Summer has finally arrived!

We don't know what happened to spring, it seems we went from super wet winter weather straight into our steamy 80 degrees this past week. Yes, that's warm for us, lol.... we like our mild weather. So we've been doing all kinds of summer type stuff trying to keep cool while we work on our new yard. We've been outside pretty much as much as possible lately.

We got a picnic table and it has become Joshy's job to help move it.


We've had lots of watermelon and popsicles (doesn't help that I crave watermelon non-stop)


And we got the kids one of those inflatable pools to play in. And I've been wading in it too trying to keep my feet cool and less puffy.



I hope everybody else is keeping cool and having fun with the start of summer!

So Josh decided to learn to blog today, and posted a whole bunch of pictures for you! Aren't you lucky. Now I'm going back through to tell you what you're seeing :)

First, the pic of Joshy is from last summer's trip to Hell's Canyon. He's still that cute :)

Then he posted a mountain of pictures of our fantastic yard. Now that we've mowed it, it looks a whole lot nicer than the long grass that we moved into. The kids are loving it, and even though it's a lot of work, Josh and I are enjoying that we have a yard of our own to take care of, because it's OURS!

Then he posted some pictures of our backyard BBQ last night, including a fantastic "squidgy" face that I made for his sake only, but he decided to share.

Next, we had a bit of a hair adventure this week. Isabel got up yesterday and got something sticky in her hair. She won't say what, and pretends she doesn't know, but I think she snitched gumdrops and ate them in bed, falling asleep in the sticky goo. Instead of asking for somebody to help clean it out, which would incriminate her, she CUT IT OFF! So we got to go to the salon and get haircuts at the same time yesterday. So the sideways pic of Isabel is in the salon before her hair got chopped off, if you look close you can see the evidence about chin length on her right side.

Thankfully they were able to layer it to try to blend the hack job into the rest of her hair so that they didn't have to give her a chin bob. She just has a big swoosh of hair that looks like it was supposed to be jaw length. They did a nice job. Here's what she looks like now:


And the last pictures are what happens when you get in dad's garage :) That's Daddy's space, and little kids shouldn't get in it, lol.

Busy Busy Busy!

April and the beginning of May have been the craziest times ever! We have tons of pics that I could post, but that would just take too long to load up :)

First there was Easter, and Steve, Katie and Raleigh came up to visit. We got to play at the zoo, go to the Tulip Festival and all kinds of fun things. It was fun to get to spend some time with them even though it pretty much just rained a lot of the time. Welcome to Seattle, huh?

After they left, it was time for Bubba's farewell to head to his mission in Jamaica. So all of the Tracy clan was up for a visit. We got to visit with lots of family from far away, which was really nice. So Bubba's in the MTC now which just seems unreal. I remember the first time I ever saw him, and he was at a Jr High wrestling match. This scrawny little kid wearing a wrestling suit, and I couldn't figure out why they called this little guy Bubba, lol. Then I saw his baby pictures and understood better :)

And while we were doing all of this visiting with family members, we were anxiously awaiting the closing of our new home in Mt. Vernon. It closed WAY late, so we were getting itchy to move. Not to mention it is a pain living around boxes. So it finally closed just before the end of the month and we finally got to start moving in. The kids have been loving the huge back yard and space to run. Josh and I are really enjoying our freedom and lack of downstairs neighbors. We're getting close to having our boxes unpacked, one of these days the garage will be emptied out and we can use it for a car instead of a storage unit.

Josh made a whole bunch of videos of the house this morning for everybody to see, so I'm posting some of them here :) Here's the girls' room. Pardon the mess, we haven't organized anything in there yet, so they just throw it all on the floor. I don't suppose that will change even after everything has a home.


And here's Joshy's room (and it will be the baby's room come October as well) The wall bed is awesome, it was a total bonus, we thought it was a weird closet when we first visited the house. So if anybody wants to come visit, we have a hide a bed (not so comfy) and a wall bed (quite comfy) if you don't mind sharing a room with Joshy :) This room will be painted blue in the near future.
And here's the street view. We haven't figured out what to do with the missing door area, we'll probably plant something like a lilac that will fill the space there.


We'll post more of the house later :)

We've learned lots of things about the previous owner by moving into this house.
1) she hated to clean. She probably just straightened things up but never did a real clean. The paint was so dirty that when we went to wash it up to paint the livingroom, it was literally stained. We just had to pray that the primer did it's job well. And it did, so it looks lots better with a new coat of paint.

2) She liked to change her window coverings, but didn't like taking out old brackets. As I took down all the old lady lace in each room, I discovered each window in the house had about 6 different window brackets in it. She would just put the new one a little higher than the old one to hide the ones that she wasn't using. 3) She was a very "make it work" kind of person. There are all kinds of oddities that when we run into them we wonder what they were doing and why they didn't just get the right thing. Like the blinds wired to the window in the girls room. Why not just buy a bracket? It probably even came with the blind, lol. Strange things :)

4) We think she was worried that somebody would come steal her during the night. This house has about 15 exterior lights, around all sides of the house. Every window has a lock AND a bar.

But we were very grateful that she was willing to sell her home of 50 years to us for the price we offered, as it made it possible for us to own our first home and have a place for our kids to play. Newer houses just don't have a yard like this one does. So we will just deal with the strange things that come with an old house and slowly update everything to our liking. And we'll enjoy having a yard that we couldn't have had otherwise. We have a lot to be thankful for right now :)

Oh! And Becca turned 4 too :) So we had her party on Saturday, and the sunshine even came out. So we had a little BBQ of hamburgers and hot dogs. I made her an Ariel cake, but the face turned out really scary, so I called it her "Scariel" cake. She didnt' seem to mind, though. So Happy Birthday to Rebecca :)




I'm looking forward to a less busy rest of the month!