Farley Family Fun

Grammy's Visit

My mom came to visit for a week. It was so wonderful to have her here with our family. We enjoyed making some memories while she was here, and God blessed us with a lot of sunshine and pretty weather as well. Here are a few pictures from her visit.

(I was wrong. There *is* a clash day picture! How embarrassing!)

Pitching to the boys

Sanding their wooden puzzles

I love this one.

Getting tickled at the end of the slide

Grammy/Barber ;)

Grammy bought these training wheels for Logan. Now if only he'd learn to pedal on his own!

Grammy got to tell the bedtime Bible story on her last night here. She chose Samuel.

Thanks, Mom, for coming to see us.

Chick Fil A

We picked up Grammy at the airport last week and were blessed to have her stay with us for a week. When we left the airport we went to Chick Fil A to eat (of course!) and to let the kids play a bit. To our surprise there was a man there making balloons for the kids.

Joseph

We went to Sight and Sound in Lancaster to see the production of Joseph last week. It did not disappoint. I'm glad we were able to go and take my mom with us as well.

The girls

Before we went in to sit down we had the kids run around to get rid of the wiggles. Here are Trevor and Cole counting, while David and Logan go hide.

On the way back to the van after the show, David put Brooke on his shoulders. I think she enjoyed the view from up there.

Brooke

Here are some random photos of my little girl. She is nine months old now and she brings so much joy to our family.

Easter morning

At the mall playground

With Grammy

On the front porch

Cute li'l profile

Johnstown Chiefs hockey game

Looks like her halo is slipping already! :)

So precious

Spring Cleaning

It's not the spring cleaning that you're thinking of. In the front of my house near the porch we had some old bushes that needed to go. Now that my husband has a truck I got him to put it to good use. He hooked a chain up to the bushes and pulled them out of the flower bed with his truck!

Hooking up bush number two

The boys were happy to ride in the back of the truck while we took the bush around the back of the house. David helped Grammy (and me) get in the truck for a ride also. It's a big step up there!

Homemade Liquid Laundry Detergent

I decided to branch out and try to make my own laundry detergent! A lot of friends had been talking about this phenomenon on the internet and I admit that I was intrigued. I knew that this would be right up my mom's alley, so I planned to do this while she was here. It took a bit of doing to track down the ingredients that were needed, but once we had the ingredients in hand, the recipe turned out to be quite simple and easy.

The ingredients are:

4 Cups - hot tap water
1 Fels-Naptha soap bar
1 Cup - Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda
*½ Cup Borax

- Grate bar of soap and add to saucepan with water. Stir continually over medium-low heat until soap dissolves and is melted.

-Fill a 5 gallon bucket half full of hot tap water. Add melted soap, washing soda and Borax. Stir well until all powder is dissolved.

Fill bucket to top with more hot water. Stir, cover and let sit overnight to thicken.

-Stir and fill a used, clean, laundry soap dispenser half full with soap and then fill rest of way with water. Shake before each use. (will gel)

-Front Load Machines- ¼ Cup per load (Approx. 640 loads)
*Arm & Hammer "Super Washing Soda" Baking Soda will not work, nor will Arm & Hammer Detergent - It must be sodium carbonate!!

The jury is still out on how well we like this detergent. The truth is that I'm trying to finish up the jug of store-bought detergent that I have already, so that I can fill it up with my own detergent! My mom washed one load of her clothes with this detergent and it seemed to work fine. At any rate, it was a fun project and very inexpensive. You can find the recipe online here: http://www.duggarfamily.com/recipes.html

Spirit Week

We had Spirit Week at school the week before Easter. I missed photographing a few of the fun days. (You can just be thankful that I missed clash day!) Trevor dressed up as a hunter/ranger on one of the days. Here he is posing with his BB gun.

Minor League Hockey

I realize it's been a while since I've been in blogger-land. I've missed it. Today I signed in to my blog, intending to post pictures and stories from the last few weeks. I quickly got sidetracked when I saw all the new posts in my blog-following-list that I haven't read yet. Wow! I missed out on a lot of news over the last few weeks. One friend is expecting her 12th baby! Another got ducks and chickens, and some have just been having good family times. It was fun catching up with everybody. Now I am going to attempt to catch everyone up on our family fun.

A couple of weeks ago we went to a minor league hockey game. It was our first time to go to a hockey game and we really enjoyed it. I wasn't prepared for how loud it was in the stadium. It wasn't the people making the noise either. The noise was coming from the hockey sticks smacking the puck around the rink. It was pretty neat! I'm not a big football fan, though I do enjoy baseball. But hockey, now that's something I could probably get into.

The honor guard and National Anthem

I don't know what you call this. It's not the tip off, or the coin toss! But this was the very first move of the game. The ref dropped the puck and the players got right to it!