August, first half

 Nathan's workbench making progress. Definitely an improvement from the floor!

It is nice to see the floor of this freshly painted room. If only the beds and tops of furniture where also tidy!

It isn't just Daniel that heaps things on beds and furniture--Evelyn's side of the room is looking equally heaped up. I guess I should just be focusing on the floor and enjoying it's bareness. :p

Oh hey, there are dirtbike motor pictures on my phone. When this happens, I know that Nathan has been borrowing my phone to text pictures to Grandma to show to Grandpa to help him solve a particular problem he has run into. Grandpa always has time to help out, and he always seems to know how to deal with the latest snag.

Matthew usually does the mowing now...but Nathan is still in charge of the maintenance of the machines. Which I certainly appreciate!

We went for a family walk one day. I don't even remember the occasion. Was there a holiday in August? Did Philip take a day off just for a break?

The trail we found was a bit disappointing in being kind of short...not worth returning to in the future, but it was fun to explore it, and it was long enough for an afternoon walk.

Reading outside in the shade on a summer day. Such a way to spend the summer.

And if it isn't enough to have toys all over the floor...get a new Lego catalogue in the mail and there are kids all over the floor drooling over it. Yup, right in front of the door, or right in front of the stairs.

We found out that we can no longer buy Red River Cereal, our previous "go to" breakfast dinner for our camping trips. Good thing I was looking early to stock up on supplies and not scrambling in the last few days...so we had to brainstorm ideas for lightweight filling breakfasts. We came up with scrambled eggs with bacon and hashbrowns. We could find affordable hashbrowns online and bacon is nicely available as bacon bits, but the eggs required a dehydrator...we have fresh as can be eggs to start with! I bought myself a dehydrator and if we get cracking with the eggs (haha) we can get enough ready in time.

Oh, did you buy ME a new appliance? Matthew got "his" eggs going in the dehydrator and soon we had a batch running practically every day. There is only one tray for drying liquids, so we could only fit about five eggs at a time. We did it outside because it's kinda noisy, and I really don't like the smell of eggs.

Nice relaxing summer days.

Matthew was overdue for a haircut. Which I was happy to give. The hair clippers were not as happy, strangely enough.

Melanie and I came across this cute little guy while going for our "daily?" walk down our road. A cute little guy.

Hopefully he didn't get run over. Maybe he is a newt? We were planning on finding out what he was, but never did get around to it.

Melanie got commissioned by a friend of mine to make a necklace.

With very tiny beads. She worked hard at it. But didn't have the right type of string/thread.

A friend who moved away to Peterborough came for over for a few days stay. We had a lot of fun keeping her girls busy.

They spent a lot of time in the pool. And playing with our toys.

I got lessons on Cameroonian cooking. It really is wonderful how they just go by feel and taste to make everything turn out. But I can't remember so many details and want to right out a recipe so that I can repeat it later! So yummy!

Melanie's necklace project looked like fun...so the girls ended up pulling out other beads/elastics and did their own jewelry projects...but not with such tiny frustrating beads. Melanie ended up drying her thread with glue so that it would go through the bead holes more easily.

And a while ago Nathan got his learner's drivers license. I have a chauffeur anytime I want a ride somewhere. It's quite nice sitting in the passenger seat.

He prefers to choose where we are going though, so to Princess Auto we go. Actually, he is usually just driving us to church and back. He really hasn't had much variety in places to go. Since we hardly go anywhere!

The corn is getting closer to being ripe. And so it is getting picked every night. By the greedy raccoons.

Melanie helped me fry up plantains. They were really good! Almost as good as my friends!

Colouring time.