th from the left or 6th from the right. Our other model is to her left. I had little to do with her outfit. This was the judging of the designs.

Here is our finished product. Josi was a great model. She got a chocolate bar for it. Our design won! That is a garbage bag and tissue paper on her head, held on with a rubber band. Her dress is a garbage sack held together with clothes pins. Her belt and sleeves are tissue paper. She has a toilet paper train that you can see in the top picture. She was ready for a day at the Kentucky Derby or a night at a grand gala. Such a cutie. I was told I was in charge of Halloween costumes by a lady in our ward. It was really fun. Josi had a ball.

Happy Mother's Day to me

After bringing the furniture home, Ben took the kids out and left me home. He said he wanted to have a little personal time with them. Made sense, summer is coming on fast and won't see them much for a few months. I was happy to have a little time to myself and I took the time to blog and work on my dad's website a little and watch one of my favorite movies, Pride and Prejudice. Not the condensed version with Kiera Knightly, but the A&E version that is 6 VHS tapes long (I am watching tape 6 now). I am going to have to get it on DVD now though, because tape 3 wouldn't play at all and 2 of the others were not working properly either. Kids!
Well, Ben just got home and the kids lugged in a package, grinning ear to ear, exclaiming Happy Mother's Day and Happy dirfday Muders (Hyrum).




Ben had taken the kids shopping for me. He gets sweeter every year. Hyrum picked out the card and Josi picked out the Hannah Montana wrapping paper.
I asked if I was supposed to open it now or wait til tomorrow. He said I might want to open it now, but I could wait til tomorrow if I wanted.







So I opened it now. Inside was ....




the fabric for my curtains in the front room! And a new feather pillow for the bed. (Mine was a hand-me-down from my mom when I was in junior high and barely resembles a pillow anymore, but I totally love.)





I didn't want Ben to feel bad, but it was the wrong color. It was red, instead of the burgandy I had picked out. I finally got brave enough to tell him, and he said that the lady at the store said they had two of them, but one of them was out.
Of course, it was my burgandy one. Ben, typical male that he is, couldn't tell the difference and got me the red.





It is still beautiful and looks great in the room. It matches the few other decorative things I have in there, like the candles on the table. We hung it up on the blinds to see how we liked it. Ben says he likes it better, and it is growing on me.










Here is a close-up of the fabrics.




I guess next week I will be making curtains, festoons and sheers. I can see now that I am going to have to line the fabric. It looks striped where the sun shines through it. I still have to pick out the rods for them though. I am not sure of the style I want yet though.


Hyrum's own personal gift to me, just in time for Mother's Day, is that he is all daytime potty trained. He still has to wear a diaper at night, but he hasn't had an accident during the day for nearly a week. And he goes when he gets up in the morning. I am so happy I don't have to buy diapers any more. At least not for a while. (Nothing implied!) Thanks Mom and Karin for the cold bath trick.

At long last

Woohoo! We finally got our front room furniture. I guess it had been ready for a while, but the guy at the La-Z-Boy store messed up our phone number so they couldn't call us. I finally called to check on it and we were just now able to go get it today. We decided to save the delivery fees and get them ourselves since the pick-up location was across the street from Ben's work.


Here is a somewhat elevated view from one angle.
We got a sofa and two chairs. (The other chair is behind that half wall.) We definately need some color in there now. But it does have that "celestial room" feeling Ben always said he wanted that room to have. I have a few things that I need to get framed and put up.





If anyone ever feels like splurging and spoiling me I really want a copy of "Prayer at Valley Forge" for that room. Just a print of it in the size I want is about $100. You would have to really love me! :)
I love this painting. It was painted by the same guy, Arnold Friberg, that painted all of those Book of Mormon paintings they had on display at the Conference Center. You can read about it here. I will put a copy of the 'Declaration of Independence' on one side and 'The Family, A Proclamation' on the other side, which I already have.










And here is the view from another angle. The diamonds can be seen in this one. There's the other chair! I can't get a much better picture. That half wall is in the way.




Here is one of the chairs so you can see that shape. The kiddos had to get in on the photo action. We are leaving the plastic on them until the novelty of them wears off of the kids a little. They were climbing all over them and jumping on them, so I am glad we did.






And a close up of their cute mugs.












And the sofa, for the shape. I really like them. They are pretty much exactly what I wanted. We had found some at Ikea that I liked, but when we went back to get them, they were gone. They had been discontinued. It worked out good though, 'cause I like these better and I think they will hold up better too.

I DID IT!

Okay, I got up at 5:30 this morning to beat the heat. I weed-wacked it a little, mostly around the edges. I am so glad I got a weed wacker that doubles as an edger. It doesn't look as green anymore because it had gotten so long that it was all thatchy underneath. It took me two hours to do it, but I got it all cut and I even got it to the lowest cutting height. And it was even kind of fun, mostly the challenge of it. It looks much neater now, hopefully it greens back up now. I decided I hate bermuda grass. The runners it sends out to spread are so thick, it jams up the mower. Compare to the top photo below. Tomorrow I will prune the tree, if I can move:)

Mowing the Lawn

So, we are finally to the point that we need a lawn mower. The front yard has completely filled in and is growing like crazy now. You can see in the picture below. You can also see I need to prune that tree up again! It grows like crazy in the spring/summer.

I just used the weed wacker all last summer, because there wasn't that much grass and I could get it all done at once ( a little side note, our weed wacker is a cordless electric one, which means it has a battery that I have to charge after each use). Well now, there is so much grass that I can only get half of it done before the battery dies.

And, since the grass in the back has started growing in, we are really needing a lawn mower. So today I went to Lowes and bought one of those reel mowers that run on muscle power. I thought it would cost less in the long run, because we wouldn't have to pay for gasoline or electricity for it, and that I could get some exercise too. Well, it sure is a work out! But it was kind of fun too.

I think our grass is too long to start with because I had it set at the highest it would go and I could barely go a few inches and it seemed like it was getting jammed. I even tried adjusting the blades and it didn't seem to work. Any advice dad, since you have one too?
You can kindof see here that it is really long on the top and bottom left of the picture and shorter on the right and up into the middle left some. I had to keep pulling it back and push it a few inches then pull it back and push it a few inches, going a little bit further each time. But I gave up because it is about 99 degrees here today and I was getting too hot. I already took a shower today after an hour of pilates and didn't want to take another one. But, sitting here typing this post and re-hydrating I can feel the sweat roll down my back and stomach, so I think I will have to take another one anyway. Tonight I will try to get Ben to help me and go ahead of me with the weed wacker first and I will follow behind with the mower. I will even try to get it to cut shorter. I am definately going to have to water less so that I don't have to cut it as often. Maybe by the end of the summer I will be in great shape. My shoulders, back and abs can already feel it.

I had a couple of handfuls of the winter grass (fescue) left so I sprinkled it in a couple of spots on the back yard and here are the tiny little blades starting to poke out. And that little clump on the right is the bermuda starting to spread a little. It is so exciting to think we will have a nice back yard soon.

On a slightly different topic, here is a plant I have potted on our front porch. It has just really started to bloom the last couple of weeks. I love it, because it is purple. It is the only plant that isn't pink or red or orange so far. It is called a 'Desert Sky Flower' I think it is so pretty. Click on the picture so you can see the details of the flowers. It is sort of vining so I hope to train it up and around the column it is next to just out of the picture). I will probably have to plant it in the ground there eventually because it will out grow that pot. Then I can plant some annuals or something in this pot.

Water Fun

It has been really hot this week. Upper nineties and it is just getting hotter. Yesterday I got an email inviting us to go play at one of the parks near us this morning. I decided we should go so the kids could have a little social interaction with other kids. We don't get out much. So at 9:30 we got all lubed up with sun block and in their new summer outfits we got yesterday.

The park had a splash pad that sprayed water up in the air. The "floor" was made of recycled rubber so they wouldn't slip or get hurt if they fell. At first they were a little wary of the water. It had been a while since we had been to a water park. But the other kids quickly showed them what to do.

They got the hang of it pretty quick. Hyrum would jump in the puddles in the intervals between the water works.

They both ended up going all out. Josi skipped all around singing.

Hyrum eventually would even stand in the streams of water.

My little water babies were the wettest kids there. Next time we will have to wear our swimsuits and I would get out there too.

Happy 4-20!

On April 20th, Hyrum came to me and put his finger and thumb together as if he was holding a joint, put it up to his pursed lips and sucked. Then made a gesture as if he was handing it to me. I was shocked and wanted to find out where he learned it from, but I couldn't stop laughing. I asked Jayme if she had put him up to it or where he had learned it. With me laughing, he kept doing it over and over, which just made me laugh more. Jayme didn't know what I was talking about. Jayme realized what was going on and then told me he wasn't smoking a joint, he was playing tea party with Josi earlier and was just sipping from his tiny teacup and then offering me some.

Easter

I finally took the time to get the easter pictures off of Ben's phone. We took them at the church on our way in. We (of course) were late and didn't have our regular camera, but I wanted to get some pictures while they still looked fresh. I am glad we did, because after church Josi's curls had relaxed some and Hyrum's hair was all fuzzy. I made Josi's dress and Hyrum's tie. It was so fun to make. I even hand mad all of the pink edging, bias tape and piping for the dress and dyed the lace under the skirt to match. It surprised even me at how well it turned out. It is my second favorite that I have made.

They do love each other sometimes!

The best part about this dress is that Josi loves it. All of the others I have made her, she was either too young to care or she hated wearing because she said it was itchy. I think because all of the seams were unfinished. This dress I finally had a serger to finish the edges. Thank you mommy and, ultimately, daddy for giving my mom a new serger for Christmas that made it so my mom had 1 serger too many!

What a handsome little dude! I was going to make him a bow tie at first, but I thought it would be fun to try a necktie. I just took apart a clip-on that he had and use it as a pattern, then put it back together. Instead of this one being a clip on, it has a strip that goes through the tie and clips in the back. It made it look more like a regular tie.

It was so sunny they couldn't open their eyes, but they just look so cute!

Cheating

I finally decided to cheat and go buy some plants for my garden. I got 12 tomato plants, (4 cherry, 8 Roma) 4 bell peppers (2 red, 2 green), a cantaloupe and a zucchini plant. Of course as I was planting them, I found 3 more tomato plants that had sprouted and 2 pepper plants. But that just gives me more plants.


Hyrum helped me place them in the garden. He was so happy to help and each one he would pick up and say "so heaby mommy, so heaby" as he lugged it to his chosen spot. I had to move most of them around because he had them in groups of threes and a few in the wrong spots. But I waited til he was gone.

This is after I planted everything. The corn is growing so fast. Some of the plants are already about 3 feet tall. I don't know if my brussel sprouts will do anything. They have a lot of aphids on them and I have sprayed them a few times, but all of the new leaves are curled and I don't see any sign of the fruit. I will have to make a small box with screen on it to cover them next fall and try again.

And I picked some more carrots and about 8 beets. I am so excited to eat them. I haven't had beets in so long, especially not garden fresh ones.