Timber! May 4, 2011

We like trees.  We do.  We had a huge oak tree in our front yard, as well as a tall pine by the fence leading to the back yard.  The pine was casting a shadow on our garden (and it was kind of ugly), and what we really wanted was fruit trees.  So the big trees had to go.

Our across the street neighbor, Guillermo, who last year gave us raspberry and strawberry plants (which did awesome this year) and who continues to be generous with his farming resources and expertise, happened to have a logger contact who came and cut down both trees for us.  Neighbors are awesome.  We are so blessed.

It was quite a sight.

The boys loved the tractor, obviously.

 The missionaries came to help.

The tree falling:

We had a lot of help cleaning up, for which we are very grateful.  (Who knew trees make such a mess when you cut them down?  Not me.)

Now we have three nice little apple trees out front (Jonagold, Honeycrisp, Freedom), as well as a peach.  I know it will be a few years before we harvest much from them, but I'm really excited about it.

A New Back Door (and back to blogging)

The past four months have been my biggest blogging/journaling/family record-keeping failure ever, I think.  Whenever one of my friends goes months without blogging, I tend to think something is wrong.  In my case nothing was wrong other than being busy and having a hard time summoning up the energy to download/upload photos and write something meaningful and/or witty.  So now I'm trying to pick up where I left off.

Two days after Lucy was born this happened:

A closer look:

So the following Monday the whole family trooped over to Lowe's to buy a new door, and sometime after that Paul (with two little helpers) installed it.

We had been planning to put in French doors eventually, just not right at that time.  That's just how life goes sometimes, I guess.

Blankets for the Baby

 One of the great parts about having a girl is that I have things to make.  A boy would already have everything he needs because of Benjamin and Rhett.  But while I'm sure a girl would be just as warm and snuggly in a blanket patterned with footballs and basketballs, wouldn't it be nice to have something a little more feminine?

As soon as Christmas was done I was excited to start on some baby projects.  I've only done two so far, and other matters are starting to take precedence, but it's a start and I love how they turned out.

The first is a simple cotton blanket perfect for a nursing cover or letting baby play on the floor.  It should work for swaddling too, if this baby will stand for that.  Paul's sister Marianne first made me one like this when Benjamin was born, and then another for Rhett, and they were well-used.  I think this one will be, too.

I followed instructions and tips from this blog and this blog to make this flowery four-layer flannel blanket. Just like they said it would, it took a lot of time to make!  But it definitely wasn't hard, which was great.  I have the materials to make another one, but I haven't decided to go ahead yet because of the time commitment.  Even so, it was worth it and I hope this blanket gets a lot of use over the years.

Reindeer and Remodeling

One of the activities in our countdown to Christmas was making candy cane reindeer, which the boys thought was fun (except that I wouldn't let them eat the candy canes--I'm so mean).

 I tend toward the traditional (red nose, brown antlers)...

but not everyone else does.

Benjamin chose red and red (of course--thank you, Lightning McQueen) and Rhett went with a bit more eccentric: purple nose and orange antlers.

Then it was off to the bathroom to help Dada with finishing the shower.

 

 

First Snow and more

We had our first dusting of snow last week and temperatures have been freezing since then.  The boys enjoyed checking it out (Rhett for only a few minutes and Benjamin a bit longer).

 

 

Benjamin was quick to jump on the chance for some snow play.  Although not quite enough for a snowman, there was plenty of snow to work with for a good snow angel.

Our hot chocolate consumption has been on the rise.  And this evening we put our living room fireplace to work for the first time.  (Does anyone know how to get the most heat out of a fireplace?  Ours isn't warming the room like we'd hoped.)

 Finally, we'd like to point out the difference between the fireplace Benjamin is posing in front of and the one below.  The picture really doesn't do justice to the ugliness that was here when we moved in.  I seriously could not stand being in this room because the color scheme was so terrible.  Teal painted bricks, faux marble-painted mantle and hearth, "celery ice" walls (we know because we found the paint can in the garage), and some sort of royal green colored carpet.  Blech.  As we contemplated taking pictures of our Christmas decorations in this room, it became quickly clear that action needed to be taken.

 You can sort of see the results in the previous picture.  While we have a much classier vision of our fireplace for the future, for now we settled with painting over the ugly paint on the bricks and making them the color bricks should be.  The mantle and hearth took some trial and error, but we now have a stone gray for the hearth and some sort of wood color for the mantle.  And the walls are trusty beige.  The difference is huge and I actually like being in the room now.  Someday we'll add lights and furniture.

Halloween!

It has been a busy Halloween weekend at our house.  The church trunk-or-treat on Saturday night was a big hit and the boys had a lot of fun.

Here is our costumed duo:  Benjamin went as a fireman (red shirt made by me, most of the rest pieced together over time from Goodwill) and Rhett was the dalmatian (white shirt from Goodwill, pants, hat and spots made by me).

 

No pictures of the trunk-or-treat because it was so dark.  The costume pictures are both from afterwords. While Rhett looks happy, he put up a major fight when it came time to don his costume.  Even during the construction stage when I was trying to fit the white pants on him he acted as if it was major torture.  I finally got it on him, painted his nose black when he was strapped in his car seat, and when he refused to wear the hat I told him he couldn't have any candy unless he wore it.  Worked like a charm (much to my surprise).  While his costume wasn't difficult to put together, it had been too long a day, and I had spent too long sewing on spots to have people think he was a cow.  The ears were a must.  (And only one person asked if he was a cow, even with the ears on.)

For last year's trunk-or-treat Paul had a great time putting together a real door for kids to knock on at the back of the car.  This year he wanted to come up with something equally memorable.

Can you guess what it is?

It was definitely a project, but something that's we'll reuse year after year (we'd better).  I wish now that we had taken pictures of the process but at the time of assembly things were stressful enough that I didn't want to bother.

 Basically, it was made with a structure of PVC pipes shaped by pouring heated sand through the tubes until they bent freely.  (Try it sometime, it's pretty cool.)  Then we pieced together a few bedsheets (part thrifted and part from home) that had been spray painted orange (because dying them didn't work well enough) and taylored them to fit the pumpkin form.  Paul used some window screen material for the face so that he could see through while inside, which was the most fun part of the whole thing.  Inside the pumpkin Paul attached a hard hat at the top so he could wear it and walk around in it and hand candy through the nose.

 

He got some great reactions from people at the trunk-or-treat as he walked amongst the crowd.  I wish it hadn't been too dark for the camera.  Tonight he set it up on the front lawn with a light inside to attract trick-or-treaters since ours was the only of the four houses that wasn't dark and people weren't bothering to come down our street.

 Benjamin had fun opening the door for the trick-or-treaters and was even caught calling out to the empty street  for more trick-or-treaters to come to our house when we had a lull.  I found myself having increasingly thin patience for the teenagers that would come dressed as nothing and asking for candy.  To them went one piece each of the worst candy we had.

Finally, our Halloween dinner: chili in a pumpkin and pumpkin cornbread, finished off later with some pumpkin pie.  I decided last year during the holidays that we don't eat nearly enough pumpkin pie this time of year, so we decided to start early. 

And that was the Duersch family Halloween 2010!  (So glad it's done!)

August Overview

We have been terrible bloggers lately.  I can't believe two months went by and we hardly documented a thing!  So here, in brief, are some of the things that went on at the Duersch house in August.

We picked blueberries... about 30 pounds altogether.  The little farm stand down the street sold them for $1 per pound.  Some ended up as jam.

 

We watched our garden grow.

Thanks to our great backdoor neighbors we acquired a large supply of free apples, most of which were salvaged from the ground half rotten. I canned 40 quarts of applesauce.  Paul was at Priest/Laurel Conference.  It was a long weekend.

I learned (for future reference) to stock up on used canning jars during the off-season because when I ran out toward the end of the applesauce project the thrift stores hardly had any, and Goodwill tried to charge me .99 for a quart jar.  I've lost a lot of respect for our Goodwill since then.  (A quart jar is not worth 99 cents.)

The boys played outside in the water, sometimes with pants, sometimes without.

We visited the Northwest Washington Fair and saw newborn calves and piglets, various reptiles, and horses named Rhett and Ben.  We decided to always name our kids after horses at the fair so we can get pictures taken with them each year.  Not really.

We also glimpsed Rick Springfield, ate fair scones, and visited the John Deere shop.

Paul and I went to the temple in Vancouver, B.C.

And I did a little bit of sewing.  (Note: I didn't like how the inside pockets were constructed and would change that in the future.  Definitely a learning project, like most everything I make.)

And finally, we took on an unplanned bathroom project, five days before guests were to arrive.  Thank goodness for two bathrooms!

When we moved in this was the state of the shower in the master bathroom:

No kidding.  The inspector barely wanted to touch it.  Can you blame him?  We tossed around the idea of tearing it all out, on my part mainly because I didn't want to go anywhere near it even to clean it.  We decided it was just too expensive so my heroic husband got in there and scrubbed till it could pass as a usable shower.

But it still had problems.  It took massive amounts of strength and patience to turn the water off so there would not be a dripping shower head.  After a few months it became nearly impossible and at about that same time we begin to hear through the wall that something was amiss with the plumbing.  Sure enough, Paul took apart the wall to find a nice leaky pipe.

We got some help fixing the leak, but why stop there?  We hated that shower anyway.

So off came more drywall, behind which we discovered hidden scraps of more drywall stashed in the wall by the builders.  Nice.

Paul had lots of good help.

And finally, out came the nasty shower.  That I had cleaned the day before.

 

  

We now have a nice new bathtub in there, but the busyness of September has prevented more progress in there.  Like I said, thank goodness for two bathrooms.