Well, I mentioned the upcoming posting of this topic. And then without even thinking about it, I gave it all away in this post. The funny thing is we got 8 comments on that post and EVERY one of them had something to do with "the mustache". Yes, folks. It's real. He's been growing this for a while now. I guess you could say I'm getting used to it. When it all began, I didn't put my foot down or anything, but I didn't really think he'd go this long with it. It's not really my favorite, but I don't think he's going to keep it around forever, but I guess I better not count my chickens before they've hatched. (Ha, chickens!)
To be honest, he really doesn't have that many supporters of his mustache. But his co workers think it's pretty great--or so he says. :) Apparently, there are several now that are growing mustaches as well. Who knew he'd be a trend setter of sorts?
He's SO looking forward to wearing these sunglasses this summer. And he keeps bringing up his favorite movie line when conversation turns to his mustache.
It's from an older Clint Eastwood movie (he can't remember the name). Clint Eastwood walks into a restaurant to discover it's in the middle of being robbed. This is the conversation he has with one of the robbers.
"Well, we're not just gonna let you walk on out of here."
"Who's 'we' sucka?"
"Smith, Wesson, and Me."
Such a tough guy! :)
I just have my fingers crossed that he'll shave before the baby is born. I don't want this poor child to be "the one" that has the weird birth pictures with daddy's mustache. I'm currently looking for good opportunities to make bets with Shawn about when to shave. Bets that I think I'll win, of course. :)
Each spring, Shawn and I are usually diving into this book and making big garden plans.
We dream of having a backyard garden like this one. With rows of healthy green vegetables, thriving in the sunshine in weed free rows.
With a weekly harvest like this
Sadly, this is usually what our garden yields. The beet on the right was from our garden last summer. The one on the left is from Shawn's grandma's. Hers fit nicely in the palm of your hand. At least our beets didn't need any slicing! :) Even if we only got enough for one meal...hmmm
So as you can see, even though we try every year, our garden never seems to measure up to our expectations. Oh, we're not giving up! We'll still plant a garden this year, and we'll make some changes to hopefully get a better production than in previous years. And really, we got a lot of snap peas, lettuce, and herbs so that's not too bad. And we can grow a lot of rhurbarb here. So at least we found a few things that grow well in our garden. This year, I'll have to plant the beets and carrots a bit earlier so they have more time to grow and can hopefully get bigger than the length my fingers! :)
But this spring, I don't think either one of us has even cracked a garden book. That's because we've got a different kind of fever. We've been pouring over this book
and dreaming about these. We're particularly fond of the black and white one on the right. I believe it's called a Barred Rock.
And we're dreaming of these....fresh eggs
So the process has already begun. Several weeks ago, Shawn and his brother set to work on our chicken coop for our backyard flock. Conveniently it sits next to our usual source of spring fever--our garden boxes.
Day 1 of Construction
Day 2 of Construction
Day 3 (or so)
The boys decided to turn the coop before they added more weight to it. Now the chickens can enjoy partial shade instead of full shade. Much better.
I believe this was Day 4. The coop was 95% done.
This was when Shawn started bringing over friends to see his handy work.
The walk way with perch spots up to the nesting boxes.
The human side of the nesting boxes. Nice and easy access for collecting eggs. We may have to find something for the kids to use as a step stool though. They won't be able to reach it without being lifted up. And I'm not going to be lifting them up with my expanding waistline.
After Shawn made a few more final touches, we had our friend and resident chicken expert, Matt, come over for a "coop inspection". He thought everything looked great! Yay, we passed inspection! (Ha, ha!)
Now we're getting ready for the arrival of our feathered friends--hopefully sometime today.
We gave in and let the kids sit up in the nesting boxes and play around in the coop yesterday. But we reminded them that they won't be able to do this once we have the chickens. This is probably the cleanest this joint will ever be.
I believe this is her best chicken strut.
The chicken view of the nesting boxes
With a rather large chicken inside :)
The human view with a few fake eggs to let the chickens know where to go to lay the real ones.
Real ones like these
They'll be delicious and nutritious!
I'm sure we'll keep you all posted on the arrival of our new feathered friends. Until then, I suppose we're still dreaming.
Over the weekend, we got a few new additions to our home. We're not the proud caretakers of 5 goldfish! Here they are sharing the breakfast table with the kids. Fortunately, we had a goldfish about three years ago, so we still had all the supplies for the fish. I hadn't ever gotten rid of the stuff because I always hoped we'd get more.
We got our fishies at the boat show over the weekend. What a crazy, fun time the kids had there. This little guy thought getting on every boat was as good as riding all the rides at an amusement park. And guess what? No lines! He would hop into the drivers seat on each boat and give the wheel a spin. He's SOOOO ready for being on the boat this summer.
The highlight--for our little girly at least--was the fishing station for kids. A local pet shop in town had this inflatable filled with water and goldfish and let each kid "fish". Daddy helped but all total, they caught 5 fish! They were very proud of themselves.
Our little man kept saying, "We caught five salmons!" Such a good little Alaskan boy. Every fish is a salmon, right?
Our little girly was so excited to carry the bag of fish too. She saw other kids carrying their bags while we were looking at boats and she wanted to go right away and find the fish. I told her we would go find the fish right before we left so we didnt' have to carry the bag around too long. But that was her master plan! She wanted to carry her bag of fish around.
The good news is that after 5 days, we still have 5 goldfish! We'll see how long this lasts!
The First Day of Spring in our neighborhood was glorious. Just the dose of natural vitamin D many of us enjoy. I've been trying to keep myself moving lately--don't want to gain too much pregnancy weight! So the kids and I headed off for a walk to the glacier. And yes, sunglasses were required!
The little missy wanted to ride her bike and I agreed. She's been doing a great job riding on short walks or in front of our house and not getting tired too quickly. So I figured this might be the year she could do it--ride her bike all the way to the glacier without pooping out and begging me to push her bike for her.
I figured the little man would want to walk some of the way, but I knew he would get tired and I wasn't going to be carrying his 35 lb. self, so I took the stroller. To my surprise, he rode in the stroller the whole time and was quite glad to. That made it nice for me to be able to walk at a faster pace instead of a 2 year old pace.
I'm very proud of her four year old feet that pushed her four little wheels all the way to the glacier and back. She did walk and push her bike a few times, but she took care of it herself and didn't ask me to push it for her! What a big girl!
Practicing her Lance Armstrong moves.
A beautiful day called for a great walk/bike ride and I'm glad we took the opportunity. Especially since it snowed two inches overnight. (Fortunately, it's trying to turn to rain now. Hopefully it will melt off soon.)
Here we are, just past the halfway point of this pregnancy. So I figured it was time to post some belly pics. And to keep things a little fun, I went digging into our picture archives to find some photos of my previous pregnancies. And it's all working out nicely since I found pictures from each pregnancy that were taken at about the same point. Perfect for a little perspective and comparison.
Here I am with baby #3. This was at 20 weeks. And now I'm at 22 weeks. We don't know what we're having and hope to keep it that way until the delivery. A good ol' fashioned surprise!
This was at 20 weeks with baby #2, our little man. Notice, that I'm about the same visual size now as then. And yes, I'm wading in water that's touching the glacier in the background. Not to mention the waterfall that is surging with snow melt. Shortly after we took this picture, we waded to the other side of this "finger" of the lake to get closer to the falls. I'll just tell ya--it was COLD! Never mind that it was June.
This was me at 18 weeks with baby #1 our little missy. Just look at that ridiculous little baby bump. You can hardly see it! No wonder I've felt so big with #2 and #3. I am compared to this picture. And on a side note, this photo was taken at the Pittock Mansion in Oregon. It was a photo we didn't end up choosing for our Christmas card that year, but it shows the belly pretty well.
And on another side note, check out the hair on my husband's head! If you never knew us until we moved to Alaska, then you've probably never seen him like this. Sometimes I wish he'd grow out his hair like this again. But there will be more on hair growth in another post....
Well, I think it's official. I've become totally inspired lately by the Make It And Love It blog. A few months ago I saw this idea on her blog. I read through the entire tutorial she had and knew I wanted to make something similar in the near future.
Recently, I heard about a little girl from church who was sick and even spent some time in the hospital recovering. She's just a few months older than my little guy, so I knew there were probably only so many coloring books and TV shows that would occupy her as her little body recovered. I wanted to do something for her that would bring a smile to her face, and maybe even occupy her time for more than a few minutes. (If that's possible for a two year old.) My mind turned to this idea, and I decided to spend some time making a little felt potato for her this weekend.
Isn't he cute just hanging out in my windowsill, soaking in the natural light?
To start, I had to make my own patterns. But I just sketched them out by hand on regular paper. Nothing too technical. A few pieces I folded in half to get them to be equal proportions, but I tried not to be too picky. Then I cut out the pieces in felt--a front and back for each piece. (The pieces are layered together in this picture.)
Then I placed the velcro where I wanted the face pieces to be on the body, and then sewed them in place. Then I sewed a pocket to the back piece to hold all the extra pieces.
I then sewed the opposing pieces of velcro to one side of each face piece.
Then I took the two pieces of of each face piece and sewed them together (with wrong sides facing), left a gap for stuffing (poly fill), stuffed, and then finished sewing them closed. (All on the machine, of course. Cause no one want to sew all that by hand!)
For the body, I followed a suggestion I found online from someone else who used this idea, and sewed the body with right sides together. Then I turned it, stuffed it, and sewed up the bottom. The intent was to prevent it from puckering too much around the edges. I did it this way, but I'm not sure if I'd do it that way again. It was really hard to not get a flat bottom doing it this way. And we all know potatoes are round!
One nice thing about this project was using felt. Felt is great because you don't have to worry about the fabric fraying. That's why I could sew the pieces with the wrong sides together and expose the seams.
On these two pieces I sewed some detail seams. Teeth and lip lines. The teeth lines don't show up very well in the picture, but you can see them pretty well in the photo at the top.
Then I warmed up my trusty hot glue gun and added some accent pieces from some scrap felt. I used some photos online as a guide and then cut them by hand.
Here's all the finished pieces.
Here's the Mr version.
And the Mrs version
And then the extra pieces can tuck inside the pocket. Although in the future, I think I'll do the pocket differently too.
I will admit that this project was a little more than I had bargained for. It wasn't really difficult exactly. It just took me a bit longer than I had imagined. The truth is, it took me a total of about 5 hours to complete. And half of that time was interruption free because I worked on it after the kids were asleep. Shawn thought it was great and admitted it would have taken him much longer to finish. But he still told me, "That's five hours you'll never get back." Some boys just don't get crafting, huh? I realize there may be some of you reading this that are thinking the same thing, but don't worry. I don't feel like my time was spent in vain. I enjoyed the creative process and making something with my hands. And the bonus will be seeing the smile on the face of a little girl who will enjoy it.
Share the love little potato guy!
