Wow, what a difference one day can make. We had that nice slow rain all day yesterday and by 5:00, we had grass poking up out of the ground!! How exciting. You can see little patches of it coming up in the front and back.


I just could not wait to share this super cool craft project I have been working on for the last two days! These are crayon rolls and they hold 16 crayons and then roll up and stay snug in their little pockets. I think these are neat ideas. I hate trying to get crayons in and out of a crayon box and it is almost impossible for little ones. So instead of dumping out the whole box and having crayons roll everywhere, these are easy to slip in and out. Plus, how long does the box last anyways? Within 10 minutes, that thing is already been torn and the crayons really never stay in.




I made a girls and boys crayon roll. My mom and I are going to make these for Tabatha to give to her 1st grade class for Christmas. Plus, we have a lot of little ones coming for Christmas this year (hint, hint)!











Madi is still getting used to it. We don't do a lot of crayons unless we are coloring together. I am going to adapt the pattern and make one that will hold her Color Wonder Markers. I love them, she can color anywhere and anytime and I don't have to worry about making a mess.


If you want to make your own Crayon Roll, check out Skip to My Lou. She has awesome craft ideas for kids and kids to make. Plus tons and tons of other ideas. Or let me know and I can make some for you!

Another Haircut!!

Chris and I worked down at the shop all weekend making bookshelves for downstairs. They turned out really great. We made three and since we didn't stain them, we were able to get them completely made in two days and are already in the basement. I've spent most of the morning getting our books and collectibles out of storage and getting things arranged. The downstairs is almost done, except for decorating. Next weekend the plan is to get the entertainment gadgets all hooked up and finished. We need to mount the projector and get the speakers mounted and all the wires run. I'm ready to get that done so we can start spending some time down there, other than just using it for Madi's track and field events.





I've also included some pics of the new furniture and our "tv room". It still seems sparse down there and we are debating on getting a couple of recliners. There is definitely room for them but we just have so much stinking furniture in this house now, I am tired of buying furniture.








So, while Chris and I were busy working on the bookshelves, Madi was running around the shop playing with everything she could get her hands on. Saturday, within 20 minutes of being there, she was a total dirt ball. Completely covered in dirt and marking chalk, her hands were black and her face was gross. Chris had gotten the shop all cleaned up last week so we brought her bike along for something to play with. Sunday she got bored and I started a movie for her in the office. I went in to check on her and she was sitting on the couch with scissors in her hand. I freaked out and took them from her and then noticed a big pile of hair on her lap. Then I really started to freak out. She had managed to chop off quite a bit of hair on the top of her head. It looks totally stupid and sticks up in the air but there is nothing I can do with it unless I chopped it all off. But I won't. I've been wanting to get her pictures done for months now. We were finally slowing down a bit around here that I was hoping to get them done within the next couple of weeks. Not anymore...I just hope it grows out enough by the time we get Christmas pics done. Needless to say, she went to Nana and Papa's shortly after this happened. This also confirms that she is a monkey, those scissors were on top of a filing cabinet and she had to have stood on the back of the couch to have reached them. I'm just glad she didn't cut herself or worse (shudder).





We have had a slow rain all day long so far. I am loving it!! I spent all last week watering the front and back yard. It literally takes me all day, moving hoses around, to get it all watered. It's giving me a nice break and I'm loving the free water too. I just hope it starts growing, we have yet to see anything poking out of the ground.


Well, need to get back to the basement. I am hoping to get started on my newest sewing project. I'll show you what I am working on next time!! Have a great week!!
Love, Amy

What a busy weekend. Not only just the weekend, but we have been busy and getting to see and do new things since Thursday. I am currently downloading 122 pictures from my camera and haven't even looked at the pics Chris took on the little camera. It has been fun and exhausting at the same time.

Some of the highlights have been:
Thursday
1. Seeing a blimp outside of our house, how often do you get to see a blimp in Salina, KS.
2. Budweiser Clydesdale horses in full hitch at Rolling Hills Zoo.

Friday
1. Trip to the zoo.
2. New golf cart. Loving it! I feel so much better taking Madi on the golf cart than on the 4-wheeler. It scoots pretty good...going down hill!!

Saturday
1. Parade downtown for Smoky Hill Museum Street Fair and also Salina's 150th Birthday. The longest parade ever, it took an hour and fifteen minutes for the whole thing. It obviously didn't keep Madi's attention the whole time. All she wanted to do was eat the candy!
2. Went to the street fair and quickly made our way through the museum, did a couple of games and went down the giant inflatable slipper slide.
3. Birthday party at the skating rink. Again, all Madi wanted to do was eat nachos and run around after the kids. She did finally get on roller skates and made one stretch of the rink and was done.

Sunday
1. Church
2. Bought fertilizer, grass seed, and 5 pine trees.
3. Spent all day finishing the tilling on the front and back yard, applied fertilizer and grass seed and planted our trees! Feels so good to have it done. Now we are praying for rain and dreading the water bill next month. I just hope the grass comes up, that was a lot of work.

Finally got the pics downloaded. I've got to get busy cleaning this dirty house, yuck! Have a good week.

Love, Amy



Check out the newest blog, Waiting on Eugelmer! Jason and Tabatha's blog.

First Haircut

Monday was Madi's first official haircut. I have trimmed her bangs a couple of times (not very good) but Monday we got her bangs trimmed and her hair evened out in the back. Looks great!! She won't let me do anything to her hair and very rarely even lets me brush it. I thought about cutting it real short and giving her a style instead of trying to do something with it everyday. After looking back at pictures this last weekend, I decided against it. She had no hair for so long. It wasn't even long enough to start doing anything with until January of this year. So, I just couldn't cut all of her hard work off!!



It's been awhile since I did a post about Madi. She is working on her two year molars right now. She has one in on the bottom and the other is almost in, nothing on top yet. She is definitely a two year old right now. She has little melt downs several times a day over nothing. She will be playing and having fun and all of a sudden she falls on the floor and "cries".
Me: "What's wrong Madi, why are you fussing?"
Madi: "I want a popsicle, snif snif"
Me: "But you didn't even ask for a popsicle, don't cry."
Madi: "Mommy, can I have a popsicle!" And everything is fine. She is so crazy sometimes. I just let her throw her fits.

She is starting to notice that she is alone. She will tell me, I'm going to play...in my room...by myself. So sad. And since we have been talking about Jason and Tabatha having a baby, she is now asking where is her baby sister. But she did tell me that her best friend is Oliver and she chases him with her doll stroller daily. The noise in the house when they are "playing" is deafening.

I am still trying to get her to potty on the potty chair. She occasionally will go sit and potty, but it has to be her idea. What a horrible time to try and potty train a child, being two, independent and stubborn and trying to get them to sit for more than five seconds. She'll sit and grunt and then say "It's not working" and gets up. I have to remind her to sit and have patience. I'm not pushing it too hard, it's like everything else with her, it will eventually click and just happen (I hope).

Madi is such a talker, she talks all the time. We took a trip to Beloit last week and she talked the whole way there (an hour drive) and she talked all the way home. When she isn't talking, she is singing. She loves singing nursery rhymes and along with the radio. She is very inquisitive, always asking questions and we are constantly pointing out things.

She is loads of fun and a handful at the same time. That's probably why I love and hate staying home sometimes.

Have a great weekend!
Love, Amy

Pears, Pears, Pears

So here is what I have been up to for the past two days...well 3 days since today was cleanup day! A friend of ours has a neighbor with a pear tree that just went crazy with pears this year. Monday night we went over and picked at least 50 pounds of pears. We didn't plan on getting that many but the owners of the tree came out and helped us pick. They are obviously getting tired of pears and the tree is still loaded with ripe pears ready to be picked. Needless to say, they were happy to get rid of them.



Here is our beginning product, lots of pears!


I found some recipes online for Spiced Pear Jam, Canned Pears, and Pears Conserve. I have never made jam or canned before but I thought I would give it a try. With free pears and only a couple of other ingredients and canning jars (that are reusable), I figured if it didn't turn out, I wasn't out a bunch of money. So, Tuesday after Madi went down for nap I started peeling pears for Spiced Pear Jam. It sure takes a lot of pears, once you remove the peel and core, to make 8 cups of pears. I peeled pears from 12:00 to 6:00 and only had enough to make one batch of jam and one batch of just canned pears.


The smell in the house from the Spiced Jam was awesome. It smelled like fall and reminded me of Christmas, it was great. I thought about just making some and using it for potpourri in a small crock pot. Yummy!! I was able to get both of them canned before Chris came home and I left one of the jars of jam open for us to try. Those two batches yielded 3 jelly jars of jam, 5 small jelly jars of jam, and four pints of canned pears. Not a lot to show for all my work. So Chris comes home and says "that's all you got done?" Like I had should have had all 50 pounds of pears peeled already. He looked at the pile of pears still left and immediately called his parents to come out and help peel, he is so goofy! He decided he didn't like the chunky jam that I made and wanted to puree the pears and make jam like you would buy from the store.


First of all, if you don't know Chris, he doesn't do anything in small scale and he doesn't follow recipes. He is also a very, very messy cook. I don't know if that is a Chris thing or a guy thing. But he managed to dirty up four different machines trying to get the pears pureed. And he doesn't cleanup while he is cooking, he just brings out the next thing and slides the mess over. I have quite a bit of counter space now and he managed to have all of it dirty and full of everything in the kitchen. Drives me NUTS!!



This is my first batch, on the stove top in a large pot.





This is Chris' batch. Tripled and in our huge roaster oven. At this point it is 9:30 at night and this stuff is supposed to simmer for two hours and then can it right away. We decided to cover it with foil and I would finish cooking it the next day. There was no way I was going to stay up all night to make jam. It's a good thing we didn't wait either. I started it back up the next day at 8:00 in the morning and it cooked until 12:00 and then I canned it. Triple the recipe, double the time! It still turned out great, but next time, I will try and have it done before he gets home from work!




Here is my final product. A huge success for my first time. All my jars sealed. The jam turned out great, the canned pears look great, my conserve didn't turn out very well, but I found a better recipe and will try it next time.


Now, we are trying to find an apple tree!! And next year we will be planting our own fruit trees!

Aunt Amy

I am so excited to say that I am going to be an aunt!!!

Jason and Tabatha are expecting their first baby on April 25th. They had their first doctors appointment last week and they were able to have a sonogram and see the baby and see the heartbeat. Everything is going well and they are both very excited.

Congratulations and we love you guys!

Cleaning Weekend

What a long weekend. We spent two days cleaning. Saturday, Chris helped me clean the whole upstairs. What a relief to have that done and with help. Sunday we spent the afternoon outside cleaning the garage and getting it reorganized. I can now park my vehicle inside! A couple of weeks ago while Chris was out riding the four wheeler, he noticed we had two musk thistle plants out in the field.



So, yesterday he went back out to cut them down. Instead he found hundreds of plants. Musk thistle is a noxious weed in Kansas and can easily take over a field. Plus they are hard to get rid of, they lay dormant for years. And it is actually illegal to have them in Kansas. A friend of ours has some land north of Minneapolis and he has been fighting these things for three years now. But of course we have seen them all over this area recently in the fields and along the roads. We spent a couple hours out cutting the heads off and pulling the plant out of the ground or spraying it with weed killer. I don't know if we are doing any good but I'd rather do something than nothing. We didn't get them all yet but we made huge progress. Once we get the heads all picked we are going to mow that field. We mowed it last year but we haven't mowed it at all this year yet. So hopefully that will help also.

That was our fun filled weekend. Hope everyone else had a good one. Happy Birthday to Grandpa Tom last Friday. Happy Birthday to Aunt Linda tomorrow, Emily on Friday and Ella on Saturday!

Love, Amy

It's Official!!

As of yesterday at 12:00 pm, we are done building (at least on the house). YEAH!! Carpet layers finished up yesterday and it looks awesome. It is so nice to be able to walk anywhere in the house and not worry about tracking dirt and dust everywhere. Plus, it's been a great area for Madi to just run and do whatever she wants. Especially on days that we can't be outside, it will be great.

Now we just need to finish putting stuff where we want it and I need to clean, clean, clean. The upstairs has been ignored and everything is covered in dust. So you know what I will be doing, fall cleaning!!

Here are some pics of the basement. The carpet looks a little pink in the photos, but it isn't. It's the same carpet as upstairs, beige.





Love, Amy

Ugh!

"My girlfriend is late for our annual intimate encounter. By this time of the year, she usually has begun to send me sweet harbingers of our end-of-summer fling that make me tear up, but so far, nothing. Shes probably waiting to surprise me on my birthday, which is coming up in a few weeks. Shes done that before, so I'm not worried. We've had a relationship for years, so I know this is just her playful way of messing with my head -- in particular, my sinuses. When I was younger, I would awake on my birthday to find that she'd finally arrived. I couldn't see her diaphanous beauty because my eyelids would be mattered shut; however, I knew Id gotten a whiff of her intoxicating pollen because my nasal passages would be so swollen they could stop a speeding bullet. She has that effect on me. Always has, always will.

She disgusts my wife, as any mistress would, especially one who moves in. Her name is Hay Fever (unmodified for this family newspaper), and she generally shows up about this time with enough luggage for a two-month stay . I should mention that she stops by briefly in the spring and early summer but remains uncharacteristically aloof. A few sneezes and a mildly runny nose is all she has time for. But, as summer wanes, her desires peak and all she can think about is finding ways to drive me crazy. (That's how I know Hay Fever is a woman.)

"Why don't you take something?" my wife implores. I have an aversion to pills of any kind, firmly believing that the forbidden fruit of Eden was not an apple but a time-release gel cap. Hay Fever learned this long ago and uses it to her advantage. She knows she can have her way with me for many weeks before her charms become too intense and I'm driven, snorting, sneezing and wheezing, to the medicine chest, sin or no sin. I am no match for Hay Fever, but neither is she for a hard freeze. It must be freeze. A frost wont do. She laughs at a frost and then comes after me in unquenchable fury, as if I had something to do with the weather. The best birthday gift imaginable would be a temperature reading in the single digits, but with the Earth heating up, no longer is there a place in the Northern Hemisphere that chills that low so early in September. Eventually winter arrives, and Hay Fever departs. I stand in the doorway, eyes residually crimson, sniffling the last of her, not unhappy at all to see her go."

Artical written by Gordon Fiedler of the Salina Journal on 8-24-08.

I read this article a couple of weeks ago and laughed because I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had just gotten my visit from Miss Hay Fever myself. It wasn't too bad yet, it would go away in a couple of days. But she is still here. I was laying in bed last night, not able to sleep or breath, with water running down my face from my leaking eyeballs, and this article popped into my head.

I love this time of year. The weather cools down and we get a huge break on the electric bills because I can open the windows. But on the other hand, I am so miserable with allergies because the windows are open. And not just allergies but my asthma then starts giving me fits. It's a vicious cycle. I was able to handle the runny nose and itchy watery eyes during the day for awhile. I would only take my little pink pill of heaven (Benadryl) at night so I could actually lay down and breath and get some sleep. But I can no longer go without medicine. My new best friend is my Claritin. Like Mr. Fiedler, I am longing for that first freeze now!!

Busy, Busy

This last week I have been busy working in the basement getting it finished and ready for carpet to finally be laid tomorrow. They keep pushing our carpet delivery back but so far they are supposed to be here tomorrow and finish on Wednesday. I am still super excited to get it done. Friday I spent the whole day pulling all of the tools and building materials out of the mechanical room so we could load them up and bring them all down to the shop. But of course it has been raining since Friday and is just way too muddy to drive the truck to the back of the house. So, everything is sitting and waiting until probably the end of the week, since it rained again last night.

Friday night we pulled the pool table out and got it all setup. Saturday we spent the day going through the pile of stuff that got pushed to a corner of the basement in order to put up the walls. We pretty much managed to turn one huge pile into two smaller piles. We are just waiting to move half of the stuff again into the areas where the carpet is going to be laid. Chris got himself a work bench made in the basement and was able to get most of his hunting room organized. I was able to get my seasonal tubs put away and organized. I'm anxious to get my sewing room setup and get some quilting done soon.

Sunday we went to KC and went furniture shopping. It took us four times longer to get there and back than it did to find what we wanted. But I already had it picked out, we just had to find it in the massive Nebraska Furniture Mart store. They carry some of Ashley Furniture's pieces, and I had picked out what I wanted here in town and found the same furniture for hundreds of dollars cheaper online at Nebraska Furniture Mart. It will be delivered on the 17th!!!

Madi went with us and we had a nice day. They were having the Richard Petty Driving School at the Kansas Speedway. We got to go into the infield and see the cars and the track. I was excited and so was Madi. While we waited to get in, Madi was sitting in the back seat singing, "Going to see race cars, Going to see race cars!" It was cute. And she is such a tomboy, her highlight of the day was getting a diecast race car. I asked her if she wanted a teddy bear or a car, "Car please!" She had that car in a bear hug on the way home. We kind of stumbled onto the RPDS when we were in Charlotte two years ago and got to go see Lowe's Motor Speedway. LMS is way better than KS Speedway but it was nice to see. I keep telling Chris he isn't going to be able to get away with just taking me to the race tracks for much longer, I want to GO to a race!!

I have pictures and will post them soon on Winkflash. Need to finish up here at the shop and get Madi picked up from Grandma's house.

Love, Amy