Thursday, September 30, 2010

i {heart} my family

we were able to spend a lot of time with my family as well on our vacation, which is kind of a big reason for going ;)  i have a bunch of pictures so i will break it down a bit...

time with the van dalens:

we hung out at my sister's house several times....  the girls loved it there and the chance to run around outside and get really really dirty ;) 




they met Paris the bunny... (apparently the other bunny, Fred was having some ahem, health issues, and was relegated to his cage)



















and general merriment abounded...





























the last night we were there my brother in law took them out in the loader to pick blackberries.... yum! (hmmm my sis promised to make some yummy concoction with those berries, wondering if she ever did???)  wild blackberries everywhere is another thing i miss about my hometown.

 





Monday, September 20, 2010

i {heart} vacation

back to a vacation post... 

well the "grand adventure" really is over.  now it's lots of fun visiting with family and friends.   many of these events i did not get pictures of because i was too lazy  so busy having fun reconnecting with awesome people doing awesome things. ;)

we did manage to get some pictures and of course Grandma D contributed a few [hundred] as well.   ;)

i will start with our visits with dear friends...

we got to see Jason and Darlene and crew several times.... a quick meeting at Lynden City Park of which I didn't take any pictures,  dinner and hanging out at their house a couple times. (which is now their "old" house and have since moved!) 


we got to see Mike and Amy and their twins who are only a few days apart in age from our oldest... 


and our couples Bible study group we were in (which has expanded greatly with children and vans since we left, lol) had a BBQ/bonfire at Jon and Shelly's farm.



friends not pictured were:
a day trip to Seattle to meet up with Brad and Steph and their little pumpkin about the same age as our miss baby.  shopping at Southcenter mall (which has my fave store H&M! yay!) and lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. 
a morning at the Bender Fields park with Kara and her crew, which got rained out, since Kara claimed she was going to melt ;) (j/k! i know she won't melt in the rain since we have spent many a rainy day outside growing up together)

It is such a blessing to be able to connect with friends and be able to still connect after the years and miles separate!

Next up:  family time in Lynden :)

Saturday, September 18, 2010

i {heart} being shredded

quick post. 

i am joining in on this 30 day challenge:

Balancing Beauty and Bedlam

i am on day 3 of doing Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred workout DVD.  Every muscle in my body is screaming out at me to knock it off already.  but ya know miss baby is 9 months old.... and the whole saying of 9 months on, 9 months off is not applying to me apparently.  so i am telling my muscles to kick it in gear and shape up. 

i took my measurements the first day and at the end of 30 days i will take them again and report on inches lost.  hopefully some pounds lost too ;)

anyone else want to join me?

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

I'm not sure if I {heart} applesauce

we interrupt the "grand adventure" vacation posts and skip ahead to my day yesterday.

i spent alllllllllllllllll day making applesauce.  the past two years i made applesauce with my good friend sarah but she went and moved to texas on me so i had to go it alone this year.  (not near as fun by myself, hence the title of my post)

i make my applesauce in my vitamix.  sooooo easy. 

my method:
wash apples (i didn't worry about scrubbing them since they had never been sprayed)


chop 'em up (i leave the peel, the vitamix takes care of it all, i also didn't worry about removing too much of the core)

cook 'em up (i had two pots going, in past years we had 4 pots going but i couldn't keep up with that by myself)

strain out cooked apples into vitamix and add sweetener (if needed) and cinnamon if desired
i also make sure there is a little of the cooking water just because i am guessing a lot of the vitamins and nutrients are in there

finished! 29 quart bags to freeze and one jar to eat right away plus one apple crisp for dessert :)

tip:  block baby from kitchen so she doesn't get stepped on or get hot apple dropped on her ;)


Tuesday, September 7, 2010

grand adventure, day 2.

it seems life got in the way again and interrupted my plan of "catching up" on blog posts.  pricing items for a garage sale we are holding this weekend took over my "spare" time.  i'm not a big fan of preparing for a garage sale.  it was an emotional thing to do this time (getting rid of all that little baby stuff, sniff sniff) but i *know* it is just stuff.  sentimental stuff.  but still just stuff.  i pray that someone else can enjoy a new little babe, fresh from God in those precious clothes and make use of it.  (in other words, i hope i sell it all and all this stress and time spent pricing it will be worth it!)

ANYHOO... on to day 2. 

it started with a bang at 1:30am.... but first i need to back up a little. 

when we finally got into our hotel room that first night, our eldest DD was complaining of a stiff neck and was not herself at all.  she even opted not to go swimming at the pool.  i gave her some ibuprofen and we all just went to bed.  allll in the same little room.  our original reservation, at our original hotel was for a two room suite.  well, the hotel that we were moved to had no such thing.  so a "two queen" room it would be.  and as i said in my last post, it turned out to be quite providential that the change was made. 

back to 1:30am.  i woke up.  bright light shining into the room.  dd#2 must have gone to the bathroom and not turned off the light.  i went to turn it off and when i came back to the main room i smelled a not-so-nice smell.  (cause ya know, 6 people sleeping in one room should smell like roses, right?)  it smelled like puke. i whisper to chad.... "honey, are you awake? it smells like puke in here"  he has superior night vision and got up to check each of our sleeping babes.  he signaled it was the oldest.  i went to investigate.  GROSS.  everywhere.  in her hair, down the side of the bed, on the side of the pack-n-play miss baby was sleeping in, like projectile, everywhere. GAG, GAG, GROSS.  (i don't deal well with puke) and our oldest was sleeping through it all.  so chad got her up and had the super fun job of trying to wash it out of her hair.  meanwhile i had the super fun job of trying to clean up the bed and floor without waking the rest of the family. we put everything out in the hall and called down to the front desk to notify them there was a large mass of stinky towels and bed linens in the hallway and that we could use a few more fresh towels. we all went back to sleep eventually and decided we would not try to make it on the road by a certain time that day.  i never would have smelled that she puked if we were not all put in the same room.  kudos to the hotel staff not only for having to clean up that nasty pile of smelly stuff but for making sure we woke up to a huge pile of fresh clean towels outside our door. :)

fast forward a few hours.  our oldest does not want to get back in the car. her only driving force is that we will see grandma d soon.  we make a stop at the local wally world to pick up motion sickness medicine and more ibuprofen.  we hit the road again (about 2 hours later than we would have liked) pretty much figuring that we would be finding a hotel in Spokane but we would see how the day went.  

aside from the rough start, day 2 turned out to be pretty stress free. we had one "bathroom issue" which required a change of clothes, but our stops seemed to be more effective and traveling went really smoothly and by lunch our oldest was a bit more perky. 




above pictures from our lunch stop, gorgeous, hot sunny day!

at our "snack time" stop at the last rest area in Montana we met some extremely tame rodents of some kind (i heard someone call them lemmings, but i'm pretty sure they were some type of chipmunk or squirrel).  the oldest was freaked out by them (in her defense, one of them did come up behind her and smacked her on her back) but we had fun feeding them crackers and cheese.  even miss baby thought they were pretty interesting. (see below)

we got to spokane around dinner time and we let the kids vote on if they wanted to keep going.  the thought that they could see grandma d that very night swayed them to continue on.  once we got to ellensburg we changed them into their pj's and put in the movie Wall-E and they promptly fell asleep.  now listening to this movie from the front seat and not seeing the picture is insanely boring.  there are no words for like the first hour.  just little robot noises.  snnoooooze.  which is exactly what chad and i both wanted to do.  but we couldn't.  must. keep. driving.  we didn't want to stop to switch drivers and risk waking the sleeping beasts angels, so we had to literally rub our faces to keep awake. chad and i love road trips partly because of the opportunity to talk about whatever comes to mind.  nothing was coming to mind. empty, tired, minds.

we made it of course, cause my hubby is superman.  12:30am we rolled in to Lynden in our super cool cargo-topped van. ;)  woot woot!  ahhh, home sweet home. (away from home anyway)