July Journal -- The Monkey Quilt

Something crazy has happened here since March. I have made or finished five, that's FIVE quilts! If you know how slowly I have finished quilts in the past, you'd be amazed.

I have made three little quilts that are to be used as covers for car seats. (I posted a picture of the first one here.) I found the pattern on the Moda Bake Shop website.

More pictures to come over the next week or so!

I just love the fabrics I chose for this one. The line of fabric is called Grow With Me by Moda.

July Journal -- The Flowers

I thought for today's post I would show off some of the pictures of flowers Hubby and I took while we were in Colorado.

July Journal -- The Wrap Up Photos

A few more pictures from our week in Breckenridge, Colorado. 

One evening we booked a ride on this carriage. It was very enjoyable even though it was raining. The driver told us some history of the town. I love to learn about the history when I am in a new place.

(At this point I would like to add in more photos of our carriage ride... you know, photos of the horses up close, photos of old houses and churches around town .... that sort of thing. But right after this shot, the battery in my camera died. I had no clue that it was low. Guess I should pay more attention to that, huh?)

The day after the gaNG hiked up that 14,000 foot peak, the girls and I went to a spa to get pedicures. It felt so good on the hikers' feet. (And mine from the stress of waiting and fixing lunch...oh, I kid!) 

The day we were to start the drive home, Hubby and I took a detour and went for a drive up in the mountains.  Look what we found!

It was sooo gorgeous it about took my breath away. (Well wait, maybe that had something to do with being at 9,700 feet!)
 

 It was such a beautiful morning.

I decided that I am going to buy this house and live here.

Can you imagine the view every single day??? Wow.

July Journal -- The Anniversary

Happy Third Anniversary to our son and his beautiful bride!

They are trying to look tough...

We just love their sense of humor and how they seem to really enjoy being together. We are blessed to have them a part of our lives.

July Journal -- The Mountains

I just love the mountains. I love the majesty of the mountains. I love the non-humidity of the mountain air. I love the smell of the mountain air. I don't love that the mountain air has a lack of oxygen. I had a difficult time adjusting and didn't really feel good until the day before we left. Sigh.

We rented a house in Breckenridge for the week.

 It was just great to all be together. We took turns cooking meals, we read books, we watched very little TV, and we played a couple of games. (Ever play Pictophone? It's a pictionary version of telephone. So funny!) Some people went fishing, some went hiking, some people went kayaking and some rode horses.

(The kids thought we were funny to take so many pictures....)

Hubby and three of the kids went on a couple of hikes (the fourth kid wanted to fish). Someone had the brilliant idea to hike a 14,000 foot peak. (The following pictures are from my hubby's camera.) (I don't want to give the illusion that I climbed a 14,265 foot mountain peak.)

They were blessed with seeing a Ptarmigan...

(or was it a Mountain Chicken??)

 ...and some mountain goats with babies!

Meanwhile, back at the rental house, I was fixing lunch. I made this spicy pulled pork from Pioneer Woman and it was very, very good! The hiking gang was a couple of hours later getting back than they estimated and I was trying to not panic. (I didn't.) My son-in-law and I were passing the time watching a rodeo on TV. Real bonding time. :)  Thankfully, the gang made it back in one piece, snarfed lunch, took showers and then crashed for naps.

That evening, we walked across the street to see a movie. Low key is what those hikers needed.

Like I said earlier, I just loved being able to all be together I am thankful everybody was able to take the same week off for some family time. Thanks to you all!!

July Journal -- The Road Trip(s)

As I mentioned yesterday, we just got home from a 3,300 mile road trip. Well, technically, we had three road trips back to back to back.

The first part of our time away was going to Kansas to attend the wedding of a friend of our daughter's. Our daughter was a bridesmaid. The bride and groom invited the parents of all the bridesmaids. It was fun to meet the parents of our girl's friends. Quality people. Every one of them.

I opted to bring a bit more stylish but small purse to the wedding, therefore, I did not take my camera. Bad choice. Here's a pretty bad camera-phone picture of my girl and her hubby:

Lesson learned. Next time opt for a bigger, less stylish purse, or leave the over-sized wallet behind so I can have a decent camera with me.

After church and lunch with our son and daughter-in-law, we drove all the way to St. Paul for a week's worth of meetings for hubby, and a week's worth of shopping and eating out for me. Hubby was busy from 6:30 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., but the week was quite relaxing for me.

When hubby wrapped up his meetings on June 22, we jumped in the car, drove back to our house, dumped some dirty clothes, repacked, mowed the lawn and jumped back in the car and hit the road again and headed west.

Now the adventure began.

We got lost only and hour from home. Yep. We did.

We missed a detour sign and somehow ended up driving around on gravel roads for thirty minutes.

Not our best moment...

After we found our way back to the paved road we really wanted to be on (with the help of GPS) we consoled our selves with chocolate:

Chocolate always helps, doesn't it? :)

Thankfully, the rest of the drive went much better.

Until we tried to find a hotel for the night.

I don't think we'll ever try the old let's drive until we get tired and feel like stopping method again. We ended up driving halfway across Nebraska, 145 miles more than we had wanted to because all the hotels were full in Omaha, Lincoln, and York. We finally found a hotel at 12:30 a.m. Needless to say we were wiped out.

The next day we had a lot more driving to do and this was our view a good part of the day:

At the end of the day we were rewarded with this view:

We spent a week with our kids in Breckenridge, Colorado. Tomorrow's post will be full of pictures of our fun week.

July Journal -- The Introduction

Whew!

We've been gone from home for 16 days. It's been a great 16 days and hard to come back to reality. Hubby is looking forward to a few really super busy weeks at work, so I need to get myself busy so I don't miss him too much (and don't stress him out too much with whining"I'm booored"). Aside from some quilting projects I have on the docket to work on, I decided to challenge myself with more blogging.

Today, as we were wrapping up our 3300(!) mile trip, I thought about how to blog more. At first I thought I would post a picture-a-day. But I think I will just challenge myself to blog every day. I will write about our trip, entertain you with my "deep" thinking and probably some days the post will just be a picture.

So... get ready for thirty-one days in a row of blogging! (I hope I still have more than three or four readers out there.)

And to give you a teaser of some of the earth-shattering blogging ahead:

Mmmm... I can smell the mountain air, can't you???