Five on Friday

1.  Brothers!

2.  Baseball

3.  Soccer

4.  Swimming

5.  Good times!

Samuel's idea to see if Malachi would fit in his big dump truck!

Wordless Wednesday

A lovely evening stroll across the wooden bridge, 

set aside for walkers and cyclists -

just 2 blocks from home :)

Creating

Mel had a list of things that she wanted to do when I came to visit and we are getting checkmarks up beside many of them!

One was going to the u-pick farm (we've actually gone twice) and then freezing berries and making jam.  We've got 5 containers of strawberries and 2 big bags of raspberries in the freezer and we've made 3 jars of strawberry jam plus 5 jars of raspberry jam.

Mel wanted to make the jam with honey 

so we found this new Pomona Pectin and mixed it with honey.

We had 8 cups of mashed berries and 1 cup of honey 

(which is much less sugar to fruit than most recipes use).

They got nice and thick and are ready for winter eating.

Another item was making their apartment more homey with a few decorative touches.  Today's project was taking this lamp that we bought at the thrift store for $20 and recovering the shade.  It was the first time either of us had done anything like this and it was very easy.  It looks great!

Before

After

That's Tyler's medical textbook in which he has to read a chapter for tomorrow's lecture.  

Tomorrow we are going on a hunt for pillowforms so we can make some throw cushions for the living room, using coordinating prints to the lampshade fabric.  It's going to look like a magazine home around here very soon with us two Martha Stewart wanna-bes!!

Berry Picking

After Tyler got home from the hospital this afternoon, we headed out to the Sunset Berry Farm to get some fresh berries.  It was only a 15 minute drive away and in an hour we picked 2 pails of strawberries and 5 quarts of raspberries.

Tyler and I had our pails full of berries in about 15 minutes - the plants were just hanging with huge berries!  There was heavy rain here at the beginning of the week and as a result, there are so many spoiled berries now.  I felt so bad for the farm as so much of the crop is not usable.   There were lots of people picking which was nice to see.  

 While we picked strawberries, beside us Melinda picked raspberries!  They are her favourite and she was quick to head over and fill these baskets right up.

Samuel loves these just as much as Mel does and he helped himself to lots!

I'm sure his little tummy was stretched to the max between the 2 berry patches!

Smart Mommy knew that little boy would need a diversion so a bottle of bubbles was tucked in with the pails.  The ever-present golf club made a great bubble bat!

But the best part of all was the field tractor sitting beside the fruit stand!  Sitting up on the seat and moving that steering wheel "really fast", made one little boy very, very happy.  In his words, "I driving like Grampa Bob.  Go fast!"