A Little Sewing, A Trip to the Park, & Some Gardening

 Well, believe it or not, I actually got a little sewing in the other day.  Very little.  I made a cover for the mattress of the portable crib from some cute fleece I had on hand. I had to sew two pieces together to get one long enough, but it works okay.

 The mattress is an odd shape, so I had been just using a blanket laying in the bottom of the crib.  But one of the daycare kids I watch likes to pull it up and the mattress pad isn't very sturdy. I was afraid he would end up tearing it.  I made this similar to a pillow sham - with deep pockets to tuck in so it wouldn't be able to come off.  I guess it might better be described as being similar in shape to a book cover.

My daughter has been doing the Insanity dvd's, and the nine year old decided to join her.  Most nights he does most of the program with her.  He beat her on the initial fit test, but I bet she'll smoke him next time.  She's been very faithful to do it each night after working two jobs.  She pretty much works from sun-up to sun-down, with an hour break between the two, then does Insanity.  I think that qualifies as insane ;)

 The kids were thrilled the other day when we went to the town park and found a whole bunch of new equipment.

 They doubled the number of swings - which I new they were going to do because I'm the one who requested that they do that.  This is a handicap accessible swing, labeled for 2-5 year olds, but it's pretty big - and you can't be too overweight to fit in there.

We now have a merry-go-round too, with the center post so you can turn yourself.  It doesn't go very fast though.

And the other bouncing dinosaur at the park near our house must be such a hit that they decided we needed two of them.

Here's a random tidbit.  A friend gave our four year old a new stuffed monkey at church yesterday.  It squeaks when you shake it.  This kid is enthralled with monkeys.  I can think of five that he has now.  Maybe we ought to paint the boys' room green and call it the jungle ;)

And here is a deer in our back yard.  There is only one small opening where they can get into the yard now that we have the playground area fenced off.  I was thinking maybe I could get some flowers that the deer like to eat and put them back there ... but no.  Apparently not.

Don't you love how the stump (on the right) makes it look like there are two deer facing each other?

We found another fun strawberry.

My flower gardens are starting to grow.  Not sure if some of these plants might actually be weeds.  We inherited a partially planted garden box.  Guess we'll see.  We have two curved garden spots on either side of the entryway, then a long straight one in front of the bedroom windows, which I still need to add to.

The oriental poppy I planted is already starting to bloom :)

 I bought a hanging basket too, thinking there were hooks, but they are tiny little hooks that look like they were used for Christmas lights.  I'll get a hook up later today.

We have Iceland poppies growing all over the place too.

Then there is this ...  not sure what to call it.  Some sort of climbing vine is growing on our fence.

I guess I should say it was growing, as this is just dead vines.  Do you see the hidden birdhouse?

How about now?

Here is a close-up of the dried flowers.  Any idea what this is?  Keep in mind we live in the mountains of Wyoming - 7,200 ft. elevation, so it's got to be something very hardy.

 Here are the new shoots.

I'm anxious to see what this will become.

Anyway, I pulled all the old vines off and my nine year old helped get them all in a trash can.  See the new shelter we put up?  It's one of those carport covers.  We put it up on the side of the house so we have a place to park bikes, the four wheeler, and all the many strollers out of the weather.

Here's the end results with the vines removed.  You can see the shelter just past that.

And this is inside the shelter.  So you can probably tell we've been busy :)