Firework-Free 4th of July

What do you do when there can't be any fireworks on the 4th of July? Pray for rain...and still have lots of fun!

You decorate water bottles and shoot them off using pvc pipe and an air compressor.

You fly kites,

paint faces,

and spray paint your hair.

Then you talk your grandmother into letting you spray paint her hair too!

Photo Shoot Fun

Playing around with the camera at Granny's and PaPa's house...all the kids got in on the fun!

Kitty Kazoo

Meet Kitty Kazoo. She's the newest member of our family.

Actually I have no idea if this is our cat or one of her siblings, but since I can't tell them apart, I guess it doesn't really matter.

iphone photos

Pioneer Woman's photo challenge this week is photos taken with your phone. I am having a hard time deciding which picture to enter. Any votes?

These were all taken on my iphone and then "square-ified" with Instagram.

Conversation With a 9-Year-Old

Josie: "Hey, Mom. You know Sally's* mom?"

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Me: "Yes."

Josie: "When she wears make-up, she looks like totally young."

Me: "Oh really?"

Josie: "But when she comes to school and doesn't wear any makeup, she looks like your age..." pause "...old."

Me: No response. I think my daughter said it all.

Remember this?

I was organizing my picture files tonight and saw this picture from when Jake was a year old.

Time really does fly!

Looking Out My Backdoor...

One of my favorite things about summer is gardening. Unfortunately I have learned that my small flowerbeds are not great for vegetable gardening. Jake talked me into planting corn in our biggest, but not necessarily big enough for corn, bed. Between the weather and the dog that keeps digging stuff up, we managed to grow 3 corn stalks. I figured that they wouldn't actually ever make corn since I've always heard you need several rows for it to pollinate.

Well apparently I was wrong. If this silk is any indication, we might actually get a few ears of corn.

Zinnias are one of my favorite flowers, probably because they are easy to grow. The kids and I grew these from seeds.

The fact that butterflies are attracted to them is just an added bonus. Maybe the butterflies helped our corn along.

I'm trying to learn to use the manual controls on my camera, so I've been taking pictures of all sorts of things trying out different settings.