Into the swing

What a day today was. We got so much accomplished that I feel wonderful! Tyler and Morgan and I went through all the boys clothes and did all the various sorting. Pile for Dara's kids, Micah's clothes that shift to Jake and Jake's that shift to Ben and Jake's that get put away for Ben next year and stuff that gets tossed and stuff that gets donated...after that Tyler and I did the shoes and the toys. What a job! Tyler and I then took the boys to Target to conservatively restock for the upcoming school year. We did better than I thought and we are now ready for school to begin!!!
Tonight Tyler suggested a little family walk before putting the kids to bed, so we all went for a walk, Morgan and the dogs too. Our walk ended up turning into a bike/scooter ride around the neighborhood until after 10pm! It was so nice, the weather was perfect, not typical for mid August. When we got back and were putting the bikes into the garage we decided to start cleaning up the garage and got a bunch of stuff put up into the attic. I haven't had such a productive day in a long time, and it isn't even Saturday yet! Those furlough days do seem to come in handy, now, if we could only have them and the money too!

This was a picture from Morgan's shower I wanted to include. Aunt Marcia bought Peyton a dress that someone made. Super cute and simple, it even had a matching hair bow.
Grandma Kay bought Peyton a Madeline doll house from the Goodwill for $4! I looked online and it goes for $150!!! Now we just need to collect some doll house furniture for it. Ben and Peyton still had fun playing with it.

August 3rd, Peyton put her brother's cowboy hat on and I thought she was too cute. She looks like a little cowgirl to me.

She also got into her basket of shoes that she has outgrown and insisted on wearing some. She has quite the shoe fetish. Below she is saying and signing hat.

Morgan's shower

August 1st
I threw my baby sister a shower! A few of her old friends came, Maddy and Jenny...

She got a lot of great baby gifts...

We played a few games, what's in baby's diaper?, how big around is Morgan's belly and a word scramble. Peyton liked wearing the yarn from the belly game...

Mom cried, of course...

Mom got Dustin a very cute antique Pooh.

There was yummy food, crab cakes (thanks Yolawnda) and cucumber sandwiches and sandwich rolls, and more. Dara got a wonderful cake...

Mother and daughter...Just 19 more days until the official due date!

Selective color

One of my favorite things to do with pictures is to select certain things out of the picture using the magnetic lasso tool and then select inverse and remove the color so the part you select is the only one that is in color. When I did the previous post as soon as I saw this picture of Miss P at the beach I knew that I had to do it. There is a section in our hallway that I have pictures like this of the boys and she was looking at them the other day and I realized that we needed one of her, so now I have it! It looks even better in a frame. Another nice touch was that our black ink is low so it came out looking softer or more washed out and I love it. So, go check out the post below so you can see the rest of the pictures from our beach trip!

From Utah to Pismo

We drove straight from Becca and LeGrand's house to our hotel in Grover Beach on July 16. The kids were great yet again on our almost 12 hour drive. We will definately need to visit Utah more often. That night we ate at A.J. Spurs. It was an awesome resturant. The decor was amazing, animal heads and full body stuffed Buffalo and mountain goat, there were wild boar heads and all kinds of crazy things. The food was amazing, Tyler and I both got Filet Mignon (my favorite) mine was medium rare and Ty's was Medium (what a wussy) and it was bacon wrapped. Yum. They brought us rootbeer floats for dessert, the kids loved that.
The next day we headed to the beach pretty early. We took a walk on the pier and watched the surfers for a while. I had to include this picture of P. She is a pretty big nose picker, well, not so much picks, but she likes her finger up there.

The day was very overcast and the water wasn't too cold, we all got pretty burnt, even my legs, which never happens. The kids faces were ok since I did have the smarts enough to sunscreen them.

Jacob made me laugh, he is always finding stuff and he got this huge thing of seaweed and drug it all the way down the beach to where we were, passersby couldn't help but step on and pop it. Jacob also found lots of dead crabs to bring to our sand castle, which the flies loved, thanks Jake.

I love making sand castles, so the kids humored me on this and Ty helped with the mote, there is even a little pool. The castle is much smaller than I imagined but it's nice, plenty big for our shrunken family to live in. The boys wanted to watch the tide come in and destroy it but we didn't stick around long enough.

Had to get one of us, I'm trying to get us in a few pictures here and there so my kids know that we were with them!

The boys have been into Indiana Jones lately because of the video game and they found these seaweed whips and had a great time whipping them.

I told them to be careful or they would whip themselves. Jacob got his shoulder pretty good, there was a red welt for a few days.

Miss P loved the sand, she also brought me a bee that she had cupped in her hand, it must have been missing it's stinger because it chose not to sting her! She was so fun to watch.

She loves shoes and if there are any around she'll help herself, especially if they're flip flops.

Oh my sweet

If you didn't already notice I have been having major problems with my blog. I am no longer, thank you to my sweet husband Tyler. I have spent too long trying to fix it and I just got a call from him a few minutes ago and he told me to check our blog, it is all fixed! I had to save my Utah trip post as a draft to get my sidebar stuff back where it goes, so I'll have to do another post for that trip, which is fine, I wasn't done posting it all anyway. So, for some reason that post was the problem, or the way I posted it was anyway.


So, times being what they are, and money being abnormally tight, Tyler and I decided that this year for my birthday (which is tomorrow) we will make it more service oriented. He kicked it off a few nights ago and made dinner when I didn't feel like making it. We had lil smokie stir fry, what a creation...I think he has a bit of his dad in him. I love whatever food I don't have to cook! Ty was so cute when he called, he knew the whole blog thing was really bugging me and wanted to get it working before my birthday, and he did it. THANK YOU TYLER, I LOVE YOU! Next gift idea...help me and the boys clean up their disaster of a room.


This is him, as a fountain. I don't really have any recent and normal pictures of him. It was either this one or the one of him shaking his face.

Ladybug mating season

Ok, so, first things first. I have all of my sidebar stuff still, it's just not on my sidebar, it's at the very bottom of my page, not real convenient. I know it isn't because I changed my background because I changed my background to try and fix it, it was fine with the previous background and then it wasn't, no changes made, other than a new post. So anyway, I still need help, also, my layout option is no longer there, it is however on my other blogs in my dashboard. Anyway, I guess I'll have to just live with everything being at the bottom for now.

I have several posts to do, but I am for some reason blogging about ladybugs. I went out to water my garden this morning and they were everywhere, which is nice because we have their favorite treat, aphids. As I was looking at them I realized they were all mostly in pairs, one on top of the other. I don't know how I thought Ladybugs reproduced, but based on my surprise at seeing this I apparently didn't think they actually had intercourse. I am glad they are happy in my garden, we could use some aphid control. My watermelons are growing quite nicely, there are a lot of them, my pumpkins are blooming, no fruit yet, but the leaves are looking kinda sad, too much yellow. This is our first year really growing anything, so it's practice. I hope to put a nice big garden full of yummy things in the next planting season.


Here is a closeup of a pair of ladybug lovers. If you click on the picture you may be able to see what I saw. I'm not the best photographer, nor do I have the best camera.

HELP ME, PLEASE!!!

My links on my side bar are not showing up. Anyone know why this is and what I can do about it. I can't check anyone's blogs! Help!