Our New YARD!! YEAH YEAH YEAH!!!!!!!

We have thoroughly enjoyed our yard! What a blessing! It is SO SO SO good for our children! Not only have they been able to thoroughly enjoy themselves in sand, water, and outdoor creativity, but they have also enjoyed good health! While Jon and I worked on getting the garden in it would start to get late, but we wanted to get more done before we took the kids in and cleaned them up and put them to bed. . . we would set up our TV and let them watch a movie outside with popcorn and drinks! They thought working on the garden was REALLY fun and exciting! I think as they get older and have to help us, the excitement of garden work might die down, though we could still bring out the TV and put on a movie if it helps!

Here is Mariah and Jonathan playing in the yard.

The kids "helping" with the garden--I couldn't resist Jonathan's adorable behind!

Jonathan ventuing out into an overgrown corner that we cleaned out and planted grass under (it looks great now)!

Aubrey and Jonathan playing in the water and buckets--they really had a lot of fun!

Mariah giving her toys a bath outside.

The kids with their favorite cousins watching a movie and having popcorn outside.

A Beautiful rainy summer day and the kids running around in it.

The kids having a picnic for lunch--we did this many times--it was really fun (and no kitchen to clean up afterward)!!

Another picnic outside--we all ate outside together on the card table many times.

Our first snow!!

Our New House--and the garden Summer 2008

We were very blessed to be able to sell our townhouse and to buy our house! We have thoroughly been enjoying it! The former owners left us a brand new barbeque as a "welcome home" gift with a note saying that they hoped we enjoyed the home as they did--very thoughtful of them. We have had several barbeques and fun events already!

Well to start at the beginning of our new home--we moved in the last weekend of June. We had planted seeds in planters in anticipation of planting a garden. Well, by the time we actually moved in those plants had way overgrown their planters--we had to get them in the ground asap! So we spet the first few days getting moved in what we needed and then got to work on the garden--which turned out to be a LOT more work than we had anticipated. But in some odd way, it was fun. The garden plot that existed was very grassy and the previous owners had one of those above the ground pools that you set on sand--so we had a huge circle of sand in the yard. We cut and moved sod from the garden to cover the sand and removed a LOT of the sand into the garden--a little tricky, but the kids were great helpers--filling buckets of sand and dumping them where we had already moved grass. We ended up doubling the size of the garden and getting all of our plants into the ground by mid-July. I thought the little plants would die, but once again, we were very blessed and the plants survived! We ended up having a wonderful harvest which we thoroughly enjoyed and even were able to have surplus to preserve we are still enjoying fried summer squash--one of our favorites)!
Jonathan loved helping me harvest the squash--he is so adorable--and in his father's favorite outfit (star trek academy) We also have two peach trees in our back yard--which made the yummiest peaches ever! We were able to can what we didn't eat and we are still enjoying those as well!

I had an enrichment in my previous ward about using a pressure canner and we learned how to can dried beans (pinto, black, etc). It was really neat and just what I needed!

I inherited my mom's pressure canner and got to work trying things out! I had a lot of fun learning all about canning different things and perhaps got a little carried away, but hey, I didn't have a newborn and I wasn't pregnant (a new thing for me for the past 5 years) and we have a wonderful backyard that the kids can just go out an play for entertainment--so I was able to make the time to learn how to do some canning!!

Here I am in front of the garden with some dill pickles and tomatoes I canned.

This is a picture of most of the things we canned (I say we, because although I did most of the actual canning, Jon did a lot of the harvesting and took care of other things to allow me to have time to do the canning)--a lot of it was from our garden or yard and some of it was given to us. We were very blessed!

Pumkin Patch--2008

For the first time in Pmkin Patch history we actually found the witch in the maze!! The kids were very excited!

Jonathan really tried to keep up with the other kids and most of the time he actually did keep up with them. It was really cute!

Here are my three adorable kids!

Every year we go to the Pumpkin Patch in Vineyard with Grandma Robertson and cousins. It is really fun and something the kids look forward to all year! There are blow-up bounce house and slides that they really enjoy as well. Jonathan got really brave and actually climbed up a slide and went down it. James (favorite of all cousins) would just launch his body off the top of a pretty tall slide and go flying! It was hilarious and amazng! Aubrey and Mariah were definitely amazed at his bravery!