Today is The Day!

Today I'm debuting my new small business at the Women's Expo........



Brochures...check


Business cards....check


Sign (decorated with the help of two little girlies)....check



Nervous......check


So...What is Budding Artist Books? It's my new business venture- I make photobooks out of collections of children's artwork by digitizing the art and then creating custom pages. I then have the books professionally printed and bound.

Any words of wisdom for me?

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Stopping to Smell the....Dandelions?

My garden is waking up from its long winter slumber. HELLOOOOOOO flowers!

Say hello to little girls begging to pick flowers. Little girls who would pick every last flower in my garden if I let them...Too bad I'm a mean Mommy. But just look at all those delightful dandelions!

Oh...I don't mean to be elusive about my small business. I'm working hard to get my stuff together for the Women's Expo this Thursday and hopefully I'll be able to do a post afterwards. I hate to sound clueless but how do I go about setting up a website for my small business?

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Life in the Fast Lane

One of the reasons I wanted to move out to the country was so that we could lead a relaxed- not hurried life. It seemed that everywhere I looked families were all about the Go! Go! Go! And Do This and Do That! Hurry Up!

Sigh.

I guess I should have known better. Actually, I'm not really complaining. I'd wayyyyy rather be busy that sitting around twiddling my thumbs. Yeah. Like I'd really sit around and twiddle my thumbs!

So...the garage sale went over very well. Until the rain started. And it just kept raining and raining and raining! Next weekend is Part Two of garage sale- and since we sold so much stuff on the first day I'm going through the boxes in the basement to see what other stuff I can live without. I went through so many boxes and there are so many left to go through. Obviously I can't get to them all...BUT it felt AWESOME to go through them and realize I could live without most of the stuff I'd collected over the years. I also found things that I'd lost years ago. In particular a long lost teddy bear.....

I can't remember what I had called my teddy bear. I can say the girls are really taken by him! They made this little bed- with my old blanket. Okay...here's a question for all you creative types out there..... How would you creatively display whale bones ....

an old propeller.....

and what creative thing would you do with this rather large basket of sorts (haven't a clue what it really is)????

This is our Monday morning....

Annika belting out a tune while eating cereal while Ava whines at her to stop (I think Ava was singing before Annika started but Annika "out sung" her and therefore the whining started.

ALERT: The hummingbirds are BACK! The hummingbirds are BACK! I just saw the first hummingbird of the season a few seconds ago! Time to make a batch of sugar water for them. I missed the little boogers over the long winter.

Okay...on to business news. So I've clued you in that I'm starting a new business. It started with this post from January. There's a Women's Expo in Fennimore, WI this Thursday and I plan on being a participating vendor along with my friend Amy who also has a small business called Say It Again Books. She's the one responsible for giving me a gentle nudge (or a kick in the rear..hee hee!) to get my business up and running. So I'm trying to get my stuff together for that- including writing/making pamphlets, making a sign, etc etc... I've never done anything like this! (and I'm a little nervous. Make that a lot nervous!)

Oh...are you curious about my business? I hope so! I do intend to write a separate post about it. :)

Any women in the Tri-State Area (Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois) are welcome and encouraged to attend the Women's Expo! Please come!

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Where's Astrid?

Have I disappeared off the face of the planet? Am I hiding?



It kind of feels that way!



Actually, April seems to have turned into a fairly messy month- I'm just hopping from one event to the next- hoping that I don't forget anything along the way.



This weekend is a huge garage sale. And it's not at my house. So that means schlepping stuff from the basement, cleaning it up, pricing it and squeezing it into my van. I can't even fit all the stuff in one van load either! The best part? I can make sure the stuff doesn't come back home! Thanks so much to my friend for letting me be a part of her garage sale!

I'm working on something BIG...COLOSSAL...well, for me anyway. I'm working on getting a new-small- business off the ground! I'm not ready for the big reveal...yet. I promise it will be soon though!

This is how the Girlies deal with parents who are super busy trying to get Stuff Accomplished (like cleaning the garage or...). Peek-a-Boo! I spy Ava.

The Force is Strong in this One. (or something silly like that! After all, she is a silly but very cute little girl!)

Your task? Find me a cute purse on Etsy! I'm sick of my black purse/diaper bag.

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And now presenting...."QU"

Oh me. Oh my. We got to attend a funny event last week at Annika's school.

Do you Miss Q take Mr. U except when he is needed in other words like Underwear?

The Kindergarten class had a wedding for the letters Q and U!

The girls dressed up like QUeens and the boys as QUarterbacks. They decorated the room. They made refreshments. They sent out invitations (to other classes and parents to attend the ceremony).

Annika wouldn't stop talking about the wedding for the past couple of weeks!

Their teacher read a cute book "The Wedding of Q and U" by Maureen Keegan. The school principal officiated the "wedding". Miss Q was quite queenly while Mr. U was ummmm...quite bashful! Very QUte.

And now presenting.... "QU". Even little sisters were invited to attend the event. Ava and her good friend Wynne got to dress up and have fun at the event too!

And Tonight????

There's a walk-all-night Relay for Life happening. I can't believe I signed up for an event where I'm supposed to be up and walking ALL NIGHT LONG. Mark will take the girls home and I'll stay as long as I can stay semi-conscious. What was I thinking? Life just got a little nuts! (mmmm...nuts. I could go for some cashews or almonds or hazelnuts right now!)

ETA- I walked from 6:30pm until 2am with about a 30 minute break. I came home and took a bunch of Ibuprofen!

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Easter Bunny pays us a visit!

Happy Belated EASTER!

After a super long day of doing a million and one things on our to-do list ...We had a nice Easter dinner...and the best part? Look below. Isn't she super sweet?

The girls are very grateful to Oma and Tante Kirstin for the many lovely gifts you sent! The Ikea tent you sent was a smashing success! The girls wanted to play in that tent all day long...and they did a sleep over in it on Sunday night (Annika didn't have school yesterday).

We've so busy that I didn't even post photos of some fun activities we've done recently- like the Magic Milk in the Cereal trick I pulled on April Fools Day (drops of blue food color under the cereal- when you pour milk on top it turned it to blue!). We also made some lovely Easter eggs using Neon colored food dye and punched out stickers (using masking tape, freezer paper and various hole punches). We placed the stickers on the eggs before dying them and then did the big reveal afterwards (we had lots of bleeding through the edges of the masking tape).

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Happy Spring...or Spring Cleaning Fever!

Happy Spring!

mini daffodils for you!

Happy Crazy Spring Cleaning!

Happy The-Day-After-Easter!

Notice that the Christmas lights are FINALLY down! I love my outdoor Easter tree. The girlies helped decorate the foam eggs with foam stickers that Oma had sent a few weeks ago. I don't know about you but we had an amazingly productive weekend! We truly need a weekend to recover from our weekend.

Let's see....what did we do?

1) Planted early veggie seeds in the veggie garden.

Planted early veggies in my garden....peas, radishes (do you see Ava's radishes marker?), spinach, beets, lettuce, carrots and onions. I use plastic spoons as plant markers (wooden stakes tend to rot away before the season is over). We're planning on getting a load of cedar chips to fill in between the raised beds.

2) Plant tomato and pepper seeds indoors. They're sitting on a heating pad that is supposed to encourage germination. Let's hope the seeds germinate as they're a few years old. I've got 12 varieties of tomatoes- Black Krim, Juliet, Ildi, Sugary, Brandywine, Pruden's Purple, Sun Sugar, Wisconsin 55, Mortgage Lifter, Opalka, Kellogg's Breakfast and Park's Whopper. I had intended to order new seeds but never got around to it. Oops. I've also got Anaheim, Sunray (yellow), Red Knight (red), Sweet Banana peppers and Ground Cherry.

3) Cleaned out the garage!

I couldn't even bring myself to take a before photo of the garage. It was so embarrassing and disgusting. You're probably thinking-"So what? My garage looks better than that!".
Trust me- this photo is a VAST improvement over what we had. I bought three shelving units and we purged, purged and purged some more. It's amazing the amount of filth and grime and cobwebs we cleaned up. The dogs really do their part in bringing in the dirt and grime (they have an enclosed cage in the garage with a dog door that leads to their dog yard). It took us two full days to clean out the garage. What's under that big brown tarp you ask? It's a jogger that's for sale...are you interested in buying a single-seat jogger? It's awesome!

4) Started the deck cleaning and treating process.

This deck is five years old and we've never cleaned or treated it. Big oops on our part. Since we don't feel like shelling out big bucks to replace our deck we finally decided to cave in and clean it. We shoved everything over to one side of the deck while we washed the other side down. I scrubbed and scrubbed! I don't think I notice a difference though. I really wanted to seal it today...but as you might notice is that today is cloudy with an almost certain chance of rain. Frustrating! Once I seal this side of the deck I'll shove everything (oof!) over to the other side and clean that side. I hope it looks better once it's washed and sealed.

We also did this weekend: brewed a batch of beer (probably the hoppiest beer yet!), celebrated Easter- of course!, attended a Q and U Wedding and I've started an exciting new Adventure into the Small Business Realm. More on all of that later!

What's on your Spring Cleaning List?

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