Raines Hatteras Trip!

On Saturday, the girls & I got back from a trip to Hatteras Island with the Raines clan. We had great weather & a great time together. Here's my brother Dwight taking the girls on a boat ride and Sadie learning how to eat a crab.

One morning, we took a walk on the beach and saw a roped off area protecting baby sea turtles.

Here's Sadie pretending to be a sand crab!

Here's the girls having fun with their cousin Marena doing a dance by the pool.

Lastly, here's my dad with his girls :0). They love their Pop Pop!

Our Gardens

I was outside watering the plants this afternoon when I decided to snap a few shots of our gardens. After two years, our black eyed susans are finally putting on a great show! This bunch started with just a few small plants that my friend gave me one fall. Now they've spread to a nice 3 X5 ft area.

Here's our little vegetable garden with some sunflowers behind it. I'd love to make the vegetable garden bigger and more beautiful one day, but it works for now. We have two tomato plants, lots of little watermelons, and cucumber. We also had sugar snap peas and strawberries.

This year I'm so excited that our sunflowers are doing well! We only lost one to "Nutty Nut"...our frisky squirrel friend who apparently jumped on one and split it in half. Now if we could just keep him off our tomatoes!

Here are our pumpkin plants. We're excited to see some flowers blooming and hopeful we'll have at least three pumpkins by fall (one for each girl).

Lastly, here's our butterfly bush with a few little visitors. We had two swallowtail butterflies and I thought it was interesting how they had different patterns on their backs. Male & female perhaps?

2nd Annual American Girl Doll Camp

This year our girl was Josefina from New Mexico. We decorated the house with Mexican clothing, pottery, blankets, baskets, and chili peppers!

We had 9 girls total and began the camp with weaving on our cardboard looms. Josefina had to finish all of her household chores before she could attend the fandango and one of her chores was carding wool, spinning it into yarn, and helping with the weaving.

After we learned a bit about Josefinia's life on the rancho in the 1820s, we enjoyed some delicious Feast Day cookies, tortillas with cinnamon & sugar, and hot chocolate with cinnamon & vanilla.

When we finished, we played a game called El Floron. The guesser stood in the middle of the circle and had to guess who was hiding the flower in their hand!

The fandango continued with a dance called La Vaquerita. The girls had fun twirling their skirts and dancing to spanish folk music.

Our time together ended with craft time. We made Memory Books just like the leather one Tia Dolores showed Josefina. We made it look like leather by crinkling the brown paper, rubbing it with candle wax, and ironing it. The girls got very creative while making their covers!

Happy 4th!

We had a fabulous 4th! We started out the day painting red & blue fingernails, walked to our neighborhood parade, and ended the day with friends, fireworks, and lots of yummy food!


I'm so grateful for our country, our neighborhood, our friends, and our family. Thank you to all of those men & women who have risked their lives to protect our freedom.

I like this quote, "Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom." Albert Einstein

Blueberries!

YAY! Blueberries! Last year, we were so sad because we couldn't pick any blueberries at the farm because there was a very small crop. This year there are blueberries aplenty!

Did you know blueberries make you silly?
The next morning, the girls asked if we could make blueberry muffins. Mmmmm! We ended up picking 3 lbs, so I froze the rest for smoothies or maybe even blueberry pancakes!

Happy Birthday Buxton!

Today Buxton turned 11. Elise kept saying, "That's 77 in dog years." Yep...our sweet boy is getting old :0(. He's moving much slower and needs his medicine everyday, but has the same amount of spunk in his heart that he had when we brought him home.

Happy Birthday B! We love you!