Now A Family of *gulp* Six.

While it has been an unplanned minor catastrophe at our house, it really couldn't have happened at a better time. Truly: I wanted to clean out the cupboards downstairs. We needed to put everything into plastic tubs and had just been putting it off. We had been putting it off for months, but we just got our reimbursement check from my daycare account. So we had money to pay the cleanup crew! After 10 years in this house, we finally built a garage. So now there's a place to put everything from the basement. We had been talking about moving some things around in the laundry room and putting a different type of flooring in. Now, we can definitely do that. In fact, we can adjust the flooring in the office area, and truly clean out all toys like we had been daydreaming about. It's practically a blank slate! So blessing always come from tragedies. I'm just paying attention to which toys the kids miss and which ones they don't, so some may just never make it back in.... And...

I always loved that Pooh song. Piglet gets washed away... much like our basement. Now before I go on detailing our minor trauma, I am well aware that we are blessed and blessed again - that we only had 3 inches of water in our basement, that we have the finances to cover it (although painfully), and Doug has tomorrow off to deal with the cleanup. However... Wow, has it been raining. And more, and more. Yesterday's took the cake. The volume that fell in just an hour or so flooded the sewer system of my town, therefore forcing water back up into people's homes. In a neighboring town, main roads and intersections were closed due to flooding. Many buildings were closed because of extensive water damage today. So our 3" was nothing. Except... the carpet & padding. The floor molding. The couch. The laminate flooring in the office area. Storage area. Everything soaked. The amusing part, according to Doug, was watching the boys' aircraft carrier realistically float across ...

Just wanted to document this somewhere. Birds we have seen at our feeders: Blackbird Red-winged blackbird Chipped sparrow white-throated sparrow Cardinal Mourning Dove Black-capped chickadee (Robins, obviously, in our yard) Oh yeah, that hawk that attacked another bird once Doug's favorite is the chickadee. I like them too, and the cardinal. Charlie seems to like the blackbirds, but he calls them starlings. He and Roman like to scare the mourning doves off. I have recently been interested in the white-throated sparrow though, because they look odd - brown bodies, with black-and-white stripes on their head. Anyway. Back to your regularly planned surfing.

An oxymoron, no? It is near impossible to be a scrapper and to be up to date at the same time. There's always a side project, or an idea bouncing around your head, or the sheer volume of pictures to contend with. Last year I decided to forgo Project 365 and focus instead on "The Monthly": doing layouts by month. I can choose how many for each month, stick the shots in a template, and by the end of the month they are ready to be paged through. I also picked 8.5x11 size because it's easier to sit with it in your lap. It worked so well for 2010 that I am doing it again this year and am very pleased. I just finished April - take a look! It's a simple matter of digital photos sorted by date, templates purchased at Designer Digitals designed by Cathy Zielske , and the color-dropper in PSE. About one hour, & I had 4 layouts done. Hooray!

Here in Michigan, it's hard to tell what season it is somedays. We can go from 70s to 40s in a day, or like yesterday, 60s to 40s when the wind blows just right. It's been rainy too, but not the April-showers kind. It's been the rain-that-could-turn-to-sleet-at-any-minute kind. Today, finally, it feels like Spring. Upper 60s, cool breeze, just right for playing outside. Spring around our house means busy weekends. Roman has started Spring flag football so has practice and games. Doug has turned his attention back to the grass (or lack thereof) and I start dreaming of a relaxing outdoor area. My brother will be working on the latter - we hired him to design a space for us now that the whole thing is trashed from the garage-raising. Charlie, always an outdoor kid, wants to spend every waking minute outside. He is the type that can wander around outside for an hour, amusing himself with sticks and mud. He is working on making friends with Jumpy, our squirrel - they sat and sta...