Hot!

For those of you who know us very well, we LOVE to tease our kids!!!! We love to tease them about being hot and making kissy noises in front of them to get the desired response of the rolling of the eyes and gagging noises! When I saw this scrapbook page from smilebox, I knew I had to use it! I keep putting as my background on the computer, but Melissa keeps changing it. :)

smilebox- calendar 2010

I'm done early! Crazy tradition we started 10+ years ago. Every year I say I'm going to start early, but never have. This year I actually sent my pictures off and I'm ordering calendars. This is a first. Usually I make the scrapbook page and then get them color copied, make copies of the calendars and then Ray & I go to Office depot and comb bind them. Well last year they charged us for comb binding them! This year there was a special going for calendars if I was done before November 10th that made them less than $9 a piece! So I played w/ smilebox again and made my scrapbook pages and used them for my pages. I haven't received my calendars, yet, but they are in the mail and should be here next week.

Here are a few of my scrapbook pages that didn't make the cut for the calendar.

As you can see a lot of them are the same pictures just in different pages, it is soo hard to choose! I'll share the ones I chose after Christmas. I love smilebox.com! Its the only way I scrapbook anymore.

This is what we do for excitement?!

Now that it is getting colder we have been having fires in the wood stove. Nothing is better! I love almost everything about having a fire, the smell of a fire going, the warmth, the gathering of the family, the lower power bills... until it gets a little too toasty and I have to vacuum from all the little wood chips.

It is really cold downstairs and due to my ..uhm frugal nature, I don't want to turn the heater on downstairs, so we gather in the living room and get a little silly and creative.. Here is Keagan being silly w/ his pajama pants. Not sure what he is doing,but as usual he was making us laugh!

So lately I have been spending less time on the computer (the computer is downstairs, too) and more time ready, see having a fire going has all kinds of advantages!

Here are some of the videos I took of our trees coming down. (August 28th- it only took me a month and a half to get these up!) We thought it was pretty cool when they came down! I love the big THUNK when the trees hit. It is amazing to watch. We had quite the crowd to see them come down. I think the grown -ups were more fasinated than the kids..
It was amazing to see how this son/dad crew can use their kabota tractor and know exactly where to cut and where they are going to get the tree to land!

3 Bears and a Fish

Here is what Ray has been doing the last few weeks while the sun is shining... trying to get all of the tree limbs to the dump before the rains start. We had the trees cut down about a month ago and he has been working on it a little bit every night. This is his 7th run to the dump.

We sold some of the big chunks of wood to a guy who makes carvings out of them. He paid us and also in exchange cut down some of our stumps and carved 3 bears and a fish for us. He is coming back in a couple of weeks to finish the fish and carve an eagle on the back side of the stump with the fish and the bear. Very cool! We are loving our back yard. It is soo big and open! Can't wait until it is done, Ray said, I'm not sure what I'll be doing when this is done,.... don't worry dear I'll come up with another project for you to do! :)

Just starting the carving. The only sad thing was I wasn't there to watch it. (Melissa and I were walking for the breast cancer walk- another post)

The tree stump was soo heavy that it tipped the trailer, luckily 2 of our neighbors were out and they came and helped roll it further into the trailer. Good job on the picture taking, Keagan!




All of these big sticks are from the tree!

Sunshine poking through our backyard!

You can tell how huge these pieces were!

Here they are trying to figure out how to best get them to their trailer!

Birch Bay

I love this sign in the Peace Arch park, leading into USA!


We got to go up to Birch Bay this week. Ray & I actually went listen to a timeshare presentation and got a free trip, but somehow it got messed up and we already had all our vacation time and babysitting (thanks mom & thom) set up, so we used Mom's bonus time for her time share in Birch Bay which is only a few miles away from the Canadian border. We don't have our passports or enhanced driver's license so we couldn't go into Canada. It is a 3 hour drive up to Birch Bay and only a few more miles to the border.

Here is a pic w/ the water somewhat out this morning before we left, it was right across the street from where we stayed. It would be really nice in the summer.. but prob. not available then, either. We stayed in a cute little studio apartment, w/ a little kitchen and a Murphy bed.

Ray by the water yesterday w/ the tide in.

We went to the Peace Arch Park and they had all the names of the flowers, here I had Ray stand next to the "Sexy Rexy" :)

Some of the strange sculptures they had there.

ok , Ray & I felt a little bad that we were sooo fascinated w/ a black squirrel, but have you ever seen a black squirrel before??!

had to take one of both of us to prove I really was there.

The Peace Arch

The flowers making the USA flag

The peace Arch

The Canadian flag

My kind of garden... it had rocks by the flowers w/ a name of each flower.