So, this is Case in church (before the service began), coloring...you will notice "Perry the Platypus" next to him! It belongs to Katie, who is one of Haley & Moriah's friends, whom Case has a special fondness for.

Girls & guns!

In the Muscatine Journal, there's a good article about the class I took on Saturday regarding "Girls and Guns" and gun safety. http://muscatinejournal.com/news/local/area-women-take-a-shot/article_e125f380-b8d9-11e1-a8e4-001a4bcf887a.html The photo of the target above is after my first 30 rounds.

Dan in Canada - Surprise back home

Dan has been in Canada fishing with some guys from work, sort of a work-related "retreat." They left last Saturday and will be home tonight. It looks really pretty there, although he said there are lots and lots of BIG bugs, and though it is sunny today, the past few days have been very, very cold and rainy.

So...while he was gone, we wanted to do something special for him to let him know we were thinking of him every day. The girls and I decided to tackle something we weren't sure if we could accomplish in just one week: Take on the Garage! We wanted Dan to be able to breathe easy next time he was looking for a tool, and we thought maybe he'd enjoy parking in the garage! - he's on his way home today from Canada, and we are really hoping he is surprised and is happy with what we've done. *gulp!*

So, here are a few "before" pictures:

 Note the white tall cabinets - you won't see them again in the "after" pics. :)

 ...and here are a few "after" pictures:
Haley had a great time organizing small items into these bins...

 I had fun putting the power tools in one location, and also the pool supplies found a couple shelves, too.

 Haley & I assembled a workbench for Dan, which was pretty fun to do! Moriah, Haley, & Brooke found lots of hand tools and misc items to hang from the peg board.

 If you saw in the "before" pictures the white cabinets that were on the wall, we took them down. Dan has said he wanted them gone and they were very impractical, so we replaced them with shelves we already had in addition to one more we purchased. Moriah went through all the old electronics & cables, Brooke & Haley put similar items together, and then we started labeling and re-shelving.

 We placed long items on this "long item rack" above the car. Note also the deer antlers! The black cabinet on the left side contains all the painting items. Not in the picture, but later I added a tennis ball on a string from the ceiling so the girls know when it's time to stop driving forward. :)

And the wood pieces are sitting in a rack that I built, which isn't that great. I chose the wrong casters to put on it - I should've bought heavy duty casters, but hopefully we won't need to roll the cart too often.

It was a fun project, although fairly time consuming. As a motivation, we said we would treat ourselves to new cell phones at the end of the week IF we actually could pull this off. Well, by Thursday night, we had two parking spots (hopefully Dan's Suburban will fit in that empty spot), and by Friday morning, we were on our way to Verizon!

Happy Early Father's Day, Dan!!! We love you, and we missed you!

Another use for the welding helmet....

...looking at the partial solar eclipse around 7:20 pm, Sunday, May 20th, 2012.  It looked something like this:

Beautiful Day to Stain the Deck!

Case is in his 7th day of chickenpox, so he skipped school today. Instead, he helped me stain the deck!

See Tilly? She gave birth to kittens a few days ago, and apparently thinks it's awesome to sit on and/or near fresh stained wood. There's Case's hand dipping into the can. Brooke is doing a nice job with the post.

Chickenpox

This is Case, fast asleep late in the afternoon. If you'll notice the little spots on his face and above his eyes, those are chickenpox! This is Thursday, May 3rd, and his pox got progressively worse, but today (May 8th) he seems to be clearing up. He got the vaccine for chickenpox back on 10-21-2008, which is 97% effective. Guess he's the lucky one!

Brunch

So this is the Italian Torte I made ahead of the brunch I hosted last week at our house. For the brunch, I tweeked the recipe and also made it in individual serving bowls.

These are some of my friends from Tuesday Morning Bible Study...we all serve on the leadership team for the study, so we ended our year with a meeting and some yummy food!