Day 57

We went to the Wildlife Safari for the first time today. It's only about an hour and a half away, and we've lived here almost 9 years, yet we haven't made it out there, even though we've driven by a dozen times or more.

It was fun, and thanks to Little Grandma & Papa, we have a one-year membership now, so we'll be back again!

Day 55

I didn't have my camera with me today. But I had my phone in my pocket, of course! We were looking at a property we are possibly interested in making an offer on when I saw this butterfly on their flowers.

Day 54

Some friends were camping over at Rogue River this weekend. I had happened to meet Julie on Facebook and it turns out we have a number of friends in common from "back in the day". Since we only live an hour or so away from each other now, and they were camping only a half hour away, naturally we had to meet. Turns out Julie remembered Charlie from various youth meetings when we were teenagers and she came to visit her uncle - who happens to work for Charlie's Dad and attended our church for just about forever.

Our Hannah and their oldest, Lexy (Lexie?), are only about 3 months apart in age and hit it off instantly. No surprise to Julie or myself. Hehehe.

Day 51

We decided to meet a couple of friends at the spray park before Vacation Bible School today. It's hot!!

Day 49

We went to the Toga Shop at VBS tonight. The kids got to be wrapped up in Toga cloth, it was too cute!

Day 48

What a great first night at VBS! We had nearly 75 kids show up, and a lot of their parents stayed, too. This is the "family time" when we divide into groups to talk about what we'll be doing that night (or what we've just finished doing - beginning and ending family times).

Day 47

Our church is putting on a Vacation Bible School starting tomorrow. It's "Paul, Rome and the Underground Church", featuring Paul in the time of the early Christians when they had to worship hiding in caves. We've turned most of the church grounds into Rome, AD 70. I love what they came up with for the potty station! LOL!

Day 46

Park Day! We go to the park with the local homeschool group every Thursday - barring bad weather! During the school year (and especially when it's rainy) we meet for a more structured P.E. style class, in a gym type room at a church a few minutes away. But for summer fun, we just enjoy the park!

Day 45

Not an exciting day. Can you spot the error on this sign?

Day 44

The new sundresses I made for the girls. Found this fabric on sale for $2.48 a yard and only needed 2 yards for 2 dresses!

Day 43

Sarah opened the door to look outside a little while ago and shrieked with excitement. Apparently the babies are getting big enough to really be wandering around with Mom. I grabbed the camera and stepped outside as quietly as I could, but they still started to move away. I had to zoom out pretty far to get this picture, and unfortunately only managed to get 2 of the babies in the shot - there are three of them again this year!

Day 42

Hannah found a green lady bug today. It was crawling so fast it was all I could do to snap one good close-up!

Day 41

A quiet day at home today, just doing laundry and such. Charlie went down to work on the VBS set again. Here's the view of the sunset from our back deck.

Day 40

A friend asked us at church today if we wanted to go with them up to the Rogue River Gorge. This is a fairly narrow channel which the Rogue River races through at incredible speed and force. It's carved out of lava rock and there are a number of places you can see open ends of lava tubes from when Mt. Mazama erupted thousands of years ago.

Charlie wasn't able to come with us, he had to run the p.a. at church for the evening program, so it was just the girls and me with our friends Rosalee and Dana. Kind of a girls' day out. Fun!

We also stopped the Natural Bridge - just a couple miles further down, also made of lava rock. It's a bed of hardened lava rock that the river goes through - the river actually disappears under the rock and comes up a few hundred feet away. We hiked about a half mile up the trail to where we could get right down on the riverbank, when it started pouring rain! We had a great time hiking back to the car in the downpour.

Stopped at the fish hatchery on the way back down from the mountain. The girls had a great time feeding the fish - there are food stations provided where you can buy a handful of food for them for a quarter. We barely made it back to the van there before it began to rain again!

The perfect end to a fabulous day... a gorgeous rainbow split the sky. I especially liked how this photo came out with the tree in silhouette in front of it.

Day 39

Sarah, what do you have in your hands?


Ohhh I should have known. A roly-poly! We are completely inundated with these little guys this year, and both girls are totally enamored with them. I should have waited 5 minutes to take the picture... Sarah had about 10 of them in her hand!

Day 38

We're helping get ready for the upcoming Vacation Bible School that our church is putting on in just over a week's time. The theme is Paul and the Underground Church in Rome. It's going to be so cool! Anyone in the southern Oregon area is welcome to attend! It should be fun for all ages. For more info, click here.

Tonight I went down to the church to help Charlie do paper mache cave walls.

Day 37

Fun with sidewalk chalk...

"Sarah, the Rock Star", by Hannah, age 5 (6 next month!!)

Day 36

Not watching TV makes for a lot more imaginative games than we had before - and we didn't have a shortage of it even then! The TV was background noise for a good 80% of the time, but music makes even better background noise and isn't as distracting to the imagination!

Here's Hannah, with all her dolls and stuffed animals lined up at the edge of a blanket. She's the teacher and they are all her students.

Day 35

Sarah the fire-fighter. Just an at-home day today.

Day 34

Gluten-kabobs! We used the recipe for the gluten ribs I posted a couple weeks ago but instead of cutting it into rib shapes, we just cut squares out of it for kabobs. Yum! Red, yellow and orange bell peppers, onions, whole mushrooms, fresh pineapple chunks, brushed with teriyaki sauce and grilled. Mmm...

Day 33

We went to the coast this weekend. It started out as fairly overcast, and then the other beach we went to when the sun came out wasn't really a pretty beach, just a long straight stretch of sand. I'll post the pictures on my main webpage, but just this castle for here.

Day 32

Today was day 3 of "we watch too much tv - no more!" For the past 3 days I've restricted the kids to no more than 30 minutes per morning and 30 minutes per afternoon. I remember one summer we spent at a babysitter's house who had kids about our ages. She restricted us to that limit and it worked well. So far they've been watching Wilbur on Discovery Kids in the morning, and Word World on PBS in the afternoon. They've been playing with their blocks and really getting imaginative. I think this was their attempt at creating corrals for their toy ponies and other small animals.

Day 31

My beauties...

Day 30

Rain on my window. Seems like there's a song about that, but I can't think of it right now.

Day 29

The kids went out into the backyard today and came running in, breathless with excitement, to tell me there was a frog in the pool!

The thunderstorm last night had dumped all kinds of tree debris in the water, and the frog seemed to like it - it would swim over and hide under a leaf sometimes. They wanted to keep the little guy, but I told them we had to wait for Daddy to come home. Thankfully, the frog had made his way out of the pool before Daddy got here and hopped off. Phew!

Day 28

I have never professed to being good with plants - particularly house plants. I've managed to kill almost every one I've ever had. Right now I have one pothos that is going on two years now - that's got to be some kind of record for me!

A bit over a year ago, my mom gave me a tiny little start of an aloe vera plant, in a yogurt cup. It was maybe 3 little stalks poking up out of the dirt, about 3 inches tall and no bigger around than my pinky finger. Apparently this aloe likes my north-facing kitchen window, because it's gone crazy. It's got branches two inches thick and a foot high. I've had to re-pot it twice, and right now it's in desparate need of splitting into multiple pots. I've got a bunch of yogurt cups ready to go, just need to get some potting soil for them.

There's a calla lily peeking in on the picture on the right side. I've had that since March. So far so good, but we'll see!