Me and the Kiddos!

This is our most recent family picture.  It was taken for our church directory.  The kids are really growing up and getting big!

We went to the pond today!

We went to a friends pond again today.  It was 92F today so it was very refreshing!

 17 yo DS doing flips off the diving board!

I let 8 yo DD jump off the diving board without her life jacket today.  She was thrilled!  She jumped in feet first a couple of times and then diving right in and then doing cannon balls!  She did fantastic swimming back to the ladder all on her own.

Back to school bash!

A local church was having a back to school bash.  They had games, a bounce house, a blowup slide, face painting, food, and prizes, and school supplies.  My kiddos had a blast!

 4 yo DD made a ring on a blue juice!  This game is harder than it looks!  My 14 yo played several rounds and could not win pop!

 Cotton candy!  YUM!

               Snow Cones and Popcorn!

 Face Painting!

Swimming!

The two oldest boys helped a friend from church with some gravel hauling and some other stuff and then I brought the littles over to her house to pick them up and go swimming in her pool. We had some hot dogs on the grill for lunch.  The pool was was freezing cold because we have had such a cold and rainy summer so the littles did not stay in the water very long.

 Of course my 17 yo is always thrilled to have his picture taken!  Sigh...I can't believe he will be 18 years old in just 20 short days! He has gotten so tall and has turned into a fine young man!  

 11 yo is, thankfully, still in the stage where he loves to have his picture taken...and make goofy faces of course!

I published my first ebook! Canned Potatoes and Recipes!

I published my first ebook!  It is an ebook on how to can potatoes with several different recipes to using home canned or store bought potatoes.  I also included a bonus chapter on how to can caramelized onions and a few recipes using caramelized onions!  I hope you enjoy it!


                                                        

I added 24 new posts today and put in a ton of pictures from this summer so you will have to scroll back through the pages to see them all!

Parade and Fun run!

The older boys were in the local parade today with their youth group.

 4 yo DD playing on the play ground while we were waiting for the parade to begin.

 Sitting and waiting for the parade to begin with the littles!

 Then they had a fun run!  8 and 4 yo getting ready to run the quarter mile!

 They sprayed the kiddos down at the beginning and the end of the run!

 11 yo almost to the finish line of the quarter mile run!

 8 yo DD almost to the finish line of the quarter mile run.

Garden Pickings!

This is my first real picking of beans.  I ended up with 15 quarts in just this one picking.

 I canned 13 quarts of peaches and 2 quarts of peach juice when I canned up the green beans.

Some of my other pickings from my garden.

16 year old's Birthday!

 He had been working hauling wood and cleaning out chicken coops so he was all sweaty and dirty.

Burn Pile and Garden!

We accumulated a HUGE burn pile when we remodeled the kitchen and cleaned out some of the house and yard.

 We waited until it had rained the night before and was threatening rain for most of the day so that it would not burn to fast and catch the grass on fire.

It burned down pretty quickly!

 A couple pictures of my garden.  My garden did pretty crappy this year!  It was so wet at the beginning of the season that everything drowned.  The puddles and mud made it near impossible to get in and weed or till around the plants.  I have gotten some green beans but everything else didn't produce much of anything.