week 30 in pictures

sunday: our neighbors, who live on the lake, invited us for dinner. we had a lovely salmon dinner on the deck on a lovely summer evening. the kids enjoyed their hot tub, we had an amazing fly-by by two hot air balloons, and then we took a little paddle on the lake in one of their canoes. it was a very fun evening. we are blessed with a lot really wonderful neighbors.

monday: looked out the front window in the morning to see this pair feasting on my neighbor’s huckleberry bushes. we watched quietly and took pictures until they made their way across the street and toward my garden… then there was much shouting, window banging, and shane chasing them out of the yard!

tuesday: well, not really. this was actually sunday, but I don’t have a picture for tuesday, but had 2 from sunday. the weather was FINALLY nice enough for shane (and micah and layla) to try out the slip & slide he got for his birthday. it was VERY entertaining to watch. shane was probably a little too big for it, given that he slid off the end every time. micah was probably a little to small and couldn’t figure out how to dive onto his belly. he kept doing these knee land/belly splats which were hilarious. layla decided she was feeling well enough to try it out a few times too.

wednesday: I was making a blenderful of smoothies in the morning, when I heard a ‘rattling’ sound. then the contents of the blender stopped mixing. I lifted up the pitcher and saw this! crazy!

thursday: I decided to try my hand at making some beef jerky. used angie’s recipe and a roast I had in the freezer and put it in my dehydrator. turned out pretty good!

friday: I posted this before. the kids playing restaurant after team-cleaning the table and stools.

saturday: after several days of rain and cold weather, it finally got warm enough to swim again. layla, in her stack of tubes.

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what’s in my car?

it’s time to play an exciting round of… WHAT’S IN MY CAR????? (applause) yes, that’s right, this morning, I was incredibly irritated by all the crap that was in my car. SO irritated, in fact, that it was making me a little twitchy. (and I may have yelled at my kids once or twice for less than reasonable things.) it was so bad, in fact, that I decided to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. dun dun DUNNNNNN… and so, after dropping my 3rd (and final) kid off at the 3rd (and final) institute of learning (aka: preschool), I came home and cleaned out my car (instead of taking a nap and/or brewing another pot of coffee, which was what I really wanted to do). when I get bees in my bonnet like this, I’m really bad at remembering to take a “before” picture. although, in this case, it’s probably better that I didn’t. it was BAD. so, we’ll have to have the “after” pictures suffice. and, of course, I have to account for what was actually IN my car before this. keep in mind, this does not include the...

a few things that have tickled my funny bone this evening.

3 year old logic is great! layla was in the backyard today and she came up to the door with her lightning mcqueen bike helmet in her hands and said to me, "when i break my lightning mcqueen helmet, you better get me a princess one." (yes, mary. i am aware that my worst nightmare is unfolding before me.) dave brought home dairy queen treats when he went to pick up our pizza this evening. layla was very excited about this and wanted hers as soon as she was done with her pizza. we informed her that she had to eat her green beans first before she could have it. she's not so fond of them lately and made a little stink about not wanting to eat them. but we stuck to it and said she had to eat them first. so she turned to me and said, "mommy, you eat my beans so i can have my ice cream." then there was this conversation: layla: daddy, i want some blue jelly beans. dave: you don't need any jelly beans. layla: but i want some blue jelly beans! dave: no, layla. layla: ...

sick.

and sick, sick, sick… we are sick. we have the flu, or something like that. it’s not horrible, nobody’s dying… we’ve definitely all had worse, but it’s still no fun. and we all seem to have just a slightly different strain of it! on wednesday, shane woke up with a dry cough. a tickle in his throat. we went to the eye dr. and he had his eyes dilated. this gave him a headache. a headache that lasted ALL day. he just sat around. the next day, his head still hurt, he was still coughing, and he still just laid around. he also added a sore throat to his résumé and when I took his temperature that night, he was at 102.5. yup. sick. friday he still had the fever, cough, and sore throat. saturday morning he had a slight fever, but by evening even that was gone, but his throat was still hurting a lot. I called the nurse line at the dr.’s office to see if they thought he should come in and have his throat swabbed. they said to wait a day. saturday is also the day I started coughing and feeli...

the winds of dietary change…

well, hopefully not THOSE kind of winds! LOL! so, I thought I should come out in the open with this. not that it’s a really big deal, but it’s one of those things that I’ve kind of kept to myself, for the most part, just because it seemed like the right thing to do while I was figuring some things out for myself. in the last several months I’ve become, more or less, a closet paleo dieter. if you don’t know what that is, google it. there’s a bazillion sites and blogs and books and what have you that will explain it to you. I have several friends who also follow this diet, openly. LOL! you can read about their adventures here or here ! BUT, I feel the need to give you MY personal take on it. first of all, I hate the word ‘diet’. if ‘diet’ meant what ‘diet’ really means, I would have no problem with it at all. a diet is simply what a person or animal eats. that is their diet. but, in 21st century america, a ‘diet’ is something you do in order to lose weight. there are 4 million and ...

another sign

i'm going to have to take more pictures soon, i'm running out. christmas movies! yes, one of them is a bob the builder movie, but the kids deserve to get in on the festivities too, right? we also have the polar express , but i'm not sure where that was when i was taking the pictures. and a charlie brown christmas , but that's on vhs and our vcr broke, so it will have to be replaced. i want to just keep building our collection each year. there are so many fabulous movies! and speaking of, i promised living-under-a-rock-kate a list of the absolute MUST SEE christmas movies... obviously, the ones in the picture (well, you can watch the bob the builder one if you REALLY want to, but i don't really consider that a MUST SEE!). in addition: it's a wonderful life, miracle on 34th street (the real old one, not the new one with the annoying girl), a christmas story, frosty the snowman, santa claus is coming to town, the year without a santa claus, christmas with the...

rachel's continued ramblings

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