Hope?

The sun is gaining power these days. So there must be hope that spring is on its way! Here's a little evidence of it. Despite the fact that it didn't make it up to 30° yesterday (and it's only 10° now, BTW), there still was a bit of melting going on. Note the icicles on this evergreen tree:

Just ignore all the snow that's still around the gas tank (like I'm trying to ignore the 5+ foot snowdrift that covers most of our back yard, among other places). At least we can SEE the tank now! And I purposely didn't take more pics of all that white 'stuff'.

Have a closer look at the icicles.

Have hope!

(Click to enlarge, for even bigger hope! ;-) )

I took these pics just minutes ago. I've kinda scraped the bottom of the barrel of photos lately, and I don't have much left to post. I do, however, have a couple of projects in the works to show you soon. One should get finished today, and the other is an ongoing one with Courtney. Maybe we'll get that far enough along tomorrow that I can post pics of it soon, too.

And WHEN spring gets here, the beautiful (i.e. not WHITE) photos will begin again!

(Do I sound like I've had enough of winter???) Ha!

Young artist at work

There she was back in January, amidst all her art supplies, hard at it. Note the daycare babies napping in the background. A girl has to sneak in time to develop her talent whenever she can!

Her "cohort" quietly watches on.

Usually Josie's not so relaxed, though. More often she's in the middle of whatever Courtney's doing at the table. Soooo curious (hasn't killed her yet, though!). SUCH A PEST!!! She gets tossed to the floor many times while Courtney's busy. Unfortunately, she bounces right back up. I guess Courtney and Grandma won this round, though. Quite temporarily, to be sure.

Here's our artist again, more recently, using one of her birthday gifts. Did you notice the huge supply of beads she got? With a cool box to sort them all into.

After sorting the beads by size and shape into the many little compartments, she decided to make Grandma a necklace.

Such exacting work it was!

And TA DA!!! My new necklace....

.... which she took home with her at the end of the day. Gotta go "green" and recycle those beads, y'know!

(Aside to Cindy: This little kit saved me the work of dying our own beads. ;) )

For Auntie Jess

Courtney wanted you to see her pretty orange toenails!

The fingernails complement them nicely, don't you think?

(Josie wanted to show off her nails, too, but they're a little too hairy. And they're not orange, anyway.)

Aww.... look what I made!

I sooo love this set of baby doll clothes patterns I got! Well worth the wait caused by the slow postal service.

Here's another outfit I made... a little fleece sweatsuit. Note that it even has pockets! Okay, the pants pockets are fake, but the ones on the top are real.

Here it is, filled up with baby this morning:

And being held by her proud mommy:

I'd forgotten how long it takes to make doll clothes. They take nearly as long as making clothes for humans... the seams are just shorter. ;) But I have plans for more, so stay tuned.....

(And I just noticed, when previewing this post, that the snaps are on the wrong side for a girl. Don't tell, okay?! I actually had thought of making sure I did it right at one point when I was ready to put in the snaps, but obviously my short memory kicked in again.)

No, no..... NO!!

I refuse to post any more snow photos!! Even though we just got another 8 inches or so of the ugly white stuff and it's still coming down in flurries. YUCK! Ptooey!! Blech!!!!! Enough already! Thank goodness we had a lovely week last week and some of our old stuff melted.

Oh... I almost forgot to tell you... we also had lightning and thunder with our snow yesterday morning. It looks really weird to see lightning flash against the snow!

But anyway.... here's a pic I took awhile back... on Courtney's birthday, in fact. It's frost on our living room window, and it was just too pretty to pass up. I continue to be amazed at the formations.

(Click to enlarge.)

Now, let's bring on SPRING!!!!!

Here's a little more color, at least. I mentioned that I had one more birthday picture to show you. I didn't think it deserved a post of its own, so I'll stick it in here. It's just the card I made for Courtney:

So Josie was at her party, too!

Nice photo of Josie, right? Thanks, Jess!

Party pics, Part 3

What's a birthday party without PRESENTS?! Here are most of them, at least.

(Click to enlarge.)

Did you notice that huge bucket of Fun Fusion beads? I see more 'projects' ahead!

Note the cheesy grins. Methinks she was REALLY tired of getting her picture taken by that time, especially noted by the pic on the bottom right. LOL

Actually, that green item was from Grandpa and me. Here's a better look:

It looks kinda flat there, and it was. But it opened to a duffle bag size. My great intention was to get a bunch of clothes made for the new baby she got for Christmas, and put them in the bag. I won't bore you with the details, but because of lots of complications, I didn't get any made before the birthday party. So she only got a promise to go with the bag. ;-)

This week I finally made good on part of the promise. Here's the first item, a sleeper and matching hat.

The fabric is leftover from a T-shirt I made for Jess when she was around Courtney's age! Wow, that was a long time ago!

I think she likes it!

Actually, she loves it... the best part of it being that it has a zipper!! :-)

Now to get more outfits made (and use up more fabric scraps!).

(That's the end of the party pics! Oops... except for one. I forgot to include it in this post, and if I add it now, it'll screw up the formatting. So I guess it'll get a post of its own later. If I remember. ;-) )

A Fresno morning

In other words, it's foggy and dreary. I spotted this guy in our back yard. He didn't look like he was enjoying the weather very much. But hey, he survived the winter! It's very likely that a lot of them didn't, what with all the snow cover and cold temps.

Here's another photo, zoomed in a little closer and enhanced a bit:

(Click either photo to enlarge.)

He appears to be standing on just one leg. Do they really do that, Dale? He stood there not moving for quite a while, then disappeared when I wasn't looking.

Spring fever?

We've been having some rather spring-like weather the last few days. The cats have been out and enjoying it, too. It's been so nice to see them outside again, after all that COLD that kept them inside the machine shed day and night. Here are a few of them enjoying a morning out on the snowbanks.

(Click to enlarge.)

Did you see those couple of calicos lurking from the lilac bushes? And poor(?) Josie admiring her brother through the window? But look how our LP tank is finally emerging from the snow! It's melting... hurray! Today's forecast high is near 50°, so the melting should continue! Ahhhh.... I, for one, certainly do have spring fever!!

(Now if only it really were spring. But I'll enjoy this while it lasts!)

Here's someone else who seemed to have a case of spring fever yesterday. She was quite wired all day!

Or maybe it was too much valentine candy??? ;-)

She was watching her shadow and admiring her 'tails'.

Party pics, Part 2

"I finally got to eat the cake!"

(Oh, yeah... more pics to come!)

P.S. See the hearts on the shirt? That reminds me.... Happy Valentine's Day!

Party pics, Part 1 (finally)

Sorry for keeping you waiting so long. Good grief, the party was over a week ago already! Okay, so we had a little unexpected excitement during the week that threw me off a bit (no, Grandpa, I'm not gonna blog about it... ), but still! My excuse is that there were too many pics, and they were too hard to narrow down. SOOO.... you get to see them all! Well, almost. I did eliminate a few. But as I looked through them, I just got such a chuckle out of them that I thought maybe you'd like to chuckle a little, too. ;-)

So here we go. This first one isn't really much of a photo. And yet again it is. This is just as the photo session at the cake began. I title it "Reality". ;-)

Okay, almost ready. The birthday girl must get her headband just right:

"That cake looks so GOOD! Wish those grownups would hurry up and get their cameras ready."

"Oooh, they're gettin' closer now!"

"Here's a pretty smile for you, Mommy!"

"Aw, gee. Wasn't that good enough? Can't we just eat it?"

First let's have a closer look at that adorable cake Mommy spent hours on:

The adults are getting comical behind the scenes, methinks:

Okay, candle lit. One cheesy grin:

"Finally, I got to blow it out!"

Ohhhh.... let's re-enact that scene:

(Where'd that mop come from???)

"Oh, man.... will we ever get to the CAKE?"

"I'm getting tired of smiling, Mommy."

One more blow......

Hey, that candle's lit AGAIN! "Is this smile good enough?!"

*sigh*

I don't know what this last one was about. Perhaps "I'm gonna blow out that candle and be done with it!" Whatever was going on, I thought it was pretty cute.

Hope you enjoyed 'em. But come back tomorrow, 'cause we're not done yet!

For Kris

This is the best I can do for now. Hope it brightens your day a little. ;-)

Cooking (and eating) with Courtney

Sorry, I'm again bypassing the birthday pics... because I haven't had time to do anything with them yet, and because I wanted to show you this first!

Courtney and I tried something new and fun for dinner (lunch, if you're from the city) yesterday. We made Spaghetti Dogs!

First we poked uncooked spaghetti through cut-up hot dogs:

That was very fun. And easy!

Then we covered them with water and cooked them.

And voila!!!!

Gross? Maybe! LOL

Since I didn't want to open a whole jar of spaghetti sauce just for this little bit, I decided to use ketchup instead. It worked just fine.

Delish, right? ;-)

Notice that I did provide her with a fork, but....

No, I didn't make her strip down to eat them. She got hot, so she took off her sweatshirt. Brrr! It barely made it to zero outside yesterday!

But it turned out to be a good thing she took it off:

It washed off just fine.

She ate all but one dog, and we topped it off with fresh fruit. YUM!!

I got the idea for the dogs here. Thanks, Megan!

(P.S. Grace, that IS a fresh braid. ;-) And the rest of the nice clean hair was only tied back to keep it out of the ketchup.)

Winter weary

As I write this, it is 10° below zero outside, headed to -17°, if the forecast is accurate. Not to mention wind chill. Brrrr. Enough already.

I even had a request for a post with flowers the other day. Hmmm.... Sorry.

(Click to enlarge.)

I'll get to the birthday party pics as soon as I get them sorted and whittled down. :-)