Borden Park

This is a favourite park of ours. It's got so much green space, you can easily spent hours there exploring. 

There are unusual sculptures like this 'dragon egg.' I'm not sure what it actually is, but that 's what we call it.

Perfect for playing hide and go seek in.

There are pretty fountains and ornamental grass gardens, nice shady spots to read a book and lots of room to toss a football. 

Even the bathroom building there is neat!! Haha! Two way mirrors make up the whole exterior, and it's really quite nice. 

This is our take on the 'bathroom selfie.' 

And of course, the playground. It's fantastic and never seems to be that busy. Perfect for monkeys of all ages. 

Plenty of spots to climb, swing, and slide.

Another great day of play!

Laurie, these are for you. It took me awhile to post them, but I loved hearing that you like our pictures  on the blog, so we made sure to take a few that day. 

Sadly, our picnic ended before I could get any pictures. With 5 kids and a playground in sight, there's not much time wasted eating.  ;)

Gracie's First Day of Grade 1

Where did the time go? 

Everyone says it flies by once your kids get into school, but wow! It has been flying. 

This little cutie was off to her first day of Grade one this week and she did so great!

She took the bus by herself to school and back (doesn't matter that I put her on the bus, drove to the school to get her off and then did the same in reverse at the end of the day...)

She picked out her outfit, helped me pack her lunch and woke up singing. 

She even spoke at her school assembly in front of the whole school with a microphone! She introduced herself, her teacher and said that in Grade one, they focus on sharing. Cue the 'awes.' 

Come on! 

What a brave, smart, funny girl she is. Chip off the ol' block, I suppose. 

:)

Layout 11!

The last layout from my kit at Treasured Memories. My kit sold out, too, so you must have loved it as well! Thanks! Apparently, there were 5 kits spoken for before they even hit the shelves! Hurray!

I love this paper. It's like a giant colouring page. I chose to paint some of the flowers with my watercolours, making a trail of colour that grew from my picture, but you could make it into anything you want!

Leave it black and white. Splatter some paint on it. Use pencil crayons, gelatos, crayons, copic markers, markers, whatever.... Pick your colours, pick your shades and make it fit your needs perfectly. 

I love this!

And I loved making this kit and creating with it. I hope you did, too. If you got a kit, show me how you used it! I'd really love to see your creations. 

Hanna Slo-pitch

What a weekend! 

We have put a team in this tournament for the past three years, but this year we played a new game. 

Slip and slide pitch. 

Mud-ball.

Sloppy-Pitch.

It was a mess!

But, it was fun. 

We had a great team and a great visit with friends and family. 

Can't beat that.

Backyard Bounty

I love our backyard this time of year! We have fantastic fruit trees that produce delicious plums and apples.

I used the plums to make muffins and we ate a lot. Plus, I chopped and froze lots and gave tons away.

My little helpers like adding the plums by hand. I full the muffin cups half full, they sprinkle plums in and then we cover them so we get a little plum pocket in the middle of our muffins.

mmmm.....

My neighbour has great sour cherries, so we picked some of them and Emma helped me wash them and sort them.

We made nutrigrain type granola bars with them and froze the leftovers to make cherry jelly with Grams this fall.

The apples this year were crazy! There were a ton and they went from nearly ripe to over ripe in the course of a weekend, so we picked two big batches almost back to back.

My helpers are always with me.... Sometimes less helpful, but always entertaining. Emma kept yelling, "I'm a robot!" and making farting noises by blowing on her bucket/helmet.

I probably got 15 bags of apples in total this year off of one tree. 

We made apple sauce, sliced and froze a bunch and did some more baking with them.  

Here's a look at some of the baking bounty that went in our freezer. 

Simple pleasures.

Layout 10

Two more layouts to go. 

For only $35 you get $50 worth of coordinated scrapbooking product that you can use to make layouts, cards or mini albums. It's so fun, to greab a kit and head to a crop or scrapping with friends and need nothing else besides a trimmer and glue. 

The month of August has passed, and with it, my month kit, but there's a new kit coming out for September. It's the perfect time of year to get back to your crafts. Stop in to pick up September's kit today and kick your scrappy mojo into overdrive!

Layout 9

Another layout from the Treasured Memories August kit that I made called Easy Livin'.

I thought these cute square chipboard pieces were cute, but automatically I saw them as diamonds dipped in gold. Not sure why, but squares seem boring, diamonds are so much better!

To get the gold-dipped look, I simply covered half of the 'diamond' with scrap paper and painted the rest with Inka Gold. 

I love the background paper. The green, ombre pattern is really great. I thought it repeated the diamond shape again, so I liked how they worked together.

I cut up a piece of white cardstock to mute the pattern a bit so the focus was on the picture and then splatter painted because it can't be completely white...

A few layers and a title, conveniently misspelled to save my e's (which I always seem to run out of), some machine stitching,  and it's done.

Almost there! The month is nearly up and I couldn't even share all of the layouts I made with this kit! 

Check out the full kit at Treasured Memories.

I made 11 layouts plus had lots of leftovers all with this $35 kit. They are so worth it! The September kit will be coming out on the first. Check into it!