This week’s Everyday Adventures post is a little bit of everything. Cupcakes, rain, exercise, family history, and more.
Last week I posted an Ask the Readers asking for tips for my daughter and her interest in cake decorating. I loved all the comments on that post. Thank you for all your help. These cupcakes are her most recent project. I think they turned out great!
We picked our first cucumbers this week from our garden. That means I made our first batch of refrigerator pickles of the year. My family loves these this time of year.
We have had a lot of rain here in Oklahoma over the last month. I love walking out to take pictures after the rain is over. I took this one last weekend. It is the view from my kitchen. I don’t think I will ever get tired of that view!
We have also had some beautiful sunsets. This picture does not do this sunset justice. It was a beautiful sky full of orange, pink, and red after a storm went through.
We have managed to fit in a few runs in between all the rain, but not as many as I would have liked.
On the days that it has been raining I have been exercising on the elliptical in our garage. I think watching The Pioneer Woman while exercising might be counter productive though. I thought about food the whole time I was exercising!
We love pasta salad during the summer and I finally got picture of the one I have been making a lot lately. I will share the recipe soon. It is perfect for summer.
The summer boredom has already set in with my two youngest kids. They know not to complain too much though or I will quickly find them something to do. 🙂
A couple of years ago I brought back a box of family history stuff that no one else in the family wanted. Years ago, back before computers and online records, my grandmother worked hard to trace the family history and she put together quite the family tree for her side of the family. I have like 5 notebooks that she put together for the different lines she traced back.
When I hauled it all back from Oregon I just put it on a shelf up high and figured I would go through it some day. When my kids were bored one day this week, they pulled the stuff off the shelf and started going through it. They spent most of two days looking through all the stuff and talking about it.
They found food ration stamps and gas ration stamps. They found copies of various military records of family members that fought in WWII, WWI, the Civil War, and even the Revolutionary War. They found land records and family letters. And my daughter read me a letter that my grandmother wrote her mother in 1917.
So summer boredom turned into quite the history lesson at our house and I am so glad that I hauled all that stuff from Oregon to Oklahoma!
We have a busy but fun weekend planned. I hope you all have a great weekend!
Wow! I’m envious of your family records! I became the family historian just because I’m the only one who had an interest in it out of all of my siblings, but in the case of both sides of the family it’s been near impossible to find things out about them as both sides of the family were so closed mouthed. It’s taken years and some help from my step-mom doing some work too, but we’ve been slowly compiling together things. For one I found out that not only did my family found a city in Canada, but a distant cousin of mine is still the mayor (or Canadian equivalent of such) of the town. I thought that was really neat.
I envy the ration books. I love the social history from WWI and WWII, so I keep contemplating buying some ration books for my history collection. Having family ones would be awesome *laugh*.
I am very thankful for what we do have, but most of what we have comes from dad’s mom side of the family. My grandfather’s side can’t be traced back far at all, only really to my dad’s grandparents. And my mom’s side of the family is a mess, for lack of a better word, and can’t be traced back really at all. So it is fun and fascinating to me that there is at least some family that can be traced back that far. There is so much history to be learned and shared simply by looking back at our own families and it is a blessing for sure when we have the information. I love WWI and WWII history too so I agree I love that we found some ration books! I have to give credit to my grandmother. She was very organized and keep a lot of stuff. What she kept was not really junk either, she organized it well and even did a lot of scrapbooking type stuff. I am amazed and thankful at how well she organized what she was.