Heritage Lake in Indiana

Well we've had a busy week, mixed with some really nice sun (and a lot of wind) and then a lot of rain. The kids and I tried to spend as much time outside as possible despite the 20-45mph winds we had. The kids helped me plant some spinach, salad mix, sugar snap peas, and scallions outside. We also started some seeds under lights inside: paste tomatoes (2 different varieties), cherry tomatoes, basil, marjoram, parsley (I have a really hard time getting parsley to germinate...so we'll see), marigolds, and cabbage.
The rain came Thursday...just in time to water our new seeds. On Friday we set a record for the most rain in a day in April since 1880...it rained ALL day. Friday we went to Tomah on our way to a benefit dinner for the Boys & Girls Club in Tomah. On our way the kids and I saw Tom's Billboard...I didn't have my camera. We're going back Monday for yoga class, so I'll take a pic then. Reeve and Kyle stayed with Tom's boss's son (14yr old) and two granddaughters (ages 3 & 7) while Tom and I went to the benefit with Tom's boss & his wife.
Tom left early Saturday morning to start a week long AdvII Photo Voltaics course. He said they're going to install 3 different types of PV systems in this course this week.
I wanted to share these earlier... They are the last of our pics of our visit to my parent's house in Indiana. We had so much fun. We were there to take the boat out of winter storage, get her cleaned up, and launch her into the water. The kids loved the ride around the lake.

After I read all 7 Harry Potter books to them (in 7 wks) they decided that they wanted to start reading book one on their own (with help). They're sharing the reading. Kyle reads one page in about 20 minutes, and Reeve reads two a day in about 15-20 minutes. Reading really helps Kyle focus and calm down, here he is reading a page to my Mom (Is my Mom flipping me off???) :-)

Kyle loves to pose. Reeve got a pirate kit with a spyglass for his birthday, and Kyle quickly latched on to the spyglass.

He was looking high and low

for what we don't know

I think he just like posing.

Latest Craft Projects

For his birthday Reeve got a small weaving loom for making pot holders. Kyle got one too, but he wasn't as enthused as Reeve. Reeve went to town and made the first pot holder before I even thought to get my camera out. It's the red & yellow one, and he thoughtfully gave that to my parents.

There's nothing like a good craft project to get you thinking.

We got to keep the blue and yellow one he's finishing in this pic.

My Dad had a surprise for me, he re-finished a leather clock that my Grandfather had made. Who says Dads can't be crafty! It's beautiful! I love it, and it works now too!

My Mom taught me how to knit :-). She had tried the last time we visited, but we didn't work on a pattern. This time we both started a scalloped round dish cloth. It was a lot of fun!

I had to call her to help me finish it off yesterday. The finishing part was easier than I thought. It's not perfect, there are holes, but I'm pretty pleased with the first thing I've ever knitted. Next I'll attempt a square dish cloth, then maybe a hat before I dive into some comfy socks!

I'm still working on the cross-stitch. This is not the greatest pic. I need to iron this and stretch it, but I'll save that for last. Spring is complete and I've finished the summer clouds (hard to see).

Back from Indiana

We made it back safely from our trip to Indiana. The Illinois roads were horrible! Filled with gigantic potholes on the Interstate...I thought for sure I was going to blow a tire. I tried to avoid them, but they came up out of nowhere. Luckily it was perfect driving conditions otherwise...a nice cloudy day with no rain. We left Indy with temps in the 60's and we came back to Wisconsin with fresh snow on the ground! As a matter of fact this morning we got about 2 more inches of snow...Hello! It's mid-April? Will it ever warm-up?

We had an excellent visit to my folks house in Indiana. Reeve and Kyle love to go to the zoo. It's hard to see the animals in tanks and behind bars, but this zoo does talk a lot about conservation and saving the animals.

Kyle tried to pet a shark, but couldn't quite reach one. He took a million pictures of this dolphin before the show...he's so excited to see them after they get developed.

At first we weren't sure if they really wanted us to see the dolphins...

I guess Indy likes to keep it simple...one door for entrance & exit.
We saw a new sign this time with Reeve's name on it

We had no idea that this little Muntjac was named after him.

They got a kick out of standing by this Laughing Turtle

I took this pic before we saw the movie "Nim's Island." Now when we look at it all we can think of is Fred from the movie. Reeve wanted to see the movie for his 8th Birthday. It was a very cute movie, but we all thought it was too short. Fred is a bearded lizard and a great friend of Nim.

More pics of the Indy visit to come. Also I'll post an updated pic of the Four Season's cross-stitch. I'm done with the Spring chair and I've started Summer. We got crafty in Indy and Reeve & Kyle started their own craft project. My Mom taught me how to knit and we're working on a project together. Now when I get tired of the cross-stitch project I can go knit. I'm going to start some seeds indoors today...

Indiana Trip & Spring Chair Week 2

The boys and I head out for Indiana today to visit my folks. The kids were up and ready to go at 5:30 this morning! I still have to pack :-). Tom's getting ready for work and can't make the trip. He's liking his new job, and he's the company's new poster boy. They took his picture just over a week ago and they've made it into a Billboard! When it goes up I'll take a picture of it, that's for sure.

I'm sooooo close to finishing the Spring Chair. I'll finish it in Indiana and start the Summer Chair there. We'll be there about a week, so I'll post again when we get back.

Four Seasons Chairs: Week 2 for the Spring Chair, almost done :-)

Spring Cross-Stitch Week One & 2 Easter Pics

Well we had a white Easter Sunday. Kyle was very excited that it was Easter morning about 5:30am. He woke up saying at the top of his voice "It's Easter, It's Easter," and then he went back to sleep. Again around 7am he woke up shouting "It's Easter, It's Easter." No one else was really stirring, so he went back to sleep. Then at about 9:30am he kind of sat up in bed and looked like this:

He was very groggy, didn't even say "It's Easter," and just kind of sat contemplating something for about 15 minutes before he decided to join the rest us for breakfast.
I can't believe I didn't take ANY pictures of the easter eggs or hunt. The only pic we ended up taking was this one of colored snow. After we colored the eggs...Reeve colored all of his Green and Kyle colored all of his blue...we threw the dye water out in the snow.

We started a little tradition that the kids have seperate colors for their eggs, so that when the hunt is on they know what color to find and keep very quiet if they see the other color. Tom hid 11 eggs and I hid 11 eqgs and it took them about a half an hour to find them all. We've never had a hunt in the snow, so this year was very interesting. I did manage to video tape the event, but for the life of me I don't think I'll ever figure out how to upload videos. I'm bad enough as it is trying to get them on a DVD. I just managed to send out DVD's of our summer trip to Canada. Actually I'm amazed I got it done in under a year!

Here is a pic of the first week of the Spring chair cross-stitch. I like this one better than the winter chair. The wreath on the winter chair sent me cross-eyed. The spring chair is far easier to follow. I can tell already that Summer is going to be a challenge...clouds and sand and lots of light colors that are hard to see and differentiate, but Autumn looks the funnest. I like saving the best for last.

New Kids on the block...(baby goats down the road)

Isn't she the sweetest thing you've ever seen. She's a baby Nubian goat. Her ears are so soft and long!

Our friend's goats had some babies and there are more babies due in about a week. I absolutely LOVE baby goats. They are extremely soft, playful, and beautiful.

You can't resist wanting to pick one up! This is Hazel's first time being a Mom and she was a very good Mom. Very attentative and nuturing. She didn't let her babies out of her sight for a moment...especially around Kyle.

I'm really thankful the boys can get this experience with these animals. It makes living out in the middle of nowhere fun.

First Spring Snow

Even though it is now officially Spring we can still get snow well into April. Acutally the Fall and Spring snows are the best snows. The temps aren't bitter and it's fun to play outside. The snow tends to be a better feeling snow. The kids both said that this Spring snow was the best snow they've seen this year and last.

They had a ton of fun playing on the swingset in the snow. Reeve was in charge of building up the snow jump pile.

and Kyle had fun jumping into it!

Reeve wanted me to post this pic of a crane he made. He's pretty proud of it :-).

Happy Spring!

I did it! I met Reeve's challenge and I finished the winter chair in my four seasons cross-stitch...now I'm on to the more colorful Spring chair.

We actually had a very nice last day of winter. It was sunny and the temps were in the 40's.

For those of you with curbside trash/recycling pick-up please consider yourselves very fortunate. We do not have that luxury and there is nothing more sobering than having to deal with the storage and then removal of your own trash. We're very aware of how much garbage we produce and we try very hard to minimize our waste. I seriously think the last time Tom went to the dump was way back in September. I have a recycling system setup in the garage for paper, bottles, plastic, and cans. We actually have 3 to 4 times as many recyclables than we do garbage. Since we had an early snow this winter season that stayed around all winter Tom wasn't able to get his truck moved from in front of the wood pile. His little red truck has been our garbage truck, but I couldn't take the pile up any longer.

It took me about an hour yesterday to load up the mini van with just recyclables. I removed about a quarter of what we have in the garage. Incredible! The kids could barely fit in the back seat.

For the Love of Joe

Our neighbor and friend with the goats also has an adorable baby (he'll be a year in the summer) donkey named Joe. He's the sweetest donkey I've ever met. He loves hugs and is super calm.

Many a time we've told Kyle not to run up to Joe from behind, and many a time Kyle doesn't process instructions of the warning nature. Kyle is wild, loud, and Joe is patient and calm with him.

Joe is also very patient with Brenda's friendly and playful doberman Angel. Angel loves nothing better than to run up to Joe and jump on his back to wrestle with him. I guess we have Angel to thank for tempering Joe...Angel is way more rowdy than Kyle. We were all cracking up at Joe running around with a doberman playfully on his back. Joe loves it and really knows how to get Angel going.

Even though Joe is still a baby Brenda hoisted the kids up on his back for a test ride.

We're going to have a lot of fun visiting Brenda this summer. Reeve absolutely LOVED riding on Joe, and we all loved Joe's wonderful temperment and sweet personality.

Today is the last day of winter and I'm almost done with the winter chair in my cross-stitch. I'll post the picture tomorrow and hopefully I'll meet Reeve's challenge.

100th Birthday for the Elroy Public Library

Our local library had it's 100th Birthday recently. They had a drawing contest and an essay contest to mark the occasion. Kyle kept making excuses as to why he didn't want to work on his drawing and essay. I didn't want to press the issue with him. Reeve reluctantly wrote an essay, which I made into a cursive writing worksheet using a great little website that I've discovered recently:

Well I'm happy to say that Reeve won first place for both his drawing and his essay. If you click on the picture above you can see the picture and essay better.

He was a little nervous when he had to go up in front of everyone to accept his prize money, but he was also very stoked! He never expected to win, but he secretly hoped he would.

The Library was very generous and the 1st Place Prize was $15 for the Drawing Contest (1st-4th Grade...Reeve's technically in 2nd Grade) and $15 for 1st Place in the Essay contest (1st-4th Grade).

When we got home Reeve told me that he felt very special. After he won he had lots of people that he didn't know come up to him and congratulate him. He told me later that he felt like Harry Potter, because everyone seemed to know who he was and they were very glad to shake his hand.

Cross-Stitch: Winter Chair

Okay I thought for sure I've posted since Feb. 22nd, but apparently my world is once again on warp speed.

A lot has happened in these past few weeks! Tom has resigned from his job with the State of Wisconsin and is now an HVAC manager for a local contractor. He's had one week on the job and loves it. No more suspensions without pay for being 15 minutes late! No more Supervisor from H-E-double L! The owner of the business is very calm, easy going, and genuinely nice. The kids and I met him yesterday. He has nothing but good and positive things to say about Tom...what a relief!

It's Saturday and believe it or not there is a lot I want to get done today. I decided I am going to try to post a little everyday, so despite the fact that this entry is short and sweet it won't take me nearly 3 weeks to post again.

This is a picture of my latest creative time waster:

It's a cross-stitch project that I started a year and a half ago! Where does the time go? I remember I put it on hold when I started back to work at the gas station and then the mortgage business. I decided to get back to my cross-stitching when I found myself obsessively doing sudoku puzzles in my down time...that's the time when I know I have a million things to do (like cleaning/paperwork/etc...) and well I just don't feel like doing them. I try to limit the time to early mornings when I like to wake up before the rest of the family on the weekends or when I get up with Tom during the week. Also in the evening is a good time or when I take 5 min. me-time breaks during the day. The nice thing about cross-stitching is that it is so portable and you can just spend 5 minutes on it here and there.

However Reeve has put a challenge to me. The project I'm working on now is a Four Seasons picture and Reeve has challenged me to finish the "winter" scene before the 20th of March (first day of Spring). He obviously doubts my ability to put all other duties on hold while I greedily spend time stiching. I have a lot to do yet, but I might be able to pull it off. Most of the main stitches are done and what's left is the back stitching and some window stitches.

Covered in Snow

The last snow we got just under a foot. Luckily it happened on a Sunday and Tom and I were able to tag team the driveway shovel duty.

No neighbors to plow us out this time! We ended up shoveling 1/2 the day together.
By the time we finished the first part the Township snow plow came by and dumped about 5 inches of snow over the entire area that we shoveled.

These pictures don't quite portray how funky it looks here and how much snow we seriously have piled up, but if you scoll down to posts I made on Jan 22nd and Jan 30th you can compare and see that we have a ton of snow now.

This pile by our 1990 Ford Festiva (42mpg!) is like ten feet high! We're running out of room to put all this snow.
I must say WE LOVE all this SNOW.

It's an amazing feeling to go outside when it's about 16F and blowing wind and get so heated shoveling snow that it's too hot to wear gloves and too hot to wear a coat. I just had a t-shirt and sweatshirt on and I was sweating. I didn't want to take the sweatshirt off because the snow was still falling and as it was my sweatshirt was soaking wet with snow and sweat by the time I came inside. Fun, eh? Well we're suppossed to get more snow on Monday :-).