Jumping Ship

Call me schizophrenic. I have decided to move my blog over to blogspot. I am sorry for the few of you who have faithfully followed me all over the web. This is my last move. I promise.  I just got tired of the boring  possibilities with the wordpress templates.  You see my fun polk a dot background is gone.  It’s because I have to pay another $15.00 to have the freedom to change the background.  Therefore, I am done with wordpress. Please come see me at:

fromthenarrows.blogspot.com

Thanks so much dear bloggy friends for you encouragement, prayers and keeping tabs on me. You are a blessing.

Susan

Camping was a blast

Camping is:

exciting, dirty, wet, a lot of work, exhausting, and an absolute blast.

Camp Food

Best Buds: Belle and Jo

Oregon Coast

Heceta Head Lighthouse

Beach Play-Washburne State Park

Best Buds: Phi and K-lyn

Bobo in her element

Best Buds: Bobo and GBear

Heceta Head Lighthouse

Max: Hubby brilliantly figured out how to slow him down so he wouldn’t get very far and yet he had a little freedom to move around and play.  He was one tired pup at the end of the day.

Summer 08: The Best Camping Trip of the year.

Needless to say we all had a great time. The weather was PERFECT.  It was by far the nicest weekend at the coast I have ever experienced.  Our camp sight was great (meaning really close to the bathrooms). Looking forward to the next camping trip, but I don’t mind waiting until next year. For all the fun it was, my goodness, is it a lot of work.

Camping again

Friday we head out for another camping trip. This time we are going with friends. This time we will be staying in a tent. This will be the first tent experience for the girls. They are looking forward to it and it should be a good time. We all (parents and kids) get along well.  Plus I will have another mom to share the meal duties with. Yeah!  The weather has turned a bit yucky with rain, thunderstorms and general cloudiness. I hope it dries up. I hope it won’t be too cold.  Hubby and I don’t have sleeping bags so we will have to make some sort of bed on inflatable pads and blankets.  I guess I don’t really plan on getting good sleep.  Thankfully I can sleep in when we return.  We don’t get to the beach very often. In fact I don’t really even like to call it a beach, because the word evokes feelings of warmth and sun and slight breezes.  That is not what we get on the Pacific Northwest. We get cold, windy, very windy weather most of the time.  So I will call it the coast.  We are going camping on the coast.

This was taken 2 years ago.  We went last summer, the summer we met Max.  We don’t go very often, even though it is only an hour away. I have no idea why. It might have something to do with it being cold there.  I will hopefully have some fun photos to post when we return.

Susan

No News is Bad News

Which means that our house has not received one single offer yet.  We have had surprisingly very little traffic. The weird thing is the feedback is positive. Lot’s of people have loved the house. I guess just not enough to actually buy it. We are in crunch time right now. We took a big chance and now we need to make some decisions on what to do next.  I covet your prayers for this house to sell and quickly. You see, if it doesn’t then part of what we need to do is cut back on everything. And I like food, and hot water, and heat in the fall, and my phones and my internet. So if it doesn’t sell quickly then I will have to tearfully say goodbye to some or all of these things.  I wonder what will be the first thing to go?  Will it be my food, or my internet. Hmmm….it’s a toss up.

Susan

Window Mistreatments

I thought I would join the Nester’s mistreatment club. I admit that I did not do these myself. I had a friend come and help me, but we did these in one afternoon with 6 little girls and two dogs hanging around.  I have this breakfast nook window that had gray vertical blinds for the 10 years we have lived in this house. YUCK. They were UGLY. I still cannot believe I lived with those all those years.  This is such an improvement.  These windows made it difficult to hang a valance with the angle of the walls and the size of the windows. I could not decide if I should treat this area as one large window or three windows.  We decided one large window would be the easiest.  We did do a little bit of sewing but also used stitch witchery for some of it. We used a staple gun to make the pleats and stapled it onto a three thin pieces of wood. When it was finished I nailed them to the wall. I love how this turned out and was glad that I didn’t have to invest in expensive rods and hardware. I hot glued black gross grain ribbon to the top to hide the stapled pleats.

The small window is above my sink. We had just enough fabric to make one small panel with a pocket and hung it on a pressure rod between the two cabinets.

Sorry for the poor quality of photos.

Susan

PS—The fabric was free. My other friend gave it to me to match my kitchen. She bought it for a project and never used it and decided not to. The wood was in the garage as was the staple gun and staples.  Out of pocket expense was the ribbon. Not too bad eh?

A bouncing party

Today we officially celebrated Bobo’s birthday with friends and family.  Here are a few photos to show how fun it was.

Photo catch up

Because I am so lame about putting photos with my post.  Here are just a couple photos from camping, again the lameness with the camera. I don’t like carrying it around with me, and I also talk myself out of wanting a picture of each and every little thing.

So here are the camping photos:

Belle turned 11 last Saturday. Instead of the big party with lots of kids she had a special afternoon with a good friend. She decided that a pedicure would be just the thing to ring in the 11th year.  We had a lunch outing afterwards with a gelato topper and a little shopping at Michaels.  What a day!

Today is Bobo’s (peanut) birthday. She turned 7.  We decided to go to the Enchanted Forest.  What a great day.

Phi (9), Belle (11), Bobo (7)

That’s it folks.

Susan

I’m Back

HI all,

I’m back from camping and I have a new computer charger.  Camping was a blast. The kids had so much fun. I didn’t have to cook or clean, could read, visit with people, and play games, as well as lay in the sun and swim. It was very relaxing.  Upon returning however I had to unload, unpack, do laundry, have a birthday party at our house (Belle turned 11) and then clean up for an open house on Sunday. Phew. I’m pooped again, enough to have fallen asleep yesterday evening.  I know I am tired when I fall asleep during the day because I never nap.

My almost 7 year old finally learned to ride a bike without training wheels at camp.  The funny thing is that she was in shorts, no helmet, and barefoot.  (she was riding on dead grass and I was with her, so I wasn’t too worried about the no helmet–but we do take that safety precaution).  Her sisters when they learned were in jeans, helmet, socks, tennis shoes, long sleeves and probably knee pads.

The speaker at camp was David Eckman, an author of several books and involved in the ministry called What God Intended. I will talk more about him later as I think his teaching is great.

August is a busy month, and we have no date yet to move, nor have we sold our home yet.  I have no idea what life is going to look like the next couple of months and what that means for school for us. I will plan as usual and make the best of it, but it would be nice to be settled in the new house.  I am trying to take it one day at a time and trust in God for the outcome.

Well, just wanted to say I’m back with a fully charged computer and a new charger. Thanks hubby!

Susan

computer update

I am borrowing my friend’s husband’s charger. Mine is toast. Literally.  $80.00 buckaroos to replace it and right now we can’t replace it. Bummer!  So I will get this charged up and be totally stingy on my computer time. I do have some business to conduct, you know, important things to do on the computer. It’s not all just fun and games. In the mean time, while it’s charging, I gotta catch up on my favorite reads. Man, you gals write a lot. I’m gone for a few days and I have this huge list to read.

All that to say, I won’t be around much for the next week and a half or so.  The girls and I are going to family camp with my in-laws church next week. It will the first time for them and they are going to have a blast. The following weekend is my daughters 11th birthday.  The week after is my other daughters 7th birthday.  August is going to be a busy month.  But fun!

Susan

Computer emergency

Help……

My computer charger cord is on it’s last thread. I may be lost for a while without a new computer. Does anyone have a spare? I have an Apple Mac Book. We probably won’t be able to buy another if this goes for a little while….signing off….I smell something burning……