Camping

At the end of June we headed up to Sly Park with our church group for a weekend of fun.  Brian never ceases to amaze me with his real life tetris skills.  The amount of stuff he can fit into our car and tent is quite impressive.  We made it another year without a car top carrier or larger vehicle.  Brian even managed to bring up the wind surfer board which was a hit with more than just our kiddos.  Even Joel got a ride around the lake on it. 
  

 

The dirt was dirty, the marshmallows were tasty,  the lake was refreshing, and the rocks were fun to climb on.  A good time was had by all.

Monster Birthday

  Our Little Monster turned one a couple of weeks ago.  We celebrated with the grandparents and some monster themed fun.

I Needed to Saw Something

Brian Here,

Yesterday on my stay-cation we stayed home to give us all a break from all of our activities.  So in the morning I took Rachel on a bike ride.  That was fun.  Then after lunch Rachel, Joel, and I all took naps while Rebekah went to church to help prep for VBS. Then after Rebekah got home she wanted to bake some things while the kids were still asleep. That gave me 2 hours to do anything I wanted! WOW!  I started labeling pictures on my computer for a little while, but it wasn't quite right.

As it turned out, I just needed to saw something! 

Rebekah and I have a few small white boards that are about 8 inches by 14 inches and we put them on the refrigerator. They are fairly cheaply made and one of them had been dropped several times.  So much so that the plastic frame was broken pretty bad.  So I decided to make a new wooden frame for it. This would allow me to saw something!

I have a 12" X 1" X 6' piece of redwood that I had lying around, left over from the planter box I made for Rebekah at the last house. I ran it through as a test piece for grooves when I made Rebekah's new planter (which does have really nice grooves).  So ripped an inch of it down the long way, and then ripped it down to 3/4 inch on the other side. That gave me two smooth sides. Then I turned it on a smooth size and ran it through both ways to cut off the rough parts.  After that I ran it through with the blade up only 1/4 inch high to create grooves for the white board to fit in.

After I had a 6' long piece all milled to the proper dimensions with my table saw, I got out my miter saw and cut the 45 degree angles. The trick here, was that I had to use a stop on the miter saw so that the pieces could be exactly the same length.  This was a little tricky, but I was able to do it.  After I got all the pieces cut out I tried to put them on the white board, and they didn't quite line up right. Oh no!  But, the trick was to raise my table saw blade a 16th inch and run the boards through again to make the grooves just a little deeper. That worked!

Then it was dinner time.

After dinner, Rachel came out and put glue on the boards for me, and I clamped it.  That took about 15 minutes. Since I used so few tools for the entire project, it only took about 15 minutes to clean it all up. Woo Hoo!

And here is the picture of it!  Recap: 2.5 hours, 0 trips to Lowe's, $0 extra spent, and the project was completely finished in a day.

Fun to be (almost) One Photos

Last weekend we took Joel's 1 year old photos.  We went to Capital Park because we got such nice backgrounds for Rachel's 1 year photos, but with the drought the flowers were few and far between.  Plus Joel got tired and cranky.  The best pictures we got that morning were of Rachel.  We were able to get some nice ones of Joel later in our front yard.  Also note that this year no one is dressed is white or black for the photo shoot.  It only took 3 years of Brian mentioning how difficult it is to take pictures with those colors for me to get the message.

May Days

Wondering what we have been up to?  Well look no further.  Actually not much other than enjoying our kids and working on projects around the house.  Here are some pictures from the past month.

 Rachel and Joel love each other.  One of my prayers for them as siblings has been that they would not just love each other, but like each other and genuinely enjoy each other's company.  I absolutely love how Joel squeals with delight when we go wake Rachel up from her nap, and how she asks about him every morning.  As Joel has developed more personality it has been fun to watch their play evolve.  He wants to be with Rachel and do what she is doing and vice versa.  They seek each other out.  Yes, they don't always get along, but the majority of the time they do play well together.  My prayer is that their relationship continues to grow and that they are friends.  Other friends may come and go, but they will have each other for a lifetime.

 Joel discovered he could climb on the step stool the other day and reach all of Rachel's notes.  Once he ran out of notes within reach he got even braver and climbed onto the table.

We have three baby pigeons living above our bedroom window for the next month.  They are cute in a messy, noisy sort of way.  In a couple of weeks they should be flying, and then we will be taking steps to discourage them from coming back to make more baby pigeons. They fit in nicely with our lesson about how God made birds this past week.

This week Rachel decided we needed to have "fancy day," and then "fabulous day."  These pictures were taken on "fabulous day."  I think she nailed fabulous.

One of our projects was to make Rachel as area to dig in.  I had removed the rocks and fabric, but the dirt was really hard and impossible to dig in.  Brian discovered there was a thin layer of concrete under the top layer of dirt and dug it out for us.  Today the three of them enjoyed some time in the dirt.  We have some more fun plans for that play area so stay tuned in the coming months or year (you know how house projects go).

Creatively Conquering His Lion Walker

 Joel, the baby engineer, is a problem solver.  You can see the wheels turning in his little head when he encounters a puzzle, problem, or something new.

More Macro

Brian here,

With all the projects going on this weekend I still managed to pull out the camera and take some pictures.  We have a fairly large cherry tree in our new back yard and there were bees all over it this weekend because it's blooming.  I took 40 shots, and only a couple really turned out ok.  Bees when they are moving are really hard to get good shots.

It's a bee!

 This one is actually quite sharp and could probably be blown up to 8 X 10 and still look good.

Here it is again with a tighter crop.

Ok, I know you all want to see Joel. Here he is.