Tomorrow is garden day.

I am so excited! We are renting a tiller tomorrow and starting our garden project. Can't wait!!

Um... thats it. Just excited. It will take several months of course to see the fruits (and veggies) of our labor. I will maybe post some more pictures of our place in the next couple days.

Its Ours!!

We closed on our house today! HOORAY! It has been a long road. The past two months have been so stressful. Now we are gonna have some fun and just enjoy our new place.

ON the to do list is:
1. Plant "Ginormous" Fall Garden. ( I have my seeds started.)
2. Till up and prepared said garden spot, fence it away from deer/rabbits.
3. Get clothesline put up.
4. Keep unpacking boxes and organizing.
5. Paint Gioia's room.
6. Make more slings.
7. Finish some quilts I have started. I have 3 in progress.

We are going on vacation in August. We also have two Chiefs games we are going to. One preseason and one regular season. My cousin is getting married plus my sister, mom and I are throwing her a shower. We have the Jameson Picnic next week (which Dominic, Gioia and I are all singing in the talent show). BUSY!! But fun stuff!

Birthday party fun!

Well we had the big girls birthday party. It was a blast. We had a big turn out and everyone had a great time. We had an ice cream cake with Care Bears on it. She loves Care Bears. I can't believe my baby is 6! The girls in this picture are Tati (Christina's daughter), Morgan (kara's stepdaughter) and Gioia. Gioia declared them her best friends. :)

Homemade Hamburger Buns

I have been wanting to make these for a long time. It is a dinner roll recipe that several friends have used to make Hamburger Buns. They turned out BEAUTIFULLY!.

Milk or Water - 1 1/2 cup
Butter, room temperature - 1/3 cup (5 ½+ T)
Eggs, large - 1
Honey - 1/4 cup
Salt - 1 teaspoon
All-purpose flour - 4 cups ( I used 2 ½ cups Whole Wheat, 1 ½ cup All purpose flour)
Red Star® Active Dry Yeast - 1T

4 Tablespoons Vital Gluten (only needed with Whole Wheat flour)

Place all ingredients in bread pan in order listed. Insert pan into machine. Keep pressing the "SELECT" button until the course selection arrow indicates "DOUGH." Start machine.

After the machine has completed the "DOUGH" cycle, (1hr. 30 min.) Remove pan; place dough onto a lightly floured surface. Divide dough into 4 parts; divide each part into 4 pieces.

Place rolls 2 to 3 inches apart on greased baking sheets.

For Hamburger Buns flat them out to Bun size. Place 2-3 inches apart.

Cover; let rise at room temperature until almost doubled, 15 to 20 minutes.

Bake in a 400º F preheated oven for 10 minutes until golden brown. If
desired, lightly brush with vegetable oil. Remove from pans; cool on a wire rack.

Yield: 16 rolls or 10 hamburger buns

Two sweet things happening this week.

Luca is learning to walk. He is walking behind the Elmo mower. He also enjoys pushing the laundry basket empty around the living room.



Second, this beautiful girl is turning 6 on Sunday. WoW! Time marches on (and right over us!). I remember when I was pregnant with her I said I wanted the babys sex to be a surprise. Well, I am not good at waiting for surprises so we found out. Boy was I excited to be having a baby girl!

Moths

The other day when we went to run errands in town, we saw some huge caterpillars. A man said he was pretty sure they were moths. So i looked them up on the internet and WOW they are. They were Cecropia Moth Caterpillars and now I REALLY wish we would have brought one home with us. They are awesome. HUGE!

Here is a link to another blog of a lady who has raised them. She has awesome pictures of them.
Caterpillars

And here for the most recent updates on this ladies blog about the moths coming out of the cocoons and pictures of the BEAUTIFUL moths!
HERE

Blackberries and Pet cemetary update.

So it seems we have Blackberries on our property. They are wild so they are covered in thorns. But MMM! They are really good and the kids love going out and picking them. They are growing wild in our field. We also found that we have an apple tree on the property too. It is making apples but doesn't look real great. We need to trim it and fertilize it.







I also had to update on the pet cemetery. I had earlier posted about Sylvester that we found. After taking a walk with some friends we found more cement markers. There are a total of 8 dead pets buried out on the back field. All are complete with names and cement markers. I would take a picture of it, but its 50% sweet and 50% weird. So we will skip the picture.

I also wanted to update that I put out the hummingbird feeder and our hummingbird has been coming back every morning. YEah!

Jehovah's Witness...really?

So we have lived out here on a gravel road, in the country for about 3 weeks. YOu would think that I would not have to deal with solicitors. Wrong. We have had 4. The first guy was the one selling the kids books that go door to door. Second, was the ice cream truck driving by. I was pretty surprised (and a little weirded out) with that one. Third was the seafood and steak guy. Fourth was the minivan full of Jehovah's Witness ladies that stopped by today.

What is the deal? They think we are stuck out here without ways to buy stuff. Hello! I have the internet! Why just last night I was ordering things for my daughters birthday. Yesterday in the mail I got a stack of yummy fabric I ordered from a group. So stop coming to my house trying to sell me things. I live in the country! GO AWAY. I need to make sure the dogs are outside and just not answer the door.

The blog has been a little lacking lately, but I have two new funny things to share later. Probably tomorrow.

CLOSURE!!!

As in the house closed. Praise the Lord! It only took 2 months. Seriously, the offer was on May 21st? or there about. Now on to this house. Luckily the appraisal is the only thing left to do really and it shouldn't be a problem. I say Shouldn't, not Won't. The appraiser is coming out tomorrow so we should know this week if everything is ok in that department.

We went out to eat tonight and then to Home Depot to buy our mower. We need a bigger rider for this property. We have had our trusty push mower since 2000. So we have got our good out of it. It still works and we will keep it as a backup or for small jobs.

Hummingbirds.

We had a hummingbird in the garage on Sunday. At first Massimo wasn't sure what it was. Then the bird slowed down enough for us to see him. I think the poor thing was really confused. Finally he/she found its was out. I put up a Hummingbird feeder and saw it again this morning investigating the feeder. I hope to see more of the little bird.



Here are a couple other good pictures of the family I got this weekend.

Kitchen!

We didn't have any blinds or curtains on the glass doors in our dining room. On one hand it is nice to have the view of the countryside, but the east morning sunny was blinding us at breakfast every morning. So i ordered some curtains from JCPenneys. I had to leave my beloved vintage tab curtains at my last house. So I went with the same style. The valance on the small window matches and I got a second one for the small window in the laundry room.

New hair style.

I had been feeling a little blah about my hair and hair color. I haven't done anything to it for a long time. So I went all out and got this done to it. I really like it. It is very fun!

Here lies Slyvester.

So this weekend we finally got around to exploring our entire piece of property. Now you might think we would have done this already. No. We didn't realize there was an opening in the treeline at the back. We also were more concerned with the house and inspections so we just hadn't done it yet. WOW!! We were missing out. If we would have walked the whole thing when we saw it the first time there would have been "no if ands or buts about it". Here are a couple cool photos I took of it.

We found a grave stone that was man made and must have been the previous owners dog or cat. It was really sweet. It was next to an old bench. Also to tell you how cool this property is. You can't see this back field and creek from the house. You have to walk down the path/road to get there.

My hard drive died.

I am so sad. I lost everything pictures of my kids, documents, my recipes I had accumulated. Even my old stuff that I thought we had backed up. It turns out that DH had rebuilt his machine and it was gone. I am just sick about it. Luckily, we did have a backup of our Quicken (checking account, financial stuff). At least that is a small comfort.

:(

On the bright side, we love our new house. I planted some flowers this weekend. DH went on a wasp killing spree. There were nests all over the house. My daughter got stung by one on Thursday so we played inside the rest of the day until my husband could get medieval on their asses. LOL!

Friday, the owner came and they got rid of all the trash. They also burned a huge pile of wood trash. They started in the daytime, were here until after 11pm. Then it rained during the night and the fire was STILL burning slightly in the morning. We got to meet them and talk to them. They are real nice people.

I'm back!

Wow! What a week it has been. I have had no internet since Saturday and that was probably a good thing. I have gotten a lot of unpacking done.

We moved on Saturday. It took all day and lots of people. THANK YOU! to everyone that help. We couldn't have done it without you.

Sunday we had to pick up the fridge with the moving truck. Our driveway is a hill, so when we were unloading it we almost lost it. It was starting to roll off and I had to stiff arm it to keep it from crashing to the ground as DH frantically pulled to stop it. Finally we get it to the house and it is almost too wide for the door. The solution was to take it in sideways after removing the door handles. Then to take the truck back and go to our old house to clean up and get our final items (vacuum, brooms, etc..). Another long day indeed.

Monday DH headed back to work, although he came home early. The spigots on the washer hookups were both leaking badly and had to be replaced. They were only $6 each but I had to wait for them for doing laundry.

The rest of this week I have been making slings, unpacking boxes, delivered a sling, finding my way around a new area of KC, went to the library, saw some cool trains in Belton and trying not to lose my mind.

Our house still hasn't closed. Another bump in the road has come up with the loan/title companies. The buyers were renting and needed a place to go. We let them move in already, I can't say early as this is when they were supposed to move in. However, they haven't closed on the house yet. We ended up calling them directly. They are very grateful that we let them move in. What else could we do? We need the deal to go through and we have moved in early to this house as well. Pay it forward, you know? They have two young boys so I understand their feelings and issues.