I hope these pictures speak for themselves. Here is the old.

Our old kitchen was a pocket that you could fall into. Now it is a portal, keeping the flow of our lives moving on.
Pictured here: our basement kitchen that kept us afloat during the remodel.

 

The demolition begins

Oh look! A blank slate!

 

 The cabinet installation begins...



Yard work has been our answer to every question about our plans or our thoughts in the recent weeks.
Here's a pic from the east side of the back yard last fall. Lush ivy on fence, lots of lawn, edge rimmed with river rock.
We had a desire to expand our vegetable garden opportunities and came up with a plan to change this area (the winter was really hard on that ivy, but it's growing back). We started by removing a lot of the river rock and sod.Cam carefully leveled out areas for gardening boxes......and then began building them.WOW!When it came time to fill the boxes, we got the kids involved in mixing up the soil.Dane planned out where the 44 veggie plants should be placed. Bryce and I planted them all, some of them while it rained. We also planted two peach trees (on the right). Although we're not finished yet, we're so excited about the progress than has been made. So much hard work!
I didn't help a lot because I've been working on the west side of the yard.
Just over the edge of our deck was a lawn that wouldn't grow. Too much shade, spindly little blades of grass...Last fall we had a cement patio poured.On May 16th, I began building a retaining wall out of river bed rock.
This is only a fourth of the rock delivered to our house.

The work is basically a little bit puzzle and a little bit Lego and a lot of chiseling.

The progress is mostly slow, but every now and again a whole bunch of rocks will align perfectly together, one right after another. Believe me, it's such a blessing when that happens. It's a bit taller now than pictured and I have to add one more foot worth of height over a 15 foot stretch, but when this thing is finally finished, I think I'm really going to proud of what I've accomplished. More pictures to come, when we're all finished!

Since our computer died weeks ago, we've found ways to survive...

Daddy's new I-Pad has helped.

It's obviously a fascinating piece of technology. I guess we've gotten used to it. I tried to "swipe" the screen at a Red Box, trying to rent a movie. This month, my sweet nephew was baptized by my dad and confirmed by my grandpa.

On that same day, my cousin got married and we hung out at the beautiful reception center with our family.

Here's Mandy, my sister and Bryce

Zealand loved going over this little bridge.

You've gotta take photo ops when you can!Cam took last week off of work so that we could work hard in our back yard. We got a lot done on Monday. He built a few square-foot-gardening boxes, took out portions of our lawn and leveled out other areas in the yard.I began to build my retaining wall by first hauling around 2,000 lbs of stone into the back yard.

The more it rained, the more our plans seemed to expand. We started getting bids and ideas for remodeling our kitchen.

This is Dane at a granite-slab showroom. Heavenly Father sure made some incredible rocks! We're pretty sure we've got the company chosen to do the cabinets, but there's much to be done before then. First and foremost is to do nothing until after I host my brother's fiancée's bridal shower.
But after that, Cam and I will play demolition crew and get the job going! We're really excited!

This is Bryce's last week of preschool. It's bitter-sweet. Thankfully, he's completely excited for Kindergarten and is looking forward to having Ella's teacher, too.

I'm going to miss the string of waves he gives me as he runs up to his teacher's home. Today we celebrated B's birthday. She will be my niece as soon as her mother marries my little brother.This is our attempt at a grandkid photo. It didn't go over well at all.

The rest of the month is busy as well. Bryce is enrolled in swimming lessons. So far, so good!

Ah! I'm so glad to be back! I've missed blogging and hope that our computer troubles are at an end.

I saw my first fine fat Robin this morning. Yay!

I've been looking through a lot of gardening books lately. Cameron and I are planning a great upheaval in our yard this year, all for the better.

I couldn't wait to get out there and clean the rest of fall's leftovers off the ground and get at least one of our projects off on the right foot.

Bryce likes to help me move worms from the old, damp leaves to the vegetable garden. I say he helps me, but he really does it all. He says he likes the big ones best. No fear of ick in this kid.

Anyway, I love yard work and when I look around our yard, it could really be a full-time job.

I've been washing clothes a lot, increasing the pile to unreasonable amounts (unless one has a book on cd to listen to). My plan of attack begins today. Oi! I hate out of control laundry. I'm usually pretty good at keeping it in place, but the holidays threw that off.

I've also been getting really excited for this charity crop I've attended for the past few years. Scrapbooking has been on the back burner for a long time now and I've got some fun catch up to do! I've been pouring over magazines for ideas. I'm really out of the loop. I know this because everything old is new again. Makes me laugh.

I've been listening to two things I've really been enjoying.

1. Brothers by The Black Keys
2. Certain selections from The Moulin Rouge soundtrack. Baz Luhrman films can always be a little quirky/odd, but the strength of the chemistry between Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman comes through, even in their duets. Such a sad story.

Cam and I have enjoyed some quiet evenings together, by-passing our video games (I got Street Fighter IV for Christmas!), and watching Big Bang Theory episodes and we just finished Inception the other night. Someone out there said they couldn't wait for me to see it, but I don't remember who...so my brain is available to pick on this. I did love it. I've also enjoyed laughing out loud with my husband (back to Big Bang Theory). It's a good time.

Anyway, hope all is good for you out there. What are you doing to keep busy?

We have pretty simple dreams around here (except the one where I want...oh never mind).

Since we moved here to this home, one predominant dream for us was simply to have a vegetable garden.

Over the past few weeks, Cameron has been building a huge raised bed box for the first phase of our garden. He has learned new skills with new tools and has accomplished this awesome task. He finished filling the area with a great garden growing mixture (peat moss, composted fertilizer and vermiculite) yesterday and we all went to Western Garden Center to pick out our plants.

Woo Hoo!!!

We left the nursery with twenty-four tomato plants and two summer squash and a chives. We hope to get more next Saturday.

We are so excited!!!

This morning, Ella told us that she wanted to go check on the tomatoes. When she came back into the house, she said "There aren't any tomatoes on the plants yet."

So cute! She wouldn't really remember our big garden from a few years ago anyway. But she was our hardest kid-worker, breaking up a huge block of peat moss by herself. The rest of gardening, she'll learn.

Ella is also part of our dream to have musically-skilled children. She began piano lessons this week and she loves it! She's practiced a lot since her lesson and each time she reaches the end-of-piece double bar she hollers: STOP!

The final dream leg that Cam is embarking on this week is his promotion. Long hoped for, long denied for the simple fact that we do not live and will not live where the main offices for his company are located. His talent and general awesomeness cannot be denied any longer and he has been given a job worthy of his abilities. I'd say his employees are pretty lucky. :)

Go Cameron! Go Daddy!

I was adopted by marriage into a family of bird lovers. My in-laws do the whole bird sanctuary, sitting-in-swamps, binocular bird watching and they love it!
A few years back, my sister-in-law gave me a bird book for beginners that grouped them by color and ever since, I have been hooked.
At our old home, we had a lot of pretty little House Finches.Now we have a lot of them.
We'd occasionally have a cute Dark-Eyed Junco.

This early spring we had them by the score.

Since moving to this tree-enclosed home we have really had a great time watching the birds. We have two seed feeders and we just put up the hummingbird feeder because I saw some today.

We have a pair of American Kestral falcons that like to hunt around here. One is sitting in our neighbor's tree nearly every morning, visible from our bed. It's pretty cool to hear them screech and to watch them dive to their prey. I'm not entirely sure what they hunt around here. Probably the small birds and hopefully, any small rodents out in the park.

We have more of these Mourning Doves than we'd like. They're kind of dumb actually. I think your tires actually have to nick their tail feathers before they'll move out from under your car as you come into our circle.
Lately, we've had a pair of Chickadees move into our little bird house. Their call really does go "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee." They are really small and have cute little movements. We're glad they're going to be living with us.

A woodpecker similar to this one has hammered on our skylight, our metal chimney vents on the roof and a telephone pole outside. I've never seen him hammer on a tree.

We love robins, but I've definitely learned they are not necessarily the first bird of spring.

We've been thoroughly entertained by these Western Scrub Jays. We have (at least) a pair of them in the neighborhood. They like to bully the Mourning Doves and pretend they're small (they're 11" beak to tail) by standing on the small feeder perches and eating the sunflower seeds.Sparrows are a common site for the first time this year.TODAY WAS MY SPECIAL SIGHTING.

This is the Lazuli Bunting. I've never seen on before and I got to see it and its mate twice today. They are small and very pretty.

Every morning for breakfast and each night during our dinner, the birds come to eat the seed we've put out for them. It's quite a show.

My mother-in-law says we'll have to trade houses so that she gets to see all these birds.

It's a really fun summer hobby and I love that they come to us.

None of these great pictures are mine, but hopefully one day I can just hang out on our deck and wait patiently for the opportunity.