Making Time

Things have slowed down, incredibly, at work since the end of the semester. As much as I hate to say it, I pretty much get paid to sit and do nothing...all summer. So, by the time I get home I just can't sit down and do more nothing. I HAVE to do SOMETHING! I recently discovered that this need to work (since I can't do it at my paid job) is a good thing and resulted in me having all the chores done and the entire house clean before the weekend, which meant that I didn't have to spend my whole day Saturday cleaning. The weather was beautiful and the day was sunny, so we took the kiddos to G&G's to play while the hubs and I went to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. After that, we met the kids at Ross Park and let them finish having their fun before we went home. The kids hadn't slept all day, so they were 100% asleep when we got home, and for the first time in what felt like forever, I finally went into my "office" and started some scrapbooking. It was wonderful! How much I miss doing that. I realized that it had been a long time since I had taken a moment to do something that I wanted to do. I hope I can keep doing some scrapping at least once a week. I read about a neat idea on the internet and decided that I needed to organize all of my scrapbooking stuff.

So, I bought a $5 shoe organizer at Wal Mart and separated my scrappin' stuff into that. I can see everything I have now and I love it!

These are the pages I was able to work on once I got everything organized:

I still have a ton more pictures to scrap and even more on my computer that I need to print and get working on. I am about 2 1/2 years behind in pictures for Uriah and obviously about 1 1/2 years behind on pictures for Jordyn. If I am able to do 5 pages a week, hopefully I will catch up some day!

At the beginning of May, my brother graduated from the Law Enforcement program. The ceremony was formal but felt informal because the speakers pretty much said anything they wanted and they all joked and talked about the fun things they did in the program and what it means to be an officer. My brother got a special Sharp Shooter award for shooting 90% while he was in the program.

 My brother posing for me after he received his certificate.

My brother and his beautiful wife after the graduation ceremony.

I am very happy for my brother and I hope he continues to do things that make him happy.

When we moved into our new apartment less than a year ago we quickly learned that we couldn't sleep with our windows open on certain nights because the sprinklers were partly aimed directly at our windows. We asked the apartment manager to alter them so they didn't spray into our windows but I don't think there was anything they could do. As a result, our windows looked like this:

I felt like our room always looked dull because the sun couldn't shine through like it was supposed to. The window was ugly and made me feel like my bedroom was ugly. So one day Jared decided to go to a local cleaning store and find something to cure those nasty hard water windows and...

TA DA!

Windows we can see through! It really made a huge difference and I am so thankful that Jared was willing to go around and clean all the windows in our apartment.

Well, this Saturday is the big day we have been waiting for 3 months for! The DAY OUT WITH THOMAS is this weekend and I am so excited to take Uriah and show him a real Thomas the train. We will get to ride in a coach pulled by Thomas and there will be games and fun things to do all day. We are planning on leaving early Friday to go to Utah and hang out with some friends and go to Thanksgiving Point. That is, assuming I don't have to go in and serve for jury duty. Yup, about two weeks ago I got a letter saying that I had been called for jury duty. It started last week and I didn't have to go in, but now I am worried that I will have to go in on Friday and be stuck there all day when we should be traveling to Utah. I guess we will have to see and let the chips fall where they may. No matter what, I will DEFINITELY have a lot of pictures to show when we get back!