Knitting Hats

Today we had a "girls day." This is a day that all the girls in the family gather together. This time we decided to work on our service project. We are knitting or crocheting scarves and hats to give to a homeless shelter this upcoming December.

This is me being a little silly. The round green thing is how I made my hat...and it's upside down. The hat looked awesome when I finished it.

It was also a lot of fun just to sit around and talk. It wasn't as peaceful as I made it sound. We still had all the kids at the house and so we were constantly checking on them or putting bandaids on some little hurt. And little kids always seem to be hungry.

This shows the table with different colors of yarn from which we could choose our yarn for the scarves or hats. (That sentence feels really awkward...sorry).

Let's just say that we had lots of fun and now I know how to make a hat on a round "thing."

Weeding

As most of you know, I love working outside in the beautiful weather. Last Friday my mom and I went to my brother's house to help him get a handle on the weeds in his front yard. Luckily, I remember to take some "before" picture and then the "after" pictures.

Because we've been having such great rain storms...we didn't have to water the flower beds before coming. They were perfect for weeding.

That side flower garden was never finished all the way. We worked and worked but found the dirt hard towards the top. We'll try to finish it next week...after it has been watered.

It was fun to weed out an area and find different flowering plants or bushes that had been hidden by all the tall weeds.
And here are some of the hard workers taking a break and eating fresh peas from my mom's garden. Yum!!
I love how beautiful the gardens look after they have been weeded.

Garden Update

It was just over a month ago...I think one month and one week ago that we planted our little garden. And it is growing "like a weed" except that it is not a weed. You can see that we even have little baby tomatoes starting.

SM will come home from work, change out of his suit and go out to talk to the garden. He also encourages growth in certain directions by placing the vines or leaves in certain areas. In the above picture he is working on the cucumber plant.

One of the pepper plants also has a small pepper growing.

When my father-in-law cuts the grass, he lays it down in the garden to prevent weeds from coming up between the plants. It also makes it easy for SM to walk around in his bare feet in the garden.

Friends from Virginia

I thought I'd post some of my friends from Virginia. These are pictures we took during our trip last week.

I enjoyed meeting a few new faces...as I said before, everyone stayed the same except the babies and expecting mothers.

A Post For My MOM

My mom is out of town...she's helping my sister-in-law who just had her third child. So, for the next week I'm incharge of her garden, lawn and anything else I want to do.

And since she is away from her yard, I thought I'd bring some of it to her. Today as I was finishing mowing her lawn, it started raining. And so then I had to take pictures of some of her flowers with the rain on them.

Aren't they beautiful?

I actually enjoy mowing the lawn. There's something theraputic about making the lawn look so beautiful.

And here are some photos of her garden. Look how it's growing! I've been watering and weeding and the sun is doing the rest.

It was actually raining as I took this picture. The better picture would have been me on the riding lawn mower...with a giant umbrella. I was almost done mowing and it started raining...so I quickly ran inside, grabbed a giant umbrella and finished mowing. Mom's neighbors commented on it later when I spoke to them.

From top to bottom...peas, two rows of carrots, beats, spinach and lettuce.

And I saved the best for last...lovely, large, yummy, red strawberries. I'm sorry you aren't around Mom to eat these with me. They are really good. I will try to leave some for you when you come home next week.

Memorial Day 2009

The above picture is from Memorial Day 2008...and I'm walking in the Annual Fun Run for the City of Falls Church. The picture below is me walking from Memorial Day 2009...and once again I'm walking in the Annual Fun Run for the City of Falls Church. Above my friend is pregnant...below she has beautiful baby girl in the stroller.

The above picture is the free T-shirt we got last year (2008) and the below picture is the free T-shirt from this year (2009). I'm not sure why I wanted to include last years' pictures in with this post...it just seemed cool.When we planned our vacation for Memorial Day weekend, we forgot that the city of Falls Church did so many fun activities for their Memorial Day. It was also nice to participate in these activities because we ran into friends and were able to talk and catch up on their lives.

My husband has always had a following of little girls. I think it's because he'll play with them until he gets too tired.

I miss all my friends in Virginia...so that's why I had to keep taking pictures of me with them. I love creating memories and photos help me remember those memories.

Here's my friend and her two cute daughter, who walked with me the last two years. This is also a former missionary from my same mission. We were never companions but we had a lot of the same companions. It's fun to compare notes from that time in our lives.

And here are some more friends. One was my visiting teaching companion and the other is a former home teachee of my husband. When his partner was unable to go home teaching with him, I'd be his partner and we'd have a great visit.

Trip to Virginia

Last week we flew to Virginia. We went back there to visit friends, be official tourists and SM threw some work in also. We were able to stay with our former bishop and his family. The above photo shows the joys of being the older brother. This little guy is also a former student. I worked with him last year and we fixed some articulation errors.

I just couldn't not post this picture. The bishop and his wife have four kids and this is their youngest. She is so cute.

When we attended church last Sunday, we had many former ward members ask us why we were there. Many of them were hoping that we had decided to move back. Unfortunately, this was not the case, but we did explain that we were just there for a vacation. A few of them were confused why we would spend our vacation in Virginia. To us, it was a no-brainer. We were surrounded by friends, had a place to stay, a vehicle to use and were able to be tourists in DC. We had something every night...dinner and games...or dinner and talking....or movie. It was lots of fun and we enjoyed seeing so many of our friends.