crickets

Dear little blog,

I promise to blow the dust off you this week and get a post done.

I cannot promise I'll get caught up on the one-new-recipe-a-week posts, but I will try.

In the meantime, have a great week and enjoy the weather.

Love,
Blog mommy

Life at the Zoo

My mom came to visit for a few days.

We decided to spend a morning at the zoo.

Thought you might like to come along!

It was a cool, gorgeous morning...with virtually no one at the zoo. That means we didn't have to wait for a turn to take pics climbing on any of the statues.

Mom and the girls.


The girls and me.


The giraffes were hanging out very close to the fence.

I think we could have fed them from where we were standing if we really wanted to!

The lion was c-r-a-n-k-y. He came down from his Lion King boulder and paced back and forth and was roaring like a madman.

I like flowers.

Love the hairdo on this bird. I so could not pull off that look.

The gorillas were one of the highlights of the day. We've got a great gorilla exhibit here, and they always seem to come hang out by the windows, which is fun. I think this was Virgil. He and Hannah spent a lot of time checking each other out.

Contemplating something serious.

Love this picture.

The tigers were pacing around a lot too!

The other highlight of the morning-- the baby chimp!! She was a year old! There was a sign up that had the birthdate listed and below it, it said Sex with the symbol for female next to it. Brooke thought it was the birthdate and the name, so she goes "Ohhhh...look at Sex. She's so cute". It was hysterical. Don't tell her I told you that story!

The baby chimp (whom we later decided to name Hannah) was climbing all over the fence. Then she began her descent....

And plopped down right on top of a sleeping adult chimp. We thought, "uh oh, sex, you are in trouble now!"

Then we decided it must be her mommy, because they cuddled right up to each other for a nap. It was super sweet.

So far behind!

Not enough hours in the day.

Not enough attention span in my head!

I'm a little behind on blogging, PTOing, cleaning, whatever-ing.

I know I owe you several recipes. I'll get caught up again sometime, I promise! In the meantime, we went to see Toy Story on Ice this weekend. Our third Disney on Ice show, it was, as always, fun and cold :) We were in the 4th row.

Hannah and I before the show:

Brooke and Matt before the show:

hannah wearing the foam alien hat that was attached to the $10 bag of cotton candy.

Our buddies Mickey and Minnie were there

And obviously all the Toy Story gang. It was a compilation of all three stories.

Loved the barbies. Barbie and Ken kinda stole the show! But my pic of them is blurry.

And the trolls were funny!

The aliens were a hoot too. "ooh. The Claaawwwwww"

We love taking our kids to things like this. Not only does it give us a Disney fix in between trips, but it's just fun to watch them taking this kind of stuff in!

My weekend via Instagram

Some of the cooler blog chics post their life via instagram every Friday. I'm not cool, nor am I that organized. I do, however, love the Instagram app on my iphone. Here's a glimpse of a bit of my weekend via Instagram


Dirty Dancing on Netflix streaming. Irritated with Netflix, always in love with "Dirty Dancing". And I think it's a total travesty that they are thinking about remaking it. I'm not one who usually cares about remakes, etc...but that one is a C-L-A-S-S-I-C and I think remaking it is an insult to our belove Patrick Swayze. Like they will ever be able to TOUCH the perfection that is the original version. Yeesh.


Brooke loves art. I love Brooke. I love Brooke's art. Especially when it has narration to it. If you can't read the pic, it says "A small island at the cribian sea with fish and a shell." Girl after my own heart.


Baked some of these. Reverse peanut butter cups. They are yummy.


HALL-LE-LU-JIAH. Hallelujiah. Halle Lay Lou Yah. Praise be to God. I swear, it's like a double-shot of Zoloft in the form of a weather forecast.

Many moons ago, I watched this show on TLC called "A Dating Story". Like "baby story" and "love story" but instead, "Dating Story." A couple went on a date. The restaurant had these, for S'moores desserts. Not such a rare find these days, but harder to find back then! My inlaws' neighbor at the time owned a Chinese restaurant, and he had one of these pu-pu platter things in his back room that he gave us. We love breaking out the pupu platter for Smoore's night.

Went to what's left of Beech lake for a picnic today. Enjoyed the new playground, and went exploring around the old shooting range. Even picked up some non-broken clay pigeons. We decided it was like hunting for seashells in Kansas.

Had Matt's folks and our good friends the Houser's over for dinner. We've known them and done things with them for a long time. Brooke has loved Greg for-ev-er, and apparently Hannah loves him too. Here she is sneaking a smooch on him. He's such a good sport about it!

I've got a few recipes to post for you too, coming up soon, I promise! Have a great (short!) week!

What are you going to do with vintage doorknobs anyway?

I've had this project idea floating around in the back of my head for a few months. I think I might have seen something like it at a friend or acquaintance's house and thought 'I can make that!' I don't remember where I saw it, but I shuffled it back in the back of my head.

The project involved this space:

And vintage doorknobs. First of all you should know that I HATE going to garage sales. Hate hate hate. Sometimes, like every 5 years or so, you might see me hit one of those neighborhood-wide garage sales because you can check out a lot of stuff at once. But you will never see me randomly driving around looking for a garage sale. I hate it. The closest I come to buying stuff from a garage sale is ebay or craigslist.

So for this project, I put on facebook "I need a few vintage doorknobs. Anyone have any laying around?"

My first comment was from my Aunt Debbie. She says "what are you going to do with vintage doorknobs anyways?" to which I replied 'wait and see!'. I had several other replies such as craigslist, the habitat for humanity Re-store, and --thank you E.R.P- Hobby Lobby.

Fake vintage works for me. Look what I found at Hobby Lobby:

Exactly what I was looking for. The set of two brown knobs were on clearance for $9 and the clear glass ones were on sale for $14 for the set. I brought my finds home and explained to Matt what I wanted to do. He was onboard with his part of the project so I proceeded with mine.

I bought a pine board at Hobby Lobby too. Their wood stuff was on sale 40% off. Whoohoo!

If you paint it with a sponge brush and some acrylic paint, you can make it look like an aged oak board instead of a pine board.

I should have done the same instagram finish on these two shots so you could see better, but here is the board painted with a coat of brown-ish (cappucino?) colored acrylic paint.

After that dried, I used a wash cloth to rub some black acrylic paint over most of it, especially in the grooves, etc. Then I quickly rinsed the wash cloth out and wiped off most of the black paint...leaving this kind of finish behind. I loved how it looked.

Time to enlist Matt. The girls and I enjoyed a gorgeous morning outside while he went off to Lowe's to get the hardware we would need. Three bolts to countersink thru the back to screw the knobs onto on the front side, and two long screws to go thru from the front (in the middle).

Do you know what it is yet?

A place to hang backpacks/bags behind the front door!

I love it when a project comes together like I planned!