Pumpkin carving

Kayla and Brian grew a whole bunch of pumpkins and they had people over to carve them. The pumpkins were perfect. Some people carved free hand and others used patterns.

The little monster is my pumpkin and the person in the bed is Aimee's.

Steve doesn't use a pattern.

King Boo is Steve's pumpkin and the bat is Hunter's.

SPOOKY.....

Our Anniversary and Picture Lake

On Sunday we had our first anniversary. After church we packed a lunch and drove up Mt. Baker. This is a popular place to take a picture obviously because it was amazingly beautiful. This is called Picture Lake.
The views on Baker are incredible and we only drove through. There are so many places to hike and so many more places to see. We are going to go again, but next time earlier in the day...
Here's to the next 75 years together and all the places we have yet to see together!

Our Garden

We have a very small garden this year but it's so much fun to be able to eat veggies that we grew ourselves so next year we are going to have a big garden.

The corn didn't taste good at all. It was really mealy. Our soil isn't that good so that could be why. Our corn plants only grew to be about 5 feet high.

We have an abundance of tomatoes and since Steve is the only one that eats those things it seems we have thrown quite a few out.

This are my favorite things that we grew. They are mini pumpkins and they are so cute. But we only planted one plant so we only have 10 pumkins. Next year we are going to plant a bunch of these.

Our pepper plant is doing really well. They are perfect looking.

1st Anniversary Vacation

On Sept 20th will be our first anniversary. The last year has flown by, I don't know where the time has gone. The first year was great and to celebrate we went away for the Labor Day long weekend. Steve picked me up form work and we headed down to Portland, Oregon where we spent 2 nights in the Ebassey Suites. It was an awesome hotel as you can see the picture with the 3 elevators. They had a wonderful breakfast every morning complete with build your omletes. Well they would have been delicous if we hadn't mistaken the jalepenos for plain green peppers! Those were 2HOT omletes. We really enjoyed it there and hope to go back some day.

On Saterday we went to a Japanese garden. everything we so green and beautiful.

On Sunday afternoon we drove from Portland to the Oregon coast and we stayed in Tillamook on Sunday night. On Monday we went to the Tillamook factory where they make all their cheese, ice cream, yogurt and other dairy products. We ate lunch there and, of course, I had to eat the grilled cheese. It was DELICIOUS! So cheesy.

Steve enjoyed looking at all the tubes and pipes and levers and nobs ast the factory.

We tried 5 different flavors of their ice cream. Bubble gum was my favorite. Steve's favorite was caramel toffee crunch.

On Sunday and Monday we spent most of our time on the coast. As you can probably tell...it was a little cold but it didn't rain as much as the weather channel said it was going to.

The coast is dotted with lighthouse, most that are still in use today.

Cannon Beach and Haystack rock.

On Monday the last place that we stopped was in Astoria. Steve really wanted to go to the Maritime Museum. It was full of boats info about all the shipwrecks along the coast.


It was so nice to get away for a few days, but it went so fast. Well now we can starting thinking about were we want to go next!

Garage sale finds

Aimee and I went garage saling on Saterday because Steve was at the shooting range with Rev. Rutgers and Hunter was working. So glad that we didn't because not only did we have tons of fun but I got some great deals. I got a few books and a few CDs. I got 2 travel book, one for London and the other for Yellowstone National Park. Whenever I find travel books I get them and give them to Steve and that way when we go on trips we will have a book on all the sweet places to go are. I also got a family fun book, which I haven't looked through yet.

I got a great deal on some toys. I got all these duplo and the wooden blocks for $1. It was a huge tub full. That's the benefit of going later in the morning. Now I have toys for when kids come over.

This punch bowl is at least 50 years old and it came with 30 cups......i just love it.

This was a pack of charger plates that had never been used. I will use these for fancy dinner parties.

And the best of all is that I got a bike at a garage sale. I have been wanting one for a while so that Steve and I could go on bike rides together so now Steve just needs to get one. It was a fun morning, I just love getting good deals.

10 month anniversary

My wonderful husband brought these for me for our 10 month anniversary. Isn't he the sweetest?

Two new parks we visited

This is Whatcom Falls, a beautiful park that we went to late in the afternoon last Friday. We didn't have near enough time to look around. There were trails and swimming holes everywhere. There are also tennis courts somewhere but the park is so huge that we didn't have time to find them.

This is on the brigde that the falls go under.

I just LOVE you!

This picture is from Hovander Park in Ferndale, about 15 minutes for our house. I only had to work a half day today so I did a little shopping and I found a picnic basket at Target on sale so that inspired me to pack a picnic and surprise Steve when he got home. I had been to this park once before but Steve had never been and it was such a neat park.

This was dessert, and it was delicious. An Andis Mint chocolate cupcake for Safeway......yum.

Our new picnic basket worked great.

Having chicken alfredo, watermelon, baked potato salad, cherries, and chips with dip.

There were gardens everywhere. This is the Hovander House, which people can tour during the day. The gardens were really nice but our camera's battery died so we couldn't take very many pictures which was disappointing but the gardens were cool. They had every kind of vegetable growing there too. They donate the food to a local food bank.

There were all kinds of animals there too, kind of a petting zoo. This is one of the bunnies and it looked so funny. He grew his own pillow:)