Scrapbook Pages

My favorites are the bigger pictures. I am not sure how to set my camera up to take better pictures of documents. I will figure it out eventually!

I had so much fun and can't wait until the spring!! I have started to save for the cricuit as well...some day!!

Canning Applesauce

Last weekend, my good friend, Dawn and I spent all day (and I mean all day) canning applesauce. It was a ton of work, but well worth the sweat and aching feet that we put into it (no we did not put our feet in the applesauce ;) I was able to purchase 2 bushel of apples for $20 from a local amish family. Unbelievable apples too! They were perfect and huge. I wish I had taken a picture of them before we started, but I was thinking of only one thing and that was canning. Next year :)

Here the hot water bath is going on the left and the apples are cooking down on the right.

1/2 bushel of apples cut up, cooked and ready to push through our food mills.

Dawn using her grandmothers food mill. I think it worked better than the modern day mill at times and at others, my food mill was the one to do the job :)

Our first batch of canned applesauce. We added cinnamon into the first batch and several others, but this was our very first! Isn't it beautiful ;)

34 quarts of applesauce later and we were ready to call it a day!! But I absolutely love the end product. We didn't add any sugar and for those of us that love a tart applesauce, this is the best!!

And to end the day Ken and Cody headed over to our house, picking up a pizza on the way, for a bon fire. What a beautiful night. We joined them as soon as the sauce was completed. The boys had a blast playing flashlight tag...or simply running around with the flashlights. We made s'mores and ended the night with a display of fireworks from the local firehouse. We could just barely see them over the tree line, but it was a perfect end to a tough day :) I don't know how people do this all the time and with kids under foot!! To those of you who do, you are truly amazing women!!!!!

Old Orchard Cider Mill

I can't believe that I forgot to post these pictures! I was going back through my blog and realized that I had forgotten to post about our trip to the orchard with our friends Dawn and Ken with their two boys Cody (who is Josiah's age) and Brady (who is around a 1 1/2 years old). We had a great time. The boys just ran around! I think Josiah loved the hay bale maze the most. That and riding on the wagon ride! What a beautiful day and I can't wait until next year already :)

This is a funny picture, simply because this elderly woman was on the swing and Josiah wanted to join her. I think it made her day :)

Scrapbooking Addict

I too am a scrapbooking addict and don't care to seek help for it :) (commenting from Christina's blog)

I had an incredible weekend last weekend. I decided to go away on a scrapbooking retreat!! It was sooo awsome. I left right after work on Friday (which turned out to be the crazy busiest Friday since I started 8 months ago) and arrived around 11:30pm. the rest of that night was just getting settled in and setting my stuff up. I didn't do any scrapbooking because I was exhausted from work. So I was the first one off to bed.

I was however, the first one up and at em on Saturday! I got some breakfest and started getting my pictures in order to determine what I would work on first. I am going to try and take pictures of my blog pages and post them, but not sure if that will work out or not. Plus most of the people who read this blog will probably see them in person at some point anyway ;)

I was amazed at the creativity and skill that these women had. There was a group of 5 of us (Christina from church, her sister and two of her friends). And then there was another group of 3 sisters. So a pretty small group over all, but a great size, because we got lots of table space. they taught me so much about layout of my pages, to color combinations, to my new piece of scrapbooking equipment that I am now coveting, "The Cricuit." these machines are amazing. You select the cartridge with the font or the picture that you want cut out, plug it in, type the letters out or select the picture and hit "cut" and wala! Out come everything you want cut out perfectly (most of the time) for you...all you have to do is glue it down. Speaking of glue, they introduced me to this amazing paste that you can get at Michaels...and of course I didn't write down them name. But it lasts a long time and is perfect for glueing letters and pictures alike down. and the best part, is that it is only $10.99 or cheaper with the 40% off coupon ;) they said it will last them about a year and they scrap a ton.

Needless to say, I will be going again, money permitting of course, in the spring. I was able to complete 16 pages and 16 pages that I am very proud of ;) So thank you, Christina, for inviting me on my first scrapbooking retreat!

Crazy Busy...

...Both at work and at home. So I haven't had time to blog much lately.

Josiah update: He is now sleeping very well at night. We increased the brightness of his nightlight. He told us that he was seeing monsters, so by adding a nightlight and giving him his own flashlight for his bedroom, it seemed to do the trick. I believe he was also going through a major growth spurt at the same time, because shortly after he started sleeping at night again, his pants were all of the sudden to short.

Now we are having sleeping during the day problems. He won't take naps anymore. We are continuing to put him down every day, but he is not sleeping. When he is at daycare he is at least having down time and is quiet. But at home on the weekends, he just screams and yells for us to come get him. Not sure what this newest phase is all about except for the fact that he doesn't want to miss out on anything. This to shall pass, right? He is just not ready to go without naps, he is so cranky and on the edge of meltdowns, if not melting down every night. Oh well, such is life with an almost 3 year old!

Me/Work: Work is going ok! Most days I don't believe that this is a job I will ever be really good at. I am not an attention to detail kind of person, but I started thinking about it and what kind of jobs out there will even higher someone who doesn't have attention to detail. I make mistakes every day. Even if they are miner, they are still mistakes and I look stupid to the others that I work with. If it was only once and a while, it wouldn't matter, but it is every day. They are always telling me to slow down, or "I do this" or "I do that". Well I do go slow and do what they are saying, and I still miss things. The thing with this job is that going slow isn't really an option. I don't like to go slow and I think I make more mistakes going slow. I don't know! I will keep plugging along and hopefully this will come together for me some day.

I think it is only one person in particular that makes me feel like crap every time I make a mistake because she is constantly watching for me to make mistakes and then tell me that she doesn't do things like that. grrrrrrrrrrrr!!! She is also the same person that doesn't thank me for doing anything that I do extra to help her out because she is sooooo very slow. She thanks everyone else for helping, but not me. Why do people do crap like that? So I continue to help her out, even though I don't have to because I wouldn't be very Christian like if I just stopped helping her because she doesn't say thank you. But man, I don't want to help her ever!! She is young and vulgar and has a very different belief system than I have, so I don't think we will ever mesh, but a simple thank you will go a long ways in this work place! Thank goodness she isn't working my shift this week, so I don't have to put up with her for the last 2 hours of every day.

A very fun thing that has happened at work, is that the person that trained me, the persont hat I had such difficulties with in the beginning has become one of the only people that I even want to talk to around here. Funny how things change and how people change. The others are so liberal and democratic that I can hardly stand to be around them right now with the election going on. I just keep my mouth shut and walk away when they begin to talk. I have my opinions, but they are as bias as theirs and no one wants to hear them anyway!! So this week is nice because the young/vulgar person leaves at 9:00 and I am free to not feel excluded from any dumb conversations or whatever!!! A low self-esteem free week :) (if that makes any sense)

Wow that was a bunch of complete babble and nonsense, but I just felt that I had to get it down and out!

Update on not sleeping

Josiah is still having difficulty getting to sleep and staying asleep. I feel like we are dealing with a newborn. Last night it was almost 11:00pm before he finally crashed, but Dan said that he was up screaming histarically by 1:00am (he had turned the monitor down and forgot to tell me, so I never heard that). Dan ended up sleeping in his room until 4:00am. And then again at 6:00am he was screaming again. Crazy types of screams, ones that make you want to run right in and see what's wrong. So he could be playing us, but at this point how long do you let a kid scream. It was 3 hours last night on and off. Unfortunately we made the choice to bring him into bed with us and he never went back to sleep, except for a 15 minutes snooze there sometime before 8am. Oh well! Hopefully tonight will be better. We have no idea what is going on! Could be nightmares, his mouth could hurt, he could have a cold and ear infection and he could simply be playing his mom and dad, pushing his limits. Kids are so hard to read at this age. We are stumped.

The New Bike

Thanks to Uncle Mike, Josiah now has a boys bike and a very cool one at that. Josiah loves it and calls it his cool bike from Uncle Mike (kind of has a ring to it ;) The training wheels are from the pink and purple bike, but what can you do, you can't win em all :) Plus we plan on having him riding with out the training wheels by next summer, and the purple training wheels are even more insentive ;)

We were shopping in the bicycle isle for Dan's bike and I saw that horn on his bike for only a couple of bucks and thought it would be fun to have on it. the only problem is that you can hear the horn from the back of our property all the way inside our house. Oh well, I guess I will always know where he is ;)

Thank You again Uncle Mike

Sunflowers and a sunset

I think this is one of my favorite pictures that I have taken of nature this far. The windmill in the background has tricked several people. When you first look at it, is the windmill black or white?

Not a beautiful sunset, but kind of a neat picture