Happy Birthday to Erika!!

I'm not sure how old she is but I do know that she's younger than I am ;)

I hope it's a good one Erika! See you tonight at Dinner.

Raleigh at the beach

Here are some pictures of Raleigh at the beach this past week.

A Whole Bunch of Posts/ My Favorite Place

Hi all,

Don't be overwhelmed because I've added 6 posts in just one day. I decided to split up my blog about this past week into a few different posts.

You can find them here:

Best of Friends:

http://dandeelionsoup.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-of-friends.html

Strawberry Farm:

http://dandeelionsoup.blogspot.com/2007/07/strawberry-farm.html

Fourth of July:

http://dandeelionsoup.blogspot.com/2007/07/fourth-of-july.html

Felting Soap:

http://dandeelionsoup.blogspot.com/2007/07/felting-soap.html

Wrap up of Tyler's Visit:

http://dandeelionsoup.blogspot.com/2007/07/wrap-up-of-tylers-visit.html

And Then to complete my posts from the week, I have pictures of my favorite place in the whole wide world.

This is an old mining pit that has filled with water. You can see that the water is crystal clear and absolutely beautiful. When I was younger, my brothers and I would swim across this body of water to search for agates on the other side. I have a lot of memories at this lake. Enjoy the pictures.

Felting Soap

I took Chelsea into GR to visit our yarn shop, where she purchased some fun-colored wool. When we got back from town, we felted some soap bars with my mother and my two oldest nephews.

After we finished felting them, we put them outside to dry in the sun.

Best of Friends

I had a bunch of fun putting together this video of Raleigh and Sam. It is always fun seeing them interact together now that they are both more aware of their surroundings.

The Strawberry Farm

On Thursday, we went to a local strawberry farm to pick berries. They were the most delicious berries ever and it was really hard not to just sit and eat the berries instead of putting them in our collection buckets.

Each of us (Mom, Barb, Chelsea, and myself) picked 2 buckets each. And at $8/bucket it was completely worth it. After eating strawberries from the grocery store for the past 10 years, I had forgotten how delicious they were when they were freshly picked.

Barb canned her berries, Chelsea and I froze ours, and Mom used some of hers for making strawberry daquiries.

The Fourth of July

Mom woke up early to save a spot for us at the beach, and Raleigh and I joined her after about a hour and we both took turns driving back to the house to get supplies for our day at the beach.

Aside from some really rude people that tried to bully us out of the spot that we were up so early to save, the day went really well. We had about 5 families there, and my brother David brought his boat out to give tubing rides and boat rides to all that wanted to take part.

Mom cooked BBQ chicken and ribs on the grills, and before that there were hot dogs for the kiddies. Barb made some delicious potato salad, and Mom had her normal rotini salad (The only pasta salad that my dad will eat, I think).

We had a little smidgen of rain drops, but we stood fast and held our ground while other beach-goers decided to call it quits. After the rain let up, the day went back to being all sunshine and a bit of breeze. This was probably one of the best Fourth of July celebratiosn we've had in years. The weather cooperated, the food was delicious, no injuries, and only fun to be had.

Wrap-up of Tyler's visit

On Sunday, we all drove out to Buffalo State Park to go swimming. We even went on a mini-hike on one of the walking trails. The mosquitos were horrible, but we did find wild rasberries.

I don't remember which day this was, but Tyler and Josh moved the fort that they built in the livingroom into Raleigh's room so that it would be out of the way a bit. Tyler spent one night sleeping in his fort.



And here are some video clips of Raleigh's June and a bit of Tyler's visit.

Wow! What a week!

... I took over 300 pictures and I don't know how much video this past week. We had a blast. We're home now, and we're just trying to catch up on some sleep. Josh and Raleigh are sleeping and I'm going to do the same after I enter this blog.

I'm planning to post 5 separate blogs and then one blog that has links to the other blogs. I'm hoping to do this tomorrow. So check back then.

No blog until Saturday evening

We're at my parents for the rest of the week and we had such a fun 4th of July. I'll have pictures and hopefully video to share starting on Saturday. We'll be leaving here on Saturday morning to head back home.

We'll see you then!!