EKjourney Backup

Glorielle, 2 months shy of age 3 Brighton, 4  Evangeline, 6  Jubilee, just turned 8 Sawyer, 9 1/2

Our brand new baby, our first born daughter. Turned into this lovely 8 year old girl. What happened?  Oh my, she is growing up so fast!  We are super blessed by her.  She is so helpful around the house, creative, social, is wonderful with Glorielle, has become a great reader this year, loves projects and making things.  She is my right hand girl! Her birthday gift, a lego friends "juice bar" set. She was super excited and I let her skip school for the day so she could put it all together! The others weren't so fortunate.  Doesn't it look like everyone is sitting so nicely and working quietly (they are at the moment).  You might think that school must always run this way...LOL!  I like this picture because it reminds me that there are moments when everything is running just right! We had a funneling of birthday celebrations throughout the day.  Daddy came home on his break and brought flowers and bagels for lunch.  Grampy, Grammy, and Eddie (f...

We abandoned inside chores and activities and got an early start in the garden right after breakfast.  It is amazing to me how quickly the garden becomes a weedy mess and how much time it takes to clean it up! Jubilee's latest project.  She is always doing some sort of project.  Here, she is cutting cardboard boxes up to make a house.  Starting in on the weeds.  We have hundreds of sunflowers.  I love them but too many shade the garden. Sawyer and Jubilee are moving rocks. Freshly weeded. The peas were a disaster!  We didn't stake them up when they were small so they had twined themselves around sunflowers stalks and it took forever to weed them and then separate the rows in order to put up the cattle panels. This took me almost the entire day...and Phil did the peas LOL. The next raised bed is up and partially planted.  We don't quite have enough dirt to fill it yet.  If you scroll down, you can see a before picture.

Summer is on the horizon.  Phil and I flip flop a bit in our normal routine in the summer.  He takes on odd jobs during the summer months, works around our home as Mr. Fix it, and spends a lot of time with the children, and is not driven by schedules and work related to do lists.  I try and balance household responsibilities with a long list of yearly chores:  a deep house clean, working in the garden to provide food for our family for the Summer and Fall, preserving food, homeschool planning for the year to come...things that are easier to do with a second person helping with the children. I so enjoy these days of hard work, sunshine, long daylight hours, and feeling accomplished.  This switchover is just around the corner and I am anxious for it.  Anxious to get working on my to do list, anxious to have Phil home and have family time, anxious for adventure and fun, anxious for the extra relaxation even in the midst of so much to do, and anxious for the li...

Ta Da!  Here I am at my very first vendor fair.  How exciting.   I had a great spot (the first spot as you entered the set up area).  Grandma Tracy came down for the weekend so just Phil and I went in for the morning set up around 7:00.  We didn't have to get children up early and since it was just the two of us, it was like a date.  LOL.  It took just a short time to get everything set up.  The entire week prior, my livingroom was in an arrangement similar to this so it was pretty easy to duplicate the spacing and table top displays.  I was so pleased with how it looked.  It was amazing how the parts and pieces that I got second hand (linens and shelf) or that I borrowed (tables and chairs and awning) or things that I already had (room divider, little side table) all blended together.  The only thing that we bought new was burlap for the table topping and the materials to make the picket fence.  It makes the experience so much...

It is too beautiful to be inside and I am spending a lot of time thinking about how I can reduce the inside chore and meal prep time so that I can be outside instead.  So far, I don't have any brilliant ideas. I just can't seem to get around the fact that my inside household duties take up most of my day.  What we can do, is school outside.  I dusted off the outside umbrella and made a crude holder out of cinder-blocks and we did our school in the shade on the tiny strip of lawn that we have left.  All other lawn has been dug up in favor of raised beds but I am glad we left a little just wide enough for a big blanket. The bucket of course contains snakes. The current state of my livingroom!  It is set up a little smaller than the canopy tent that I have but I am getting an idea of design and table display.  My main concern at the moment is that it looks sparse.  I want the tables to be overflowing with handmade goodies and bursting with color.  I ...

Mother's Day Phil managed to put together a big breakfast for me before church (very impressive).  We went to the Sunday School session and drove home via my favorite side rode.  I brought along my camera because I knew the clover field was in bloom and when I was picking up milk on Friday, I discovered a lovely purple field.  With a hot weather week looming on the horizon, mid day or not (mid day is generally not very good lighting wise), I wanted to get record the spectacular colors before they faded.  I could have stood there all day with the warm sunshine on my face, and the birds twittering, and honey bees busing and the colors, oh my the colors!   At home, we had a house left in the wake of being out and about on Saturday running errands to prepare for next week's vendor fair.  I now have all the table linens and have done a practice set up in the livingroom.  Phil and the children did some yard clean up while I set the house in order and then I ...