It’s a comfort to know that when lunch disappoints, there’s dessert to make up for it. 🙂
(c) 2014. Â All rights reserved.
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Photo 365 #5
My boys are like tiny little Energizer Bunnies, especially Thumper. He literally goes until he drops. I made them sit still this afternoon while I froze more corn, and a miracle happened.
Thumper slept.
(c) 2014. All rights reserved.
Lemon delight
So the other night, I tried a new recipe. I don’t normally care for a lot of lemon things, but the rest of my family ADORE all things lemon. I thought this lemon bread would be a hit for supper (we wanted to keep it light that night), and I couldn’t have been more right. As a matter of fact, it was an even bigger hit the next day.
The wilds of Iowa
You may recall that last weekend, we had some wild weather.  It’s actually been a wild couple of weeks, weatherwise.  Between floods and tornadoes, we’ve had all we can do to keep up with the effects of the storms leveled at us.  Last week’s storms knocked down two of our trees, and left branches dangling from a couple of others.  Seymour and I spent Sunday afternoon trying to clean up the yard, only to have more storms roll through that night.
My hometown was too close for comfort to one of Sunday evening’s passing tornadoes.  Apparently, our new house was also fairly close, but I didn’t know that till Monday morning.
Photo Friday: Out and about!
This week’s Photo Friday is all about being out and about, and since it’s Independence Day here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., I can’t think of a better place to be than out and about.
I started the day off out and about at our old house, prepping for the open house this weekend. Â That was followed up by a trip to the park, which is where the bulk of my hometown’s Fourth of July festivities take place:
Tornado monsoon
June 29
I went upstairs to put the boys to bed a little after 8:00 p.m. and the sky was dark.  Like middle-of-the-night dark.  Given that it’s been staying light till somewhere around 9:00 p.m. lately, this was odd.  But it had been raining, so I didn’t worry too much about it.  I had just started reading Fox in Socks when the emergency alert went off on my phone – a tornado warning had just been issued.  I hollered down to Seymour to find out what was going on and he said he’d check the radar, so I went back to reading.  A couple minutes later, Bubbles thundered up the stairs and said we were supposed to head down to the basement.
After yesterday’s monsoon, we woke up to find our basement submerged beneath three inches of water.  We managed to drain it eventually, thanks to our cousins – they came to Cricket’s birthday party this afternoon packing a pump.  The basement is once more flooded in places, but that’s fodder for another post.
I may even write it one day.
I am enough
Remember a while back when I reviewed Moms’ Night Out? Â I went to see it again, this time with my mother-in-law, who’d had a very stressful day and needed a good laugh. Â I’m so glad she went with me, because we don’t see each other as often as I’d like and we had a ton of fun. Â We definitely need to do things like this more often.
Anyway, as we watched the movie, I got to thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know) about why I related so much to Allyson. Â I mean, I’ve been there – I stayed home with Bubbles till he was two and now that I only work part-time, I’m home alone with Cricket and Thumper two or three days a week.
It’s hard! Â It’s so hard. Â Like Allyson, I wanted to be a mom. Â Of course, I also wanted to be a world-famous author, but let’s just take this one dream at a time. Â Her reasons for wanting to be a mom are never mentioned – it’s simply her dream, and she’s lucky enough to be living it.
Facing fear
Once again, a Writing 101 challenge. Â Today’s topic: My worst fear.
I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but my worst fear is that I’ll die before my kids are grown up. Â My memories of my mom are fragmented; sometimes I remember things that don’t seem possible, and other times I recall things with crystal clarity.
But mostly, I don’t remember. Â I don’t remember very much about my childhood before my mom died. Â I would really, really hate for my kids to say the same. Â I’ve always worried about it, which is why I stayed at home with Bubbles the first two years of his life.
Love rocks
We’ve been doing a lot of work on houses lately. Â Last weekend (not this past weekend, but the one before it, the weekend of Father’s Day) we painted our old house because our deal fell through and people who’d looked at it before thought it was too much work to fix (although what’s so hard about hiring someone to side it once you’ve bought it is beyond me).
Anyway, it’s a three-story house. Â We painted it in a single day.
Now you know why I’ve been so tired lately and so behind on so many things. Â I have a whole post (complete with pictures!) that I want to write on the topic, and maybe I’ll get it done in the next couple of days. Â But this isn’t about that.
This is actually about all the work we’ve been doing on our new house.
We haven’t done as much to the new place as we’d hoped to have done by now, primarily because we haven’t sold our old house yet. Â So far, we’ve connected to rural water (No more smelly well water! Â Yay!), we’ve replaced the water heater that crapped out on us at the end of April, we’ve installed a new washer and dryer, and Seymour has built a new bathroom down in our basement. Â It’s not quite functional yet, but we’ve been so busy that he hasn’t had time to finish working on it.
We also filled in an old well and two cisterns last fall, something we thought was a great idea. Â Now the kids can play in the yard without us worrying that they’ll fall through rotting boards and drown (seriously, that well was so deep that it took three full dump trucks full of sand to fill it up, and even then there was a dip in the yard that we had to fill with dirt).
The death of Corn Carnival
Yes, this really exists, and yes, it appears every year.
Wait, what? Â No more Corn Carnival?
This must be a joke.
But no, the City ran out of money. Â For whatever reason, the businesses who call the Brook home decided not to donate time or money to make the annual celebration a success. Â The ladies who sponsor the quilt raffle have all passed on to that great quilting bee in the sky and, while their spirits may be sewing for eternity, that doesn’t put quilts up for raffle prizes here in the land of the living.
No more kettle corn. Â No more funnel cakes. Â No more mini donuts.
Suddenly they all died. The end. 