{ heart }

What do you get when you wear
a bow tie and a t-shirt?

A Kodak moment!

Happy Monday!

upgraded

Upgraded: I love taking pictures. I take a lot of pictures. In fact, we needed to get an external hard drive for our computer just to hold my plethora of pictures. I tease my husband that taking pictures is cheaper than therapy.

I have been limited to working with my faithful, point-and-shoot Canon camera the last five years. I really like how small it is and I can take it anywhere. But it can only do so much and I was ready for an upgrade. For my birthday this year, I asked for money towards getting a better camera. Friends and family helped out and I finally got my new camera! It is a Canon EOS Rebel T2i. I love it!! I am thrilled and can’t wait to dive in and practice with the different settings. I think I have a decent eye for picture taking but I still have a lot to learn about the camera.


Here are a couple pictures I took with my new camera!

my lovely niece



the 4th



rain

banana bread

I scared the living daylights out of my oven when I turned it on today. It has been too hot to even think of baking or cooking anything. But today, today it was a cool mid-80 degree day. Anything seems cooler than a day with a 110 heat index.

I made banana bread with my youngest. Nothing fancy. My standby Betty Crocker’s recipe does me just fine. I so wanted to put walnuts in the mix but the boys haven’t developed a taste for nutty banana bread yet; one day.

It was still gone faster than I could say...

“I-forgot-how-good-the-kitchen-smells-when-I-bake!”

lemonade ~ stayin' cool

Wow! We have had some intense heat here in Maryland. The highest temperature was 104 with the heat index hovering around 110!

There were a couple days I snuck out after breakfast to water our garden and flowers and came back in dripping wet from the humidity and heat.

On top of that heat, we had some incredible storms pass through as well. The storms knocked out power to thousands of people in this sweltering heat. Thankfully, we only lost our electricity for several hours.


I’ve been pulling out my old tricks to keep my boy's little hands busy as we have been staying indoors to stay cool. I decided making lemonade would keep their hands busy and refresh us as well.

I found Paula Dean’s lemonade recipe online and decided it was simple enough for the boys to make with the help of my husband.

The boys enjoyed cutting and squeezing the lemons.

And my husband made the simple syrup.

Careful pouring.

It was delicious!

The boys gave it two thumbs up!

It was easy, fun and refreshing!

We will definitely keep this recipe on file!

Cheers to stayin’ cool!!