Maddie Videos

I always procrastinate loading videos of Maddie on our blog because they take so much time to upload! Sorry for being so selfish and keeping these to myself!

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Here is one of Maddie and her latest phrase, "Where are you?" which sounds more like, "Where dar you?" She was in the tub looking for her purple easter egg and upon finding it in a cup full of water, decided to dump the cup of water onto the bathroom floor. Lovely.

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And here are a couple of other movies...Click the blue text to see the movies.

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This one is of Maddie naming off animals and other familiar objects on her wall. Brandon built her a wall hanging rack to display her art work. There are all kinds of animals and plants on it that she likes to point at and name. After she's done with that, we move onto reading a book. Some of my favorite Maddie words are on this video including muttafly (butterfly) & gug (bug).

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This one is of Maddie playing "Cat". That is what she calls the spelling game Brandon and I have for her on our phones. It was downloaded in the middle of sacrament meeting one Sunday while we were trying to keep our little firecracker quiet. She loves to drag the letters around and spell out words. She definitely knows her letters and can point them out in every day life.

First Fruits from Maddie's Garden

We had 4 tomatoes ready to be picked this morning! So, Maddie headed right out in her Santa pajamas and was so excited to pick her "tay-tos."

On a side note, the roley poleys were not deterred by soap flavored strawberries. We are now spraying vinegar on the strawberries. I will keep you posted...

June Happenings

Maddie's Garden Update

Alright roley poleys, this means WAR!

I tried to be nice and just spray them off with a hose. No more.

This morning, I headed out to the garden and found out the few roley poleys eating strawberries last week have now multiplied! Apparantly, they called all their buddies and invited them over to eat strawberries for breakfast. The party is over.

I sprayed all the plants with dish soap and they all scattered. We'll see how long that deters them. My next weapon is vinegar.

I also found this in the garden this morning...

What do you think? A bird? More bugs?

Well, whoever it is, I hope they like Dawn flavored tomatoes.

Here are the other tomatoes - just starting to turn red...

These are beautiful!

A couple of more days and these will be ready to pick!

And here are the strawberries the roley poleys haven't gotten to yet.

If I can keep the pests at bay for a couple of days, I think the strawberries will finish ripening and we can pick them. We'll see how well the dish soap spraying went when I check on the garden tomorrow morning.

Canyon Lake Trips
Well, we are over 100 degrees here for the duration of the summer, so off to the lake we go. It's so nice to have Canyon Lake so close that we can take our dinner to the lake and have a nice evening trip on a weekday after work.

Blackberry Blueberry Muffins

I had a ton of fully ripe, fresh blacberries and blueberries smiling at me in my fridge, so I adapted this recipe and came up with these little beauties.

I altered this recipe using one cup blueberries and one cup blackberries and using raw sugar crystals to top the muffins instead of regular baking sugar. They were delicious. As I pulled them out of the oven, a couple of the muffins had berry juice bubbling out of the top. Yum. I had no problem letting Maddie eat 4 of these in one day. She calls them cupcakes. They're made from scratch & think of all the anti-oxidents she's getting in her system- yay!

Here's what I came up with...

Blackberry Blueberry Muffins

18 muffins

Prep: 15 min. Bake: 20 min.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, softened

1-1/4 cups sugar

1 tablespoon raw sugar (to sprinkle on top)

2 eggs

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup milk

2 cups fresh or frozen blackberries (I used half blueberries, half blackberries)

Directions:

In a bowl, cream butter and 1-1/4 cups sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt; stir into creamed mixture alternately with milk. Fold in berries.

Fill greased or paper-lined muffins cups two-thirds full. Sprinkle with raw sugar. Bake at 375° for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks. Serve warm. Yield: 1-1/2 dozen.

Nutrition Facts:

1 serving (1 each) equals 172 calories, 6 g fat (3 g saturated fat), 38 mg cholesterol, 172 mg sodium, 28 g carbohydrate, 1 g fiber, 3 g protein.

Maddie's Garden - Update

Maddie's Garden is in full bloom!

While we were in California, Great Grandma Milloy gave Maddie a special rock to put in her garden. Grandma knows how much Maddie loves rocks, so this was a wonderful addition to the garden. This rock was given to Maddie's Great Grandma Milloy by her father, so we are excited to have it! Thanks Grandma!

Here are our strawberries.

These are doing surprisingly well for the amount of heat and sun they have to endure. We have a ton of new green strawberries sprouting up every day. However, as soon as they start to turn red, someone else decides to eat it right off the vine.

Nope, not this little bug....

This little bug...

Our strawberries are covered with these little guys every morning! I don't want to spray pesticides on our fruit, but I'm also not sure I want to supply a strawberry buffet to the roley poleys. Does anyone know of any "green" ways to deter these little guys?

Our tomatoes are growing bigger every day!

I can't wait for them to turn red.

And our cherry tomato plants are really starting to perk up. We weren't sure if they were going to make it. They seemed kind of droopy and unhappy, but last week, they decided to pull through and we have our first cherry tomato growing.

The next morning, Brandon and I checked on our garden and the cherry tomato was bright red! Our first fruit of the season. Yay!

We are having so much fun with our little planter garden. I am already excited for next year to come so I can plant bell peppers, peas, green beans, and other fun things!

Memorial Day Recap

Memorial Day weekend marked our first 100 degree temperature days here in Arizona. Welcome back triple digits! I am sure there are many more of you to come! The boats were rented out all weekend, so we spent a lot of time cooling off in the backyard. Maddie loves her pool and she loves it when Dada and I are in the pool with her. It makes for a tight fit, but neither one of us can resist a request from Maddie.

This is Maddie's new swimsuit this year ... I love her in yellow and I love the girly ruffles.

While shopping at WalMart last week, I found the Dizzy Daisy on clearance for $3.00! You stake it into the ground, hook it up to the hose, and it whips water all over the place. It is a lot of fun for $3.00!

Here is Maddie inspecting the Dizzy Daisy.

She was okay with it at this point.

And here she is after we turned it on.

Not too sure about that unpredictable flower...

She has warmed up to it now.

We spent the entire weekend grilling outside. My most favorite dinner is kabobs. I really don't believe there is anything more delicious than grilled chicken, pineapple, and veggies. And I love that it's such a healthy meal for our family. Oh, and the mess and the heat stay outside instead of in the kitchen - that's my favorite part.

Here's the before picture with chicken, pineapple, bell peppers, zucchini, potatoes, and cucumbers:

And the after...

It's 7am as I am typing this and I would eat this right now. Yum!

As I've mentioned before, we are self-proclaimed, fair-weather fans of our home town sports teams. If the Cardinals or Suns are doing well, we are on board. We had a ton of fun watching the Suns sweep the San Antonio Spurs and we watched every playoff game against the Lakers. Especially the heartbreaking loss on Saturday night. Darn those Lakers. And darn this guy.

Kobe, we hate you. You are so darn good.

Please come join the Suns. :)

We also got to catch up on some movies...

a luxury not commonly enjoyed with a 1 year old.

We Red Boxed "Dear John" and I liked it until there was no happy ending. I don't like those kinds of movies. I like to feel happy & resolved at the end of movies, not sad.

Our friends Cody & Emily brought over "Ironman" for us to watch and it was so good! I usually am not a fan of action movies like this, but I loved it. So after seeing that, we decided we needed to see "Ironman 2"!

I thought this one was just as great as the first one. Some of the fighting scenes dragged on a bit, but it was great! Maybe the Milloys are action movie fans now...

We hope you all had a fun and relaxing Memorial Day weekend too!