Signs of Summer

We've been having a great summer. It's been incredibly hot and humid here which makes for some fun water activities. The kids just finished up their swim lessons and recently we've been playing on our homemade water slide. We have a great hill in our backyard that makes it really fast.






Along with summer also comes fruit. . . and lots of it. My friend recently returned from her parent's home in Northern Alabama. Her parents have some awesome peach connections so she brought me millions of peaches (well- just a lot, but we've been singing that song a lot lately). They are so amazing I don't think I'll ever be able to buy them at the store anymore. We couldn't eat all of them this week so we cut a bunch of them up and froze them for smoothies. You can see how enthused Ben has been with this project.

Homemade Laundry Soap

About a month ago I decided that I was going to try out cloth diapers for the next child. I ended up buying a few diapers to use while I was potty training Dayne to see if I wanted to invest more into it. I figured that it would cost us quite a bit less for diapers if I only had to buy them once and be done with it. I figure that the initial investment will be about $300, but then I won't have to buy anymore after that (I calculated that if the baby were potty trained by 2 1/2 years old then we would have spent approximately $1,000 for diapers).



After I had put the diapers through a few loads of laundry Ben did some calculations of his own. He figured that the cost is actually about the same because water is so expensive here (he calculated how much it cost per diaper/per load - for those of you who know Ben, that is soooo typical). Anyway, he also thought that it wasn't that much different for the environment. Anyway, to make a long story shorter, I decided to make my own laundry soap that was environmentally friendly and incredibly cost effective. I was really surprised with how easy it was and Ben was really happy that I'm going to be saving TONS of money (we go through a lot of laundry detergent). Oh and by the way, it actually works.

Next week I'm going to tackle making my own household cleaning products. . .

Here are the kids helping me to
make the laundry detergent.
They were calling it"magic potion."

Family Photos

A friend of mine came over with her super cool camera and shot some photos of our family. It was pretty informal and I thought it was pretty funny that the only thing we really had that "matched" was Auburn University apparel. Ya, we're dorks!