Tuesday.

1. if today is any indication of what the summer is going to be like around here, I'm not going to like it. It actually has nothing to do with the weather, surprisingly. Our house is old and sits on the side of a hill. The hill is starting to slide a bit. Which means the house is sliding a bit. There are engineers here today trying to work up a new retaining wall. And because of that, my dog has had to be in the house all day. She's NOT an inside dog. It's driving me nuts. There has to be another solution to this. Because they are going to be spending all summer building this wall. Apparently. ugh.
2. we planted our garden this weekend. Of course, it's right in the path to where these worker guys need to work. Pete is not real happy about this. We did a direct sow with seeds in the ground instead of trying to grow seedlings or buy seedlings to save time and money. At this point I'm not having too much hope for our food plot.


3. Jake had a pretty awesome week. He lost both of his top front teeth and he shot his very first turkey. Before any random readers think we're crazy...He did complete his hunters safety course last fall and does have his hunting license and was fully supervised by an adult the entire time. He did however, shoot this big old turkey all by himself. Pete was beyond proud! I think he may have even got a little teary eyed over it. (don't tell him I told you that) We had barbecued turkey Sunday afternoon, and turkey alfredo last night and we'll have turkey fajitas Thursday. It's not going to waist. We eat what we kill.


4. I've told Jude 3 times now that I'm going to do a project life update here and I still haven't. I'm lazy. I will though!
5. I'm trying really hard to boycott my local grocery chain. I'm just so sick of it. I go in there to pick up milk and bread and end up paying 50 bucks. And the produce there sucks. I live in California. Really, we should have just about the best produce anywhere (the state is like 90% farmland) but it's just gross. I picked up an avocado off the pile and it literally burst open and 100's of fruit flies flew out of it. I just about puked. So to the best of my ability I am vowing to shop only at Costco, Trader Joes and Target. The only 2 things I can't seem to get anywhere else but the grocery store is the salad dressing we like and basil. But hopefully, we'll have our own basil soon growing in our garden.
6. We just started using this online chore chart. I'm not real big into charts and stuff, but this seemed kind of cool. Jake really likes to do things on the computer. It makes him feel independent so he's totally into it. And parents this is totally and completely FREE. I love free. Anyway, it's pretty cool. I encourage you to go to the website and watch their little video, it can explain it better than I can. But basically you set it up for your kid to log in themselves every day, see what their chores are (day and evening) and then they get to work on checking them off throughout the day. They earn points for every job they complete. You get to set the point value for each job. The points can be exchanged for money (also set by you) and they can save, spend or share. They even have it set up so you can go directly to Amazon and purchase a reward once it's earned. We haven't even discussed rewards yet and Jake is still totally into it. There's a whole list of typical chores and can even add your own. You can also set "extra jobs" that they can do if they want to earn extra points. Like I added wash the car, vacuum the car, pull weeds and clean the bathroom to our extra jobs. Megan isn't really into it, but she's kind of young. Jake is like a dog with a bone. He seriously is begging for extra jobs every day. I told him he's only allowed to wash the car once a week! LOL!
7. Thanks for all the Trader Joe's recommendations! I'm going tomorrow!
8. other than the 3 days of testing last week, we didn't do any schoolwork. I kind of understand now why public school just seems to fizzle out right after standardized testing. Because I feel completely fizzed out right now! We started back up yesterday, but it has been tough. None of us have been able to focus. It might be this nice weather too. We just want to play!


9. It was so nice last week that the kids never even came inside until dinner. Jake is already getting tan. This kid gets so tan, so fast. Even with sunscreen.


10. And that's it.