Check out this site for some cool Christian T-shirts. They are very creative and different from the usual t-shirt. They would make great gifts for someone who needs encouragement, or for a Christmas gift for someone who has a favorite scripture. Their website is wildolivetees.com.

Quilt for Aunt Johnie

Aunt Johnie asked me to sew a quilt for her that she'd cut out in quilting class. When I got the directions, I thought oh man what did I get myself into? It looked really hard. But, once I got started, it wasn't very hard at all. Here are some pics of me making the quilt.

It required lots and lots of ironing.













This is the almost finished quilt. I added a sunflower border around it, but I forgot to take a picture of it after I completely finished. When I was done, my mom, sister, Mema, Gram, and I took a little trip to Santa Anna visit her and give her the quilt.

My Garden

My husband is so sweet and talented. No one ever taught him to build or work with his hands, but he has taught himself and is getting better and better at fixing and building things every day. Nathan built me a garden a couple of weeks ago, it is so cute. I can't wait to pain the fence and plant things in it. Hopefully I will get some things to grow. I didn't have any luck with my pumpkins. They grew into big plants, bloomed, but never produced a pumpkin. I found out that another lady in town did get pumpkins, but she had to cross pollinate them herself. Guess I have to learn which flowers are male and female so I can try that next year. I guess the flowers have to be opposite sex.....anyone know? Anyway, I plan to plant a winter garden in the next couple of weeks. Any suggestions on what to plant?


My hunny workin hard






Love it! It will be so cute once its painted and planted and a sign hung from the entrance.

NO more TV!

I was talking with Dr. Little about vaccines the other day and inevitably, autism came up. It seems like the statistics for autism are growing every day. Just last year the odds of your child having autism were 1 in 166. That number is now 1 in 150. It is very scary to me that by the time I have kids, the odds of them developing autism are great. Everyone has their theory on autism. I know a lot of parents want to blame it on vaccines so they refuse to vaccinate their children. In doing this, they not only hurt their children by not providing them any immunity to vaccine preventable diseases, but they are also leading to strengthening of diseases that were once nearly irradicated. I learned the other day that in a new study done on autism, the rate in unvaccinated kids was slightly higher that in vaccinated children. That's not to say that choosing not to vaccinate your children leads to autism, in fact it was such a small margin that they called the risks equal in vaccinated and unvaccinated. Researchers are now theorizing that watching television is what leads to autism. A correlation to TV viewing and increased autism cases was found by the autism rate rising in the 80's, around the same time TV's and VCR's became widely available. It is though that the viewing of brightly colored two dimensional moving objects interrupts the brain's interferes with the visual processing center of the brain which is developing at this age. Researchers have also linked excessive television viewing in toddlers with ADHD. So no television for the little ones! In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends absolutely no television viewing under the age of 2. I think that television has led to health problems in adults as well. People are spending more time indoors, becoming sedentary, and not using their hands and minds as God gave them to use to use. So I think it would do us all good to get up off our butts and go outside. Engage in physical activity and mental stimulation. It will keep you younger longer and much healthier and happier. To learn more about autism go to autismspeaks.org. I would not use that as my only sourse of information in making informed decisions about autism risks, however. The site is not comprehensive in talking about theories on autism triggers.

David's Graduation Party

Saturday my sister, my mom, and I threw a graduation party for my little brother. I can't believe he's old enough to have graduated from high school! We ate fried chicken, played horse shoes and washers, listened to good music, had good company, and the boys played basketball. Here are some pictures of the fun-





The boys had fun playing basketball... and only hit a couple of people with the ball.















Nathan played the guitar for us. He's so talented







The Fam










David got a jar of quarters to do his laundry....we'll see about that. He's never started a load of laundry in his life.















Here is David's gift card tree. You'll see more of it later.






Pitchin washers...... simple yet so entertaining.


Playing horseshoes was a lot of fun















Remember that gift card tree?? Nathan pullued up the tree that those branches came off of later that night. It just came right out of the ground. We later decided to replant the stump under the carport to hand things on.
Nathan handed the tree off to Nancy and she held a tree that was about 3x's taller than her.