Tea With Stephanie

I finally managed to get photos of Alaric in his webelos cub scout uniform. My mom had taken photos but I thought they were unrecoverable. However my darling husband did a good job of finding them on the SD card so here are some photos. This was from the night before scout camp at Alaric’s first wearing of his uniform. He went with my Mom to a scouting event where they had a police officer and a K9 unit do some demonstrations. It was fun.

My handsome boy all dressed up and ready to go.

Just checking out the police car.

I do not have any photos from scout camp. However Devin and Alaric had a great time and Alaric is very sure he wants to continue in scouting now.

My surprise flower that I still don’t know what it is. One stalk was pink and the other a delicate light yellow.

The front bed after I cleaned it out and moved the tree in the center from its previous place in the corner nearest the front door. It was growing sideways, it is much better looking now.

The very healthy oregano, with chives on its left. Unfortunately the basil and parsley really did not fair well. Some pretty petunias in the birdhouse box on the fence.

Our spiral of succulents. The top kettle was mothers and the rest were mine but empty.

Our extremely healthy and happy tomatoes. Seriously never had tomatoes ever do this well before. I think I have a combination of containers and sun in the right spots. You cannot quite see a really pretty planter box on the right hand side of the chairs.

This is my hanging basket out front, Mom helped choose things and planted them, they turned out VERY pretty.

This past halloween was the second year that we have let the children go trick or treating. I had a few simple rules for their costumes, 1 They had to be creative and 2 They had to be cheap or homemade. This is what the end result was.

Treanna as a Jedi Knight. She originally wanted to be Shaak Ti but struggled with the time to get my help making the head part. I told her we would concentrate on the jedi part of the costume as that would be our fall back plan. Thus:

Of course you cannot see her awesome hair do (a leia-like roll around the head like a crown), or her riding style boots and other small details that make the outfit. She has her Dad’s purple lightsaber in hand and a back up hanging from her utility belt.

Alaric as the 9th Doctor from BBC’s Doctor Who television show.

Yes that is a sonic screwdriver prop. His cosutme is so dark you really cannot see how neat it turned out. He chose the typical v-neck sweater for his top and has slacks and oxford style dress shoes. The coat was the hardest to find but I did find it second-hand and he thought it was perfect (which is all the counts). I really wanted him to be the 10th Doctor but did not want to spend $70+ on a pinstripe suit!

They had fun and still have too much candy left over.

This seems almost like a dream.

Especially when just this last week I took this:

While I am excited about November, Summer seemed just like yesterday.

Tomorrow I shall post Halloween costumes!

The children both seemed to enjoy the Bento lunch. Honestly in some ways I found it easier to make and get ready than the standard lunch. I think part of that was just that it was fun and I had stuff for Bento. I did not have everything needed for the standard sandwich, cookie, carrots, and some sort of cracker/chip lunch.

Treanna has Hello Kitty stuff enough for 2 different days. She is quite happy with the sheer amount of pinkness she has.

Alaric however is using other things. He liked the size of his sister’s boxes but could NOT tolerate the Hello Kitty. Not that I blame him. We have tried it with the sandwich keeper containers from Tupperware and those so far have worked out pretty well. However after looking online I could not really find a box that he really liked that was not a lot more money than I was prepared to spend. So as a trial I bought one of the HK boxes in blue and tried taking off the HK part. It worked suprisingly well. With a little fine wet/dry sandpaper and running water I managed to get the character off the top with only a little effort. After it had dried I used some colored permanent markers and made a small turtle design on the top. He was quite pleased with it when he saw it Friday morning.

So as you can see they are interesting to look at a good size and hold a lot of food. The ones on Friday held baby carrots, extra roast beef, rice, roast beef stars and cheese stars with some olives for color on the rice for the top layer. The bottom layer held lemon jello, green grapes, watermelon circles, and vanilla sugar wafer cookies. They had a little plastic spoon for the jello and a small pick to eat the fruit with. The children say they have had plenty of time to finish and have not gotten teased at all. I like it as somehow it seems easier to get a good balance of foods into them. I have been liking them enough that I even went and bought me a green hello kitty bento box since it was only a dollar. I figured having an easy way to pack me an appropriate lunch couldn’t be all bad either. I am still waiting for the interesting container I got for myself to come from  Tupperware but then I will have 2 different containers for myself for lunches.

I don’t know that I talked about the release of Harry Potter 7 and events surrounding that.

First off we did go down late to the big Borders store in the Redmond Town Center. I was amazed at the sheer amount of people there! The children wanted everyone to get dressed up. Devin and I went as muggle parents of a young witch and wizard. The children however did an excellent job with their outfits.

Alaric is dressed as a Quidditch fan wearing blue jeans, a wand in his hand and a snake in one of his pockets. Very obviously the young casual wizard.

Treanna wearing a purple satin dress, a black velvet shrug, a lovely flower corsage, with an additonal flower up in her updo is fashionably dressed to attend the ball. In addition to the above she insisted on bringing her white fluffy kitty Snowflake.

Excuse the photos that not only were taken outside after midnight but with crappy lighting and my phone camera. Normally the pictures are not too bad but at nearly 1 in the morning that isn’t always the case. The line was incredibly long that night but we had our book and was on our way home by 1:30 a.m. Devin finished the book by 8am, I had it done by 3:30 pm, and Treanna had it done by 10:30 pm that night. Alaric poor guy took him all of Sunday and part of Monday to finish reading it. All of us enjoyed the book and we were satisfied with the end to a wonderful series.

Ok I have had several requests for a picture of my newest haircut.

This was taken by Devin yesterday morning just after I did my hair. You cant really tell just how curly it is either. I had put my hair up in pin curls and just lightly fluffed it and this was the result. I love the shorter hair and am loving the curls I can get.

I took some pictures of the back garden on the 15th. It is still pretty weed filled but I liked a lot of the flowers. Granted these are not in their prime most of these are a bit on the spent side of blooming. Anyway here goes:

The above picture is a photo of my Malva along the back fence. I was really pleased at how well it did this year. Despite putting it inside a support this year part of it still decided to grow its own way. The plant is almost as tall as me and I just love how many blossoms it has on it.

This picture is of some magenta flowers with some sage leaves. I like the plant though I am completely spacing on what it is called. I got all of these from my friend S. She had them coming up like weeds all over her yard and hated them. I just kept digging them up and bringing them home. I planted them in a tight swath along a 4 foot section of the fence. It has nicely kept any weeds from growing along there. Plus the constant flowers since June have been very lovely to look at.

These are probably my favorite flower of all. This is a pink Dianthus or Carnation-like flower. This is along my back fence as well and it doubled in size this year. Unfortunately only 1 section had flowers on it but they smell heavenly and blend nicely with all the other pink/magenta colored blossoms along the back fence.

This is another perennial that suprised me this year. My balloon flowers really did well this year. I thought they died over the winter but came up late and strong. I love watching the balloons open into these pretty blossoms.

These have a funny story about them. I was at a yard sale in early June and someone was selling this small section of daisies for 50 cents. I figured 50 cents is worth seeing how they would do in my yard. So I bought them, brought them home, cleared a small patch of weeds in the back yard against the house and plunked them down. Watered them a few times and left them alone. This was my suprise! I thought they would be regular daisies but these are fantastic! I just love the wispy edges to the petals. The plant has more than doubled in size and I can easily see this taking over an entire bed in the backyard if left to its own devices. I just love suprises like this.

Last picture:

This is what my new patio chairs look like. I bought 1 each visit to Costco until I had 4. I think they are comfy and eventually I will get some simple cushions for them as well. They stack and go well with the table and even the plastic chairs. I now have enough seating for 7 people outside. To continue the black theme I am contemplating painting all this short little plastic fencing I have black. I think it will look fabulous with all the plants and make it look coordinated and planned. I have a big pile of some white fleurdilis style fencing that is going to get done first before I start on the little picket fencing. Almost everything else in the backyard is black wrought iron so I think it will be very nice when all finished.

So today’s blog post will feature 2 different pictures.

The above is the picture from a few months ago of the new windshield going into the Ford Focus. It was really cool to watch it. It has also made the Focus much nicer to drive. Besides the Focus is all our now!

The next pictures is one of the chairs from the dreaded chair project. This was one of my school chairs that I put some foam and some of the upholstery fabric on. They turned out very nice and are much more comfortable to sit on now.

I have more pictures to post to the blog later. Especially of my garden flowers. I am also planning on assisting the children in updating their blogs since we took pictures of them with their current collections.

Yesterday afternoon I had a hair appointment to get my hair trimmed. It was getting pretty long and fried.

See:

My hairdresser cut a good 5-6 inches off since the bottom 4 inches were shredding and splitting terribly. We then decided to cut a few more inches off for good measure as I really wanted some a bit different. Not too short but short enough that it would not annoy me but still long enough for a ponytail.

I am much happier and feel nice and light and springier. I still need to try putting it in curls.

Oh and excuse the crappy pictures as I took them with my little logitech webcam.

Well I am off to make some stuff for a teaparty next week.