Stephen's Baptism!

OK, so I am looking at some of my friends blogs to see what is new in their lives, when much to my chagrin I realize that I have yet to update my own blog, and trust me a LOT has happened in the last six weeks! The first, and most important in my book, is that Stephen turned 8 on October 17th, and was baptized on October 31st! We had a wonderful turn out! Both my parents came along with one of my sisters, my grandparents, my aunt and uncle and their kids, Ryan's parents and several of his siblings and their kids, a couple of his friends from school, several good friends, and quite a few members of our ward! I especially want to thank my Mom for giving the talk on the Holy Ghost! It was a beautiful talk! I also wanted to tell Stephen and his friend Julie (one of the girls from our ward) thank you for singing a duet for us! It was a lovely service and the luncheon afterword was wonderful! Stephen, I am so proud of you for making the decision to be baptized! I love you and your wonderful spirit!

Help Raise Money for My Cousin's Daughter Who Has Cancer!

My cousin has a four year old little girl who was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia in August 2009. Her name is Taylie and she is a wonderful little girl! I would appreciate it if you would all take the time to check out her website: http://www.tayliebug.com/ ! On her website there is a blog, upcoming events (fundraisers), and a place to donate! In addition, if you post a link on your blog, your facebook page, or tweet about her website; there is a donor who will be contributing $2 per post or tweet. If you want to participate and help us raise money for Taylie please visit http://www.adashofseason.blogspot.com/ ! I really appreciate you all taking the time to read this post and hopefully posting about it too!

First Day of School

Hi Everyone! Sorry that I haven't been great about updating my blog. This summer has been a fun, but busy one around our house. (Then again when aren't things crazy at our house?) I know that I am going to be p0sting things out of order for a while, but I want to get some of the great pictures that I have taken posted. I am starting with the first day of school for Stephen and Jenny.


Stephen was so excited to be starting 2nd grade! (I know that he doesn't look like it in the picture, but I had called him back from getting into the van to take the picture and he was concerned that he would be late for school!)

Jenny actually started Kindergarten a week later. (The school has placement testing for the Kindergartners the first week of school for all the other grades.) She was so excited to be going to school! She even has the same teacher that Stephen did for Kindergarten.

I just had to include this last photo. They were in such a hurry to go to school that they didn't even give me a chance to take a picture of them walking to the van!

New blog set up for my Grandparents!

Hey everyone! I am just making a quick blog to let everyone know that I set up a blog for Grandma and Grandpa Hatch today! I hope that they will continue to update it regularly! I have linked as many of your blogs to is as I have so if you want yours linked to theirs, you will need to email them with the info, or you can send it to me and I will forward it to them. More posts (and pictures) of my own are to follow soon!

End of the School Year

OK, once again I find that I have not spent the time that I have wanted to updating my blog. There aren't going to be an pictures this blog, but at least I'm posting something! I cannot believe that another school year has come to a close! I seems like just yesterday that Stephen started kindergarten and here he is finishing first grade! What makes it even more unbelievable is to realize that he will be turning 8 in October! I don't feel like I'm old enough to have a son getting ready to be baptized and starting scouts! Someone had better pinch me so that I can be sure that this is real! (I'm not even going to go into the fact that Ryan and I celebrated our 10th anniversary on May 7th!) Well, I guess that this will be all for now. (Hopefully I will get back here soon with more posts and pictures!)

Halloween Fun!

I know that it is almost Thanksgiving, but I just had to post some pictures from Halloween. Ryan and the kids did pumpkins this year. (They came out of our garden!) Ryan would draw out several different eyes, nose, and mouths for them to pick from and then drew them onto the pumpkins. He then helped the kids cut them out. They all turned out so cute! This year Stephen was Optimus Prime (a Transformer for those of you who don't already know), Jenny was Tinkerbell, Zack was a firefighter, and Alyssa was a very adorable black cat. (None of the pictures seems to do Alyssa's little costume justice. I may have to put it on her and try to get a better picture or her!)

Mystery Squash

OK, so I know that I was going for one blog a day to get caught up, but I think that maybe I had better just shoot for one a week! I have taken so many pictures lately that the battery on the camera is dead so I will just start by writing the text while I have the time, and then upload the pictures later when I have another chunk of time.

The first blog for now is about our garden. As many of you know I had a garden this year with a friend of mine in our apartment complex. Part of the way through the summer one of the other neighbors who had planted a garden moved, so we took over her garden too. Now, due to circumstances last year at harvest, two of the gardens were just allowed to go grow wild and everything not picked was left to rot. When things started growing this spring, we discovered that we had tomato plants where we didn't plant any and a number of squash plants that were not in the locations were we planted ours this year. (Although we originally left them to grow because we weren't sure if they were coming up in odd places because we had little helpers while doing most of the planting!) By the end of the summer we had an outrageous number of tomato plants and several what we termed mystery squash. You see we didn't realize it until later but many of the vegetables that were left to rot last year had self germinated and ended up cross pollinating with what we did plant! (We planted zucchini, spaghetti squash, and pumpkins, and last year we aren't sure but we think there were at least crook necked squash, and butternut squash.) It is always interesting to see what comes of such a mix. Well here are pictures of the results! (The one in the center was actually a honeydew melon, the other two seemed to be a cross between butternut squash and pumpkin. We also had several that were spaghetti squash or a spaghetti squash, zucchini mix. They looked more like the honeydew melon though more oblong in shape.) I hope that you find the situation almost as funny as we did!