Road trip to Winston-Salem!

This past weekend Chris went camping with his Bible Study guys and Ella and I went on an adventure!! We drove to North Carolina to meet up with 2 of my college friends and their kids for the weekend. All around it was a lot of fun but the 6 hour drive turned into 8 hours with traffic so that was TOUGH. We ended up staying an extra day to psych myself up for the drive home :-) Ella was a HERO though. She honestly did not whine or cry the entire 16 hrs we spent in the car together. Amazing blessing! She colored, ate snacks, and read books for hours but I must say I am SO thankful for a kid who is easily captivated by cartoons and a portable DVD player!


What I stared at for a lot of hours

What I looked like towards the end of the drive on day 1. Not. Happy.

What Ella looked like. Silly girl!

My GREAT friend Annie and baby Lucy!

Ella loved being able to feed little Lucy!

Ella had a blast with Will and Thomas, my wonderful friend Libby's kiddos!

Ella and Will are exactly a month apart and played together really well! Ella got to learn all about "boy toys" (i.e. guns, swords, and spiderman dress up clothes!)

A kind of horrible pic of Annie, Libby, and me trying to do a self-portrait :-) It's such a blessing to be close to people I've been friends with for literally 12 years now!

And, my favorite pic of the weekend! Thanks for hosting us Libby! We had so much fun!

Bandaids Video

Couldn't upload this before but it's so cute, Chris says it's worth posting on it's own :-) Refer to the previous post for the background story :-) Oh, and the box of bandaids is all gone. Easy come, easy go!

Ella's foray into capitalism: stimulating the economy pre-school style

Today is a momentous day. Ella made her first purchase! She used her own money, from her own piggy bank to buy her own....drum roll please....BANDAIDS!!! This may not sound exciting to you but it was the perfect solution to her tendency/obsession with using bandaids with no real bandaid-required injury. I told her she could buy her own bandaids and use them whenever she wanted and my bandaids are only for actual blood. Now we're both giddy! It was SO cute watching her take quarters out of her ziploc bag and give them to the very accomodating check-out lady at Walmart. She was jumping up and down when she got the bandaids in her own bag, with her own receipt instead of with the rest of our purchases. SO fun to watch this little milestone of responsibility. My little girl is really growing up! And yes, she's already used about 5 of her bandaids today and it wasn't that hard to bite my tongue and let her :-)

County Fair!

We've become annual fair-goers. And we're particular: we don't like the state fair, only the county one so this Saturday was the day! As usual, lots of fun complete with friends, piglet races, stinky cows, and deep-fried oreos. Great day.

Not that you can tell, but that's me holding Ella, and Esther holding Hanna on our way down!

Ella and Hanna were "Yee-hawing" all the way around the carousel

Tall enough to go on the Train ride by themselves!!

Chris and Andy, thankfully, did not lose their lunch on this one. I almost did just watching it.

Halle milking a goat!

Me and my fascination with non-domestic animals, I had to jump in and try too :-)

I'm sure there's some reason for this but I just took a picture because it was odd.

My favorite fair folks :-)

Extreme Garage Clean-out

The state of our garage had gotten out of hand and we set aside a whole day (not realizing it would actually take that long) to clean it out. We've cleaned it out before but those were soft, sissy clean-outs. This was HARD CORE. We got rid of 5 SUV-loads of stuff. Two to the dump, two to the Salvation Army and one round of returning things to people. We also jettisoned some stuff when Drew, Ping, and Silas (Chris' brother and his fam) came by and took home a bunch of toys. Also gave some stuff to neighbors who thought we were having a yard sale. Not to self: don't clean out your garage on a nice summer Saturday morning on a street popular for yard sales. We turned away at least 20 people and some of them were NOT nice about it! Oh well. We feel lighter and freer and wonderful about our newly emptied garage so it was all worth it. However, I promise I have not been that dirty or sweaty or tired in a long, long time.

I don't have a true "before" picture because I didn't think of it, but imagine all of this stuff...

in here. With all of this stuff still there too.

The sign we eventually made because SO many people stopped, parked, and pawed through our stuff before they believed us that we really weren't having a yard sale! I did try to sell some things but yard salers are picky!

Ella was a trooper with us working all day but entertained herself for hours with sidewalk chalk and a bucket of water.

The End!

All done. Whew!

Sayer born=Produce for us :-)

A week and a half ago our good friends had their third baby (Sayer Malachi-he's SO precious!) and because of this event, Chris was able to fill in for them at the CSA they're a part of. I knew this would be right up Chris' alley and I was right. He's always excited to do something physical with such a sedentary job. And we got buckets of produce as a prize! We'll cover for you any time Shaun :-)

Chris got caught in an INSANE wind/rainstorm while at the farm so he was happy to be home and dry :-)


We got peaches, apples, peppers, eggplant, lettuce, and all kinds of squash! Plus fresh eggs and bread. Good deal for 4 hrs of work (that I didn't even do!). Definitely considering joining a CSA for next year :-)