Macungie Car Shows

It seems that Macungie is ALWAYS having a car show.  It is not odd to see old fancy cars driving around the Valley.  I love having fellow resident wives as friends because when our husbands are gone we can get together and keep each other company.  Kristen Dowling inviting Nash and I to go with her to the car show in Macungie Park.

I randomly took a picture of a door mat...???...

Yes this is a DaLorean the Back to the Future car.  Popular Pennsylvania car it seems.

The crowd that attends these car shows are a bit different.  My favorite part was the people watching.

Of course I had the cutest date in town...

He was so happy when I gave him some money to buy this cute little wooden truck.  He paid the man and said "Thank you."

The Wildland Conservancy

Emmaus has a huge nature park where they have little summer camps for kids to go and learn about nature.  It is open to the public to wander the trails and enjoy nature.  A few weeks ago we had the Ockerman kids hanging out with us while their mom performed her churchly duties at girls camp.  I don't know how excited the kids were to go on this nature walk...actually I know it wasn't their favorite.  We invited the Gilstrap's and Smith's to join us.  This post is for Andrea, Stacia and Brook because the only pictures I took were of your children.  Poor Nash... :)

The bird watching area.  Ya we saw nothing.

Nash tried so hard to keep up with the big kids.

Where ever there are kids that is where you will find Darin.

The beehives.

Yeah this spider web was the only wildlife we saw on our adventure.

The crew.  Doesn't Adam (in the red) look thrilled to be there.

There are some smiles...well from happy Amy.

Then we enjoyed the river.

There's a picture of my boy.  I love how the humidity makes his hair curl.

Baby Dawson had fun dipping his toes and splashing.

I think we are entering the pre-teen stage.  I love having the Ockerman kids over, so does Nash.  They are so well behaved.  I feel bad for them because they have to deal with all my activities.

Little Lehigh River

This summer we spent A LOT of time down by the river! :)  Last year I was introduced to this awesome little area and since Nash HATES swimming in a pool I decided that I wasn't going to pay for one this year and use the river as our water fun!  It turned out to be a great idea.  We went to this awesome place every Monday and Friday afternoon for weeks.

This area of the river is very shallow and does not move quickly at all.  There is a nice beach area for the little ones to play in and the moms to lounge and talk.  I loved putting my chair in the water on those HOT and HUMID days and enjoyed the nice cool water on my toes...Sounds amazing right! Well it was!!!!

Darin even got to join us a couple times, along with a few other dads.  The kids always liked it when the dads came because they would get to walk down stream.

My friend Christine wins the best mom award.  She would get in with Emory and help him swim around.

She even fetched floating away toys.  Such a hero..what mom!

Our child on the other hand was content staying close by mommy and playing with his dinosaur.

And every so often he would check out what the other kids were up to...

Even baby CeCe dipped her toes in the river...

On one occasion there were a flock of geese that swooped through our area of the river.  This picture is not the best, if you look closely you can see the geese and poor little Ellie is crouching down away from them.  It was cool and little frightening too...

I think the kids had so much fun playing at the river.  I know I enjoyed the relaxation.

Our little river rat....

Loving the Living Room

We are progressing along in our home.  We have finished the majority of the main floor and I am in hopes that it will be completely done by the end of this week.  Here is what the Living Room/Entrance looked like when we first viewed our home back in April...

Yeah the curtains were the first thing to go when we moved in!

Next I began ripping out the carpet.  This is the trash pile of flooring/carpet minus a couple of bags.

Then there was this crazy hardwood flooring.  It doesn't look to bad in this picture but it really was damaged and not very appealing.

So we got our crowbars and hammers and began destroying!  I don't know if we have ever recovered from this...HARD WORK...and super noisy!

Heres the pile of wood when we finished.  We couldn't put it with the trash because of the nails sticking out of it.  So I spent a night hammering the nails and now we have them in bags and we put them in the garbage can each week.  We can't put it all out or they will not take it unless we pay another $50 for pick up...blah!  I wanted to do a HUGE bonfire!

We also painted.  This room started out a yellow cream neutral color but Darin hated it.  So I let him pick the colors and we have blue now, which I love.

The entrance wall is a deeper blue.

...and well the stairs have seen many phases over the process.  I liked a picture I saw of stripes.  So I started with a brown and cream stripe...which looked GREAT!  Then we changed the room to blue so I painted the cream, blue.  That looked like a nursery so I added white and it just was too much so NOW this wall is solid brown. :)

This is the stack of flooring.  We decided to do a vinyl wood flooring.  It was super easy to put in and it looks really nice.  Not to mention easy to clean!  So here is the FINAL outcome....

My mom was a great help on SKYPE, and she told me where to hang things.  Sometimes I LOVE technology...

We were happy to find couch covers because our couches are a deep blue like the chair and the room was a bit BLUE!

We still need to put pictures in the frames but overall WE LOVE IT! Nash's speech therapist was a great person to bounce ideas off of.  She has a good eye for decorating and she suggested the rust color to accent the light blue...which I never thought of.