My Baby Girl is 2 Years Old

Can you believe that my baby girl is two years old? Sometimes it seems like just yesterday that I was in the hospital with her. And now we're preparing for her second birthday tomorrow. Time sure does fly. And little ones grow up entirely too fast!

Here are a few memories from the last two years.
Happy Birthday Isabella!

Completed bench

Here's Ken's completed handiwork. Isabella loves it because she can climb up and sit and look out the window. I think he did a pretty good job on it.

Need a bench?

So Ken decided that we need to have a bench under the front window in our living room. Linda has some extra pressboard laying around, so he used some of that. He was very glad that there are plenty of tools at his disposal at my parents house. Between Dad's table saw and Mike's compressor/nail gun, it wasn't too bad to build it. Its still in the garage over there, but will be at our house in the next couple days, so I'll post a picture then of the finished product (most likely minus cushions).

Here's a few pictures in process. And of course, Isabella had to try to help. Then she ended up covered in sawdust because she thought playing in the pile of it was quite fun.











Oh and we cracked open a jar of pickles, they're good.

Pickles anyone?

So we went to a Farmer's Market yesterday and one of the stands had pickling cucumbers for $1 per pound. That's a really good price. So I bought about 5 1/2 pounds of cucumbers. This morning I cut the ends off and cut them into spears and put them into ice water. Evidently soaking them in ice water for up to 4 hours makes them more crisp. Who knew? Then at lunchtime, I cooked up the brine and packed cucumbers into pint size jars. Once the cucumbers were packed and the brine poured over them, there were 10 pints of dill pickles to be processed in the canner. Luckily they don't process very long. So after another little bit, I have 10 jars of pickles sitting on my counter just waiting to be eaten. But you're supposed to let them sit for at least 24 hours before trying them. We'll see if I can wait that long. Oh and just a note, I found out that the padded shelf liners work great to put the hot jars on rather than using a towel. Here's a picture of my handy work.



I'll let you know later how they turned out.

A Particular Child and Saving a Little Money

So we've decided that Isabella is a very particular child. Especially when it comes to music. We have discovered that she does not like the things we want to listen to most of the time. For example, we can be in the car and have one of her kids CDs on and she's just fine. If we turn the radio off, she's fine. If we change the radio to a station that we like, she has a fit. We have, however, recently learned that she will listen to Christmas music (yes, even though its July) and that she likes Josh Groban. Go figure! She is a funny child.


So I've gotten into couponing lately. Unfortunately it takes a lot of work, but we've been able to save quite a bit and haven't had to skimp on many things either. I have my lovely little coupon organizer that is chock full of coupons. Some are from the circulars in the Sunday paper, but a lot are printed from a few coupon websites. The ones I have found that are good are coupons.com, couponsuzy.com, and coolsavings.com. Safeway, the grocery store that I primarily use, will also let you "clip" coupons onto your shoppers card. Its so cool at the end of checking out and you start seeing everything come off on the monitor. Like today, I saved $50. I am so proud of myself. I'm not one of those fanatics though that goes to a billion different stores to do my shopping. I don't have the time or energy and its just not worth paying that in gas for me to do that. I check out all the sale ads and go to the store that has the most deals that I want/need. Its not worth it for me to make a trip to a store for 2 things. Plus, I prefer to go to the stores that double coupons up to 99 cents. Just if you decide to get into couponing, remember that you can't shop for just a week at a time, you have to shop what's on sale and what you have coupons for.

The 4th of July, A New Room, and A Cousin's Wedding

These are going to be in reverse order beginning with the most recent.

Yesterday we were able to attend the wedding of Tammy's cousin, Melissa, in Mechanicsburg, PA. We drove up and changed clothes at Tammy's aunt and uncle's house and then went to the church for the ceremony. The Ceremony was very nice and sweet. The reception was held at the Officer's Club on the Naval Base there in Mechanicsburg. It was beautiful. The pics from the wedding are in reverse order as well. Isabella was a dancing fool.

Isabella fell and was a little upset....at least, until a Bon Jovi song came on.


Dancing with her Daddy


What a cutie pie!


Isabella and Caleb (Tammy's cousin, Chris's son)


Melissa dancing with her Dad, Rich


Isabella trying to sneak onto the dance floor


Melissa and Adam dancing


We're kind of trying to start potty training. I just thought this picture was funny though.


As we were working on getting stuff organized and cleaned out in the two small bedrooms, I went to check on Isabella to see what she was doing and this is what I found.


The craziness on carpet cleaning day. All the stuff that was still upstairs ended up in the Master Bedroom and the little bit of a hallway upstairs.


Ken preparing to clean some carpets in the small bedrooms (yes he was still in his pajamas)


Doesn't everybody sit and watch TV in a big fancy hat?


This isn't a desk?


On the 4th of July, we had a big barbeque at Linda & Mike's and did fireworks that evening. It was Mike's last weekend before he deployed, so we made the best of it. It was a lot of fun, even though it was very tiring.

Playing in the sprinkler with her cousin's on the 4th of July


Just a funny picture


Olive anyone? She wouldn't eat it but she liked putting it on her finger.