Tasty Tuesday-Guest post

It's Tasty Tuesday here and I have two "firsts" for you today. I have ventured into the world of vlogging (video blogging) and today I have the first ever vlog for this blog. :o) Actually, I didn't make this cute little video, so there you have the other "first" for today--a guest blogger, or I guess I should say vlogger.

So, without further ado here's our first ever vlog.

I was quite surprised after going back to the kitchen to get my hot chocolate to find Michelle with the camera making this little video. Too funny!

I saw some ghost marshmallows made on another blog and although I didn't want to do ghosts, I thought this would be a cute way to make someone smile. How can you not smile when your marshmallows are smiling at you. I simply used food writers to draw the faces and plopped them into her mug. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

Well, I'd like to thank my guest vlogger for today. Great job, Michelle. It's time for us to do spelling, and it's pretty much impossible for me to help her with that and type at the same time so, I better close this here.


Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Misc. Monday

Although I haven't taken much time to blog the last few weeks, I have kept my camera busy. The leaves were so beautiful and the weather was so warm that we skipped out of school a little early a couple of times and got outside. I'm glad we did 'cause it's getting cold out now and a lot of our autumn color is gone. Here's just a few miscellaneous shots taken over the last couple of weeks.

We had pretty yellow leaves outside my bedroom window.

 And red/orange leaves outside the kitchen windows.

Michelle loves her zip line and I love that she's getting some exercise while having fun.

One of the fun things about homeschooling--getting hot chocolate and cookies while working on spelling--or math, or science, or whenever we feel the need. :o)

 Mom gets home made white chocolate. Yum! And yes, those cookies are pretty crumbly. Angel brought them home from work the night before and they didn't transport well in the plastic bag. They were still yummy though.

 Looking out the kitchen window it looked like someone threw a huge confetti party in the yard. Such pretty colors against the bright green of the grass. I love fall. 

Michelle is multi-tasking here. She's both the model and photographer at the same time. :o)

And here's one of her photos. Love the starburst!

I also took Senior Pictures with Angel this week. See.

Sorry, couldn't resist.  Actually, this was from Senior Day at school for Home Coming Week. I did take some real Senior Pictures as well, but I will post some of them later this week.

There you have it, a couple of snapshots of life here in WI. I hope you're getting a chance to get out and enjoy this time of year. I'm going to close this here and do some scrapbooking.

Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Through the House Thursday-Laundry Room Part 2

Last week I promised some close-ups of my folding table. I LOVE it. It's the perfect size for the girls piles of folded laundry and it hides all those necessary, but ugly, pipes under the window.

Here's the table by itself. There are so many pipes back there I couldn't even get in there to paint the wall all the way. That alone would have driven me crazy to see every day.

Because we have to  access the softener (and probably the well pump sometime), Mike made the table so it could lift up and out of the way. (He's so smart! :o)

The hook hanging here is used to hold the table in the up position.

The adhesive on my velcro didn't want to stick to the paint so I used some tacky glue and a staple gun to make sure it wasn't going anywhere. I simply hot glued the other side of the velcro to the skirt I made out of a drop cloth. Yup, that's right, a cloth drop cloth. It was cheaper than any of the fabric I could find around here and seemed heavy duty enough to do the job.

So, there it is. I wish I had a better "before" picture to show you the difference, but I am totally loving this. Now if I could just figure out a good storage solution for all the coats and shoes on the other two walls of this room. :o)

It is late here so I will close for now. Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Through the House Thursday-Laundry Room Part 1

 Yes, I realize this is a Through the House Thursday on a Friday, but I didn't have "after" photos of the laundry room so I needed to wait till today to get better lighting for them. Anyway, here is a couple of "before" shots taken when we first moved into the house.

 

This was taken when we were first looking at the place. The water softener by the window wasn't winterized properly and had a huge crack in it. That turned out to be a blessing because we were able to get a much smaller unit that doesn't block the window. 

  

I took this one just before we started to paint. You can see how yucky the walls were.

 

Here's the cabinets above the washer and dryer. They are nice cabinets, but I wanted to paint all the trim work and cabinets in here to help cut down on the visual clutter.

Now here's a couple of "after" shots. I had several different cans of leftover paint from various rooms in the house and decided to mix them to get enough of one color to paint the walls. I really like the shade of blue that we got.

 I painted the ceiling and all the trim a cream color and used the blue on all the walls. I found some wall paper that had the exact blue in it and covered some boxes for storage on the open shelves.

I still don't like the area above the washer and sink, but it's a work in progress.

 I hot glued clothes pins to the front of the boxes to hold labels. This way if I need to rearrange what's in the boxes, it will be easy to redo the labels as well.

Do you see the table below the window? I use it for folding clothes, but more importantly, it hides the water pump, softener and various pipes. My handy-dandy hubby built that for me. (insert really big grin here!) Next week I'll show you more details and how I made the skirt for it.

Well, I've gotta go get dinner going. Till next time...God's love and blessings!!

Wednesday's Walk-A Visitor

These are some pictures I took of a visitor to our yard a couple of weeks ago. Coco kept up this annoying bark, and when I stepped out to get him to come in and be quiet, I noticed what I thought was a sweater or something Michelle left in the yard. She has a habit of leaving the house dressed warm and coming in stripped down. I quickly realized it was not a piece of clothing, but this little guy.

 I guess he's not really so little, is he? Coco didn't know what to think of this guy (girl?) He's so used to the animals running away from him when he comes barking them, but this thing didn't move. We had to keep Coco in the house for a bit so the poor little guy could go on his merry way in peace.

Michelle enjoyed watching him. She would come in the house every few minutes and give me updates as to his movements. He eventually disappeared down the creek bank. We're not sure where he was heading, but it would be pretty cool if "he" turned out to be a "she" and she laid her eggs along our creek bank somewhere close by. Looks like we may have to do some research on what time of year they lay eggs and when they hatch.

I think Michelle's quiet reading time is almost over, so I better close this here. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to post some pictures of laundry room renovation.

Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Tasty Tuesday-Yogurt Parfait

Last week I showed a picture of what has become a favorite snack around here-a home-made yogurt parfait.

Sorry about the poor quality picture, I was in a hurry to eat this thing!

And by home-made, I mean home-made--well, about as home-made as you can get without owning your own cow and oat fields. We made the yogurt, granola and berry sauce, then just assembled them parfait style. These are so yummy!

Here are the links to the websites where I found the recipes in case you'd like to give them a try. I found the yogurt recipe at A Year of Slow Cooking website. There are some yummy recipes there and this one intrigued me so we had to give it a try. I have a granola recipe that I use quite a bit, but I wanted to try something different this time. I found this one from Alton Brown and decided to give it a try. We like that it stays crunchy for quite a while. My previous recipe would get chewy after a day or so. The berry sauce came from the Arctic Garden Studio. I used a mixture of blackberries, raspberries, and black caps in mine since that's what grows on our property. I think I may have to try her Caramel Apple Cake one of these days.

Well, as much as I would like to keep this blog updated and share more of the fun stuff we're doing, it seems as soon as I sit down here, my little 8 year old insists on sharing all the secrets of her day with me so I shall close here and give her my full attention, instead of the 10% she's getting right now.

So, till next time...God's love and blessings!

Misc. Monday-leftover summer

For those of you in the south, summer may still be hanging on, but for those of us here in WI, it is quickly fading away. The temperatures average in the 60's during the day and we've had to have the heater on a couple of times. One evening I even turned the electric blanket on. There's nothing like warm sheets on a cold evening. :o)

I love fall. I love cooler weather, wearing sweaters, warm soups, snuggling, hot chocolate, watching the leaves fall (which I get to do from every window in our house :o). And while my veggie garden gave up a couple of weeks ago, it seems like my flower beds don't want to let summer go. I transplanted a couple dozen daisy plants from our pasture into my flower bed this year. While most of these, and all the ones in the pasture have long since given up their flowers (I think sometime back in July), I have one plant that keeps on blooming. I checked today and not only are there several flowers still blooming, there are a couple more buds that haven't even opened yet.

 A friend gave me a couple different types of flowers last year. I don't remember the names of them, and wasn't sure what they would look like till they bloomed this year. These are some of them. They were the last flowers in my garden to bloom. I think next spring I will transplant a couple of these to other parts of the garden so they are spread around. Right now it looks kind of funny with this huge patch of purple in one corner and everything else is just green.

Anyway, I say all this to show you the pretty arrangement I decided to make this weekend with these two pretty flowers. I had picked the gladiolas a couple of days ago and these are the last of them (although I found another plant out in the garden that hasn't bloomed yet). Even though it's fall outside, this arrangement reminds me of summer-well, spring, actually.

And here's another bit of summer that I plan on enjoying all winter long.

I picked close to 10 gallons of berries this year! I froze them right away, and right now I'm in the process of processing them. :o) Yesterday I made a batch of jam, and today I started a batch of syrup, but I think I will finish it off tomorrow. Right now, I'm sitting down enjoying this:

Home made yogurt, granola, and raspberry sauce...YUM!!! I know what's for breakfast tomorrow. :o)

Well, I will close this for now, enjoy my dessert, and get some snuggle time in with the little one before she heads off to bed. Till next time...

God's love and blessings!