Love. Not like. Love:)

When we were in Colombia adopting Athena in 2007, we bought her a beautiful emerald since Colombia is known for their emeralds. We will give it to her some day when she is old enough so she has a little piece of her birth county from the weeks that we spent together there before returning home with her. We wanted to do something for Alton also, though we weren't completely sold on getting another emerald for two reasons. First we thought it might be better for each of them to have something different than each other for their special thing from the trip. Second, aside from putting it in a tie tack we couldn't really see what he would do with his emerald. Well, we kept our eyes open each time we went out and about & to the markets the whole time we were there. When we got our sentencia and knew we only had about a week left, we were about to just give up on finding something original for Alton and we were going to go ahead and get him an emerald too even though we weren't super excited about the idea for him like we had been for Athena. We went to the markets one last time. While we were shopping we stopped an an artist's stand with piles and piles of canvas paintings. I told him I was looking for something with trees or flowers or something 'naturey'. He dig through the piles and pulled out one kind of abstract painting of some very colorful trees with falling leaves and one more realistic looking one with purple flowers. We were going back and forth deciding between the two and then I put them side by side to compare and once I saw them next to each other, I wanted both of them. I thought they had just enough complementing style and color that they would look awesome hung side by side in identical frames. John still teases me that I ruined any chance he had to do any bartering because of my excitement and insisting on having them both no matter what:) So, after carefully rolling them and rigging up a travel container made out of puff cans duct taped together the paintings made it home safe and sound. We took them in to be professionally stretched and framed. That, BTW will cause you a bit of sticker shock if you've never had that done before! Yowza! But it was so worth it!!! They turned out gorgeous! Of course they will be Alton's some day, but until then they have a home in our master BR where they look amazing:) This wall has been blank since we moved into our new home 2 1/2 years ago and I think fate made us keep it blank because it knew we would be bringing these gems home from Colombia some day. Of course the snapshots here do them little justice, but it gives you an idea of how awesome they are:) I lovelovelove them!

I knew it was only a matter of time....

With a sister as his only sibling and the fact that our good friends who we have over for playdates have all daughters, I've been just waiting for this to happen. Sorry Alton, but I'm thinking this is only going to be the first of many, many times that you end up being dressed up like a girl by your silly sissy and her gang:) (although this time Athena was working alone)

He was definately a good sport about it though and hammed it up for me when I found him and ran to grab the camera!

Horse riding lessons?

I took Ena and Alton to the zoo on Monday. Alton did good and the elephants seemed to be his favorite:) They were being really active and whipping dirt everywhere. Being that Alton also loves to get dirty and throw things, this was right up his alley!

I usually let Athena choose one extra activity at the zoo. She usually chooses to ride the carousel but this time she wanted a pony ride. She loved it and was beaming the whole time! I've been considering looking into horse riding lessons for her for something fun to do and I've read that it can help kids with self-confidence. I'm thinking maybe this could help her with her separation anxiety. Well, after seeing her so proud of herself and beaming the way she was on that pony, I"m for sure going to start looking for some horse riding lesson options in our area:)

This bush has been going gang-busters blooming this year so I wanted to take some pictures of the kids in front of it while it's in full bloom:)

Fun lunch flower bouquet

Each flower is a round cracker topped with either a raspberry center & string cheese half circles for petals or a string cheese circle center & grapes for petals. All of the stems and leafs are celery:)

Lemon Blueberry Scones

I made a batch of my lemon blueberry scones the other day. I gave several of them to friends and was asked again by a few people for the recipe so I thought it would be a good time to post it on here:)Lemon Blueberry Scones

1 cup sour cream

1 tsp baking soda

4 cups flour

1 cup white sugar

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp salt

1 cup butter

1 egg

1 cup dried blueberries

Glaze

3/4 cup powdered sugar

1 T melted butter

1 T milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

juice of 1 lemon

zest of 1 lemon

1. In a small bowl, blend the sour cream and baking soda and set aside.

2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place silpat sheets on cookie sheets. If you don't have silpats, lightly grease the sheets.

3. In a large bowl combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, cream of tartar, and salt. Cut in the butter. Stir in the sour cream mixture and egg into the flour mixture until just moistened.

4. Dump the dough out onto a floured surface( if will still be crumbly). Knead it briefly, folding in the blueberries as you knead.

5. Once it comes together into a nice dough, divide the dough into 2 balls. Flatten each ball into a 3/4 inch thick circle and cut each one into 8 wedges. I use a pizza cutter. Place them about 2 inches apart on the baking sheets.

6. Bake about 15 minutes until lightly golden & then transfer to racks to cool and glaze.

7. After they are cool, mix together the glaze ingredients and drizzle the glaze over them. You may need to add a little more powdered sugar or milk to the glaze to get it just the right consistency for drizzling.

Let's go summer!

Someone had a fishing date with daddy this weekend:)John got up early, way early for a Saturday and got everything ready and packed up for his and Ena's fishing date. He woke her up at 6:15 and they headed out! She was so excited she jumped out of bed. Ena is NOT a jump out of bed kind of girl. She's normally more of a 'drag a grumpy, crabby, kicking bear out of bed' kind of kid. They had lots of fun, caught a good number of fish and stayed out for almost 3 hours:)

Next we headed out for city wide rummage. I think I did pretty good and got all of this stuff for under 30 bucks. What does one do with that ginormous bag of ball pit balls? Fill a kiddy pool with it in the living room and jump in it of course!
After naps (which BTW, a bonus of Ena's early moring fishing date is that she took a 3 hour nap!), Alton had fun watching John cut the lawn. Check out that awesome tippy-toe action:)

So cute!