Mini Break

lots and lots of playing in the surf
this one loves the ocean. she finds the beauty and it fills her soul.

in step. two peas in a pod

lots of wet clothes for the boy. who could not stay out of the water.

but isn't that what boys and beach are for?

dad flying the kite. almost took him out a couple of times.

beautiful, glorious sunsets that reflect God's amazing love for us.



We had a great time at the beach. I love Beverly Beach. It is one of my favorite campgrounds. The beach never fails me and it has showers. ha ha. We took the kids to the Mark Hatfield Marine Science Museum and they really liked it. We had lunch at the chowder bowl and played on the beach. We went for lots of bike rides and slept thru a night of pouring rain, but it was a great 4 days. Halfway thru I got a call from my friend telling me that Thad was not going to make it around Rainier and that he was on his way home. Totally disappointing to the guys who had planned this trip for months. But he made it home and after a good 24 hrs of rest, he felt much better. The kids and I stayed at the beach and just relaxed. The last morning we headed down to the beach and ran into a family from school. Their oldest daughter was helping the youngers find treasure in the sand, by dropping pennies, nickels and baubles in.....my kids got in on the action and had a blast! It was adorable. It was the perfect way to end the summer!

Lil' People Close 2 My Heart

These two little ones are so cute! They came to the beach with us for one night and day and they had a blast. Well Ry-Ry did. Luke slept the whole time...although at one point he woke up and smiled at his auntie shell. We certainly got sandy, enjoyed the sunny weather and played in the water. Ry-Ry does not like to get dirty, at all, period! But after watching my two dig their toes into the sand and run into the waves........she jumped right in. In fact, the pix below shows how much she loved it. ha ha. that is some serious sand she is in and she did not complain once. It was a great time at the beach and I do have pix of my kids too, but wanted to share these for now.


Our little mermaid, sunning herself upon the shore

summer lovin'

see ya

off to the beach for sand, surf and maybe, hopefully some sun.

It's official

Today has been our only day at home (meaning, no where to go and cleaning to do) in about 3 weeks! And I spent it cleaning my playroom! Literally almost all day, incredible what happens when you don't go in a room except to open a window occasionally! ha ha. Toys were everywhere, as well as bean bag filler which had been cleaned up (sort of) in june. This was to be my summer project, clean it up, get rid of toys and turn it into a tv room of sorts. Some friends told us they would give us their old couches and we have a small tv that we could put in there for now.......thought we could put up old movie posters and frames of different pix, like red robin.....it would be a fun room. So yesterday, I skipped church. Now we have not been in town for weeks too go, but yesterday I flat out skipped it. I felt bad, but I needed some time at home before we take off again this week. While I was cleaning I was inspired to search thru our cans of paint and find something we can use to repaint the little kid playroom into a more adult space. I found some and in less than six years, I have officially re-painted every room in my house! I am tired today and I still have to steam clean the floors and find some bookshelves to hid the toys that will remain and tomorrow I have to go to the fair, then it is off for some camping fun with my family since my hubby is out of town for the week. I am a busy, productive lady.

Saturday Morning Football

coach erik, reminding them who is #1
love the jersey's they got yesterday!

Yesterday was noah's first scrimmage game for flag football and it was super cool. I love football! I am sooooo pumped that I was able to talk him into playing this year, he on the other hand is just along for the ride. I know that he is young, but he is not a sports kid. Maybe he will grow into it. He truly is more excited by bmx, mountain biking and video gaming (maybe he will follow in his uncle's footsteps).

I gave the coachs' permission to give him some football discipline's. It worked out okay. Noah is such a space cadet during practice, but during the game he tried a little harder. He did not understand the linebacker position, but he sure knew how to run after a flag! He got one flag yesterday and was pretty proud of himself.

All in all it was a great morning, sun shining, smell of fresh cut grass and a little coffee! Good stuff. Except that I forgot my good lens, so you have to put on your magnifying glasses to find noah in the pix above!! ha ha.

Bon Apetit'

Today was the best meal by far.........each of them came running out to tell me how amazing the pizza dough was and that they absolutely loved it. I thought wow, that must be some dough. When I finally looked at their cookbooks that they received at the end of camp, the dough was from:

Winco or from a jiffy pizza dough box!!! ha ha. so much for high class pizza dough.

my lil' chef

My dd has been taking a cooking class this week for kids and she has made some incredibly good food! The first day they made panini's, pasta salad and tiramisu. Second day they made marinated chicken, fresh green beans and peach cake. Today is pizza, salad and some dessert. The best part of all of this is that she makes lunch for herself and then brings home a second one for me!!! he he. Really good stuff. She has been having a blast with her two cousins. She is a little nervous about the pizza today, she has this aversion right now to mozzarella. She is really hoping that she will get a chef's hat today to wear with her apron. ha ha. Unfortunately I have not taken many pictures, especially of the food, because once she hands me the box I usually just start eating. ha ha.

Oh My Goodness

This vid cracked me up!!! I could just see one of my kids doing this. I love how calm the parents are during the whole thing.

Random

My friend http://brulottes.blogspot.com/ tagged me a couple of days ago, so here it is. now that i have completed the camping clean up! some weird random things about me. nothing to exciting, just the facts man.

Rules Once Tagged:1) Link to the person who tagged you.2) Post the rules on your blog (copy and paste 1-6).3) Write 6 random things about yourself (see below).4) Tag 6 people at the end of your post.5. Let them know they are tagged and leave a comment on their blog.6) Let the tagger (who tagged you) know when your post is up.

Randomness about me:

1. I am a toilet paper over the top girl. I will actually fix the roll if it is put on wrong.

2. I use a headlamp to read at night in bed, so that my husband can go to sleep. it is just as bright as my lamp, but he likes it if i wear the headlamp.

3. I shop the clearance food section at target once a week. I get the best deals on snacks and other random things.

4. I used to save my pictures to disk and costco at the end of every month, faithfully. Now I am lucky if I get them loaded to my computer, let alone saved to a disk! bad photo mommy!

5. I hate to iron. It is the one household task I hate more than anything. I will wear a shirt with wrinkles, rather than iron it.

6. I actually hate to be dirty. I really don't like my feet dirty. I don't like dirt on my clothes or really anywhere. but I love to go camping!! huh?

this weekend

south falls

she loved this hike. she thought the waterfall was beautiful

our group headed down

the little ones. poor noah, all alone in a world of little girl cousins

but the big girl cousins love to make him laugh

another tatoo, but this one was a UofO duck.

ummmmm, what was carter thinking, we are beaver fans.

another fine camping adventure, except for the 100 degree temperature and feeling sticky and icky! ha ha. we went to silver creek falls with thad's family and had a great time. did a little hiking, although not much, when you sweat while sitting down, it is too hot! We survived though and it was a really great trip. Noah was tickled to death and tried to play football with the older boys, although I think he had more fun annoying them by taking the ball. The older girl cousins are so good to noah and watch out for him and tickle him and make him squeal. Syd ran around with her two cousins and they rode bikes, but mainly they held the new addition to our extended family......Paco the chihuahua. They fought over who could hold him next and I swear that poor dog never got to touch the ground. ha ha. We also had some amazing thunderstorms on saturday night that were literally right over our head. Thad and I were just about ready to make a run for our car, after realizing that we were sleeping on metal cots, when it started pouring down rain. It was pretty amazing to watch the lightening from our tent window. It was also pretty funny to hear the teenagers, which were up the hill from us, running around at 1am throwing their ran fly's on so that they did not get soaking wet. All in all a great time.

It makes a mother proud!!

His first adventure in ink.........I like it. thanks to cousin hana for tattin' my boy up, it looks good. in fact tonight he would not wash his arms, because he wanted to show his friends tomorrow all of his ink he got this weekend from his cousins.

Hardcore

Our little mountain biker and he proved it this last weekend by taking this huge hill all by himself (haha). He loved riding his bike this weekend because the campground is quite hilly and everytime he wanted to go down the main hill and then ride over to this little dirt hill. This one was the perfect first dirt hill. There were a couple obstacles for him to get around, rocks and some grasses and he managed those with ease. He seriously loved it. I missed the shot of him turning and spraying gravel and dirt everywhere at the bottom....that would have been sweet. But as you can see the coming back up part did not go over so well. I think we will have to work on those leg muscles a little and do some hill climbing together. It was probably help too if he was not on a spiderman bike that he got for his 3rd birthday!! ha ha. Maybe for his 7th he can get a real bike with gears and everything!!! Bring on the ER visits, cuz he his hooked.

Two Movies in One Day???

How did I get so lucky??? Of course it was the same movie twice, but that was just fine by me. I never get to go see movies and I love movies, but yesterday I went and saw two. In the afternoon my friend and I decided to go together and since I was saving Dark Knight to view with my husband, we chose to go see Stepbrothers. Now we have been friends for quite awhile and I think I know what she likes, but as we sat through the first 10 mintues of this movie I was wondering the whole time if we could leave. I kept looking at her and she was watching the movie.........I did not know what to do. (and she will read this post, she is a lurker on my blog, not a commentor). ha ha. Anyway...........finally she got a phone call and went outside for awhile. But she left her purse and I thought, "Oh No, she really likes it....now I can't leave". After about 5 minutes of excruciating pain while watching this horrific movie (and I really like will ferrel, but this was just gross), I decided to gather our stuff and go out and tell her I could not watch. Once I told her, she said she totally agreed and she thought I was liking it. ha ha. So we switched out tickets to the only other movie showing right then.............Dark Knight.

So as the story continues.............I picked Thad up, we went to Newport Grill Happy Hour (yum) and I told him that I had already seen the movie. He being a guy, did not hear me. So about 20 minutes later I told him the same thing................this time he heard, but we went anyway and we double dated with two of his boyfriends that were there watching the movie. I was so glad that they could come on our date with us. ha ha. I really loved the movie and it was so much better the second time. ha ha.(I was not recovering from the horror of seeing will ferrell's fake balls rubbing up against a drumset). I really loved the performances and I really do love Christain Bale. I think he plays bruce wayne just right. I really do love me some action comic heroes!!! ha ha. I cannot wait for the new Superman movie to come out. He is my favorite comic hero. He always chooses the right, he never kills and he is not from this planet.

My Thoughts - Don't read if you have not read the book

I think it is fairly obvious when u read this blog that I love the twilight series. I have been eagerly awaiting my chance to read BD. I finally got that chance this weekend while we were camping, in between all the activities. I have some thoughts that I wanted to share and see how everyone else felt.

* I did like it
* Not my favorite, but the resolution was enough to satisfy me.
* I really missed alice. I love her character and was sad that she was not heavily featured in this book.
* I like that they got married, but i felt like it was missing some description, something was off in this section of the book. missing some detail or something to "grab" u like the other books.
* But it really "lost" my interest with the whole baby thing - at the beginning. i had a hard time reading more after she discovered she was pregnant. I don' really know why. maybe it was that we were camping, there was lots of reasons to put the book down and it interrupted my reading.
* I liked the jacob portion of the book. I liked his perspective.
* I really could care less about leah and him making peace with her. her antagonism was crucial to his character development though.
* I liked that he finally matured and moved ahead in his life and took a stance to become his own pack.
* I liked that charlie was able to be a part of her life after the transformation
* I warmed up to the whole baby thing
* Had a really hard time getting thru the whole birth/transformation process. I think that I was worried that bella would lose her character and traits that I liked. She would not be herself, which was her concern as well. But i think that SM did a great job with bella's development
* I read that SM had said that this book was not a youth fiction....the birth, baby eating way out stuff was a little gross for me.
* I was not as upset that edward was not heavily featured, because the story really is about bella. and edward is seen thru her eyes and really he stays the same except in book one where he chooses to be around her and not drink her. He always loves her and that will not change. He was not so much protector in this book.........cuz she is now invincible and is a great vamp.
* I liked that jacob had his happy ending. that he stayed in bella's life. I actually liked that he imprinted with Nessie and that he now has love. I am a happily ever after type of girl!
* I liked the 'blonde" jokes that jacob threw at rosalie (not my favorite character) and I loved when he threw his dog dish at her.
* I liked that bella had great power and that she saved them all. she was always the true heroine of these books, discovering herself and her choices.
* I also liked that her newborn self was not as violent and she could control that urge rather well. cuz let's face it, none of us wanted to see her kill a human.
* I loved it when she attacked jacob for imprinting or was it the nickname!!! ha ha.
* And I loved that edward finally got to read her mind.

I think overall I really did like it. I think that it could have been broken into a couple of books because so much of SM's writing style was missing in the first part of the book. The connection between bella and edward in the first part was different than normal. I could put this book down, where the other three I read late into the night. so that was missing for me. although at the end i could not put it down, so i guess it was kind of the same. I think that I also knew that this was the end. No more E&B. I felt the same way about H Potter....the last one was hard to get thru, because it was the last. I think overall it was a great resolution. I think I really wanted a battle at the end of this book. I am hoping for a jacob/nessie book. I mean come on. that would be great. I need a little more time to digest it and mull it over....but right now I go with a thumbs up in the overall story arc and conclusion. I had just reread all 3 books to set me up for this one and I have to say that I saw so many different things the second time I read them. So maybe I will reread this in a few months and something else will hit me. So tell me what did u think? Did u love, not like or riding the fence?

Good Times

the lake on a beautiful morning

lots of bike rides, down hills

of course the beach, it was a bit hazy this weekend, but still beautiful

the docks over by the lodge. ice cream and candy.

spy boy this weekend. lots of traipsing into the woods to look for spies.

always ready for her picture to be taken. so beautiful and fun.


This lake is a little piece of heaven on earth. The beach is amazing. The water can be a little cold, but when you are sitting on a white beach with blue crystal clear water in front of you, looking out over a little peak covered in snow....there is nothing better. We go to this lake to swim. To ride bikes and to have a great time as a family. always good. always memories.

Crescent Lake

just got home from camping for 4 days! tired. doing laundry and unpacking, so that we can repack and head out again this next weekend. will share more later.

How do I get this Goodness in me?

Berry season has been in full swing here for quite sometime and that can only mean one thing: JAM! This year a friend and I decided to buy some (by that i mean 55lbs) of strawberries and raspberries and split the jam profits down the middle. Let me tell u it was way more fun than doing it all by myself and we listened to a little mamma mia at the same time! Syd jumped in and helped us out a lot, she stirred while we got the pectin ready.

crushed raspberries, so beautiful

this part is not for the faint of heart, sugar and lots of it!


5 1/4 cups of sugar goes into 3 cups of raspberries
(it only has calories if you eat it sitting down)

now mix together for more goodness

the two have become one.

now it was time for pectin and some more stirring.

the final product. 80 pints.

After many years of making jam, 12 to be precise, this was one of the best times ever. It went so quickly, only 4 hours to make that much jam! I will admit that it was a lot of jam, so hopefully I will not have to make any next year! There is really no better jam out there.....you cannot buy stuff this good. Plus I love looking in my freezer and seeing the hard work and results filling up my door, waiting to get that goodness in me!

20 years

i have been debating about this post for a couple of days. it is fairly personal, but that is what blogging is about and the reason i started this blog....to journal. so here goes.

as you see from the previous post, i had a great time the other night. but it was quite a stretch for me. it has been 19 years and 11 months since i have teepee'd a house. as that anniversary draws near, i have been reflecting quite a bit on what my life would have been like had i not been involved or had it been me instead.

i was 18 years old, fresh out of high school and most of my friends had left town for college. there were a couple of us still around and we decided to go out and have fun one night. we ran into roths and said hi to my brother and bought toilet paper, laughing that in the morning we would be famous for the tp job we were about to do. we drove to a friends house in albany, two cars full of teenagers living life to the fullest. We were stupid and careless and we had nothing to fear. I cannot even remember know if we actually used the toilet paper? That is not what sticks out in my mind. what i remember is the horrible sound of metal and twirling taillights, slow motion, rushing to get out of the car, not being able to move once we were out, the smell of smoke, the screams that were trapped in our heads. the sirens, the lights, the firetrucks....the knowledge that there was nothing we could do for our friends. 3 teenagers lost in the prime of their lives. gathering at the hospital, but our friends were not taken there. they would never again walk on this earth. but they were in the arms of the saviour, safe and warm and in no pain.

when i am out late at night and i see lights from an emergency vehicle, my hearts stops a little. it takes me back to that night. i cannot believe that it has been almost 20 years. i can still hear the eulogies and feel the pain as "friends" was sang at every funeral. i have not been to the graves for quite awhile, i used to go and cry and just be. but somehow, someway God provided me the ability to move on. the other night was not even a big deal. as we discussed plans to tp, my heart stopped for a few minutes......but i knew i was okay. that those memories cannot hold me back anymore, that i could take flight from that horrible night. my heart rejoiced a little in that knowledge and i survived. ready for the next adventure, not realizing that my heart had been on hold for several years. waiting for another tp adventure, with laughs this time.

Moms in van at Borders!

so here we are the crazy moms that hung out at borders for several hours, waiting for a book about vampires and werewolves to be released! Let's just say that we were some of the only moms there and we were the only ones that had the most awesome tshirts!!! We got some very strange looks, but you just have to own that we were there having a good time. We all have our copies and I am sure that most of us will finish it by the end of the week or by sunday!!! ha ha. Thanks to bree for getting the tees made! they rocked, now i just need to find a place to wear mine again.

Of course no party is complete without the teepee run afterwards. We were not the most accomplished teepee women, lots of giggling and loud thunks, cuz darn those rolls were heavy!!! and we got caught! after that it was a run for some mexican food and home to our families! not a lot of sleep happened that night....got in around 3:45 and the kids woke me up at 8am.....needless to say this old bod needs a little recovery time.