Duck Ponds, Dirt Eating and Decorating Dilemmas

 Time flies when you're having fun!  On Monday I got the clearance to get rid of my crutches (and I may have experimented without them Sunday) so now I'm just in the walking boot for a few weeks.  With all the baby wrangling needed in this house it's quite a blessing to only be on the boot and to be able to stay by myself with the kids.  The weather's been gorgeous (though snow is forecast this weekend) so we've been taking advantage of it while we can.  Today we headed to the duck pond.  First however, Matthew tried to climb trees:

 Then we picked flowers:

 Not surprisingly, Catherine climbed all over me:

 But her favorite part was hanging out in the sand, peacefully watching the ducks . . .

. . . or not.  Catherine is a sand thrower/eater/lover.  Papa would be so proud of her, even after a good soak and scrub tonight there was still dirt I couldn't get off!

 And when she wasn't doing that she  was crawling over to the dock to cruise around:

 Or watch her brother run!  Matthew and one of his friends love to stand next to each other and scream "ready! set! go!" and then run off screaming.  Apparently he doesn't mind it as a solo game either.

 Matthew was helping Catherine put the sand somewhere other than her hair.  What a nice brother he is.

In light of hosting a party last week and having a few other plans coming up, I decided it was time to finally hang something on the walls.  We've gotten a good bit of our old art hung and I've gotten motivated to get some other projects done.  Here's Matthew showing off part of a project that's not quite finished but hopefully I'll have mostly done over the weekend:

 Here's the shadow box I finally put together of our wedding albums (and/or to keep the dust off the legos because they're a PITA to dust!)  There were so many great pictures of where we'd be in 10 years from our wedding album but I chose this one done by one of James' former co-workers because it's pretty close to our reality at 6 years if you just pretend one of the kids in the drawing is June :-)

 Our craft room is full of boxes and boxes and boxes like this and though I'm overcautious and judicious with grandma's stuff, it's time to get busy loving or leaving some of our clutter. 

While I love our high ceilings throughout the house, decorating them intimidates me a ton!  Large scale artwork is crazy expensive even for the cheap stuff and truthfully I find a lot of it ugly.  So, like any good modern woman I spend inordinate amounts of time on Pinterest and I finally decided to act on some inspiration, combining my need to declutter with my need to decorate.  First I took our wedding cards and made this big canvas.  I love that it's kinda abstract from afar, but up close it shows a bit of the eclectic nature of our friends/family, is slightly romantic and includes some good quotes about mawwiage and all that jazz.  I also learned I severely lack the stay-at-home-mom gene that just looooooves modge podge.   It's a giant pain in the butt and I'd rather never do it again.

 In the things that came from grandma's desk I keep moving around this envelope of pressed butterflies (which crack me up because they have little fake paper bodies glued to them and I'm dying to know where grandma or great-grandma got them!)  Anyway, I couldn't bear tossing them but what was I going to do with a stack of plastic and butterflies?  I finally took the plunge and mounted them in a shadowbox and I love it for being meaningful, super-cheap and semi-classy (maybe that should be my personal slogan) and can't wait to hang it up. 

That's all the news thats fit to print in Watsonville.  Hopefully next week I'll have an update of crazy things I'm hanging on the walls (shag carpet anyone?)  :-)