Insert Post Title Here!

I made Dark Chocolate covered strawberries this morning to take to an Easter Party. We are so blessed to have met such awesome friends here. Our kids get along great and are near the same ages, mine are 10 and soon to be 13 and hers are 8 and 13. We have a standing weekly playdate where we alternate the kids coming to play each week. It's great, it gives the kids some play time and us mom's a 3 hour break. We have such fun holiday parties. Today we'll be doing an Egg hunt, of course, and spoon races, silly string, etc.

While I was making the strawberries, I was reminiscing about the guys who stood on the street corners in CA and sold strawberries and oranges. Usually they spoke no English, but the produce was usually good quality.

Also, I miss the diversity of CA. It really hurt me last week to disenroll from a local homeschool group here. The group has some wonderful people and plans great field trips and adventures. One of the ladies in the group was asked to leave, after planning many, many events and even a week long trip to DC, because they didn't consider her a "mainstream Christian", their words, not mine. She is an awesome lady with a great heart. I decided that I can't belong to such an exclusive group. I'm sure that I'll see some of the members around town and at gatherings, but I cannot willingly support such a thing. I have friends that are the same religion as this former member and it hurts me that other Christians would be so cruel. This brings me back to CA and my diverse homeschool group, we had super conservative Christians, extreme hippie types, Muslims and Jewish members. We all got along beautifully, we respected each other and our children had a great time. For me, homeschooling is exposing my children, with my guidance, to the world and it's people.

Sigh, this whole mess has just been heavy on my heart, but I think most of all it saddens me that such prejudices even exist. Can you see why there is not a title for this post, my thoughts are all over the place this morning?

Spring, finally!

It's spring, finally! The past few weekends have been beautiful and we've been busy outside. We built our boxes for our Square Foot gardens. So far, Miss A has planted marigolds and dianthus. We plan to get veggies planted this week, such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, also a watermelon and my favorite herb, basil. Building the garden was fun and a nice family project, Miss A really had a hand in helping out. We are planning to put a rose bush in between the two boxes and then finish off the garden with a rock border.

I love petunias and couldn't wait for spring to get here so that I could hang baskets on the front porch! Happy Spring!

My love!

I ordered my new stove on Valentine's Day!  Yes, I love my stove.  I bake all of our sandwich bread, rolls and hamburger buns, so to say that I use the oven a lot is an understatement. I couldn't be happier with any other gift.  The top oven preheats in about 4 minutes, the bottom in about 7 or 8.  The bottom oven is also a convection oven, which is heaven when baking bread and rolls.  They rise a bit higher and have a lovely crust.  I was ecstatic one Sunday afternoon when I was able to convection roast a chicken in the lower oven, while baking rolls in the top oven.  I was so giddy when I could bake 3 trays of cookies at once in the convection oven, in fact that was the first thing I baked the day it was delivered.