It All Takes Shape

The last two weeks have brought astounding construction progress. We just finished week five of construction and are so very pleased about how it's all coming together. Seeing walls come up, roof come in, and even a porch being built makes it all feel so real, and we love how it looks!

Between work and school from home, construction decisions, and all the work Steve has been orchestrating in the backyard, we have been a very busy family! Granted, we're not nearly as busy as the builders (and for that we are grateful!).

When we left you two weeks ago, we had a giant concrete slab.

And at the end of the week, we had trusses and plywood!

Here's the view from the back, including the framed-in sunroom and the start of the patio

Then at the start of this week, the roofing supplies arrived!

Here's the sunroom from the inside

And the completed roof from the top! I love the angles and interest this project is adding to our house!

On Wednesday we had a finished roof

And Friday brought our porch!

We love how it's all coming together - you can see that the overall outline is coming together so well! There's a bunch of unfun (that is, unspectacular) work coming in the next days - ordering siding, electrical work, etc. But I guess that after two such dramatic weeks, a quiet week is ok.

Oh, and as a bonus (as if the rest of this fabulous progress wasn't enough!), Steve has orchestrated a massive backyard reconstruction. He's pulled out a bunch of old bushes, done a ton of cleanup, and on Saturday we planted new bushes against half of the fence in the back yard. We're getting new fence on the other half in the next few weeks, and then more planting to come!

How to make your own bike rack

by Ben

Step 1 - Have an entire day of free time

Step 2 - Ingredients:

• hacksaw
• PVC
• Little Ts
• spray paint

Step 3 - use the hacksaw.  Cut off some pieces.  You know what?  I'm gonna stop the whole steps thing.

Ok, so if you want to make your own bike rack you just have a free day and the ingredients listed above and then text my dad and ask him how.

Days Like These

It's kind of hard to decide on the single best part of a day like today...

• Girly shrieks of surprise and terror from both me and Steve to find a bird in our basement.  It was bad enough when we thought it was dead, but then when Steve picked it up and it started squawking and flapping, well, you can imagine our reaction (I ran and slammed the door behind me, Steve just screamed and dropped it)!  Thanks, Mandy, that present sure added some excitement to the day
• Sasha and WanYing's delight in pulling out the next round of hand me downs from our fabulous friends (it's all new to them!)
• Sasha and WanYing determining that they had to wear their fluffiest new dresses  today - to plant blue potatoes in the garden
• Enjoying my beautiful yard that Steve has worked so hard on
• Steve wearing his Telestial Seasonings shirt and picking up a Starbucks while helping the Elders (the men of our neighborhood Mormon church) pick up yard waste
• Playing Dominion with Ben in the evening while Sam read Lord of the Rings (Two Towers) and regales us with observations like, "Thrice 12 hours?!?  Really, people, just say 36."

Start to finish, today was just a delight.  You have to love Saturdays at home with our never-boring crew!

Blessed Mama

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference

Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time

Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace

Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it

Trusting that he will make all things right if I surrender to his will

That I may be reasonably happy in this life

And supremely happy with him forever in the next

Amen

On days like today - warm sun, happy kids, beautiful backyard (that Steve and the kids cleaned up yesterday for Mother's Day!), planting veggies, gazing at the mountains - it's so blessedly easy to feel serenity and gratitude.  I think that the last year has taught me many lessons about enjoying one moment at a time, and I'm blessed to be able to enjoy this one.  And this one.  And this one :)

Spring Springing!

It's finally getting warm and we are working hard in the yard and (mostly) enjoying it! 

This year Steve and his dad worked together to build some garden boxes and we're excited to try out container gardening.  We have 2 big boxes, one of which is completely devoted to strawberries and the other to various veggies (you can tell where our priorities lie!).  I've never seen our girls get tired of berries, but if these boxes really start producing we may even have some left over to freeze or jam!  But that will probably be wishful thinking - any berries within their reach are considered fair game for any and every snack.

 So far we've planted carrots (never had much success with these, so we'll see if they like boxes better than our regular garden), peppers, shallots, onions, a celery, a few garlic bulbs, and some spinach.  And the main garden has zucchini (only one plant!), cucumbers, and eggplant with potatoes and tomatoes to come.  Oh, and mint, don't forget the mint - summer mojito season is coming!

So far the girls are wonderful planting and gardening helpers, so we'll see how long their interest lasts.

And, of course, spring means testing out the sprinklers, means putting on bathing suits, means you might as well stay outside in your bathing suits and enjoy playing with the hose on the trampoline for the first time this year.  I guess that's a fair reward for a hard day's gardening!

How does the garden grow?

We have a veggie garden again this year, and although it definitely doesn't get the time or attention it really needs, I think all of the girls (myself included) have been enjoying eating food from our very own little patch of land. 

There's something awfully fulfilling about asking Sash and WanYing to go out and cut some peas for the stir fry while I prep the rest of the ingredients... and clearly they enjoy it, too!

Just wait until tomato season (if, that is, I can remember to water the plants), that'll really be girl heaven!

Spring springs up... on me

I'll level with you - I was not looking forward to Spring.  I mean, if you were me, would you be looking forward to another upheaval in your life, regardless of it's predictable seasonality?  I thought not.

I finally had Winter kinda figured out - we went skiing, we read books, we had a routine - and for the past month Spring has been lurking, waiting to gobble up any peace I'd managed to establish with yardwork and longer days and new routines.  Admittedly, I've never before pictured Spring as a menacing force.

But my feelings had little (ok, zero) ability to hold back the tilt of the planet.  And fortunately God isn't done with me.

Through the amazing help of friends and my mom, bikes are ready for summer, the yard is just about spring-ready, the garden is tilled, and I've gotten to enjoy some good time digging around in the dirt and nurturing new life (mine, my kids', and maybe a few plants along the way).  And Spring and I are ok with each other.

We plant...

...we water...

...and we celebrate the first sprouting seeds!

And a big shout-out to Grammy, who worked her little hands to the bone and got us all ship-shape and ready for a new season!

Peaches are In!

Hooray! It's peach season again! Our little Asian peach tree in the back yard is loaded down with deliciousness and we've managed to save at least a few from the hungry birds that seem determined to take one peck out of every peach on the tree. Between the peaches and the tomatoes, I think the girls have managed to forage for most of their meals this week.

Sasha proudly displays her latest conquest.  When the branches are loaded down, the girls can reach the fruit themselves, so it's a fruit smorgasbord

Our peaches are Asian white peaches - they're smaller and sort of donut shaped with white flesh and they are so, so good!

Sigh.  Never a dull moment.

Chorney waits patiently beneath the tree for the girls to make a wrong move and drop a peach for her consumption.  No, I don't know why she doesn't just eat them straight off of the branches, but I'm grateful that she waits for them to hit the ground before snarfing them up!

Watch out, WanYing, Chorney's just waiting for you to lose your grip on that peach so she can gobble it up!

First Tomatoes of the Year

Morningstar tomato lovers unite - the first harvest of the season is in! Sasha, WanYing, and Daddy are in for a few happy happy weeks of BLTs and eating tomatoes straight off of the vine. Sam, Ben, and I will just gag quietly to ourselves.

Strawberry Girl 2.0

I'm so glad that our girls enjoy strawberries as much as I do! Of course, it means that there are never any berries left over after harvest because they are consumed on the spot, but that's a small price to pay for a sticky, happy girl (or three).

WanYing is following in Sasha's Strawberry Girl footsteps with gusto.

Strawberries are worthy of WanYing's best cheesy grin

No time to smile, Mom, there are strawberries to eat!

That's How We Roll

Just hanging around in the back yard, driving my car around, sportin' a sweet pirate flag tat, playing with my gun.  That's just how we roll at chez Morningstar.

I think she's hunting robins. 

Boppers

What did Daddy and the kids do on our beautiful Sunday afternoon? Well, of course, they fashioned weapons of destruction and whomped on each other!  All this family needs is a set of pool noodles and some PVC for an enjoyable afternoon of light saber duels.  And, yes, everybody fought over the Sith light saber.

The helmet was Sasha's idea. Unnecessary, but clearly a fashion "must"

Sash gets in on the action (remember, the Kazakhs are a fierce people!)

WanYing liked it, we promise, although she's going to need to up the aggression factor to really compete. The fact that she only has one usable bopper-grabbing hand right now probably didn't help.

All's well that ends well

Your Sunday may have been more peaceful, but you know it didn't beat ours for fun!

Bright Sunshiny Day!

After days and days and days of rain, it felt to good to get outside and do some yard spring cleaning that we may have gone a little overboard - 2 trees down, 2 bushes demolished, almost all of the gardens cleaned up, and garage cleaned.  Wow!

Sam was very excited about felling his first tree with a chainsaw

Weeds in the strawberry patch make Sam angry

The girls took advantage of the treasures found in the garage clean-out and did a little sidewalk sledding

They dragged those saucers all over the house!

Good thing tomorrow's forecast includes rain, we wouldn't want this level of productivity to become a habit.

Tree Climbing - New Heights

by Sam

Hence the name of the blog, we're heading to new heights!  We used to only be able to only go to the top of the main trunk, but now we're heading up the branches and as you see we're really, really high.

If you look next to the tree trunk you can see WanYing in a little striped shirt.

I'm not really scared when I go up that high, unless it happens to be a little tad windy.  When it's windy it really shakes around.  Well, it shakes around whenever, but when it's really windy, bleh.  Not fun.

That concludes Sam's part of the blog post. (last sentence by Sam)

[Ben's part]
I cannot get nearly as high as Sam.  Sam's good at climbing, I'm good at races.  Cause I really think I'm afraid of heights.

That's the blog post.  Signing out.

Meteor-wrong

Thursday night we camped out in the backyard to watch the Perseid meteor shower. Like last year, our photos of the show only look like falling stars if you squint and shake your head back and forth really fast. Oh well, at least we have a nice sequence of pictures of the sky over our backyard at 3 am.

This year's shower was, admittedly, weaker than last year's. I think we just got unlucky; apparently 3-4 am didn't end up being the best time to watch the meteors in Orem Utah. We didn't even wake the kids up, but rather let them slumber peacefully in the grass - they were ticked at us in the morning for not rousing them, but not nearly as mad as they would have been to be dragged from their warm sleeping bags to watch (mostly) motionless stars!

Until next year, I suppose.