While we were out...

While Eric and I were in Palm Springs, Eric's mom came to stay with the girls. Whenever Mae (and Bruce) is here, amazing things happen in our home. A TV will magically appear mounted on the fireplace, a new dryer will show up in the laundry room, a messy cupboard or drawer will mysteriously get organized...it is fantastic! Anyways, this magic happened yet again while she was in our home. And you will be amazed, as were we, when I tell you what Eric's mom was able to accomplish in our home in the 5 days we were gone (while taking EXCELLENT care of our two active little girls!).

#1: She build the girls a playhouse. It is so adorable, and is still providing the girls with hours of outdoor fun! She and screwed and drilled and glued and shimmied and maneuvered the whole thing almost entirely by herself. Impressive!

#2: She bought and installed for us a new garbage disposal AND a new dishwasher! Oh. My. Gracious. I. Love. Them. We once again have a fully functioning kitchen.

She also had the house clean and tidy, the laundry done, a few new cupboards organized, and probably a few other things that I haven't even discovered yet!

She's amazing, huh. We sure think so, and so do two little girls who miss her (AND Papa) with all their hearts on a daily basis. Thanks Mimi. We are so blessed by your kindness and your hard work. We love you!

My Garden

Gardening brings me so much happiness!! I love it. The more I do it, the more I love it. My yard is slowly becoming entirely edible. Here are some pictures, as well as some info I want to remind myself of for next season...

Little tiny cucumber.

Reminder for next year:

Plant plenty of seeds straight in garden (don't need to grow indoors), water daily to feed their shallow root system.

The garden, messy but lovely.

Strawberries

I planted the offshoots for the first time.

Reminder: Next year plant the shoot in a pot and when it roots, transplant it to a different part of the yard.

New place for my tomatoes

So far this is a good area. Lots of slugs, but good sun and soil.

Yum.

We planted an apple tree this year, and this is our first (and only) apple!

Reminder: Next year early spring plant another fruit tree in the front yard.

Front yard garden. Remember the huge tree that fell? Here's what we replaced it with - three blueberry bushes, an apple tree, and 4 kinds of squash!

Jenna in her garden. She is so proud.

I put those blocks in the ground and put one as a chair so that she can be in the garden without accidentally stepping all over her produce.

Finally, Palm Springs...

Well, I don't feel like I can possibly sum up our trip to Palm Springs in a blog post but I will try. This will give you a little taste of our time and my heart...

The reason we went to Palm Springs was for a conference called Resolved. The idea of the conference comes from Jonathan Edwards, a strong Christian man who at the age of 18 'resolved' to live more like Christ in 70 very specific resolutions. The conference is for youth (yes, we are still youthful) aged 18-30 (okay, we are barely youthful). We were joined by 4,000 other believers in Jesus Christ to learn more about God and move forward in our faith, and to ourselves RESOLVE to follow Christ more. I can't sum it up, I really can't. BUT, I will try. What happened over all was two things. First of all, my view of God was MAGNIFIED. God is so much bigger than my little brain allows him to be. And this Almighty Creator of the universe is working ALL things (good and bad) together for GOOD. To God be the glory. The second thing that was impactful was the worship. It was absolutely heavenly to sing LOUD, HEARTFELT praised to God with 4,000 people. It was powerful to sing with that many voices, hymns that are so full of truth about Jesus and what He did for us. Amazing. Eric and I have made some changes in our life, in our marriage, in how we are raising our children. We are inspired and were reminded in a huge way that as we serve God we are having an eternal impact and being used by God and it is the best most peaceful place to be. And I want my life, our life to reflect that truth.

Anyways, if you are still reading, I commend you. You can listen to the resolved conference online now. And you really should. Piper, Mahaney and Lawson were my favorites. At least listen to the two Piper sermons. You won't regret it :)

Palm Springs airport

Well, here we are, right now (we have a laptop with a little iphoto feature that I am on), in the Palm Springs airport waiting for our flight home. It has been an amazing time at the Resolved conference. It was refreshing, relaxing, encouraging, challenging, fun, amazing, I could go on and on. I'll share more later so come back!

Our little buddies

These two pictures pretty much sum up the past couple months of watching the Fredrick boys...

It has been a privilege and blessing to care for these two cutie pies. The girls and I will miss the extra laughs and fun that came whenever Josh and Caleb were here.

6 Swags!

Here is yet another opportunity to sign up with Swagbucks and get some bonus bucks for doing it through me! In case you don't know, swagbucks is a search engine, just like google, that you use to find websites or products or information you are looking for. The great thing about Swagbucks is that it rewards you for searching. All you do is search and every once in a while you will be rewarded with a "Swag Buck". Once you have enough of these bucks, you can trade them in for lots of different prizes such as amazon.com gift cards, starbucks gift cards, etc etc! And if friends sign up through you, you get a bonus buck for every buck they earn. That is why I have so many right now!

Let me just tell you what I am in the process of purchasing with my swag buck rewards.

A new garbage disposal!!

Ours broke about a month ago. We thought we would be fine without a disposer but it has not been good. The sink clogs and it makes the dishwasher flood and it is just gross. Anyways, we decided we would invest in a new one, found one on amazon.com, and are in the process of trading in our swag bucks to buy it! WOOHOO!

So if swagbucks sounds like fun to you, sign up today to get 6 bucks today! Click on the box to get started...

You will get three swagbucks just for signing up through me. Then click on the big gray box that says how many swagbuck you have, and enter the code MEGANSCODE (case sensitive) for another three bucks! Enjoy :)

Growing up

Our kitchen is growing up :) I found the best garage sale of all time the other day and got a beautiful new kitchen table! So, we went from this...

To this!

It has three leaves and six chairs, so we can host more people! It is so beautiful and we feel very blessed!

Here's a close up of the pretty flowers on the table.