Is the iPhone worth it???

Grrr! My Blackberry is a huge pain in the butt! It's old and has to be re-booted about 5 times a day (not exaggerating) in order to send and receive texts, emails, twitter feed (very important : D), etc. I'm up for a renewal and the only thing keeping me from getting a new phone is the $200 price tag of the iPhone. I think they seem really cool, but $200 cool? I have a 160 gig iPod classic that I don't really use and I have an iPad that is freaking awesome and I love which I am constantly using and I can also use to Facetime. So do I spring for the iPhone, which I imagine I would probably love because it's a touch like my iPad or do I just spend $35 and get a new Blackberry. Thoughts??

Hope all is well, as always : ) XOXO -Amber

p.s. if you haven't tried Facetime you should, it's really cool!!!

Gardening ups and downs

The garden is in full swing!

We've got an heirloom moon and stars melon that's doing great!

The okra are struggling, but we've finally got seven plants so hopefully it will pick up a bit.

Early Girl tomatoes

Heirloom Black Russian tomatoes

Sweet 100's

Roma Tomatoes

Heirloom Green Zebra Tomatoes

Heirloom Brandywine Tomatoes

The heirloom Black Russian tomatoes grow very interestingly, the blossom end is on the side of the tomato as it grows.

This is a bit of a conundrum, our Roma tomato plant appears to have sweet 100's growing on it. Is it possible that they are cross pollinating each other.

Our beans are doing GREAT!! I almost didn't plant bush beans this year because of how bad they did last time I tried but I'm so glad I did!! We would have enough green beans to feed a large family on Thanksgiving if everything continues to grow at the pace we're at now : )

Our squash are doing okay. We've got baby round zucchini and yellow summer squash that are actually producing. Our pattypan squash plant is small and I'm not sure what's going on with it. I've fertilized it and am just going to wait it out I guess. My blue hubbard squash is getting big but there are no blossoms just yet. I've never grown a winter squash before so I'm not sure what to expect. From what I can tell, they aren't perpetual producers like summer squash so I'm not worried.

The Japanese eggplant is doing great!!

Hope all is well!! XOXO -Amber

Happy 10th Birthday Goose!!

I can't believe my baby girl is 10 years old!! The past decade has been wonderful with my little Gelsey Goo. Am I still allowed to call her that since she's not really "little" anymore. She is turning into a beautiful and poised young woman and I am very proud of her. For her birthday celebration we got dressed up and had a dinner/dance party at home. Our stay at home dress up parties are some of my favorites and I think I'm not alone in that. We rocked out to the Aly and AJ station on Pandora, had hors d'oeuvres and broccoli cheddar soup for dinner, and danced our little hearts out.

What kind of birthday cake do you make for a girl who doesn't like cake?? A sundae bar : ) I think it's kind of funny that Gelsey doesn't like cake. I really dislike frosting (at least the store bought kind or that nasty stuff that comes on store bought cakes) and when I was a kid everyone always thought I was so strange for scraping all of the frosting off of my cake and just eating the rest. Gels is pretty decided in her tastes already as well.

Gels was also pretty happy with all of the gifts she received. Since it was her 10th birthday she got a cell phone and she was pretty jazzed about that. She picked out the LG cosmos touch which is a perfect phone for her. She also got a new Kindle that she was pretty happy about. Overall, it was a super birthday!!

Hope all is well!! XOXO -Amber

Happy (late) Easter!!

We had a great Easter!! We took our pastors advice and went to the 11am church service as opposed to the 9:30 which we normally attend. The extra hour and a half gave us time to really relax, sleep in, leisurely hunt eggs, and talk about the shock and joy Mary and the disciples must have experienced on the first Easter morning. Sadly, we've attended several funerals in the past few months and we just tried to contemplate the joy and confusion we would feel if any one of our friends were alive again. It's weird to consider but I'm sure disbelief would be rampant so it's easy to understand where some of the disciples were coming from when they originally had doubts.

We don't ever do anything huge on Easter, like cook a ham or have family over. Instead we had brats, deviled eggs : ) and coconut cake.

The thing I had up my sleeve was Bible covers for the girls. I always struggle with the commercialism of Easter. Because I have children; eggs, the "bunny", and all of that are a requirement in my house. I thought I would try to at least balance it out a little bit by making something pretty they could put their Bibles in hoping that they would maybe keep their Bible on their nightstand or equivalent and hence pick it up more often.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Easter!! XOXO -Amber

I Spy....

Hope all is well!! XOXO -Amber

Good Times for Jill's B-day!

This is just one of the things we did yesterday to celebrate Jillian's birthday. We spent a couple of hours shopping and we had a great time playing in the backyard and cooking cheeseburgers on the grill. Jillian is 12 now and continues to make me proud everyday! I Love You Jill!!

Food and Stuff (original, I know)

We've been doing a little bit of experimental cooking around here. Nothing crazy, just recipes that we hadn't tried before. The favorite was this Fruit Pizza which I found on one of my favorite blogs, Fly through our Window. The girls didn't really like the name, they thought I was making actual pizza with fruit when I told them it was part of dinner BUT they let it go once they tried it. It's delish! I also had TONS of plans for what I was going to make with all of those juicy oranges that we had. I zested them and juiced them with that pitiful little wooden handheld piece of crap in the picture (I bought something more suitable the very next day). Then we ended up just drinking the juice! We couldn't help it, one sip and we were hooked. So orange creamsicle jelly will just have to wait until next time : (

Lastly, I made Nigella Lawson's Toad in the Hole from her new cookbook. I'd heard of this dish but never really knew what it was. When I was reading through her new book, Nigella Kitchen, and realized that I had all of the ingredients I had to make it. I am so glad that I did, it's really tasty! I can't believe how easy this is to make also. It's basically sausage made into patties (or cut up I suppose is more traditional) fried for a minute or two in a bit of oil and then topped with a popover batter and tossed in the oven. I thought it was pretty funny how looking at the finished product tells you how this dish got its name.

I also tried out a co-op that is available locally. I got all of this produce for $15 which is kind of a steal. The only drawback is that I had to be there at 7AM on a Saturday and was therefore sneaking out of the house trying not to wake anyone up at 6:45 on our only sleep-in day. I'm not sure yet if I'll do it again as not all of the produce has been great. The one thing I do like is that everything is locally grown, we'll just have to see if I actually use everything.

This camera shy girl is turning 12 in three days!! Yes, I said 12!! Where has all of the time gone?

We've also been enjoying as much time outside as we can get. It's still beautiful here for hopefully another month or two so we'll just keep at it until we can no longer take the heat.

Gelsey taught Frank how to hopscotch, pretty hilarious if you ask me!!

Sorry for the brain dump, it's been a little while since I've been on here I'd built up a backlog of stuff. Next time I'll give updates on the garden : ) Hope all is well!! XOXO -Amber