Another year older.

Time is just ticking away.  The years are flying by and I had another birthday this week.  With COVID-19 still making us be in "stay at home" orders, we had to get creative with how we were going to do my birthday meal.  I was feeling Mexican and so I called up El Serrano and asked if we could order for take out!?!  Yes we could!!!!

Jeremiah and Hadassah drove the Yukon with the little ones and Mike and I took his truck to the restaurant.  We loaded up a table in the back of the truck with some folding chairs and had plans on tail gating.

When we arrived, we picked up our take out order and enjoyed the food in the parking lot.  Mike and I sat in the back of the Yukon laughing and enjoying the chips and guacamole while the children ran through the parking lot and having a fun time.  The food was great and we ended up ordering fried ice cream for dessert!  The server that took our phone order brought some 'to go waters' out to us in the parking lot and commented at how it's been almost three months since he served a table!!!  People are getting so ready to work normally and serve tables!  We can't wait for this too!!!!  Eating in a restaurant parking lot is not the greatest thing ever but it sure filled my love tank to be with my family and have them celebrate with me!!!!  I loved it!!!!

Here's my dish that got devoured between Ashlyn, Austin and I!

Love these two!!!!

Time for dessert!!!!

We came back home and all snuggled together and watched "Cool Running's".  This is an old classic that we used to watch when Mike and I were teenagers.  I laughed to tears at the funny scenes and it was just the best way to end the fun evening!!!!  Laughter is so good during these quarantine days!

The kids got me some gifts that I absolutely love!!!!  Look at these cute shoes!!!!

Mike is gifting me a new laptop computer for Mother's Day and birthday combined.  Because stores are not open for business yet, because of the coronavirus, he has intensions of ordering online.  I'm excited about this gift and can't wait to use it!!!!!  Thanks Babe!  What a gift!!!!!!

Turning another year older doesn't make me feel older even though I am slowly, thankfully slowly, seeing some signs of my age.  I still feel young at heart and feel like I can conquer a lot throughout my days.  It's moments of when I watch Hadassah with Jeremiah that makes me feel older.  It's when I think about our oldest being a senior and graduating in two weeks that make me age a bit more.  It's the times when I used to do most the mulching myself but now would dread to think of doing that.  My body would not appreciate that at all!!!!  My skin is not as tight and I see some wrinkles.  But we all know that we never grow younger and so to embrace my age and take it as it comes is good enough for me.  Not sure how else to handle it!  I am in my thirties for one more year and I hope it will be grand!!!!!

I'm blessed to be in excellent health!  I am so blessed!!!!

Happy Mother's Day!

Mother's Day is always a special day for me!!!  I'm blessed to birth and mother four wonderful children.  I have a husband that says to our children now and then, "Kids, you are not going to talk to your mom that way.  You talk nicely and kindly.  She is your mom!"  I like that he reminds them of this and teaches them how to show respect!

Each year we celebrate Mother's Day differently.  Some years it was staying at home with Mike caring for the younger children and I just had the "day off".  Other years, we went to the beach for Hadassah's volleyball tournament or to the Club for a brunch.  Whatever it was, it was special!  This year was very fun too!!!!  I got a text from a family from church and invited us to join them for a Mother's Day together!  We are still having church at home and watching the sermons online.  We appreciate this so much but are really ready to gather with our church family at church again!  Maybe that will happen soon!?!  Anyway, it ended up being three families going to Blue Marsh!!!!

The men organized the food for lunch and supper!  All I had to do was cut up some veggies and ride along!  We met Sunday forenoon but got a text from Darlene that Dave is not well and having major stomach pains.  We prayed for him and hoped they could still join us!  It ended up just being our family and Merv & Juanita and their family because Dave went to the hospital with appendicitis.  Surgery happened the next morning.

We still had a great time and got to have some of the Flaud children with us.  We arrived at the park and had lunch.  The sun was shining and we went hiking!  It was fun to hike to a dam and watch the children skip rocks over the water.  Hadassah and Jeremiah hiked with us!  The older kids hiked ahead of us parents and it was just good to be outside enjoying nature and fresh air and sunny skies!  Merv filled up his "trash can" with supper ingredients and had it cooking over hot coals while we hiked!  Supper was ready for us soon after we got back from hiking and he served us shrimp, potatoes, green beans and cabbage and sausage right out of the can!!!!!  It was tasty and we totally enjoyed the day together at Blue Marsh!!!!

We got back home and we were all tired.  My family blessed me today and I love them so much!!!!  Mothering is the best gift God gave to me!!!

Happy Mother's Day to my mom and all the other moms in the world!!!

It's MAY!!!!

I LOVE THE MONTH OF MAY!!!  It's one of my favorite months!!! 

May is when the weather gets warmer but it's not the hot summer days just yet.  The grass is lush green.  I go greenhouse shopping and buy pretty flowers and plant them all around the house!  We mulch and the landscape looks it's best!!!  Seeds get planted in the garden and frost is no longer a threat to my tender plants!  Strawberries start to bloom and we will be picking these juicy red fruits in a few weeks!  I snipped the first spinach and kale leaves the other day and it made a very delicious salad!  I just love that the kids can play more and more outdoors!

The seeds that we already got planted in the garden are looking good!!!!  Here you see radishes, lettuce, kale and spinach.

The herbs are growing!

The cherry blossoms are so beautiful in the front yard!  And here's the salad I made the other night with our fresh greens from the garden!  I just love salads like these!!!!  I also loved the kale!!!!

I did go with my mom for some flowers the other day!  It was so fun to get out even if we had to wear our face masks!  Hadassah rode along too and that was fun taking her along to greenhouses!

Look at the pretty things I bought!

And here are the pots I put together.  Many of these plants are new for me but I felt up to trying some new things!

I was so happy the other day to see my first yellow finches come to the feeders!

And here is the 15 yards of mulch that got delivered to our house!  It smells good and Matthew is going to scoop it all up himself for some extra cash his dad promised to him if he does this job!  He did the whole front of the house the other day and I had to insist that I was going to help him spread it out.  He doesn't have to pay me.  :)

And then I went to another greenhouse the very next day!  We are slowly getting out more and more and it feels good!  The kids went with me this time because Ashlyn loves greenhouses too!  They both muttered under their breathe how warm their masks felt but the greenhouse rules are to wear them.

 They both picked out a cactus to bring along home!

We went from Fisher's Greenhouse to Good Harvest to look for elephant ear plants.  I want to plant these this year for different but I want a certain kind.  The search remains ...

Here is one elephant ear that Fisher's had but just one.  I want two for my front porch pots.  This just gives me another excuse to visit yet another greenhouse soon!

I'm sticking to whites, reds and some purples this year!  I'm really loving all the greens too!!!!

Normally, May also consists lots of school events!!!  We get excited to finish up school with field trips and track and field days!  We get excited to finish up the days in the classrooms and start thinking about summer vacation!  But these days are not normal for us with COVID-19 still in the air.  We are ready to move on and have the "stay at home" lift off of our state!  We are ready to stop social distancing and start going to friends homes and see more people.  But we wait.  There is a hope at the end of this but it's still unknown with how and when that will all take place.  And we continue to do school at home.  Schooling as been going well but we will be ready to take a break!  I'm sad to not have the fun events happening at school because I love to watch the kids do their best on track days!  I miss our school family, our teachers and the kids friends!  I'm sad to not know how we will celebrate Hadassah's graduation!  I know we will celebrate it but just not sure how school will do it!?!  This is a huge accomplishment for her!!!!  I want to celebrate it with her!!!  

My calendar is usually filled to the brim with all the activities happening but not this year.  Usually, we are in full swing with baseball practices, baseball games, nights spent at the parks watching Matthew and Mike play!  These guys like to start visiting the golf courses too by now!  Hadassah normally is wrapping up her volleyball season with PA Elite but again, not this year.  It's all been on hold the past two months.  So much is not the same but I'm so grateful that May is here and the season's don't change with any world events!

I miss yard sales.  I do hope this starts up this spring yet!!!

This May is going to be different but I hope it will still be sweet with fresh strawberries soon!  I hope we still get to celebrate Memorial Day Weekend like we always do!  I have high hopes that the pools will be up and running by the end of this month!  We will finish up school work here at home in a few weeks and that exciting!  These past few months have been filled with some disappoints and things needed to be canceled or changed but we are making it!!!!  We continue to do church at home and watch on YouTube the sermon of the week!  Our evenings consist of ping pong and puzzle time!  I love all the evenings together at home!!!!!

May is such a pretty month!!!!  Let's make it the best one ever!!!!

skunks stink ...

Did you know that skunks stink?  We found out real quick this past weekend that its one of the worst smells you could smell much less ever have it enter your home!!!!  Here's the story.

We were having a fun family movie night in the basement on Friday night.  The Lorax was a fun watch again and the little ones loved it!  We have been humming "Let it Grow" ever since the movie!  We came upstairs to get ready for bed and Matthew let Ginger, our house dog, out to pee.  It's what we do every night before bedtime.  When he opened the door to let her back in, Matthew hollered!  "Oh my word!!!!!  There goes a skunk!!!!"  A skunk went running across our back porch!  In less than a second, we could smell the skunk did spray!  I said, "Did the skunk spray outside or get Ginger?"  By now, Ginger is inside and when I took one look at her I grabbed a towel and then grabbed her!!!!  She had green slime on her face and under her mouth.  Her left eye had a streak of blood going down it.  Did the skunk attack her?  As quickly as I could think and move, I put Ginger in the laundry sink and searched for some gloves!  I grabbed a sock that was lying on the dryer to cover my mouth and nose because the smell was almost more than I could handle.  By now, the kids were upstairs and Mike told them to grab clean pjs and head to the Yukon!  The smell was so bad that we could hardly breathe!  It was a good idea to take them out to Lena's house ASAP!!!!  Matthew helped them gather their things and go to the Yukon.  Hadassah started opening up all the house windows!  Mike grabbed two quarts of tomato juice from my cellar downstairs and I poured that over Ginger.  It didn't seem to help a bit.  He also closed all the bedroom doors and opened up those windows.  The smell was so terrible and SO STRONG!!!!

I grabbed my COVID-19 mask and that helped a teeny bit!  I had to get this smell off of Ginger as soon as I could!  I was shouting out orders to my family and everyone helped where they could!  I told Hadassah to search Pinterest to see what to use on Ginger.  As I washed Ginger in the laundry sink, I kept dumping Dawn soap on her!  Her eye stopped bleeding and the acid stopped burning her eye.  Hadassah found a recipe we tried!  1/2 cup baking soda, a squirt of Dawn soap, and a full bottle of hydrogen peroxide!!!!  I mixed it in a bucket and took Ginger to the garage sink.  If I would have thought of that first, that would have helped with the smell that now lingers in the laundry room!  I poured the mixture over Ginger and held her still in the garage sink for 5 minutes.  I washed her again and again with more Dawn soap as she was trying to even figure out what happened to her!  She was shaking so much but did really good through the whole ordeal!  When I finally stopped washing her, I took another towel and dried her.  Then we put her in her cage in the garage and went to focus on the house smell!!!!

How in the world do you get skunk spray out of your house after your house dog ran around the dining room table, back to the hallway bathroom and that's when I grabbed her to stop her from spreading the smell!  Meanwhile, Mike took the little ones and Matthew out to Lena's.  It was almost 11:00 PM.  They were tired and smelled from skunk.  When he came back home, Hadassah and I were still trying to think of a way to help rid of the smell!  All the windows were open!  Mike started a campfire on the back porch and lit a cedar wood long stick of wood and went room to room in the house.  He thought this would help chase out the smell!  I thought it was a good idea but I didn't want a fire on top of all this yet!  He told Hadassah to burn something on the stove!  Eggs or hot dogs ... anything he said!!!!  :))))  It's so funny to now look back and see how we each respond to bad things like this quickly!  I grabbed Ginger and Mike thought of a fire!!!!

Hadassah soon went to Jess's house and the minute she walked into Gerald's, they smelled her!  So bad!  Verna took all her clothes and immediately washed them in baking soda and vinegar!  I thought of baking soda too and took what I had from my kitchen cabinet and sprinkled it on the basement steps.  I thought Ginger went down the stairs.  I left the baking soda on the carpet until the next morning.


Mike and I were tired.  We stank so bad!!!!  We went out back and decided to laugh!  What is God trying to teach us???  This is such a horrible smell to deal with at 11:30 PM!!!  I decided to change my clothes and go to Lena's to sleep too.  I knew that when Austin wakes in the morning, he would cry for me!  Lena got up one more time to let me in her house and as I laid on their basement couch, I prayed for God to put me to sleep as I breathed in their wood stove smelling pillow and my skunk smelling hair.

Mike is taking out his cedar wood!

 Austin woke up crying for me, just like I predicted!  We snuggled on the Lena's basement couch together and while I tried to figure out how to face the day!

Mike decided to sleep at home with the windows all open and the diffusers going non stop!  He doesn't sleep good other places.  He actually had a sore throat for the next three days from breathing it in.  When he got up Saturday morning, he went to the garage and let Ginger out.  She was happily waiting to be left out and seemed totally fine!  I didn't know if it would be enough to take her life or make her blind.  I just didn't know.

The next morning, the kids and I woke up and I really didn't feel like going home to such a mess but we had to!  When we got home, Ginger was happy to see us!  We were happy to see she was fine!  I took a shower and washed my hair.  The smell was still bad in the house but having the windows open all night helped a lot!!!  I also thought that washing up the floors would maybe help lift up the smell that came in with Ginger!  It did!!!!  The Pine sol smell was a nice strong scent in the kitchen!

I called Jody and she brought over some white vinegar and more baking soda!  These two ingredients help eliminate odors!  She put baking soda on the dining room rug.  I had a slight headache and wanted breakfast and coffee!  Mike had a meeting in the morning but after that he brought Matthew and I some breakfast wraps from Stoltzfus Meats!  I had to dump out the coffee beans and start with a fresh batch for my cup of joe and the ice from the fridge smelled so back of skunk.  All other foods seemed to be OK!  Austin had a bowl of fruit loops and Ashlyn ended up going with Jody back to her house for the day!  Austin did join them at lunch time!

I also called up my mother in law and asked if she would come help us shampoo the carpets.  I wanted this done anyway and now it was necessary!!!!  She came over and we shampooed all the carpets!  I wiped the floors again!  The smell was not too bad by the time we were finished!  Thank the Lord he gave us a nice day to have all the house windows open the entire day!

Jody entertained the little ones all day.  Matthew helped move the furniture while we cleaned carpets.  Mike helped with whatever needed to be done!  Hadassah was out cleaning.  It took everyone's help to help us rid of the smell as best as we knew how!!!!

We did sleep at the house that night.  The windows had to be closed because it was getting chilly outside.

Thank you everyone that helped us through this!!!!  We do hope that we don't smell like skunk when we actually do get out of the house!