Happy Spring!

Wow, it seems that this drastic change in weather has really taken time away from my blog!  I have been spending nearly every hour of the day outdoors.  Mostly pulling weeds, mowing, or other non-fun things like that, but I have done some fun things.  I planted a row of lilac bushes (by far my favorite flower!) along the back of our yard.  I know it will take a long time, but the goal is to build a little privacy between our yard and our neighbors.  Nothing against them or anything, I don't know them enough to dislike them :) but we can literally sit in our back yard and see what they are eating for dinner.  Which means they can pretty much see everything we do in our house.  How embarrassing is it to think that they have seen me attempting the 30-day shred workout?!?  I have other big plans for the yard, but I have to wait until it gets a little warmer out and we past the date of frost.  Who knows when that will be here in Iowa.  Could be March, could be June.  Heck, we could still have more snow!

Another thing that I have been busy with is brainstorming.  I am entering a crafting contest.  I'm not sure how much of it I can write about just yet, but I was sent a free product to try out with the stipulation that I will do something creative and enter it into a contest.  Pretty fun stipulation if you ask me!  The winner gets a $400 Micheal's gift card and the 2 runners up get a $50 gift card.  I believe the product was sent to 100 people, so assuming everyone enters, I have a 1 in 100 chance of winning something.  If I don't win, well I still got the free product! But I can seriously think of a 100 ways to spend that $400 gift card!  I'm like a kid in a candy shop when I am in a craft store!  Good thing they don't have a craft store with an attached garden center!  As of right now I have no clue what project to do.  I have a few ideas but nothing worthy of a prize.  Hmmmm, off to do some more brainstorming!

Did you know?

I don't know about anyone else but it drives me crazy when I open my door to a huge stack of phone books.  I don't think I've used a phone book in the past 10 years, and I hate that I have to just throw it right in the recycling bin.
Did you know that you can stop receiving them?  If your phone books come from Dex, go to http://www.dexknows.com/Green/ and you can choose which phone books you want.  I selected that I didn't want any of them, so we'll see!

Long time, no post

I feel like today has been a day straight out of Little House on the Prairie here at our house.  I've been tending to my vegetable plants (all still growing indoors), mixing up three batches of homemade laundry detergent, making a batch of homemade dishwasher detergent, washing cloth diapers, and concocting a homemade baby-wipe solution.  My house smells nice and clean though!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend!  Ours was great. We hosted dinner here Saturday night, complete with an Easter egg hunt and some awkward games of "don't drop the egg" in the backyard.  My mom was able to make it up to enjoy the weekend with us, so the kids were super spoiled. K learned to say Grandma...or MAma.  After Grandma left, he wandered around the house looking for her, yelling "MAma!"  And of course, the Easter bunny found our house this year.  Here are a couple photos from our weekend: