Busy summer life

Lots of random happenings! Summer is in full swing!!!

My flower bed at the community garden. :) It's coming along nicely. We also help with the veggies and last week we were able to bring home quite a bit of lettuce and some beautiful rainbow chard. So awesome.

Gleaned from the yard. :)

So Banden and Ira have been asking to take their bunk bed down for a while now. Ira was always just making a bed on the floor or sneaking into Banden's bed and never wanted to sleep on the top any more. Neither did Banden. I think it's because they like to talk late into the night. ;) Banden had a full size mattress though and it was just too big to have two beds on the floor in that little room. Well our sweet neighbor friends offered us a nice twin mattress the other day and that very same day their daddy offered to take their bunk bed apart. Because he's an awesome daddy. If you notice in the picture he hasn't even changed out of his work clothes yet, after working a ten hour shift plus a two hour commute. The boys were so excited!

Helping their hard working daddy because they are good sons. :)

Two very happy boys. We will get bed frames in there soon, talking Ryder into making bed frames with underneath storage. :) But for now they are comfy cozy and very pleased. If you've noticed we live a very simple life and are now living very close to debt free (besides our mortgage) because of it. Sometimes it's hard to not want bigger and better or something a little more fancy/current but boy does it feel good to live without crushing debt. I know because we've been there. We are trying very hard now to live within our means, to save as much as possible (for those inventible times when Ryder gets laid off) and to be totally okay with second hand stuff. :) If I can get something for free, and thus essential save the money I would have spent on that item I am one happy girl. Ryder calls me the queen of thrifty. He gets a total kick out of all my enthusiastic ideas for saving money and cutting spending. He's more of the spender (although he's good at saving too when he sets his mind to it), I'm generally the saver/do with-outer so together we balance each other out. ;) 

We are going to be ripping the carpet out of the bedrooms soon. It's on our list of things to save for. :) Once we do that we are re-arranging who goes where. Right now it's two kids to a room, but Leiella needs her own room soon, although she doesn't want one. :/ Poor only girl. So far she does not see the bonus in having your own room, she just sees that her brothers are basically going to have a sleep over party every night without her. Regardless it has to happen, so since the rooms are small and we will have three boys in a room we are going to trade our bigger room for one of the smaller rooms. So the boys will have the biggest bedroom in the house. We are waiting to make bed frames until then because if they don't want bunk-beds, which they don't, we well have to get very creative. Probably a trundle bed for two of the boys and a regular bed for the third. I don't mind having a smaller room, it's not like we hang out in there, plus it will force me to simplify even more. :)

My big ol' kitties. :) Just relaxing on a hot day. Our cats totally out weigh our dogs, ha ha!

I organized the kitchen some more. Cleaned off the top of the fridge and added baskets, looks so much better. Most de-clutter sites say to remove everything from your fridge to make it look cleaner, but I love my pictures, so they are staying. :) Even if it does look like a bit of a mess. 

I actually have drawers for my food storage containers! Before they were all tossed into a rubbermaid tub under the folding table. Such a mess. Love, love, love having drawers for them now. :)

Figuring out what flows in the new space.

Coffee station for the husband. So nice to be able to move this and the toaster to the back counter and have extra room around my stove now. :)

Back to potty training after a three year break. Harsh. ;) We are just starting, so he still wears diapers most of the time, but slowly transitioning into training pants. These training pants have a plastic liner on the inside… Where were these when I was potty training before! So cool. It's so adorable watching this little baby walking around with these big ol' undies, seriously so cute! Especially because they all have a picture on the bum, which for some reason makes it a whole lot cuter. ;) Plus every time he sits on the potty he says, "Yay!" and claps his hands over and over again with a big grin on his face. Cuteness overload.

So I got this crazy idea for the full size mattress and just went with it...

I'm sure it's a bit trashy but hey it's not on my front porch at least. ;) It's a reading nook! Or just an awesome place to lay and relax. I covered it with a water proof mattress cover and then a sheet. I got out an old canopy I still had stored away and hung it under the eaves of the house. I want to get some colorful outdoor pillows but for now I just threw some couch throw pillows down. It's sitting on a low wooden frame. I'm going to keep it out all summer long and store it away in the winter time. I want to add some out-door lighting along the eaves and maybe a few lights that dangle down, for a nice peaceful feel at night. So far everyone loves it. I didn't think Ryder would go for it, but he loves laying out there, getting some fresh air, after working in a toxic in door environment all day. So I'm happy that he's happy. :)

These boys also approve.

This picture is from Father's day. Much love to the best father all of us have ever known. It makes my heart so glad.

I find it hilarious that even with the bed on the ground Ira still tries to sleep as close to Banden as he can. :)

So to my husband and kids this is a fort. Sigh. ;) My husband got the opportunity to bring some scaffolding home, which is apparently super awesome, and he decided to set it up in the back yard for now so that the kids could have a fort of sorts. Not sure who's idea it was but they were all so excited about it. He actually made it pretty cool and the kids love it. I don't love looking at it from the kitchen window all that much, but it does make my heart happy to see my kids happy so all is well. :) Plus it was cute to see how excited Ryder was. We have since taken of the ladder because I didn't want littler kids having easy access to the top. My kids are total monkeys so they really didn't need a ladder. Now to keep them out of those super tall trees… :/ I wish I didn't mind them climbing, I did it all the time when I was a kid, but it totally freaks me out now! It's not so much the possibility of  broken limbs, those can heal, it's the possibility of a broken back or a cracked head that makes me turn to jelly when they ask to climb the trees. 

And I'll end with this. I tried my hand a soap making! It was fun. We just used melt and pour soap from a great (fairly local) company, Brambleberry. Mailed straight to the house, because it was easier. We then added herbs and oils to it. They turned out great. Not thoroughly pleased with the ingredients in the melt and pour soap, but not brave enough to try the cold press yet. Cold press soaps use lye which can be a bit scary, especially if you have four kids and don't have a separate work space. But some day I'm going to make soap like this. http://down---to---earth.blogspot.com/2007/07/how-to-make-cold-pressed-soap.html Much cleaner than the melt and pour. Although http://www.brambleberry.com did have better options than other places I researched. I used dried calendula and dried lavender from my yard. :) The soap on the top has this beautiful reddish color when light shines through it, so nice! They all smell wonderful, a nice light scent. Ryder and I really can't stand strong smells, and usually buy unscented soap because of this. So it was nice to be able to modulate the amount of fragrance in the soap. The only one that turned out too strong was the lavender one. We used dried lavender and the recipes called for lavender oil as well. Even though we halved the amount of oil used it was still too strong. If we make it again we will only use the dried lavender.

Well there you have it, all sorts of summer happenings!