Freedom Rock

Yesterday we drove out to see the Freedom Rock.  Since 1999, a local man has been painting a HUGE rock with patriotic images all the way around the surface of the rock.  People come from all over just to see it.  He has amazing talents.  Sometimes he receives ashes of a fallen soldier and he mixes them into the paint he uses to paint the rock.  So moving and amazing to see.

Here are some pictures of this year's rock.  Every year is different.

This was my favorite image showing the translucent soldiers by the tomb of the unknown solder.

Here is a closer look...

This is a picture of the five Sullivan brother who all died together, because they were all stationed on the same ship during WWII.  They were from Waterloo, IA, which is where my husband Joe grew up.

The upper part had a glare from the sun, but you can see the image in the picture above.

Here is a better picture of the top part (without a glare)...

The rock is about 30  miles from where we live, and out in the middle of nowhere.  Joe was skeptical that anyone else was visiting the rock and just as we were coming over the hill he said "I wonder if anyone else will be there?" and then we popped over the hill and he got his answer.  There were probably a hundred or so motorcycles and cars in the lot across from the rock.  I just laughed and said, yeah I think so.  :)

After the rock, we went to my sister Dawn's and swam in her pool.  Here is the twins Annie and Ally and their dog Regis Philbin.  :)

 Here is Hope...

Hope was busy out in her little pool this afternoon and later on tonight we took Reilly for another walk.  She also found her lost camera today, so she took her camera along and took pictures of flowers, etc.  It was pretty cute watching her try to get the perfect shot.  She really wanted to get a picture of a bird but they kept flying away.  :)

I forgot to share this last week.  Hope and I went to the mall and as we were leaving he saw two parental geese and their babies walking through the parking lot to the pond.  It was pretty cute.  

Ok, I will finish up with a few cards.  Since this is Hope's last week of school I will share some school related cards I created using the Little Yellow Bicycle scraps.

 I hope you had a safe Memorial Day.  Thank you to all that serve (and their families) our country and protect our freedoms!

Darla

A Great Day to...

...go to the Farmer's Market and a short bike ride.  Yep, we got up this morning and headed downtown to the HUGE farmer's market.  I only made it one time last summer, so I hope to make it back more this summer.  We had a lot of fun!

Hope wanted a snow cone, I had a dutch letter and Joe had a beef stick for a snack.  Then before we left we decided to have a BBQ sandwich.  YUM!

I found this really cool booth with repurposed items.  This was a coffee table with a door opening to a shadow box storage area.

I love the HOME houses on the table and the window too.

Here is another table.

Here is a picture to show just a small portion of the entire farmer's market.  If you are ever in the Des Moines area in the summer/fall time add it to your list of things to do on a Saturday morning.

We brought our bikes along and drove to this bridge that goes over the river.  Of course the pony and unicorn had to come along too.  :)  I think they enjoyed themselves.

You can hardly see them, but that is Joe and Hope going onto the bridge, and in the far background is the state capital building.

Here is Hope and me on the bridge with downtown behind us.

This is along the path too by the river, the Chinese garden.  It looked pretty good considering a few years ago it suffered a lot of damage during the flooding in downtown.

Are you still with me?  This is a VERY picture heavy post.  :)  We have had a lot going on!

Hope lost another tooth at school on Friday.  Yep, that is two in just as many days.  Joe and I laughed because again we didn't realize she had any teeth that were loose enough to come out.  

Who is this crazy looking kid????  Hehehe!

She is outside playing in the back yard with her friend Anna.  Here is Hope in her new swimsuit.  

Well, I think I am done sharing the events of the past few days.  :)  Still here??????

If you here for crafty inspiration I got something for you too...

Thanks for stopping by!  I hope you have a great Memorial Day weekend!  Don't forget to honor those in the military this weekend every chance you get.  I want to drive out to the freedom rock tomorrow or Monday.  I will share pictures of it here, so check back again!

Darla

Bits of Hope...

Last night while watching the American Idol finale...when Neil Diamond came out and started singing Hope said..."Wow, he's old!"  Joe and I cracked up and said we thought he looked pretty good for his age.  I guess the older you get the better everyone looks as they get older.  :)

We had a little neighborhood girl drama this afternoon, but hopefully they will all make up and play together this weekend.  I just seems to be when one girl comes into the mix her and Hope just seem to disagree.  I wish I could say it is like when Hope and her cousin Annie "fight" and then 10 minutes later act like nothing happened.  Oh well, they will all get through it, but could be a long summer since Hope will be in the school program and the rest of the girls are home playing together all summer.  So when she gets home they will probably have been playing together all day. Maybe one or two of them will want to do something different.  Keep your fingers crossed.  :)  Girl drama...so not ready for this!

Hope came home this week and wanted to buy some songs on iTunes.  After a few days she finally earned the songs...Firework by Katie Perry and Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO.  Cracked me up that these are her new favorite songs.  I guess we have moved on from YMCA.  :)

Hope's art area is ALWAYS messy (I think she gets that from me) so last night I bribed her...I told her I got the new purse die cut and if she would clean up her table she could use it to make some little purses for her friends.  Within 20 minutes the table was clean.  Now keep in mind, she probably has no idea where to find anything if she wanted to, but it is off the table.

So I showed her how to put the first one together and off she went.

Here are two of the purses she  put together and she was going to give one to each of the neighbor girls with some sweet treats in them.  I think she is going to make some for her teachers before school is out too.  She loves making crafts like this, so I knew this would be a fun project for her to make.

I don't know if you can read this or not, but this was on my local scrapbook store's blog.  I thought it was pretty funny and had to share.

And now some random shares...here are two more cards I made using the MME kraft 6x6 paper pad.

The first one is actually a birthday card, with the sentiment inside.

This one could be used for graduation, etc.

Well, that is it for tonight.  We have one more week of school and then I have a second grader!  Oh my!

Darla

Do wishes come true????

I had a very busy weekend.

I got to go to a scrapbooking retreat at my church on Friday and Saturday.  Then Hope stayed at my sister's overnight so Joe and I could go to a company retirement party.  We met them at church and Hope had a VERY important question...she wanted to know if we could go to the mall after church and buy these awesome shoes.  They were silver and sparkly with a bow and had heels!  I told her we would see, and she even offered to use her own money.

I had too many late nights in a row, so when we got home from church I skipped lunch and went straight to bed for a LONG nap.  Hope must have had a long afternoon and night with the twins because she even laid down for a nap too.  That NEVER happens unless she is sick or REALLY tired.

So after we both woke up, she started crying and it was because she didn't get to go buy the shoes and what if someone else got the shoes before she did....boo hoo hoo, sob sob sob!

I looked up the mall hours and looked up the shoes on-line to see what they looked like.  They were very cute and I had another item I needed to take back to the mall, so off we went.  We got the awesome shoes, a new bathing suit and cover up and on our way to the car we dropped a few coins into the wishing fountain.  On the way to the car I asked her if she made a good wish and she replied that she just asked for a wish not anything specific, but if she thought getting a unicorn would be a pretty good wish to have granted.  I just had to giggle.  I asked her where we would keep it and she said in the back yard, like that is where everyone would logically keep a unicorn.  :)

Next we headed to the grocery store.  Of course she had to wear the shoes right away.  :)

They are a bit big for her but she can grow into them and the strap helps them stay on for now until she does.  She is oh so "ooh-la-la".

She had to wear them to dance tonight too, since they happen to be the only shoes she could find to put on (except for the perfectly good pair that were sitting right next to them).  :)

This is her ballet costume for her recital coming up in a few weeks, and oh look, there are the shoes again!  I have a feeling we are going to see a lot of these shoes in the future.  :)

Hope lost another tooth (it had been almost the entire school year since she had lost a tooth) on Friday at school.  It happened in the morning and I was coming to the classroom for Spanish class observation time in the afternoon.  She was so excited for me to get there and show me her new smile.

About a week ago she came home and wanted to go get some clay at the craft store.  Well, we didn't have time to do that, so I encouraged her to get her play dough out and create something with it and it would dry up hard like clay.  So she went to work on some fairy furniture.  She created a bed with pillow (the white piece), lamp and chair for the tooth fairy to use when she visited us next.  The funny party about her losing a tooth that day is that i had no clue she even had a tooth loose enough to come out.  Once she gets it just a little wiggly she works it til she has it out.  Silly kid.  Anyway, so when I got home from scrapbooking late on Friday night, the tooth fairy had already been there.  And she must have really enjoyed her fairy furniture because she left fairy dust all over.  ;)

We found this in the back yard tonight after watering the flowers.  We think Joe created it.  :)

Well, if you stuck it out this long now I finally have the Mother's Day card I gave to my mom to share with you.  I finally got it to her this week.  Better late than never, right?

My mom likes to sew and quilt, so when I saw this pattern on the MME papers, I knew it was perfect to cut out and use a a card.  With just a quick sentiment stamped on the front, two pearls and tied a ribbon in a knot and added it a wooden spool button and it was done.  I think I also cut out a small banner and placed it over some text that didn't really go with Mother's Day.  It all blended quite nicely and no messy glitter because it was already on the paper.  Love that!

Well, I am off to finish up a few cards from the weekend.  I will share all of that in due time.  Later!

Darla

A tall tale...

Just before I was expecting Hope's bus to arrive I received a text from joe that he got a message the buses were running about 20 minutes late.  So a little while later hope jumped in the front door and started telling me a WHOPPER of a story...

The reason the buses were late was because just as school was to let out it was put on lockdown by the local police.  This part I know for a fact, but what follows is hope's version of the drama (in bits and pieces)...

mom, they locked the doors of our classroom and (her teacher) was locked out, but someone's mom let her back in...

(A boy) was in the bathroom and he saw the whole thing...the robber came down the hall and got to the middle of the school and that's when the cops came running in and caught him...(not true)

I saw the cops put the robber in the car...then later told me she was in the classroom and didn't see anything, but so and so saw it and said it was all true...(not true)

At one point in the story she mentioned that one of her friends was missing and she was worried she had been kidnapped because she wasn't on the bus home.  Then I mentioned that her mom went on the field trip today and she probably went home with her.  Her response "oh yeah".  Later I got a text from the mom and she said it was scary being in the school and she was pushed into Hope's classroom when the lockdown happened.  Hope's teacher started calling the other classrooms and found her daughter in her brother's classroom (she has started to go to the pick up lane).

The really weird thing is when I was in elementary school we took a field trip to living history farms (the same place she went today on her field trip).  On that trip we ended up being locked down in a picnic shelter because a motorcycle in a high speed chase had wrecked and the rider ran into the living history farms land area.  The other strange thing is that yesterday her school had a lock down drill, so I guess it was all fresh in their minds of what to do.  :). The mom I talked to said they handled everything perfectly during the emergency.  Good job teachers and school staff!    

Now for the rest of the story...

What actually happened is as the end of school was approaching the local police was responding to an altercation/stabbing in the neighborhood and as a precaution put the school on lock down so all the kids would be safe. I know it doesn't have the juicy drama of hope and her friends' version, but I prefer the minimal drama version and ending.  :)


Ok, speaking of school, here is a school layout of Hope's first day of school for first grade. I love the Little Yellow Bicycle paper line for this layout.  I wasn't sure at first since my daughter's outfit was pink, but it worked just fine.  Here is a full view of the layout...

The chipboard bus had a different number on it, so I sanded it off and used the glitter/transparent star with number stickers to add her actual bus number.

I love the banner title and the journal spot to add details of her class and year.

I love how I added the journaling for this page.  I worked on the spacing and kept printing it to make sure it fit before I used the actual paper.  The bottom of the page was a partial cut using a spellbinders die to only get one side of the die.  It turned out pretty cool.

Using the same paper line, this is a single page layout of Hope's last day of Kindergarten.  This was actually a make and take I made from CHA (last summer when this line came out) and I held on to it until I found the right pictures to use on it.

I added handwritten journaling on the ruler papers

...and used letter sticker for the title and the layout was finished.

Ok, well that is enough excitement for me for one day.  Have a good one!

Darla

 

You are cordially invited...

...to Hope's "kid" wedding on the last day of school.  Oh boy!  So it all begins...

Apparently her previous husband to be broke up with her, so now her boyfriend is Dillon.  She had told me a few days ago that Dillon was now in love with her.  And today she came home and announced her and her fiancé were going to get married.  Her exact words.  I didn't even know she knew what the word fiancé meant.  :)  She also said he would marry her no matter what!  And he got in trouble today for kissing her.  Yikes!

So she said they have it all planned out to get married on the playground on the last day of school.

I just had to laugh because it brought back a LOT of wedding memories of when I was a kid.  There was an old tree stump in the middle of the playground at school and it was kind of hollowed out and had a step on one side of it.  So it was perfect for someone to stand on/behind like a minister and conduct a wedding.  There were a lot of pretend weddings throughout my elementary years.  Such fun memories.  :)  I wish I had a picture of that old stump.

A picture of Hope will have to do...

After the discussion above, I decided now might be a good time to get out the flower girl dress I wore at my sister Debbie's wedding.  I was just going into Kindergarten when I wore it.  It was almost identical to my sisters wedding gown with a small train and everything.  I LOVED this dress.  So we snapped a few pictures of Hope in the backyard tonight.  The little bride to be (SOMEDAY) but not anytime too soon!  It is always fun to pretend.

Well, since my mom hasn't received her Mother's Day card, I will wait to share it here.  I will in a few days after I have the chance to give it to her.  I have a few other cards on their way in the mail too.  Sadly, I make lots of cards, but am not very good about getting them in the mail.  :)

So I will share a baby project with you that I gave to a friend just last week.  I bought a cute little dress that was inside the gift bag.  The large Melissa Francis silk flower on the bag is actually a hair clip.  I hot glued it to a hair clip and then clipped it to the bag as a decoration that could be removed and worn.  When the flower is removed I placed a button and ribbon underneath so the bag can be used again and not look like it is missing something.  :)

Here is the card I made that went with the gift.

I love the Papertrey Ink die I used to make this card.  So cute and they go together so quickly.

I also made a few other version of this same card...

Alright, that is it for tonight!

Going to the chapel and she's gonna get married!  In about 20 years (maybe)!  :)

Darla

Goin' Fishing

The cousins are here for a sleepover tonight, so Joe took them fishing.  On Ally's first cast she caught a HUGE fish.

Considering she was using one of the kiddie poles, it was almost half the size of the pole.  

Too bad she was the only one that had any luck tonight.

Another niece graduated from college today.  Congrats Lauren!  Your card will be on its way to you this week.  :)  Here is a sneak peek of it.

This was a SUPER easy card to make.  All of the elements on the card were part of the printed paper.  The only things I added was to stamp the sentiment and the two gems on each side of the sentiment.

I made another cards like this for Hope's birthmother, but made it a Mother's Day card for her.

I forgot to take a picture of the card my husband sent to his mom, but I will share the one I sent to my mom tomorrow (hopefully I find the time to make a post).  :)

Well, I am off to rest my back.  I think I pulled a muscle while cleaning the house today.  Yet another GREAT reason to not clean.  :)

Have a great Mother's Day!

Darla