seven.years

The numbers:
7 years.
3 adorable girls.
4 career changes.
2 houses.
5 vehicles.
5,779 digital memories of our life.
So many laughs, hugs, kisses, and I love yous. I wish I had a number because it would be impressive. :)

summer.time

You know it's summer when your husband writes "I LOVE YOU" with the green beans from the garden :)

 

blueberry.days

Note to self....
Even if you don't think your 1 year old will be walking around the blueberry farm, don't put her in white shorts when you go picking for blueberries. She might just get tired of sitting while you pick and want to wander around (and eat 1/2 a pound of blueberries).

Not only do one year olds wander, they also fall down a lot....and plop down (unbeknown to them) on juicy blueberries. And, from the picture above, we can all be pretty sure that whomever named the blueberries "blueberries" didn't know what they were talking about.

Clearly, they should have been called "purpleberries."

We had so much fun picking blueberries with our cousins. We picked almost 6 pounds! We ate some, baked some blueberry muffins, and froze the rest.

I think we ended up with 11 bags of these for the freezer:

I love summer.

 

seriously.july 22

It's summer....
we're playing at the park.
we're enjoying the outdoors.
we're hanging with our friends.
we're swimming at the lake.
we're sleeping in.

It's summer....
we're not blogging so much.

Seriously.

 

amelia.love

What can I say? Is she adorable or what?!!! Needless to say, she loves chocolate animal crackers.

 

trail.camera

You might want to get used to the trail camera updates. Josh likes these posts a lot!

Starting with a couple of updated pictures of "Target":

His rack has grown so much in just a week!

Moving along to our little fawns who have been startled by something off to their left:

Back to eating...

Aren't the spots on their backs awesome? I love how they aren't random. They have a little trail down their backs!

 

trail.camera

These are just for Josh...

Josh got a trail camera for Christmas and he finally hooked it up a couple of weeks ago. He is sooooo excited about all of the great pictures that he's been getting of the deer on the property.

We've really enjoyed seeing all of the fawns with the does. We even have a couple of pictures where there are two fawns with a doe. So neat.

Here is one (the farther one) that has a large target on his side:

The deer meat in the freezer is dwindling quickly these days. I typically don't make statements like this, but is it hunting season yet?

 

beeping.sound

This morning our land line phone was dying. It beeped its low-battery beep while we were eating breakfast.

I said, "Where is the phone? I heard it beep."

Meredith replies, "I don't think it was the phone. I think it was my nose."

Phones and noses don't typically sound alike, but maybe they do to 4 year olds.

running.story.1

The couch to 5K program that I trained with was pretty great. If you've ever considered running, it is fantastic! It is a walk/run program where you run for so many minutes and walk for so many minutes so that you get walking breaks within your training program.

So, one Sunday afternoon I was going out for a run. It was a run 8 minutes/walk 5 minutes/run 8 minutes. It was the farthest I had run all at once up to that point. I was feeling pretty good with my 8 minute run.

Once I was through the first 8 minutes, I started to not feel so well...stomach grumbling and such. I was glad that I had 5 minutes of walking to recover for a bit and start feeling better. Unfortunately, the 5 minutes was not enough.

As soon as I took my first 3 running steps to start my second 8 minute stretch, I really had to #2. (Sorry if you don't like blog posts about #2s...you can quit reading now if you're one of those people.) So, I stopped running and continued walking for fear that I wasn't going to make it back in a cleanly manner.

The problem at this point was that I was 8 minutes (running) away from home. I was afraid I wasn't going to make it back home even if I didn't run. The running was jostling my insides a bit too much, and the walking was slowing me down. What to do, what to do?

I tried (unsuccessfully) to begin to run again and that lasted about 2 seconds. I made it back to the driveway, but that's still a quarter mile to go. Who chose to live so far off the road? (Not mentioning any names....(cough) JOSH.)

I was miserable. One of the most miserable times that I've experienced in my life....seriously. It was borderline worse than labor...not more painful, mind you...just almost as miserable.

Thankfully, I made it home...barely. I took a few days off at that point to recover from the traumatic experience.

Any of you runners care to share running bathroom stories? Anyone else care to share regular bathroom stories? You know you have one.....maybe you don't want to share it, but you do have one. :)