Encouragement from unexpected places

This guy has been getting encouragement to scale the heights of the cliff to get the bird food in our window box outside of the kitchen. You have to be impressed by his sheer gumption. He climbs up a tree beside our house out front, scurries across the top of the roof, then hangs on the spouting and drops down onto the window box kind of like Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible ( Rich has witnessed this). If you have read any previous posts you know what a feat that is. We kind of want to applaud every time we see him there although you can hear him first when he lands. Gun'r is very interested and would very much like to get a closer look at "Ethan".

We are in the middle of laying new flooring and as all home projects do, it has snowballed. Painted trim this weekend after I filled in the cracks with latex caulk. Here's some advice: don't willy- nilly put the caulk in one of those caulk guns if you don't know what you are doing. I may or may not have had trouble getting the caulk to stop oozing out. Lesson learned. I encourage you to not do what I did.

We did get Lauren's room finished minus the final finishing touches. That all dusted off, fresh feeling when you completely remove everything and replace the floor is priceless. We are doing some decorating now which is the fun part. We made a tiered tray for some of her jewelry. I am amazed by the creativity of people when I check Pinterest. Check out DIY Dollar Store ideas. Who knew? We got this idea from there. It's encouraging to know some inexpensive ideas can look like you spent way more.

Finally, if you knew the amount of time I spend thinking about how wonderful it would be to have a successful blog like some of my favorites like Pioneer Woman or Your Cup of Cake you might be concerned for me. I am convinced it takes way more time than I have to have a successful blog. My blog is mainly just for what blogs originally were designed for, to have a journal of my life at this moment. It really is fun to look back periodically. There are times that I often just want to hang the shutter up on this blog and every time I have thought that, someone I know that is pretty smart, since kindergarten, sends me a little nudge of encouragement. Even if I never have thousands of followers I am sure I will be happy I have some memories written from these moments in time.