Just Because...

Bath Time!!

Brody after getting a hold of a chocolate chip cookie at our ward picnic.

Our family on a hay ride at the most recent primary activity

Brody doing his "job" - he loves this, he has even started trying to put away the silverware before it is clean!

Ella just being cute!

New Mow Strip

Front of house before mow strip

Front of house after mow strip.

We had Kwik Kerb install the mowstrip around our tree and flowerbeds. We were having all the grass start to grow into the flower beds and it was a pain in the neck to keep having to pull it out. I was surprised how different the yard looks with the mow strip. I guess it gives it more of a finished look. Anyone looking for options I would have Kwik Kerb do it again. You can get all sorts of designs and colors even, and it was surprisingly affordable. They had it done in just a couple of hours.

How Ella got her name

When I was pregnant with Ella and we were trying to think of names for her we went through the usual baby books and we had a hard time even coming up with any that either of us liked enough without trying to come up with one we agreed on. A friend of ours had a baby and had named her Ella and I heard the name and liked it so it was on our short list (that only ever had 2 names on it). I had wanted to give her my mom's middle name as something special. I mentioned that to my mom and she gave me a look and said, I don't think so. I didn't think about it for awhile and then one day my mom sent me an email saying that she didn't want the baby to have her middle name, but had a dream and remembered a grandma that she loved as a little girl but she couldn't remember her name. She woke up early one morning and went through the geneaology and found her...her name was Rosella. So, when I saw that I immediately thought I don't like the name Rosella, but I do like Ella Rose. I don't remember if my mom knew we were considering the name Ella or not, but everything seemed to fit together perfect and when the baby was born we knew almost immediately that it was her name.

The picture is of the letters E-L-L-A that I made for her wall. I need to re-hang the A though, it looks a little bit off in the picture. I think her room is almost finished, we still need to hang everything else on the wall. We were waiting for the letters to be done to figure out how to arrange everything.

Thats My Girl!

There is no doubt Ella has my DNA! She woke up the other morning with welts all over her arms and legs that got worse throughout the day. It was so sad! What could it have been that caused such a horrible rash to appear you ask...none other than baby lotion. I slathered her up after her last bath thinking I'd enjoy that baby fresh smell. Never again I guess. She's had that type of lotion on her before, but all of a sudden she is reacting to it. The doctor thought the welts got worse through the day as she got hotter and when she sweat her skin absorbed more of it. After a good bath and a dose of benadryl she woke up to just red dots where the welts had been and they are now subsiding completely.

Photo Shoots

We took the kids in to have a few pictures taken (or at least try!) I was trying to get a picture of the two of them together and also Ella's six month photos. It didn't go so well the first go round, so we tried again a few days later. The second experience was even worse - darn those two year old attitudes! These are a couple of the pictures from the first try...The second time the pictures of the two of them were not great, we ended up getting some of them - but neither of them are looking at the camera. It is a nice shot of their heads though. Ella did take great pictures the second time. I can't believe she is already 6 months old! It makes me so sad to see them both growing so fast! She has started to "move" around the house mostly going backwards . She is a lot more interested in moving by herself then Brody was at the same age. I love seeing the two of them play together, it is priceless!

Pretty True

You Are Pocahantas!

Free-spirited and wise. You have a strong passionate spirit that touches and changes all who know you. The wisdom and common sense that you have is really what guides you through life. Even so, you also have a very playful side that loves adventure and excitement.

Which Disney Princess Are You?

Lawn Care 101

We purposely picked a lot to build our house on so that we'd have a big yard - and we got what we wanted. Along with that, we have learned how much time and energy goes into a big yard. We don't have much to "tend" yet, it really is just keeping the grass healthy and green and pulling the weeds from the flower beds in the front yard. And, the grass we have here is Bermuda grass. Look it up in any book and it is classified as a big weed, so it shouldn't be too hard to keep alive, right? Well...hours and hours of work and hundreds of dollars (literally) spent in chemicals and fertilizer here is a picture of the result:
Not so good right? A few weeks ago Brandon started coming home and noticing how are yard just kept dying, and it has continued to get worse and worse. It is even more weird because there are spots that are green and lush too. We've adjusted the watering, which we already knew we were watering enough, we took pictures and took them to a professional landscape company to help us "diagnose" the problem but it has all been to no avail. When the last dose of fertilizer didn't work we knew there was something else going on. The last possibility we've determined is lawn fungus. Sounds gross huh?

The solution we've come up with is cornmeal. Last night after the kids were in bed we took 30 pounds of cornmeal out and threw it all over part of the yard. We are experimenting. Supposedly the cornmeal nuetralizes the fungus in the grass and fertilizes at the same time. It is an organic product used on lawns. I've done more reading on organic lawn care, and if this works we will be switching to an all organic lawn maintenace program. We are using the picture above as our "before" and we'll update in a couple of weeks on how it is progressing.

Another plus for the organic stuff - it is much cheaper and in theory it should cut down on bugs inside our house. The chemicals we put on the lawn not only rid the lawn of weeds, but they also kill all the insects. Things like spiders have no choice but to look for their food somewhere else, like inside my house. No thanks! Hopefully we'll notice a change in the bugs too. The next step for us if the cornmeal works is to load the lawn full of sugar. Apparently that keeps the weeds from germinating and kills weeds that are already exisiting. And - because the grass here gets brown during the colder months we can put rice seed all over the lawn and it will grow green during the winter.

We are pretty excited if this works! Can't you just picture a FHE years down the road of our family in the backyard in a cornmeal fight? How fun would that be? And the mess would be good for the yard!