Getting Primal at the Zoo

We just officially put our house on the market this week and our house was shown for the first time yesterday. I was really wishing I had gone to Hogwarts instead Bishop Kelley for school so I could wave my magic wand or just have an house elf clean it up for me. Thanks BK but praying the house clean just wasn't cutting it!

God helps those who help themselves, so we got down and dirty and cleaned it up! We actually had to put the kids in the car to complete the finishing touches. Then off on an adventure we went while we had to be out of the house:

Gearing up to Go


1st Stop: Krispy Kreme



2nd Stop: Mountains




3rd Stop Zoo

Totally exhausted by the time we got home. No offers on the house yet : (

Sewing an Extra Long Bed Skirt

Bed lifters, bed raiser, bed lifts, bed risers ... anyway... they are all the rage! Extra storage now for your guns, food storage, whatev. The only problem - standard bed skirts aren't long enough!

To solve this problem I took a pillow from the bed with me to Hobby Lobby and grabbed some sale fabric - 3 yards

ripped, folded, ironed, pinned, sewed, DONE! Extra long bed skirt out of my existing plain white bed skirt.



2 nails
twine
clothes pins
paper
water colors
little girl

Making Lemonade

We are trying our darnedest to get our house looking fantastic so we can sell it quickly. This is NO fun, because I am doing all the things I wanted to do, but not for me, for someone else.

Me and the credit card went to the store and bought beautiful yellow mums that we cannot afford, and I came home and planted them. Juliet and Cougar were helping me. I asked Juliet to clean off some rocks for the rock garden in a large bucket.

She told me she was done and I went to inspect them, only to my astonishment, the entire bucket was full of the tops of the mums! I yelled "NO! What did you do!?" My new, unaffordable mums were now naked! Juliet began to cry and said, "I was just cleaning them for you."

Boy did I feel like a jerk. I pulled myself together and we went in and found a big glass bowl. We put water in the bottom and put the flowers in to float on top and made a centerpiece for the table.

Naked Mums


Centerpiece on Table

Alice Dress

I love it! This dress is for little Alice Bright, my best friend Stephanie's new baby. I got the idea from the green apple dress on Cally's blog. It was the inspiration, but this one came out totally different, which I guess is how inspiration works...
Anyhow, every little girl should have a pretty dress.

Fancy Pants

These are the first pants I have ever sewn! Juliet loves her new fancy pants.

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

No lions, or tigers, but we took the kids on a hike up to Laural Falls and we encountered a Mama Bear and her two cubs! No one was hurt, she went her way and we went ours.


Poor Juliet fell into the F-ReeZing water! She was so sad and cold.



Chad and Cougar climbed the falls. Cougar is like Spiderman/monkey the way he can scale walls and waterfalls with lightning fast speed and no fear.

Homemade Peach Ice Cream

This is SO easy and you will NOT find this recipe online so copy and paste!

2 cups whole milk
2 cups heavy whipping cream
¾ cup sugar
1tsp Vanilla

1 cup crushed, sliced or pureed peaches (optional)

Ice Cream Maker
Box of Rock Salt
10-20lbs ice
water

Mix first half of ingredients in metal part of ice cream maker (wait on the peaches). Start machine according to machine directions. Once the cream is thickening up, add the peaches and let it turn until ice cream is ready.
I scream!
You scream!

Mayo or Bust!

Our new place:

Ha, Ha, just kidding (maybe)

Well, my friends, Psyke! or Sike! or is it Psych! on the whole moving to Tennessee thing. It looks like Florida is the destination of choice~

Chad got a call last night offering him an anesthesia residency position at Mayo Clinic - and he accepted!

Peach Jam

1 water bath - $18
Package of accessories - $7
Mason Pint Jars - $8
SureJell - $3
Sugar - $4
Peaches from the backyard - MANY hours of peeling and pitting

The satisfaction of making 4 Jars of Homemade Peach Jam - Priceless

I hate waiting, where are my peaches? and def leppard

It pains me intensely to wait. Either tonight or tomorrow we will find out if Chad got the job with Mayo. My intellect tells me that he is a shoe-in, but my gut is wrenched wondering about every other possibility, politics, etc... that can get in the way of getting a great job.

If he gets it - wow - we have a lot to do to get us there. If he doesn't, we are back to the old drawing board. Even more time wasted.

So we get back after being on vacation for 9 days and all of our peaches are gone. We don't know what happened to them. Many were still green when we left, could they have fallen off the tree and completely biodegraded before we got back? Could it have been a peach napper? Dressed all in black with a black sack, sneaking into our yard stealing all the peaches from the tree. Cougar has a theory about jumping bunnies.

We relived our childhood this weekend at the Poison/ Def Leppard concert. It was a lot of fun. No particular excitement to report. Didn't meet Brett Michaels, but did meet Dick Morris at the airport.

Birthday Boy aka Mr. 888

We are celebrating Brock's Birthday in Orlando. He very much enjoyed his mint chocolate chip ice cream. That was my first birthday ice cream so it holds a special place in my heart (and Tummy!)
He started making fishy faces. That's what I caught a picture of here.

swag a little

Before:

After:


My most recent project has been to hang the draperies in the conservatory window. The fabric I found and fell deeply in love with in France last year. I decided to go with a swag look with puddling at the bottom for a more romantic feel. The window was small and rather low so I hung the cream sheers a little extra wide and high. Then I framed them with the swag. None of the actual window is covered by the swag, creating an optical illusion of a large and stately window.