EKjourney Backup

Thank heavens we are out of the miserable heat wave and are moving into our normal hot. We are suppose to hold at 90 for the next couple of days and then (hopefully) move down to 80 by Thursday with clouds. What a relief. Yesterday, it was 10 degrees cooler in the house at 11:00 pm. What a relief! We went up to our friends the Irwins for dinner last night. They live on a creek with a nice swimming hole. Sawyer was quite the little water dog, doggy paddling all over (with his life jacket). Jubilee, who doesn't much care for water, even got in and was doing pretty well by the end! Poor Evi had her first water trauma. She wasn't happy about the sand but perked up when I took off her pants and shirt and sat her in the water. She was playing and crawling around and started down a bit of a decline. She went deep enough for her mouth to be in the water and you could see the panic in her eyes. Poor thing. I was just a couple steps away and she didn't even cough but tha...

I know all you faithful blog readers (what about 3 of you ha ha) are checking in by the hour in your eagerness to hear how my housecleaning is coming! The master bedroom is clean! We are talking all woodwork wiped down, every nook and cranny dusted, all clothes sorted, all office papers sorted, all linens washed, windows washed, etc.. It smells so clean in there!! A word of caution for those who are dusting the tops of their fans, EWWWW! I am a little concerned that it is Wednesday and I have only got one room done!! I am moving on to the hallway closets, bathroom, and hopefully even the children's rooms today. They should go fairly quickly. We shall see. It is suppose to be 107 today and I may have all the energy sucked out of me. Yesterday, we put air conditioning in the rabbit cage and they were happy as can be!! My plants however are not. My gunnera leaves just crisped up even though I kept it well watered. We stayed inside all day, laying around, drinking ice tea. ...

BOY! Baby Kelly number 4 evens out the household!

The temperature is in the hundreds. We don't do hundreds very often here so when the temperature spikes above 90, we swelter! Hot weather farming...This hot weather does not make for happy plants or animals. I went out several times yesterday and hosed the plants in my garden to cool them down and make sure they didn't lose too much moisture out of their leaves. I did notice a few things got sunburned. Those poor rabbits were miserable. We had a fan angled down at them, running full blast and gallons of frozen water in their pen but they were still just stretched out panting most of the day. I froze plastic cups with water for the fish bowl to at least try and keep the surface temperature down a bit. Not sure it helped. As for us, the two olders have an air conditioner in their room so they are comfortable. The rest just make do with fans. Going to be even hotter today, ugh. Housecleaning update: Yesterday I spent most of the day doing general houseclean and then t...

Well, two things really. 1. My new beautiful and perfect piano!! My wonderful mother-in-law and her husband moved from Idaho to Washington and she offered me her piano. We drove up to the Seattle area and back yesterday to pick it up. It is a perfect size, in perfect condition, with a perfect location, and goes perfect with the decor (matches the dining room table!). I will get pictures up soon. (We moved our computer into another room and Phil needs to hook it back up to the internet so my pictures aren't assessable yet.) 2. The second arrival is literally this week. Phil is almost done with his construction project so this week is my house cleaning week. I will be dusting, window cleaning, going through drawers and closets, etc in every room purging the junk and making the rest sparkle. Our bedroom gets a face lift with the removal of the computer and desk and raiding the upstairs of my parents barn for some "borrowed" furniture. I will probably put up the co...

What do you do when you are crazy busy and have a ton of things that you would like to accomplish before the Fall? Start your flock! (I just couldn't resist these cuties!) In this collection, we have different birds, all bantams. One black cochin, one red/blue laced wyandotte, one buff brahma, and two silver seabrites. Here is a seabrite wearing a hat! We have been wanting to turn this pot into a water feature for a couple of years so we finally just did it! We added a waterlilly and a canna. And what water feature is complete without fish? We "borrowed" these two from my parents fish pond. (Would have cost us $15.00 if we bought them at a pond supply place!)

We found a variety of blackberries (marion, boysen, sylvan, etc.) for $.50 a pound, machine picked. Because we missed cherry season and didn't get as many strawberries, we ordered about a 100 pounds total. We got the Marionberries day before yesterday. We spent the first day setting up for processing - freezing and measuring for jams and of course LOTS of fresh eating Here is Evi after a berry snack. Note the berry piece stuck between her front teeth! My kitchen was looking (and smelling) so nice I just had to take a picture. On the left is sugar waiting to go into the jam. The white jars are kefir. There is berry juice in the back and marionberry jam in front. On the right, is the basil I picked for a pesto pasta dinner and a couple of garden harvests. When we got home from vacation, a sunflower had fallen over so I picked off all the flowers and have been enjoying them inside. A batch of cherry-berry jam. Yum! When all was said and done, I have 18 pints of jam and 6 (mak...

There is no place like home!!! We had a wonderful wonderful wonderful first leg of our journey. We left the resort just before 8:00 and the children were so tired that they sat quiet in the backseat (this is rare!). The girls slept some and they all watched movies. This gave Phil and I a rare and needed time to talk uninterrupted for about 3 hours. We just talked about US and it was SO SO NICE to have that time to connect and communicate and get back to the same starting gate together and feel like a couple. When you are in the season of small children, sometimes being a couple gets lost in the busyness! We stopped by the Ranch to see the new adventure that the Johnson family is up too. They will soon be moving into an old ranch style home and helping out on a cattle ranch. It is definitely a project but looks like a lot of fun and a great adventure for the whole family! After sweltering at the ranch for awhile we went to their current home in Medford and let the children run ...

Today is our last day! I can say that Phil and I are officially vacationed out and ready to get back. Evi probably is too. The others don't seem to be to eager to return. We all had a very nice time! Last night was pretty rough. Neither of the girls slept well and were up quite a bit so we had another low key day here at the hotel with early naps. We had a ginormous breakfast and then went to a little art fair in the morning. We came back and took naps. We ate dinner around 3:00 and then spent the rest of the early evening packing up and cleaning out the car. We are going to ride the gondola up to the top of the mountain and hike around a little before sunset. On Saturdays, they have telescopes for you to borrow so we are going to star gaze. Tomorrow we plan to leave as early as possible. I am hoping between 6-7 but we shall see. Our plan is to make a pit stop in Medford and visit the Johnson family. We will be there sometime in the afternoon and stay a few hours. I th...

We had a nice down day at the resort today. Anna came with her two little ones and stayed for a few hours. It was so nice to visit with her. We walked around the grounds and went over to Olympic Village. It was really hot so it was nice to spend some time sitting in the shade and resting in our room. This included some much needed naps, a leisurely dinner, and evening down time. Tomorrow is our last day and it will be a busy one. We will try and take naps because we plan on being out late. Baby number 4 is a strong baby! He/She can push out hard enough for me to feel uncomfortable (and I am only 16 weeks along, I think). Phil was able to feel hard lumps where baby had wedged himself/herself and movement for the first time. I finally had to shake my stomach a bit to try and get baby to find a different position. That was fun!

Today, we splurged and rented a raft to go down the Truckee River. There is a 5 mile stretch that has a few minor rapids (if you want to call them that), and lots of shallow stretches where the children could get out of the raft and walk around and play in the water. It was a tad crowded but so relaxing. We all had a great time! Our evening routine has turned into dinner then down time with baths and a movie before bed. Poor Jubilee fell asleep a little after 7:00 last night. Evi is one who sleeps poorly at night when she doesn't get adequate rest so we will be putting her down for bed very early tonight and hope that she won't be tossing and turning all night. I asked the children what there favorite part of the vacation has been so far. Jubilee said the treats. Sawyer said the bus ride (coming back from river). If Evi could answer, she would most likely say the animals, it doesn't matter which kind - bird, dog, cat, cow, she loves them all.

We bagged the Blue's Festival last night because it got too late. Instead, we set up a movie for the children in their room and watched a movie in our room. It was nice down time! How on Earth can children play all day, not nap, and still have energy to burn! Phil and I are both wiped out! We slept in quite late this morning and then set out with a packed lunch to find a beach. We found a great one, called Speedboat beach. It had big boulders for climbing and exploring. The water was shallow enough that we could wade from rock to rock. It was sandy all around the rocks so Evi had a place to play, too. We played for a couple of hours and ate our lunch and then explored the North Shore a bit. We stopped by a park on the way home and Phil and the children played for an hour or so while Evi slept in the car (I may have dozed a bit as well). We will probably have some down time again tonight and do laundry so we can get an earlier start tomorrow. We have a rafting trip planne...

Vacation happenings... Monday: We walked around the Olympic Village (we are staying where they held the 1960 Winter Olympics). We checked out the Lake at Tahoe City and then came back for lunch and naps. We played in the stream near our Resort and swam in the pool before and after dinner. In the evening, we had ice cream at one of the little shops in the Village. Tuesday: We had a big breakfast and headed out toward South Lake Tahoe. It was a beautiful drive. We played at a Kiva beach for a couple of hours and then headed back for a late lunch and naps. There is a Blue's Festival at the Village tonight so we will probably walk down there after dinner. Phil is taking the children down to the play area while I tidy up a bit and get dinner started. In case you are wondering about the food updates, here they are: the refrigerator was clearly not meant to be jam packed. Monday, when I was getting out lunch items, I discovered that 3 out of the 5 gallon baggies of premade sal...

We arrived at Lake Tahoe last night after a couple long days in the car and a few minor "setbacks". My goal was to leave Silverton no later than 9:00 so we would have time to set up camp and enjoy Crater Lake a bit. We left our house shortly after 9:00 but the trailer tire had a flat so we had to stop by Les Schwabs. We dropped the trailer off, picked up bagels, and went to Napa auto parts to get something Phil needed for the trailer. Long story short, after all was said and done (wrong parts, people needing to go potty, etc.) we didn't leave until 11:00. The drive to Crater Lake was beautiful. It is fun to go though such different terrain. We went from the lush Willamette Valley to the high dessert. We loved Crater Lake. The rock formations, Mountain top meadows, wildflowers, and of course the lake itself was beautiful. We arrived in time to quickly set up camp and start dinner...where we discovered something terrible (for me anyway, terrible is not in Phil's ...

We are leaving tomorrow for a 10 day vacation. We will be camping at Crater Lake Saturday night, and then staying in a time share (my parents had a week they weren't using) Sunday through the following Sunday. I am not sure where we are camping on the way home. We will visit one of my childhood friends that lives in Tahoe, play at the Lake, hike, and whatever else we find to do. I don't know what it was like for you but when I was little and we would go on vacation (which was camping for us), it was all relaxation. Besides, packing my clothes, I really didn't do much else, Mom and Dad took care of all the details and packing. Now that I am the mom in charge of a great deal of the prep, vacation is a lot like....extra work!!! With 3 small children and being pregnant, I find that my brain operates in spasms of thought (some of you may relate to this!!!) so I have kept a Vacation Notebook for the past several weeks where I can write notes to myself as I think of them. I ...

We were driving back home through the countryside and Sawyer said something to the following affect: "When I have a wife, I am going to have tractors. I will have a large family. I will be a farmer. My large family will work together. I will not use pesticides."

Jubilee is NOT a fan of splashing water. Getting cold water squirted on her back Lots of fun squirting Daddy Could that be Jubilee sitting in the water????

In "real life", I choose more or less to keep my struggles private. I have become increasingly selective about what I share and who I share it with. It becomes more and more evident that I need to take my "problems" to the Lord in prayer and to meditate on scripture and be cautious about coming across as "complaining". This isn't to say that close personal friends aren't needed but in cases where you share your personal struggles with vulnerability, your confidant should be someone who can pray with you and direct you to scripture and build you up with encouragement. Having emotional fire fuled or having someone be insensitive is counterproductive. I don't hide the way I feel very easily and I know that this can and does greatly affect those around me. This is one of those areas in life that is probably my biggest struggle. Really it isn't about hiding the way you feel, it is about controlling and changing it as God has directed us to...