Fantastic Weekend

Well Mothers day weekend brought some long awaited warmer weather and our trees are now starting to bud. Our yard is so beautiful in full color in the spring.. I can't wait.Hayze, Destiny and I spent Sunday together, Saturday they spent with grandpa Jack while I celebrated my birthday with friends in the City. Jim was rodeoing in B.C.
( he is back there this weekend, If you could all say a little rodeo prayer for him that would be great)
The kids made me the best home made gifts, I always love those, and they are so proud of them. Destiny also used some of her money from Grandpa to buy me these. How generous of her.
The afternoon of mothers day we went to Mossleigh to Aspen Crossing such a cute little place to spend the afternoon. We had a really good buffet lunch on the patio. The kids were convinced that this is were we are coming for every mothers day.

After lunch we shopped in the green house and got our flowers for our pots outside.

Hayze did the more "manly" things.

Played in the fountains

Shopped for tools

checked out the "shocks"

Destiny is generally up for getting her picture taken (for awhile). So I took a few of the kids, they both clean up pretty good, so today I took my new lens with me to try it out.

Destiny's hair was so cute, everyone was stopping her and telling her how cute she was..

*she was polite and said thanks, thank goodness she didn't say "I know".. That's what she tells me.*

Hayze promised me some pictures so .. he they are. He looks pretty happy to be playing along.

our kids.. waiting for lunch, I snapped a few.. they would have liked to be eating.Destiny playing around in the gift shop while I was paying. Now when we got home, It was time to plant.. Destiny was a good motivator for that.

I was going to leave them, she wanted to do them that evening so .. we did.. and I am glad it is done.

Watering the finished pot. She did this one all by herself. I hope it works out.

Mind you I have had to cover them for the last couple of nights because our weather is so crappy.

Destiny has a visitor while she was planting.

We spent the rest of the evening on the back lawn playing around..

What a great day. I loved my whole weekend, I got spoiled and spent some great quality time with my children.

Good Friend

Marlene flew in for my birthday, we had a fabulous time together. We shopped during the day and then met up with some more friends and went to the "roller Derby" That was a funny surprise. We ended the day with going for Japanese. It was a fabulous day. I have so much to post about, but tonight I will just share a few photos from the shoot with Marlene.

If you ever caught the Canadian show "wild roses" you may recognize the back ground in this photo. It was one of the pictures in the opening credits.

Learning Together

These pictures were taken last night at Lausens arena just a couple miles east of our home.
This was Hayze's first night team roping, and he did great. It happened by accident actually..
Hayze was wanting to go to the area and help the steer wrestlers and ropers.. He likes to load cattle and work the shoot. When I left the arena after dropping him off, he was doing a fine job, Lorne even put a bail there so he could reach everything and he has the routine down pat.
About a hour later I got a call from Chad saying bring your camera, Hayze is team roping. Yup.. with the big boys. So back over I go, camera in hand

And this is what I found...

My 10 year old team roping

On a green broke horse, that too, is just learning.

Hayze did really well, we are very proud of his confidence

And well, Patch did pretty good to.

A Challenge On the Horizon

Well, to follow up on the last post.. Tanya and I had a fabulous evening together visiting and eating the nice meat, cheese and cracker tray she put together... Wouldn't you know it, a neighbour rang the door bell and gave her a beautiful veggie tray from a function he was at. So needless to say we were well feed, had good company, watched a lot of you tube, laughed and cried.. And still, no Jane Austin. You know Tanya and I have been trying to do this since November. We even bought the book, Pride and Prejudice.. can't get through that either.

I did find this link to recap from another blog. Tanya, you might find that interesting.

As some of you may know, Tanya has been heading up a small investment group. Well she seems to be doing well at picking and choosing for the group and has made us a small amount of money ( or should I say fortune). I am sure she is going to post about it soon.. When she has her tips ready I will link to it.

The last thing Tanya and I have been working on is recycling material for house hold use.

Now this is not to say that we are going to fill our homes with junk but, make a few neat projects for our home and fix up somethings we already have.

this is an old chic incubator, I have had it for years.

I took the heating apparatus off and thought once it is refinished it would make a good island or table. We have decided to use it in our mud room as a counter.

this the beginning project

Jim Sanding it down, even the corner metal pieces are shining.
I will show you the finished product, once it is in place and the room is organized.

It looks amazing

This is the coffee table Jim made in College about 19 years ago. Jim had sanded it down in this picture and it is ready to be re stained and top coated.

even reused our sausage tray for the stain. we are doing good.

Now this is an old sign that Jim made for his family years ago too.

Again sanded it down, cleaned it off and blow the saw dust off.

Stained it, and gave it new life. Now this Stevens Family can use it.

the challenge on the horizon

this is the scrap metal pile at the recycling depot.

Now I am not going lye, I have been known to claw in it before and find some neat stuff.

Tanya has decorated some of her house with it and now we want to see projects with it.

I had bought a couple of gifts while in Honduras from this ladies company

recreated art and soul

Have a look at her creations and her bio. It is really amazing.

Now we are inspired to try our hand at it, and want you to too..

Please send pictures of anything you have refurbished, or design out or recycled product.

I will post them on the blog.

We will show our projects when they are completed..
the last project I was working on Sunday was fixing up our flower beds. The ground has become so hard over the winter that it turned out to be a big job.. I planted some bulbs. I hoping they will come up this year, and Jim put a bag of peat moss on for me. It looked really nice.

After this picture, it snowed.Have a great day.

Movie night with a Friend

Well, ok.. I felt the need to bake something to share with everyone.. Couldn't decide, so I baked COOKIES.. Yes one of the simplest things to bake, yet some of the best girl friend food their is. Tanya once brought large cookies and ice cream and we made home made ice cream sandwiches. That was a nice treat.. Now I am hoping she has ice cream when I arrive tonight.

I used the recipe from here I might add, it is the best choc. chip cookies I have made. I really watched them and set the timer for only 8 minutes. I don't know what it is about cookies at this elevation but they don't take as long to bake. Please check out the Chipits website. They have some great recipes (every things choc. of coarse) and they have a contest that Canadians can actually enter for a Kenmore kitchen. I made extra big ones (just for Jim)

Now this evening I am on my way to Tanya's for a girls night. The men are both away doing stuff so we are getting together. I wanted to take her some cookies and thought of this cute way to package them. Now one reason I am so proud of this idea is because I really just started recycling . Gasp, I know.. that is a whole other post, but I am getting good at it.

I had Just added this to the plastic recycling today, so I pulled it out (see I didn't have to get it out of the garbage, (like I would) it was actually clean and with the other plastic.)

cookies fit perfect.

Now I am going to cover it, and make it look pretty.

Note the shape. a bit of a arch at the top so that when you wrap it there are no puckers.

I added a little ribbon, a card that I put stickers on to spell Yummy
and viola, a cute little bring along hostess gift.

For your paper crafters out there, the paper is from PinkMartini "flirtini"

So now when I arrive, we will be all set for our "Jane Austin" movie marathon.

A Great Post

Ya, well I had a great post in mind. I had some pictures I was going to share..

• cute brownies in the shapes of hearts with carmel and vanilla bean ice cream.


• before and afters of laundry day, and share my feelings on the "SOCKS!"


• the before and afters of Destiny room, remember this well it didn't look like that anymore. so I did it again.


• Pictures of another fire, this time west of us.. blowing this way while we ate supper.


• And a picture of Jims jean starched so much that they stand up by themselves... oh, wait.. I still have that one

The rest of my pictures... I deleted.. yes, I deleted them off of my card. I thought I had batch processed my pictures to be smaller and I had only selected one picture.. Ya, that's right. a picture of over starched pants is all that is left. Good news is, they were more documentary pictures of "a day in the life" rather than "keep sakes".

So that is really all I have for today. I do want to leave you with this video.. Because this is how I have been feeling lately.. And I am trying really hard not to raise my voice... I have been yelling a lot.. Ya, pretty much everything she says.. I have been yelling.

Watch this Video