Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Shaun and Sara's Wedding...Finally!

Well as some of you know I shot my first wedding a couple of weeks ago for my cousin Shaun and his new bride, Sara. I have had the pictures sifted through and the dvds sent out for a bit but I hadn't gotten the montage done yet. Well, it is done now and uploaded onto my photography site. For those who are interested you can check it out.

www.mandolinphotography.com

Friday, June 13, 2008

Water Water Everywhere

Well I am sure that anyone who watches the news is aware of the intense flooding happening in Iowa right now. While Jim and I were out of town this past weekend (will post on that soon!) we received a phone call from Emily that water was pooring into our basement. After many frantic calls we determined it was coming in through the old well line that had not been capped off. We hurried home Sunday through tornado warnings and ominous skies to begin work on our basement. To cut a long story short, we got the line redirected to the drain eventually, and we got the carpet cleaned and dried and some was garbage, we had two spots where it was coming in on the wall that we have controlled and as of now it is pretty much dry. Let me tell you it was a ton of sweat and tears to get here.

The rest of Des Moines is still in rough shape. Thank goodness they made improvements after the flood of 1993 because it is truly saving their butts. Other areas of Iowa have not been so lucky. Here are some pictures I took last night downtown, and this is not even nearly as bad as it is supposed to get, this is them being prepared only.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

And a Pinch To Grow an Inch

Five fives, two dimes and a nickel, a mere quarter of a century....that's right folks, I am 25 years old. Today I not only celebrated my birthday, but the last day of school for our kids. I don't know which was harder, being as much mid-twenties as I can ever be, or saying goodbye to the kids at work....oh ok, it was saying good bye to the kids. Although our program does run through summer my school loses a fair amount of kids that do not come to the summer program and that will be going to different schools next year. We lose all of our 3rd graders since the school only goes to 3rd grade and we lose an awful lot of kindergarteners who open enroll at our school for the full day kindergarten.

To celebrate the 3rd graders last time with us we go out for pizza, to a movie, and to Dairy Queen. We had our annual night out last Friday. We saw Chronichles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and it was very good. It was a long movie however, we didn't drop off the last kids until 11pm! They thought that was pretty cool, I was a bit tired at my meeting on Saturday but it was worth it. We certainly will miss them!

As far as my birthday goes, I worked...a lot, closing up and packing up for summer! Jim did surprise me at work this evening, he brought me 24 roses, one for each year I had been alive and then a card that played my favorite band, Rascal Flatts, to kick off my 25th year he said! I thought it was sweet, nothing like walking out the door to see your husband standing with a ton of flowers!

Well, here's to kicking off year 25 and a rockin good summer!

Sunday, June 01, 2008

How Ironic!

Well, here I was just bragging about how rockin' awesome our yard is when we get a knock at the door confirming that inded, our yard is amazing. We were just sitting here relaxing when a representative from the Downtown Urbandale Neighborhood Association came to announce that we had won the Lawn of the Month Award! How Awesome!!!


The Blooming Creation We Call Our Yard

One of the coolest things Jim and I have experienced this spring is the total transformation of our yard. We knew landscaping was here but when we moved in it was covered with snow. This spring we cleaned out all of last fall's gross-ness and got everything trimmed and ready for growth. Since then, everyday has been a surprise!

This is how the yard looked after we got it all cleaned out (April 6th)



Here is is just a couple of days later, you can see the green sprouts!(April 10th)



Here it is a couple of weeks later (April 23rd-30th). You can really see the early spring blooms, the crocuses, tulips, and daffodils.






My favorite this spring were these mini daffofils


This one was taken May 4th


May 7th-more beautiful flowers





It was about this time that I decided to start mulching, so these next are of a half mulched yard. I have about 2/3 done now and if it would ever stop raining when I had free time I could finish the rest! These were taken May 15th RIGHT after I got that mulch down. You can see how much the plants have grown though.





And in a culmination, this is our yard today. Quite beautiful if I say so myself. The flowers in front would now cover Jim's face if we were sitting like in our picture above. The grass picture is where our grass meets the neighbors grass and I like how ours is darker (pretty sure its Kentucky Blue Grass right Dad?)