bits & pieces

tons of pictures today. just a little glimpse of what we've been up to lately...


mckinlee got this great shot of a butterfly that landed on her zinnias.
when she's not taking pictures, she's been creating one of a kind art with hand sanitizer and food coloring. (she calls it her "germ-x art"! funny, yes?)

i just love little glimpses of summer around the house. bright beach towels just scream summer, right?

a couple of weeks ago, a friend from our hall and i got together a picnic at a beautiful park here in frisco. it was one of the hottest days and when i got home, i was comatose for the rest of the night. but we had a fun time and quite a few from our congregation got to come.

the kids cooled themselves with spray bottles of water...

and fought over who got to hold baby z!

the music was so loud from another group at the park that the girls got to do the cupid shuffle!

isn't this the cutest family? they recently moved into our congregation and have the cutest identical twin girls!

we've tried to be sure mckinlee reads at least 30 minutes everyday during the summer (it hasn't always happened!) but this evening she and chris (who has decided he likes reading--go figure!) sat outside on the porch and read. how cute!

this is part of a scrapbook page from my stampin' up lady's open house. it is kind of hard to see, but it's a glass of lemonade made out of transparency material. isn't that clever? i've got to try it out!

i made "romy's chocolate cake" and thought it looked so pretty, i had to take a picture! it was so good.

we finally got our passports! yippee! now we can go somewhere.

while mckinlee had a friend over last week, cosmo crawled into my lap and watched tv with me until the camera scared him off!

then he got to enjoy what the girls were making for him... his own cat corner. every blanket and pillow we have is in there for him. they worked so hard, i just couldn't make them clean it up. he has been in there probably 22 hours a day for days now!

the fruit right now is so good! sprouts had their pineapple on sale for $1.50!! you can hardly buy a can of pineapple for that. and it tasted so good. mckinlee likes to "shave" it--as she calls it.

check back tomorrow. i'll try to post pictures of a "first" for mckinlee.

i'm still here

i'm sorry--i've been a very bad blogger. i have a lot of pictures to post--i just haven't uploaded them yet. i will try to get to that later tonight. for now, we're off to our weekly wednesday swim day! i'll be back later :)

the master bedroom

next stop on the tour of homes...master bedrooms. here's ours:
this is what you see when you walk into the room:
our bed~which i love. (it is so comfortable!) bedding is nautica from bed,bath & beyond~several years old

this is a watercolor my dad painted~very special to me.

this is my bedside table. i love to read and usually have a stack of books on it. on the bottom is part of my egg collection.

this is chris' side. (i want to get new lamps, but that hasn't happened yet!)

here's the little sitting area. i think almost everything there came from hobby lobby. i really want to move all that stuff up to the guest room and get a comfy chair for the master. (that hasn't happened yet either!)

this is our armoire that houses our little tv and chris' clothes. cosmo usually worms his way into one of these doors and we'll find him curled in there asleep!

here's the other side of the room.

and a view from the sitting area:

just a close-up of some of the things on my dresser.

last one. view from the bathroom:

thanks for stopping by to look!

summer sun, summer fun?

today at 11:00 am i got the brilliant notion to walk to our neighborhood park with mckinlee and swing. i don't know what came over me, it just sounded like a fun thing to do.

we made it to the corner before i realized this might not be the best idea i've ever had. it felt, in mckinlee's wise estimation, like it was 200 degrees. (i told her i'd set the oven one day at 200 degrees and she could tell me if it felt the same.) we got down the street to her school where the shade of a small tree there was our oasis for a few seconds. the park was in view and we couldn't turn back. we'd come so far.

as we made our way to the empty swings, mckinlee would stop and make me feel her sweating head. "ooohhh~that's what i've always wanted to do" i told her. i'm compassionate like that.

finally we made it to the shaded pavilion of the park. we proceeded to cover ourselves with the lukewarm water of the park water fountains. no blast of air conditioning has ever felt as good as the warm breeze on our watered limbs.

mckinlee ran off to climb on the monkey bars while i relaxed on the picnic table. after a couple of minutes, we decided we were ready to swing. we lowered ourselves to the black plastic straps of the swing. that lasted precisely 15 seconds. i need to check, but i'm pretty sure i have permanent burns on my rear.

our walk home was a sort of desperate treasure hunt for the shade of anything bigger than a petunia. at one point, i thought i might have to run home and come back with the car for mckinlee to make the last 5 yards. she informed me that even though she was the fastest girl in her class for the past two years, she was also the one who got the most exhausted from the heat. hey, success comes with a price.

at this moment it is 12:05 pm. i'm cooling down at the computer and mckinlee has flailed her red faced-overheated body on the landing upstairs. every once in a while i hear a moan come from her.

we won't be walking to the park again in the blazing sun anytime soon.

however, along the way mckinlee told me about an illustration she remembered at an assembly a long time ago. so it wasn't all bad.

(in case you're wondering, these pictures were taken last week and for some reason it didn't feel like we were wandering in the sahara.)

take me out to the ballgame...

monday night we got to go to a frisco roughriders game. chris got tickets from a client of his and we had the best time! we had wanted to go before, but just never did. the stadium is really pretty and not far from our house at all (right beside ikea). it's a small stadium but we had really good seats on the third row right by the dugout. the tickets included all you could eat at the four restaurants there and all the beer, wine and sodas you wanted. we had burgers, bbq and dessert at the ice cream bar. i don't think the roughriders won though. we had to leave before it was over since chris was leaving the next morning for delaware and hadn't packed at all. it was mckinlee's first time at a baseball game and she kept saying "what?" "what happened?" all night long! we can't wait to go back~

my scrapbook area

friday again? wow! the week just flies by. it's bonus rooms or laundry rooms on kelly's tour. since i don't have my laundry room the way i want it, i will show you one of my favorite rooms...my scrapbook room. i started scrapbooking when i was pregnant with mckinlee. i clearly remember the day i walked into michael's and stood in the middle of the scrapbooking aisle thinking, "people could really get wrapped up in this hobby. not me--i'm just going to make one scrapbook for my new baby!" fast forward 11 years...here's my room! :)





this is the view from the landing of the stairs:

i took pictures when we first moved in and it was all nice and pretty. it's being used more right now and seems very cluttery to me (especially now that i see it in pictures!) i will work on clearing some stuff out soon.

mckinlee and i each work at these 2 desks pushed together and there is just not enough room. thinking of solutions as i type...


another view from behind the desk.

some close-ups of things on the shelves. my favorite thing is the ocean, so this room is filled with shells and pictures of vacations on the beach.

danielle and i took a class from donna downey in waco years ago and made these letters that spell create. the pictures on them are what inspire me to create.

this is what is on the top of my expedit: a collection of my s's and a gorgeous dress form danielle got my when we moved into our house. the huge s was an anniversary present from danielle and mike one year (i just realized that anything i have that is really cool came from danielle!)

i love the expedit from ikea. i just wish i would have bought the larger one!

more shells and pictures and an old camera that was my dad's!

where most of supplies are stored. the cubes i bought at oriental trading (thinking of painting them black--what do you think?) and just collected the other stuff a little at a time!

the rack and scissors came from hobby lobby. i usually put the latest pages i finish up before i put them in an album.

another shelf which holds ribbon and magazines.

i love a jar full of ribbon! aren't those yummy colors?

thanks for looking at my creative space. will update with pictures as i change things around!~

summer

SUMMER!!! my favorite time of year.
here are a few summery things we've been enjoying lately.


i saw this pot of flowers (it was originally a hanging basket--but i cut off the hanger) and i couldn't leave the nursery without it. i just love how it's so thick and filled with blooms. i had never seen this flower before. it's called a 'celebration' calibrachoa.

here are the blooms up close. aren't they pretty?

these next two are mckinlee's zenias that we planted from seed. they are blooming so pretty right now!

this picture cracks me up. when i woke up one morning, cosmo was having a fit! climbing in the windowsill, walking through the blinds--he kept meowing and looking at me and then outside. when i looked to see what the problem was, this rabbit was sitting on the porch. you can't see it from the picture, but it had a long strand of that sweet potato vine sticking out of it's mouth, just chewing away!

isn't this hibiscus beautiful? i'm having really good success with hibiscus this year.

chris grilled hotdogs the other night. we had bought all this meat from omaha steaks and these hotdogs were so good! we had watermelon with it and it was so sweet and cold. just what we needed for a hot summer day!