My Haircut

It's been over a year since I've gotten a haircut.  Since we're due to get some family photos taken next weekend, I decided it was time for a cut.  Since it's so hot, and my hair was weighing me down, I decided to really chop it.  Here's my before:



And here are my after pics:

And let me tell you, I feel like a completely different person right now.  Most days, it was too hot to dry my hair, so I would let it air dry.  As you can see from the before picture, it has a slight wave to it, but it never looked nice.  It was frizzy and just looked crazy.  I would then end up putting it in a ponytail.  Real sexy!  I knew I needed to get something easy to fix, and possibly even something that will look decent air-dried.  It looked nice this morning after sleeping on it all night, we'll see how it looks once I do it myself.  One thing's for sure though, I really need to get a haircut a little more often!

Mid-Summer Garden Update

So our garden is doing pretty well this year.  We’ve got five roma tomato, two cherry tomato, one yellow pear tomato, one Tigerella, and three beefsteak tomato plants.  Cool story: The one beefsteak is one that we had started from seed in the spring of 2010.  We then transplanted it outside in May.  Then, in October, we moved back into the house, in our big south-facing bay window.  We pruned it down to just a few branches.  By February, it had tomatoes on it!  Now, they weren’t the yummy, red, juicy, tasty tomatoes we got from outside in the summer.  But, they also weren’t the yucky, white, tasteless ones from the store either.  I call it a success.  Well, at the beginning of May, we transplanted it back outside.  And we have more tomatoes!  It's the first of the beefsteak to ripen.  Now this plant has been around since March 2010 and is still producing.  This is the third harvest for one cool little plant.  We’re so proud!  We plan on making some yummy salsa again this year, as it was a hit last year. 

We also had a bunch of pickling cucumber plants that produced a TON of cucumbers.  We canned 14 quarts and 28 pints of pickles, and still have tons of cucumbers left.  We pickled enough, so we’re just eating them as we pick them.   I use premade seasonings, as I'm afraid to make my own and have it still taste good.  Anyone have any good recipes?



We had thrown all of our pumpkins and gourds out our front door into the flower bed at the end of the season last fall.  Well, we have two plants that came up from there.  One is a “monster pumpkin” that we had last year with at least 6 pumpkins on it.  I think the other one is some sort of gourd.  AND we have 8 butternut squash that magically appeared in the middle of our cucumber patch.  I LOVE butternut squash.  I did a ton of baking in the last year, replacing pumpkin with butternut squash.  Boy is it yummy!  Pie, cookies, cupcakes, and muffins….drool…

Hot, hot, hot!

Summer time is in FULL swing here. We've been in the 90s and even in the 100s (the highest our outside temp reached was 104!) for over a week now, so the pool has been our best friend. And luckily, all three boys now officially love the pool.

C (who's 5) began the season out in the pool swimming around with his floaties on. Now he is leaping off the diving board and spending as much time as I will allow him in the pool.  He loves the "crocigator".

H (who's 3) began the season not wanting to touch the water. I would bring him in with me and he would clutch to me in fear. Now he'll jump into my arms in the pool, and spends his time cautiously swimming around. He's not a strong swimmer yet, so he wears his lifejacket.

And G (6 months) loved the pool from the beginning, and floats around like a cool dude in this infant floatie.