Getting ready for Halloween!

Miles always loves to help out in the kitchen! This past week we made some sugar cookies! We delivered some to the boys at the shop and to grandma Karen...Miles had a good time doing this!





Miles is going to be a dinosaur this Halloween! He loved his costume and even made me take a picture of the tail (not posted on here).

What would Halloween be without a devil kitty? She always hangs around when we do stuff, but she gets grouchy with Miles when he tries to tackle her.

Miles the psycho-pants boy! He had a little too much fun with the carving knife!

Finished pumpkins!!! Yay, good thing I had a couple of candles lying around to put in the jack-o-lanterns or I would've been in trouble.

New Lawn

I'm so very excited to blog about our new lawn! We've had the landscapers working on our property for the past couple of weeks and I wasn't sure if we were getting a lawn in before winter or not...but it happened! It ended up being a lot more lawn than I expected, but we still have a TON of room for the garden, herbs and other plants and trees. It's amazing how different our house looks, and it will take some getting used to but I'm just so happy with how things are looking! Our landscapers have done such a good job and I can't wait until next spring and summer when we'll have pretty much everything set up for us!
Of course our boy Miles played on the grass a little bit tonight, but then he went back to his old favorites...mud and dirt. Oh well, I think he'll enjoy the lawn more next summer.

Not so good at this blog thing.

So I'm not very good at keeping up with this blog...I'll try a bit harder now that it's getting colder and I'm not spending so much time outside anymore.
We've been really busy this summer with the shop, the garden, canning, camping and stocking up on firewood. I'm very glad that we hired a good employee to take my place at the shop so I can stay at home with Miles and work on house stuff.
Our chickens have been laying a lot of eggs and I'm very excited about that, we get great fresh eggs!
Jason went hunting and got an elk so I'll be busy making jerky and canning meat here in the next few weeks.
This isn't the greatest post, I know, but I'm going to try to keep up now that the holidays are coming up!

Mother's Day Trippin'

Last week we decided to pack up and take off for a few days. We didn't really know exactly where we would end up, but we knew we were going to Colorado. We went through Rangely down through Grand Junction and ended up staying in Montrose the first night.

The next day we drove to Ouray, it was a cute little mining kind of town then we started up the hill towards the next town.

These pictures were taken just above Ouray before we headed through the scary mountain pass!

It was a scary but beautiful drive up through the hills of western Colorado. We stopped in Durango to eat lunch and walk around a bit. We thought about staying there for the night, but decided to head toward Mesa Verde. We got to the park and drove around the loop. Someday when Miles is bigger we hope to actually hike into some of the ruins that are available...he was just too small to do any of that. We did see some very interesting things in the park though and Miles had a good time running around.

After visiting Mesa Verde we stayed in Cortez. It was a kind of interesting little city. We had a pretty good view from our hotel room, but we were pretty worn out and didn't do too much around here.

The next morning we made our way up through Monticello and through Moab. We drove into Arches National Park and hiked up to Landscape Arch in the Devil's Garden area. Miles was a little trooper! He ran pretty much all the way to the arch! He got to see a couple of lizards and even a deer. We carried him part of the way back since he was pretty tired!

We left Arches and drove to Fruita, Colorado and took Miles to a dinosaur museum. Normally he LOVES dinosaurs and was pretty excited when he saw some outside. When we went into the museum we saw some of their dinosaur robots and they really scared him! It was a pretty neat museum...they had the robots, bones and an earthquake simulator. We ended up spending the night there in Fruita instead of going on to Grand Junction.

It was a crazy but fun trip! We got to see quite a few new things and it has motivated me to want to get out and do more stuff. When Miles is big enough I'd like to go again and do more hiking and maybe even some biking...gotta get into shape!

This is for you Jac!

Life has been crazy out here with Spring coming up. We've planted fruit trees, raspberries and a few veggies so far and we're looking forward to having lots of fresh stuff this summer!

I don't really have much to blog about, but here's a picture of my latest home adventure....I have an odd spot of wall between the living room and kitchen (just a triangle between the regular ceiling and the vaulted)...so I threw a sun up there! I'll put some framed pictures up there soon. I'm planning on hanging up all sorts of pictures that we've taken in different places the past few years...hopefully it will create quite a diverse atmosphere in our house.

New Years with the Bakers

We spent this New Year's with our favorite Bakers! As is customary we always hang out with each other to ring in the New Year, we've been doing this since the beginning of our time together. We have so much fun with them, the boys usually fall asleep before midnight, but Melinda and I stay up scrapbooking all night. We didn't get too many pictures but on New Year's day we took the kids sledding....Miles had so much fun! He loved going down the hills and wanted to keep on going! We're looking forward to the next New Year with Phil & Melinda and their kids, it's sooooo much fun!