Sunday, April 27, 2008

Spring Cleaning

Oh, how fast the weekends go....

Yesterday we took the kids to family farm day at Lollipop Farm. It was lots of fun to see the kids with the animals. As we approached the goats and sheep, I had dreams of buying a house in the country and starting a farm. They were quickly dashed as I heard comments from Alicia and the kids including, "eew goats poop," "the goats scare me," and finally Jonathan, between sneezes, "mom, my eyes are itchy." Oh, well, at least I got pictures of the kids under a giant bull, albeit a fake one.




Today was spent cleaning, pruning, and preparing the garden beds for the season. Many hours later they looked a little something like this....
(notice the salvaged frames, Alicia found a few years back)




and this.....




Finally, Alicia put together a little, temporary compost pit.... we want to get something that we can tumble everyday, that will have to wait.







Something to Think About

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Earth Weak?

Something has been troubling me lately. I don't watch much T.V., but I've noticed, particularly this week, amidst Earth Day, something troubling. Going green requires lots of green. In other words, in order to be Earth friendly you have to go out and buy this or that in order to accomplish it???? Is this the new wave of subliminal advertising? It is just too much. WAL*MART, honestly? Okay, I'm grateful for every little step, but come on, talk about capitalizing where ever you can. Last night I even heard Jay Leno talk about driving a hydrogen car for the week. Nice, yes. But, does it make up for the 50 other gas guzzlers that he owns?

We are a family tries do everything that we can to reduce our impact. My girlfriend has taken to calling me granola crunch girl... largely because I want to make these instead of continually throwing away over packaged chemical laden sanitary products!



With that said, we are far from perfect, so we have committed to making a few more changes. This summer we've decided to have one electricity free day a week. From now, until it gets cold again, Wednesdays will be electricity free with only the fridge as the exception. This means circuit breakers off so no cheating. And, second, no more plastic bags or toys. I've also been evaluating my water usage. I've wanted to cut down on showering everyday to every other day, but my body doesn't cooperate (TMI if I explain any farther). So, I've decided to cut my daily 10 minute shower down to 5 minutes, and no showers if I'm not going anywhere important that day.

I'll keep you updated, until then check out, http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/human-footprint/ to learn more about how much waste each of us actually makes in a lifetime. You can even calculate how much you actually use by putting your own numbers in.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Easter



Easter was so much fun with the kids.  They loved the egg hunt.  The night before we dyed eggs.  I was nervous at first.  Picture a cupful of liquid die everywhere (I did) but once I calmed down it was so much fun that I now have visions of tie dye t-shirts for the summer.... 

I'm hoping to get a professional picture of all of the kids in their outfits, they looked so cute. After about 50 tries we were able to get a few cute pictures of everyone including my nephew Jeffery. Aren't they cute in their argyle?

Catch-up





Okay, so I haven't blogged in awhile..... so it was all of March. To say I was busy would be an understatement, in one week we had St. Patrick's day, Jonathan's birthday, and of all things, Easter. On top of that Luis created a little (big!!!) home remodeling project for us, more about that later...







Anyway, Jonathan turned six, amazing, oh, how time flies, just yesterday he came to our house and was a non-verbal, scared 2 and a 1/2 year old. The fun part, for us grown-ups was to get him a gift that would keep on giving....i.e. photos to tease about for years to come....



That's right, that is a fake brain you see atop my children's heads.....lol.