The last few weeks...with photos! :o)

Second post for this month! Whoo hoo!!! ;o)

I realize that it's been far too long since I posted any pictures, so that's what this post is mostly about. This month has been CRAZY CRAZY for me and I've been incredibly overwhelmed most of the time, but now it's nearly over. WHEW! After I get past Rieka's birthday on Wednesday (my baby will be 9! *sniff*) the coast is clear for a bit. Or so it seems at the moment. I guess we'll have to wait and see what tomorrow brings to the calendar...

SO...in brief, since my last post, I was pretty busy with church stuff mostly, with a smattering of household duties and yard work. Activity days, including prep for a recognition night for the girls (WHICH reminds me of the little Glamour Shots Lorinda and Shelby helped me with...which I made into CUTE little frames with a list of positive adjectives for each girl...I'll try to post a picture of Rieka's finished product) consumed me for a while, and I had to do my regular Sunday lesson stuff as well, and then I was trying to get stuff ready for the trip to Utah (me and the girls) for Tina's wedding. What BLISS! Lol! I'm amazed that I made it through it all unscathed. Then AFTER coming home from the trip to Utah, I had activity days again and once again had the usual Sunday lesson stuff to do as well as prep for sharing time in primary! JOY! *sigh* And now, I sit and try to think of the EASIEST way possible to pull off Rieka's birthday. Swimming and pizza anyone? I try to keep the numbers down, but we still always end up with SO MANY people! Ah well. I'll live.

As for the trip to Utah, it was quite good, even with all the clouds, rain, and mosquitos!

I got to see my brother and his family as well as their new house which is still in the fixing-up stages, and on my second stop there on the way home, we had a nice afternoon with the kids walking around Utah Lake, skipping rocks. We had a SUPER time that night being WAY too crazy while staying up WAY too late, laughing at ourselves and each other and playing silly games that we played as kids. Ya GOTTA love times like that. ;o)

It's always fantastic for me when I get to go home. I absolutely LOVE coming down out of the canyon and seeing Cache Valley spread out in front of me. The rain was even a bonus, since one of my favorite things is driving through the canyons when the clouds are low and the mountains are so green!

I got to see Tina get hitched, which was great even if things did get rained out it wasn't the backyard wedding she planned.

I got to visit a bit with family and hang out with my best buddy, Amy, who fortunately had copies of some photos that I could have lost forever due to the computer catastrophe mentioned in the previous post. We ate good food, stayed up FAR too late, and complained to each other about our kids. Ah...ya gotta loves times like that. ;o)

So for now, I can take a breath. I think that sharing time went well yesterday. We had a most excellent dinner with salmon, shrimp scampi, pasta, asparagus, squash, salad, jalapeno poppers and so on. The squash, jalapenos and cucumbers in the salad even came out of our garden! :oD

Now maybe I can just sit a bit. Maybe I can have a bit of time to read. I can enjoy the beauty of the yard and the garden , and I MIGHT even take a dip in the pool a little later.

Catastrophe and Gratitude

I recently had a major computer catastrophe and we lost everything that had been put onto the computer since the end of January. All documents, e-mails, and yes...photos. This has done little to help motivate me into blogging. It takes a LOT of time to organize, categorize and resize photos. I was fortunate to that I was able to have copies of many of those photos on another computer, but the ones that I had already tampered with were lost as well as some that were NOT on the other computer. :o( Not much you can do about it, though.

Moving on to other things, it's been crazy busy. Since my last post, we had fabulous spring break, Paul finished up with his job at Echelon and became unemployed, Leila celebrated her 2nd birthday, Paul and I had marked our 13th anniversary, and Rieka went on a couple of field trips. School is now out for the summer and Paul finally started a new job this past week. My cousin is getting married on the 20th of this month and so I'll be heading up to Utah for that, as well as visiting some family and friends. We're also planning on going to the Oquirrh Mountain temple open house.

I'm terribly grateful for all the little things in life. Our patches of garden are doing well and we've already gotten a few veggies as a result of our labors. The sunflowers are doing quite well, and despite being a bit mutated, are still nice to look at. ;o) We're looking forward to having peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers soon and hope that the pumpkins and watermelons produce for us, too.

I'll have to see if I can get some photos put up soon, but not sure when it will happen since I have to work on resizing and categorizing again. :oP And that, as mentioned before, is what takes so much time to do. Until then...love to all!