Shout out to Curt.

18 Today. Time has flown by.
I have mixed emotions today, have we taught him enough, will he know we are always on his side, is he equipped with the tools he needs to be a man?
Does he know my existence was never the same after he took his first breath.












Now my baby's all grown up, but he'll always be my baby.

This is man fun.

So if your idea of a good time is 100mph sand rails, wheelies, dirt, dutch oven cooking and standing around bragging on how many horses your engine can push out then this would've been the weekend for you. Oh and to top it off, there were no women!!! Us girls aren't the only ones who know how to party, we just smell better when we do it.








This place is known as the sand dunes but it should be called sand DOOM's for all the people that are life flighted out of there.

When the boys are away

Us girls need to play.

We watched Hanna Montana, (didn't realise a guy roping a horse was so hot!!)

We shopped for girlie things. (Ok we didn't buy girlie things, just a cool shirt that Asha is convinced is a boy shirt!)

Went to the craft store and scrapbook store and made friendship rocks with bugs on.


Painted our piggies green and blue (Asha's choice)

and ate shrimp tacos, stayed up late, slept in, and
LOVED IT!!!

Pass it on....First Five.... :)

The first five people.....
The funnest tag ever! Here's how it works: The first five people to leave me a comment get something made by me just for them. It can be anything I want, I get to choose. It can be silly or serious, edible or not, but don't plan on anything alive. There are a few rules involved (aren't there always?):

1- I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
2- What I create will be just for you.
3- It will be done sometime this year (Don't expect grand things if it takes a long time. I'm just lazy!).
4- You have no clue what it's going to be. (The choice is mine! --insert evil laugh here--)
5- I reserve the right to do something extremely strange and/or silly.

The catch is that you must re-post this on your blog and offer the same to the first 5 people who do the same on your blog. The first 5 people to do so and leave a comment telling me they've posted on their blog win a hand made, super creative, possibly lovely whatever in the heck I decide! Be sure to post a picture of what you win when you get it!

9 loads...NINE.....

On a daily basis I hear a comment about the amount of laundry needing to be done. It may be to do with our large families or our excess of clothes. Of course we may have excess of clothes because we don't like doing the laundry :)So our options are:
a)get rid of excess clothing
b)get rid of excess family
c)get a handle on the laundry
Tempting as one of those is, c seems my best option
So I decided to share my best kept secret, I'm an organized laundry lover.
So welcome to my laundry room. Complete with laundry, clean and dirty, and the socks...there is a limit to my love.

It's pretty small, a measure error on my part with building. (My washer/dryer are so massive I couldn't shut the door so they stack)But I still have all the essential parts to make the process work.

First I sort into the blue buckets, Dark, Light Colored and the 3rd, for the mathematician goes into the washer.
then to the dryer. I love my LG TROMM. Less than an hour and the dryer takes the full load.

This is where the problem starts for most. Folding! putting away, kids pulling fresh folded clothes out of drawers in search of something still on the floor from yesterday...WHY?
I don't do it, fold I mean.
Everything out of the dryer goes straight to hangers, jeans, shirts the lot.
Only socks, underwear, pj's and shorts go in the buckets. voila!
No more clothes to fold on the couch, dining room table or anywhere else.

I have a couple of spare buckets for extra pillowcases and DI stuff

and of course a bucket for socks to pair up.
The final part to this fabulous format is, to put away. All you need is "KIDS COME GET YOU CLOTHES" and you hand them there group of hangers and a bucket. At a very young age they could get there hangers on a rail in there closet ( you may need to hang a lower pole from a chain for a little one) Even if they stuff all there bucket items in one drawer, it doesn't matter, you didn't take time to fold them , I surely hope you don't fold underwear!
So it doesn't look pretty, there are no dried flowers to look cute and gather dust or sayings of inspiration (I could come up with a few)but a tried and tested process that I've used for about 5 years now and it works!!
If anyone has figured out how to get dirty clothes from body to bucket next to body, let me know.

weekend warriors.

We live in a desert yet we all try, oh how we try to grow grass! We aerate and power rake, we weed treat and fertilize, we water, we water and we water and if we are lucky and the Gods of green grass look down upon us, we just might have a patch of crispy, uncomfortable to the bare foot, but green looking ground cover that we try to pass off as grass.
I think every visitor from England has been fascinated by the sprinklers :)
So we decided that we want as little grass as our home owners association will allow and we decided that this mammoth project was something we could do. Admittedly I watch HGTV allot and wonder why we can't possibly do it in a weekend but nevertheless, I let my hair down and threw away my bra ( remember ground force :) and off we went.
This is Utah, so we start the day with brilliant sunshine and end with snow, sun, rain, hot and cold, we worked solid, minus the 8 trips to home depot, mandatory for any major project and this is how we did.


The sod cutter was easy and quick to use.

The teenagers were easy and quick to...wait I mean they were very willing and got the job done. They loaded and took the sod to the dump and two loads and $50 later (can you believe it costs that much to drop off sod? it's almost as much as it cost to buy it, I really am a sucker) we had our blank canvas to work with.

Nothing like a power tool to get a man in the mood for a job, this block cutter was great but would only cut 3 inches deep so every cut had to be flipped and cut on the backside.

Yes that is me looking rough! I built the box :)Just like scrapbooking, you measure, mark the cut, send it to the machine (Boyd) and put it in place. 56 cuts!!! ask me how many blocks we wasted.......one. I know,I know, like I said, think scrapping in gloves with really bad hair.

We had another special helper all day! Hobbs discovered sprinklers, yummy pencils and digging.

And FYI the fabulous block box is our raised, 4x4, square foot garden. More to follow.

Shout out to Jordan.

Happy Birthday, My Handsome boy turns 17 today!! I put some pictures together and realized there was a pattern....can you guess it?