Ken and I had our 9th wedding anniversary last week. We went golfing and out to dinner on Saturday to celebrate. We learned how to golf when we first got married and have enjoyed doing it together, but it's been over 4 years since we've been golfing. I was a little nervous, but actually didn't do as poorly as I thought I would. We had a great time, except for the bee sting I got while half way through our game - serves me right for wearing sandals instead of shoes while golfing.
I've been preparing for our road trip to UT and I think I'm all ready. This year I made a few adjustments to the "entertainment" after last year's trip. I made/bought less activities to hand to them and instead, tried to create/think of more activities that we can all do together. The girls and I made BINGO markers out of glass beads, paper, and magnets. That was already a hit on our road trip to the beach last month, so I'm hopeful it will still be good. And how do I determine success? If the girls play with it for more than 5 minutes. BINGO lasted 30 minutes when we played with it on our way back/forth to the beach - that is a major success in my book.
Recently Amelia has wanted to have "tea parties". She doesn't actually want to drink anything (so water works out perfectly), she just wants to pour it from teapot to cup and from cup to cup, etc. Today she really wanted to have a tea party, but it was cold outside (which is the where we have tea parties so that I don't get grumpy about the mess). Not to be deterred, Amelia sat outside, by herself, in her jacket and wrapped up in a blanket to have a tea party for one . . . because neither Sophia nor I wanted to be outside in the cold. Eventually, she ended up back inside, where her and Sophia had a tea party on the rug - so it wouldn't be so messy. And everyone was happy.
It's that time of year again . . . it's strawberry time! Ken LOVES strawberries. I like strawberries, but Ken LOVES strawberries . . . and so do the girls. So on Saturday afternoon, we headed to the berry farm, rode the "Berry Express" out to the fields, and started picking.
The girls did pretty good. Well, mostly okay. Sophia had a hard time only picking the ripe ones, but Amelia did great. And they only got bored right near the end of our picking . . . but then I got bored too . . . but Ken said I had to keep picking ;) Here are Sophia and Amelia saying "strawberry".
So what do you do with 2 overflowing flats of strawberries? I wish I knew! I wish I was more of a strawberry connoisseur, but all I really know what to do with them is make strawberry jam.
I'm wondering if the checker at the grocery store could guess what I was making today since this was all that was in our cart.
Once I got the strawberries cleaned and hulled and chopped, the girls helped me stir in the lemon, pectin and sugar . . . lots of sugar - oye!
Amelia was so proud of "her" jars of jam.
Amelia took this picture . . .
and this video (it's a bit long but fun to hear Amelia narrate).
Sophia wasn't as excited about "her" jam. I think the whole long process wore her out.
I feel like I spent all day making 3 batches of jam. . .
But overall, I don't think I spent as much time as Ken spent the last 2 days, as he cleaned, cut and prepped his overflowing flat of strawberries to freeze.
We're all set for strawberries.
Now we have blueberries and blackberries to look forward to.
Neither Ken nor I had anything planned or on our calendar for last weekend, so Ken planned us a little stay-cation. The girls have been wanting to go fishing for quite awhile, so we started Saturday morning by fishing at the local community lake. When Amelia was just a baby, somebody gave us a cute little pink fishing pole and it's been collecting dust for years . . . until now. Amelia was all set with her fishing pole and her chair.
She was so excited to actually be fishing. When I asked her to smile, she smiled and yelled "Happy New Year!". Hopefully we didn't scare away any fish . . . or any neighboring fishermen.
Sophia was sad that she didn't have a fishing pole just her size, but she happily used Ken's pole.
She was so excited to reel in the line "by myself".
Could Sophia be any happier?
The girls lasted A LOT longer than I thought they would . . . almost a whole hour. The girls said they had fun, but Amelia was sad that we didn't catch a fish. The person next to us did, so at least Amelia got to see a live fish up close and personal. Maybe we'll have better luck next time?
After lunch, we headed to a Burfoot Park in Olympia. A park with playground equipment AND beachfront. The girls loved it. It was such perfect weather too - not too hot, not too cold. The only thing that would have made it better was if I had actually planned appropriately and brought swim clothes with us, so that the girls didn't have to run around in their shirts and diapers. Oh well!
And then on Monday, we headed to the Pt. Defiance Zoo in Tacoma. I've been there before and think it's a perfect size zoo for little people. Completely walkable and able to see all the animals within a few hours. Amelia's favorite animals were the fish in the aquarium and the polar bear. Sophia loved watching the walrus swim. She was content to sit and watch the walrus swim back and forth, back and forth.
All in all, a great weekend - very relaxing and minimal amount of money spent.
I used to think that squirrels were so cute and innocent, until . . .
When we first moved into our house, one of the first things I noticed that I didn't like, was this very large, over grown, bush/tree combo in the front yard. It actually had leaves on it in this picture, but 75% of the year, there were no leaves or flowers, just ugly dead looking branches. And underneath it was a hodge-podge of overgrown, just as ugly, bushes.
Last Fall, Ken trimmed part of it, to see if just trimming it would help (it's hard to see in the picture below), but trimming it did NOT help. It was still ugly. The clump of dead-looking branches is actually a very overgrown honeysuckle vine that had grown out of control.
So, in order to appease me AND to give our house better curb-side appeal, Ken agreed to cut down all of the honeysuckle vine, and ended up also ripping up the bushes underneath the honeysuckle vine, which had grown out sideways due to a lack of sunshine, etc. Leaving just the oak trees with nice, clean dirt around it, and a bit of myrtle, the area looks SO much better. But here's the problem. Squirrels lived in that clump of mess in our front yard. And when we cut it down this March, the squirrels moved in . . . to our house! I had no idea squirrels were nocturnal until we heard them running over our heads and over the girl's bedrooms all night AND all day. When do squirrels sleep? I certainly wasn't getting any sleep, and the girls would get scared from the noise and end up in our bed, which resulted in, yep, you guessed it, no sleep. During the day when we'd hear the squirrels, the girls and I would pound on the walls to try to scare the squirrels. Yet despite our pounding and the girls screaming, the squirrels were not scared away. Ken started researching methods to get rid of squirrels. But then just as suddenly as the noise from the squirrels started it, it suddenly stopped . . . and before we'd even had a chance to try out any of our squirrel-be-gone methods. A few weeks later when Ken finally had a chance to get up into our attic, he found a few things - one of which was a very dead squirrel. He also found that squirrels had chewed through quite a few of our air vent caps on our roof, which is how we suspect they got in, but which aren't exactly easy to get back out of, hence, the dead squirrel. Today we hired a roofing company to fix a small leak we had in our roof and asked them to also replace the plastic, chewed through, air vent caps, with new steel, squirrel-proof, air vent caps. The contractor replaced all 10 air vent caps and told me that some of the old ones were so chewed through, there were gaping holes in our roof. We're lucky we haven't had a wet spring! He also told me that he saw a squirrel run out of the attic while working on the roof. Hopefully there aren't anymore up there, because now they really won't be able to get out. And hopefully the new metal caps will keep them out and they won't find anything else they can chew through.
