I was wondering...

As part of my consume as much sugar as possible diet (what you haven't heard of it?) I purchased a bag of Hershey's mini candy bars today. As I was partaking I thought to myself can you even buy a full sized Krackel bar anymore? What about a Mr. Goodbar or even a Special Dark bar? Were these poor candies replaced by their far superior mini versions? Anyone have any insight on this?

This and that

Just a few updates, mostly for my mom. We took the girls to the Butler-Freeport trail yesterday to ride their bikes. It's paved and flat and they had a good time.Over the weekend we went to Ohio to see Kyle, Sidni and Roc in Kids on Broadway. We went last year and I could really tell how much the kids have grown and improved. It was so fun, they all did a tremendous job. Have I ever mentioned how much I love living close to Bryan and Anna? Maybe once or twice or a hundred times. I really love it though and they are so fun to spend time with. We couldn't find Roc to get him in the picture....One of our home teachers invited the girls and I to go swimming anytime we wanted at his house. The very best part is that he lives only a couple of blocks away. The girls had a great time, they loved all the fun floaties. I'm pretty sure they were trying to see how many they could put on or sit on at one time.

We love summer!

The garden and such

I was finally able to take some pictures of our crazy garden. They are a bit blurry, but I think you'll get the idea. On the left against the fence are sunflowers, they get huge. In the front right of the box is the zucchini, it gets huge. Next to the zucchini is where the peas were, I took them out a couple weeks ago, it was too hot for them and they were huge.


Here's a different view. To the right are the crazy virus-like cantaloupe. It's growing up the fence, in between all the sunflowers, it's huge. In between the zucchini and the cantaloupe are tomatoes. We started them a little late so they are just flowering and not so huge yet. The garden doesn't look quite as hilarious as it did when we had the fence around it. We were trying to keep the rabbits out and it was so funny trying to keep all the plants in. Turns out the bunnies were getting in anyway, so we ditched the fence. I do have to say that we have been pleased with our first attempt at gardening. Our planning was poor, but things are growing and we are so grateful to have food to eat from our own yard.

I'm not much of a take a picture of your dinner for the blog type, mostly because I really don't cook that well, nothing is very noteworthy. However, I did make this loaf of bread yesterday and was very impressed with how it turned out and thought I would share. It's a recipe from this book. Yep it's the end of July and we had homemade bread with soup for dinner. It's OK to sweat while you eat right?

Catching up

I am way behind in my posting; I'm going to blame it on some camera malfunctions.... In an effort to catch up and really just to have some record of our summer, here's a catch-up-lots-of-pictures post.

I call this ghetto summer fun. We got a swing set free from craigslist and when Roger went to take it apart the ladder for the slide broke off. So now we just have a couple of swings and a slide and what better to do with a ghetto lone slide then put it in the ghetto kiddie pool? Tons of fun.

The carnival was in town again and we had so much fun. We never stay long or spend too much, but the girls really have a good time. Even though we had just been to Kennywood, they still had fun.

We also turned this:

into this:

We made strawberry jam a few weeks ago, this week was red and black raspberry. It's so satisfying to have 8 pints of homemade jam on my shelf.

Other than that, we are just trying to stay cool and keep busy! We love summer!

Do you remember?

I've kept our list of New Year's Resolutions in my line of sight since we made them seven months ago. Remember those? I actually didn't really make resolutions, but I did make a list of things I wanted to do better. I thought it would be time to evaluate and since I'm shameless, why not evaluate for the world to see? Here goes:

• Getting out of debt. Unfortunately this isn't going as well as I would like. Don't get me wrong, it's not really any worse, just not as good. See the problem is that I like to go out to eat, way too much. It's gets me into trouble. Roger and I were talking the other day and we think we are doing better than we were a year ago and as it stands today, I haven't been out to eat this week (hey, come on, I'm into small milestones OK?)


• getting healthy. I really wanted to lost 40 lbs this year and so far I'm up 10. That could be because I'm pregnant though and not really because I'm that unhealthy. Granted I could be doing better, I have such a sweet tooth, but I'm feeling recommitted to working hard at health, because not only do I benefit, but so does the new baby.


• Gardening. If I had to sum our garden up in one word it would be hilarious. Wait you don't associate humor with your garden? Well then you must be doing something right. We were so excited that we planted way too much stuff in a really small space. Did you know that zucchini plants get HUGE? They have taken over everything. They are almost as bad as the cantaloupe. It's like a rapidly spreading virus or something, it's everywhere. I was going to take a picture, but it's really too embarrassing to share. I will however, share this photo of our first zucchini, I think I let them get too big, but they'll be alright. Yes, Avery, they make me a little nervous too.


• Being prepared. This is actually going better than I thought. I managed to get our 72 hour kits together. I just need to rotate them now. I also got this cool plan for building up to a three month food storage. We also started a canning class at church. So far we have only made strawberry jam and man it's good. I haven't done that much canning so I'm really excited about learning as much as I can about it.
• Building a strong family. It's always hard to tell how that's going, but we are healthy, happy and trying our best to spend good quality family time together.

How are your resolutions going?

We love the fourth

The Fourth of July is not usually one of my favorite holidays. For one thing it's always way too hot and for another there's always way too many people. The lack of those things made this Fourth of July one of the best we've ever had. We always forget that they do fireworks in our city on July 3rd. We put the girls to bed at regular time on Thursday because we forgot. They came downstairs at 10 pm and said they could see fireworks from the pink room window. Roger said oh that's right, let's go check it out. (Isn't he such a great dad, he could have said who cares, get back in bed, but he didn't.) We could kind of see the fireworks from our backyard, but since the view wasn't great we decided to have our own firework show. We knew we would be home really late on Friday, so it was the perfect time. Yep it was like 10 pm, the girls changed out of their pajamas so we could sit in the drizzling weather and watch Roger light and runaway as fast as he could from the fireworks. It was awesome.

Oh, they're excited for the show to start.

Friday came and we wanted to try to go down to Pittsburgh to see the fireworks. What's great about Pittsburgh, is that there was all kinds of entertainment going on on the rivers before it got dark. We went down at about 5 and found a place on the grass to sit. It was a little bit rainy, but we were prepared. Because it was a little bit rainy the crowd was sparse. We didn't really know where to go, so we just picked a spot on the North Shore. As it turned out, we couldn't have picked a better spot. The finals of a formula one race was right in front of us. We sat right by turn one and two. It was such an exciting race to watch. Then we had some time to wait before the fireworks started. The girls were so good and for the most part were content to people watch. We brought glow sticks and that kept them occupied for probably an hour. When it was time for the fireworks, again, we couldn't have picked a better spot. The barge where the fireworks are detonated from was docked right across the river from us. It was so exciting. What's so great about the girls is they are at the best ages right now that it's actually fun to go do things like this. It doesn't feel like a marathon, or a rodeo (all the wrangling) or even a wrestling match. We had such a great time and hopefully I'll have the guts to do it again next year!

Here's one of the formula one boats. This was before the race started. During the race it was really hard to get a picture. The boats get up to 140 mph.

Ashby with her glow sticks.

Avery doing a fine job modeling her glow bracelets. It wouldn't be a holiday without Kool-aid mustaches would it? In this case it's Strawberry crystal light mustaches, but the result was just as good.

Roger and I waiting for the fireworks to start. I don't ever remember having to wear a jacket on the Fourth, I loved it!