August

Emery whipped up a crocheted blanket for her bed and a matching pillow. Her talents are endless.

My friend and I went with our 2 girls down to San Diego so the 3 girls and 3 moms could hang out one last time before senior year and college. They've been friends for many years.

Us moms had no problem talking and eating for days and days.

One of my beestings. I swell up a lot and then it gets itchy after a couple days. I've gotten stung about 10 times which didn't used to bother me and was mostly a result of my laziness or rolling a bee on accident. Now I wear thicker socks (instead of flip flops- haha) and make sure there isn't a bee between me and whatever I'm carrying or stepping on. Also, the bees tend to sting more when they have honey to protect so at least half of the year they're more docile.

All those books are for us. We love using the hold system! Every time we go to pick up our holds the librarians mention something or other that lets us know we 100% get talked about behind closed doors at the library. We're always happy when out favorite librarian Patrick is there because he always thanks us for actively using the hold system and keeping their circulation numbers high. You're welcome Patrick.

Emery is 17! She's the first one to hop in the car when I'm going anywhere- no matter how dull. She's talented and is able to use her skills not only to bless other people but for a paid job. Emery is smart and gets straight A's in really hard classes. She's faithful and gets herself and Campbell on time to seminary every day. Emery loves trying new things. She made a solar wax melter to melt beeswax and make candles, makes all types of jewelry, loves experimenting with artwork, takes care of the bees with me, made a dollhouse for quinn and a tile table for her plants. Learned how to propagate succulents and turned her room into a greenhouse. She found a free desk on the side of the road and picked it up on the way home from mutual to refinish (without me even knowing it was in the back of the car for 3 days). It's an endless list because she doesn't let fear of failure stop her- she's such an example to me.

First day of school for my senior. Bawling my eyes out.

And my 10th grader- sophomore year and Campbell is finally going to public high school. She started cross country practice over the summer and has been running on varsity most of the season. It has been SUCH a great team and experience.

Griffin came outside while I was taking "first day" pics so here's his "first day" pic hahaha. Griffin is in 7th grade this year.

Oh my gosh- Emery and my first time extracting honey could have been a show on TV- some kind of disaster show. We were so messy and could not figure out the best way to get the cappings off the comb. We had a knife and an uncapping fork but it was messy messy messy. And we were in the garage because we would have been majorly swarmed by bees if we were outside. The second time I extracted honey in the kitchen- we were way less messy the second time around.

We got more than 35 pounds of honey off of 1 hive. I can't believe it! This was not even an established colony- just that swarm we caught in the spring. I'm not in the beekeeping business for honey (or money) so we left plenty of honey for the bees to eat all winter long. We just had to pull some off because I had to remove the super (top box) so the bees have less space to warm and defend all winter.

We ended up extracting one more time in the fall- more honey from the same hive.

The honey gets triple filtered cuz I'm not taking any chances!

Emery and I set up shop so we could sit and enjoy the extractor doing it's thing but it only took about 5 mins to spin all the honey out of the frames.

The honey tastes different depending on the season and what is in bloom. One nice thing is that I can give a lot of this honey back to the bees by letting them clean the wax off that's left over after filtering. Since the super is now gone, they're forced to stock the honey in the lower boxes where they overwinter.

Back to School Father's blessings

Quinn's first STEM project of the year. Make a swing (out of any supplies in the art cupboard) that can swing back and forth 15 times, won't fall over and can hold a little figure I provided. She figured it out pretty quickly and the moved on to make furniture for her Calico Critters. She made a 2 story house, a crib, a couch and a ladder with popsicle sticks, a glue gun and a huge mess.

And now we're back to having our house look like this again- school work and supplies eeeeverywhere.