I can still learn new things

I can now add mowing the lawn to my list of skills. Justin taught me how to mow the lawn last weekend. Since we no longer live on post and have a lawn service mowing our lawn we now have to do it ourselves. Naturally, that's Justin's job. However, he is leaving for Afghanistan in the future and so that changes his household job requirements to....well, not much at all. I was left with the dilema of who to mow the lawn. Of course I can hire a neighbor kid to do it, but since the oldest is 6 years old I don't see that happening. So it boiled down to me. Justin taught me how to check the oil, clean the bottom out, put in gas, and then of course...mow the lawn. It really was a lot easier than I thought. Here's proof that I did it:

Blogspot HELP!

As you can see something has happened to my blog and everything that should be on the right side is now at the bottom. What has happened? I was trying to upload my slide show when I got a few errors but thought I fixed them. Does anyone know how to fix my problem?

Ok, I fixed my own problem! Yeah for me! An FYI for everyone else....if you upload pictures that are too wide for the column it will bump your sidebar down so it can fit your picture.

Happy Blogging Everyone!

8 month old slide

8 months old!

Joelle is now 8 months old....my how time flies! Here is her list of accomplishments:

*She has been to 9 states and one foreign country (Canada).

*She has been on 12 airplane rides.

*She eats from a spoon very well. She loves fruits and cereals the best.

*She can successfully pick up cheerios with her fingers and put them in her mouth.

*She sits up to play and grabs toys out of baskets.

*She "creeps" on the floor....not quite crawling yet.
*No teeth yet.
*Hair is growing, just a little hard to see.
*She is still in her bucket car seat and can probably last a few more months.
*She LOVES listening to daddy play his guitar (she even holds the egg shaker and is the percussion section).
*She still sucks her thumb and plays with the pacifier.
*She loves to smile and laugh and sometimes scrunches up her face and laughs by blowing air in and out of her nose (I need to get a video camera to show it...it's so cute!).
*She still wears 6 month clothes and even some 3 month clothes.
*She loves to laugh at the dogs.
*She rubs her eyes when she's tired.
*She takes 3 naps a day and sleeps 11 hours at night. That totally makes up for the first 8 weeks of one hour asleep and 1 hour awake...that was terrible!

Justin and I are loving being her parents more and more each day. She has become such a joy in our life.

smurfs

We finally did some much needed yard work to the house last weekend and discovered another clump of huge and colorful mushrooms. Living on the coast creates lots of rain which means lots of moisture for mushrooms to grow. These mushrooms grew to be 5-6 inches tall and the tops of them umbrellaed out to probably 4 inches in diameter. They were huge! Although I'm sure to some of you they really aren't that large, but I have never seen mushrooms so big just growing in a yard. We decided the smurfs must live there.

Along with finding the mushrooms we decided to dig out a rhubard plant that had not been cared for in the last four years and was greatly overgrown. We probably could have entered a stem in the state fair and won because it was so large! The most incredible part was the root of the plant. HUGE! And unfortunately we took out some raspberry plants in the back that were starting to take over the fence. Raspberry's grow everywhere here and I was a little sad to see them go, but the yard does look so much better.

And the front of our house looks bare these days...but so much better! There were YEARS of weeds growing in unleveled flower beds. I spent 4 hours one afternoon weeding and Justin finished up over the weekend. Now there's just dirt, with flower bulbs soon to come, and the beds are now level thanks to Justin. We also threw out hanging planters with dead flowers that were so lovingly left by the owners.

I will update with house pictures soon. Our storage goods from North Carolina are arriving next week. We will get the house officially set up and then the camera will get clicking!