Summa, Summa, Summa-time

drivin the tractor at the zoo today

Like I said in my last post, I love summers in Portland and am so looking forward to enjoying a few weeks in a row here. 

The plants are in full bloom, we have enjoyed several pints of home grown blueberries, our zucs are going nuts, the pole beans are ready and the tomatoes are getting red.

The roses are on their second big round of blooms and that is bringing humming birds, butterflies and bees to our garden-I'm luvin' it!  And I can't forget to mention gorgeous sunsets.

I love all the outdoor BBQs and other types of celebrations as well.  We got to celebrate our friend, Heather last weekend at her baby shower.  The theme was baseball as her husband is a coach.

A little picture of her opening the quilt I made for her baby girl.

Forgive me on this video being shakey, but if you want to see a cute toddler enjoying the summer, here you go. :)  I might just be a bit opinionated on the cute part. And you probably are wondering how we ever got such a monstrosity of a plastic toy in our yard-well, I offered to sell it for my work (I am a pediatric occupational therapist) as we did not have room for it, and, well, I guess I didn't need to travel far for a buyer-me.

Enjoy your day and hope you get to enjoy some time outside.  I'm off to research kitchen stuff while the tots sleep!

Flowers in Bloom

Loving all the plants in bloom! and really loving all the flowers I have to put in vases.

the mulch was washed away at the edges with the torrential down pour Saturday night

Steve was tired of looking at all of the weeds growing in our planting strip.  He took out the old butterfly bush a month or two back and other than a few transplanted flowers and the elm, it was crazy weeds.  What a contrast form the rest of our garden.  Anyways, he took out all of the weeds and we hauled them off to yard waste on Saturday.  We came home with a yard of dark mulch and threw it down to keep the weeds at bay until we have the time to plant the strip.

 My dad stopped through last Wednesday night on his drive up to Alaska.  He is a crazy outdoors man and is driving to Alaska in order to canoe down the Yukon-a 2000 mile paddle!  He did it back in the 70s and is going for it again.  Not surprising after climbing Aconcagua a few years back and summiting Everest just 2 years ago!  Ben loves time with his grandpa!

The Yard coming into bloom

A couple weekends ago, Steve and I decided to fill in a few spots in our front yard that seemed sparse.  We felt that all of our plants have had enough time to grow in and that we have  good feel of what the yard looks like year round.  I think that we have the open areas because we did not lay out our plants right and follow our landscape plan quite right. 

we added a couple new grasses here

a new fern and some champagne colored Heucharas

a new lewisia to replace the one that died

a few new black mondo grasses, some varigated grasses and 2 champagne heucheras

Safety First!  You must wear your helmet while showing off your bee-boo (belly button) and helping plant

started the garden-mint, basil, chives

lettuce, cilantro, green onions (left from last year)

And here is the house just a week and a half later-everything has taken off!

This past weekend, we were lucky enough to enjoy a weekend on the Oregon coast-while the weather was less than awesome Friday morning, it was amazing the rest of the weekend.  We even saw a whole bunch of Seals and their pups swimming in the water as well as sunning on the sand-so cool.

Ruler Ben

Seals!

making some of the most sinful Ice Cream ever-Ben&Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch!

the clan-can you tell that Ben is two from this picture?

It's almost Spring!

You wouldn't have guessed it was almost spring in Portland this morning.  While snow is rare in P-town, it's basically unheard of in March.  (and I know that people who live in real snow country wouldn't even call this snow but you would be surprised by how many schools were either closed, delayed or had their buses on snow routes this morning) We woke up to snow this morning and while it now has melted, it was quite the surprise. 

there are a few signs of spring at our house...

Steve even tackled a quick project on Sunday when it wasn't raining.  He used some of the leftover stone from our front walkway project to "extend" the driveway.  We were finding that we needed to step into the dirt about half the time we took Ben out of his car seat and it was tracking lots of mud into the house.  We were also stepping on plants each time we did so. 

this pillow is a little plain if you ask me

And I tackled a little spring spruce up project myself-some lighter, more spring-ish pillows for our living room.  I was getting tired of the dark red pillows that we had.  This fabric took a lot of searching to find being that grey and yellow are the "in" colors (I LOVE them together but they just don't go with our house decor) but I ended up finding it at The Whole Nine Yards on E Burnside.  The best thing about the fabric is that it is totally washable!  Yea for that. 

Fall is in the air

Had to have a little fun this past weekend as I love fall!  And it's October so must mean it's time to to do a few fall craft projects.

First I planted a few fall mums as our summer flowers were dying. At just a $1 a plant from Home Depot, they add a nice fall spruce-up to our front porch

In addition, I also decided that I wanted to do a free little fall craft.  I had two hurricanes left from our wedding 5 years ago (Happy Anniversary Honey..it's later this week) and a bunch of little fall craft pumpkins and fake insects.  I simply layered them in the hurricane and viola-all fallish (that's a word, right?)!  and free!  I need to get a better dripless candle for one of them before I light it but otherwise, good to go!  One for the dining room table and one for the front porch.

Also, we sneaked in one last camping trip 2 weekends ago with our good friends in Seattle.  It was Benj's 30th birthday.  We camped just two hours east of Seattle (more precisely 30 miles west of Leavenworth, for those who are familiar with Washington).  It was a blast and inspired us to find a little off-the-beaten path camping site near Portland.  Happy to report that the weather was clear, crisp and gorgeous until Saturday night.

Megan (who I've known for 20+ years), Benj (the birthday boy) & baby Evan

Megan, Melissa (Megan's sister) & me with all our little munchkins

Ben's "smile face" which I can't get enough of

dirty man

Steve and Porter cooking some dutch oven breakfast

a dutch oven birthday cake-pineapple upside down

look mom!