Available now: June Pictures!!!

You can see them on the right side of the blog or go here. Enjoy!

Downtroden and heavyladen

Believe me, my intent has not been to neglect this blog. In fact, I have 9, yes 9, posts waiting to be finished! A couple of them date all the way back to July 4th weekend. You, see, I have this thing about having to put posts up in order. I know, it is silly, but it seems wrong to put up a post about Madelyn's birthday, which was a couple weeks ago, when I haven't put up a post about Momma Susan's awesome birthday, which was a couple MONTHS ago! Ahhh! I'll tell you what is slowing me down. First, I have this backlog of pictures that need to be sorted and tagged. Jointly, Ben's family (including Ben and I) took over 1000 pictures on our trip for Momma Susan's birthday. There are some really good ones (really great ones too!) but there are a lot of stinkers that need to be purged. Then, since then we have taken almost another 1000 pictures too. The joys of having a new camera. And I have been procrastinating.... So, now I am starting to feel the pressure of getting it done. I need hardrive space (yes, I predicted this problem) and I definitely need to get the events of the last couple of wonderful summer months recorded. So, yes, I will be working on getting my 9 posts done and published. However, heed this as a warning - they will start at July 4th weekend. and work their way to the present. There is some good stuff in there, so don't miss any of it!

MN State Fair 2008

The Great Minnesota Get-Together is one of our favorite things of living in Minnesota! We have so much fun going every year! Ben and I have gone almost every year we have lived here. If you know Ben, you'll know that it must be special if he is willing to take a day of vacation to go. We choose to do that though because the weekends at the fair are CrAzY!!! The streets are jammed packed and it is a feat to move from one venue to another.... not us. So, we usually go on Tuesday and love how the crowd is a little more subdued. Ben's and my favorite stops are the arts & crafts building, the agriculture building, the diary barn, the baa barn, the moo barn, the oink barn, and the crazy-looking chickens, This year's visit we were "forced" to cut back on our annual favorites to give the kids some fun too! So, we added the Little Farmer Hands farm and Kidway to the mix. It was all fun!! Ben even got to do his favorite thing this year - the sky glider!!

Btw, if you want to read a great commentary about the fair and see some truly awesome pictures, go to Tracy's blog.

My little farm hands

Feeding Greyson's love of trucks and tractors


A stop by Kidway - Madelyn LOVED it!

What do you do when your legs get tired?

Petting the sheep

Checking out a month-old cow

The highlight of Ben's day - the Sky Glider!

PS - I know that this post is about 3 months late, but better late than never is what I say!

How we spent our weekend

BEFORE:
DURING:

AFTER!!!

Don't they look great!?! The bamboo boards are just beautiful. It took A LOT more work than we were expecting but I think it was worth it.

New Digital SLR Camera

Okay - I LOVE our new digital SLR camera! It really is amazing.... I didn't ever consider that we could have great pictures and the ability to shoot them endlessly for FREE! However, it is causing problems. Remember when I used to get pictures up on the web relatively quickly to share with friends and family? Well, now there is a bit of a problem with that. I was already sifting through 200 or so pictures a month to pick out the best 50 or 60 pictures to look at. But now, I have 500 pictures from June and OVER 1000 pictures from July(!) to go through. It is a daunting job and not one that I'm looking forward to.... therefore the delay in getting pictures uploaded. Sorry! Hopefully I will learn how to let go of (and therefore delete) the less-than-great pictures soon. Otherwise, we are also going to have a harddrive problem too!

Book Club Reports

June Book/Candy's Pick:
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
So, I'm a bit belated posting this review.... but here goes. This book was really good. The book was really written in a beautiful. It felt very much like a smooth flowing, gently told story; it was so graceful and melodic. I loved the bee theme that wove its way through the whole story. I thought it was wonderful that the author was able to write like this while writing about such deep and disturbing topics: domestic abuse and its effect on children, racial discrimination, neglect, interracial relationships.... this book really got me thinking about these topics and how I REALLY feel about them.

July book/Kathy's Pick:
The Saving Graces by Patricia Gaffney
A really slow starter but after about page 150, this was a pretty good book. It was about four women that formed a group and become great friends. The book rotated from whose perspective it was being written. That was a little hard to get used to. It took me awhile to be able to change gears between the characters. But as you read the book and learned more about each character and the issues that each of them dealt with it, it really started to draw me in. the women's issues went from an abusive relationship, to a terminal disease, to infertility problems, to being in love with a married man. Yet they were all woven together wonderfully within this one book as each women leaned (or didn't lean) on her friends. This book spoke to me about what a friend can be and how I can be better at it.

Upcoming - August book: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch (which was picked, by the way, BEFORE he died last Friday...)