Mom's Birthday Celebration!

My Mom's birthday was this week! To celebrate, the kids and I went out to her house for the day. We all had a great time!

My folks rent out their land to a lady who pastures her horses on it. This lady happened to be out when we were and kindly offered to give the kids horse rides! They all had a wonderful time!

 After the horse rides we went back up to the house and had a lovely picnic lunch outside!  It was such a beautiful day!

Our Week in Pictures

Day at the Park - Wordless

We spent the morning at a park close by playing.  The kids had a great time!

Another Lost Tooth!

Elijah lost another tooth this week!  He was sitting and reading a book when he said he heard a noise and looking down saw his tooth sitting on his book!  He is so excited, he can hardly wait for the "tooth fairy" to come!   Even though he knows who the tooth fairy really is it's still fun for him!  He is getting so grown up...

Vegetable Garden

I planted my garden this week.  My mom came over twice, once to help me buy the plants and then once to help plant the garden.  We spent a Lot of time preparing the soil for the garden, enhancing the soil and turning it.  We planted a lot of things:  strawberries, blackberry seeds, green peppers, lettuce, zucchini, cucumbers, and gourd seeds.  We will plant tomatoes in another week or so, when it's warmer.

 Because of the close proximity to the trees the ground was FULL of roots that we had to cut out.  The kids were a great help with this part!

 The Completed Garden!!!!  I am so pleased with how it turned out!

Awana Award Ceremony

We attended the Awana Awards Ceremony on Wednesday evening.  We were all sick but didn't want for the kids to miss out on receiving their awards, so we just tried to stay back from everyone else, hence the Far Away pictures.

Here Josiah and Emmaline are singing with their Cubbie group.  So Cute!

 Josiah going up for his Cubbie award.

 
And Emmaline going up for hers.

 Then came the Sparks group that Elijah was in, singing a song.

Mother's Day 2011

On Mother's Day almost everyone in our family was sick, only Mark and Emmaline were feeling good, so we elected to stay home from church rather than spreading our germs around.  :-)  We slept in and then had a relaxing breakfast of cinnamon rolls that I had made earlier and frozen for just such an occasion.  It was a lovely day, very laid back and enjoyable!

Emmaline was a great help!

 For lunch I made a roast chicken in the crockpot.  Jeremiah and Emmaline helped by peeling clementines.  Josiah and Elijah set the table.  Everyone was a great help!

 All the kids picked dandelion flowers for me from our backyard.

 I spent some time playing around with my camera taking pictures.  It's fun to see what kind of pictures I can take, I'm really enjoying learning about taking good pictures.  :-)

A lazy Sunday Afternoon

After working so hard Friday and Saturday, we spent the day Sunday just relaxing.  It was so nice, our Sundays are usually full, so we really enjoyed just hanging out at home and not doing anything important!

Tea and Dollhouse Stuff!

I had a friend over for tea on Thursday!  I hadn't seen her in quite awhile and we had a wonderful time catching up on all the news!  I forgot to take a picture of our tea, drat!  Somehow I always forget to take pictures of the important stuff... :-(   Anyhow, she has been building a dollhouse for a long time and she brought me some of her extra stuff that she didn't need!  I am soooo excited about it all!

Bathroom Remodel

We spent this last weekend working on our bathroom...what a lot of work!  We have lived in our house for 3 years and the floor under the toilet has been slowly sinking the whole time due to water damage, so we decided it was time to do something about it!  Here is the bathroom before the remodel.  You can't really see it but the back of the toilet is sitting against the wall, not at all where it should be.

 And here is the bathroom floor with all the flooring removed.  Gee, I think it might be molding!  Yuck!!!

 Mark removed all the sub floor and replaced it.  He also anchored up the floor joists with 2x4's to help the floor to remain level.  This is our only bathroom, so Mark worked as fast as he possibly could to get the floor done.  We had all the kids use the bathroom before we took out the toilet and we managed to  get it back in again before anyone needed it again!  Yay!  It took Mark about 6 hours for this part of the remodel, we were up till 1 a.m. on Friday night getting this done.

 We bought a new medicine cabinet and light from the local Habitat for Humanity store.  They sell used items from homes at a deep discount, our new light and cabinet only cost us $29!  Our old medicine cabinet was mounted on the wall, which I never liked.  So, Mark cut out an opening for our new cabinet.  It was very convenient because the new cabinet was the exact size as the old one, and the people before us had not removed the cabinet when they painted.  (Actually they didn't remove anything when they painted so there were all kinds of weird yellow spots on the walls where ever something had been mounted.)  All Mark had to do was cut out where the different colored paint was!