There are so many giveaways and I found another at Southern Hospitality. Her blog is awesome with so much decorating advice. I’ve been trying to catch up on my blog reading over the holidays and was blessed to find her giving away a Tamron too! Oh how I’d love to add this to my arsenal of lenses.
Go check her out!
Tell her Julie sent you!
Love those Tamron Lenses and Steamy Kitchen is giving one away to one lucky winner. Plus she has a yummy zucchini recipe to boot! Check her out by clicking on the link I just gave you for her blog. And don’t forget to tell her Julie sent you! This is from her blog:
Alright, my lens-lovin friends! What I love about this lens is that it’s got the world’s largest zoom ratio of 15X zoom, which means the lens covers an angel of view equivalent to that of a 28mm wideangle to a 419mm ultra telephoto with just one lens.
This is a great travel and food lens – because you can take a panoramic shot of the beach as well as closeup shots like the zucchini (take a look at the 2nd shot of finished dish).
The Tamron AF18-270mm F/3.5-6.3 Lens also has built-in vibration compensation – no tripod was used for the final shot, though I did use a tripod in the kitchen (I only have 2 hands!)
There’s a lens for Canon as well as Nikon and retails for $629, but there’s currently a $150 rebate so you can grab this baby for $479.
We enjoyed a lunch beside the road in the neatest little area.
The smell of BBQ drifted through the fall air and tempted us away from our ham sandwiches but thriftiness prevailed!!
Here are some shots from the day.
I want to live here…..
No comment needed here…
Nor here…..
They really are best buds…
Baby girl….
And two other bff….
Off to have Thanksgiving with family. Have a good one!
The last few weeks have been full of fun things….
Things I wish at times I could share with my friends in SC. Some of these things I have gotten to share with them. You see, I have this one friend, Lisa, who knows everything about every living thing. I swear! She grew up on a horse farm in NY and somehow that has taught her everything you’d every hope to have in a homeschool mom friend.
We recently traveled to one of my favorite places together….Hendersonville, NC. The apple orchard is there and one of my favorite places, Hands On Childrens’ Gallery. This trip presented us with a surprise though. Right outside the entrance to Hands On is the most fascinating woman, Brenda Ramer of Team Ecco. Team Ecco is apparently a group of divers for she seemed to have traveled everywhere I’ve only dreamed. And the next few shots are from her shop.
Can you guess what this guy is called?
She even fed him for us. We learned that starfish digest or ingest their food by pushing their stomachs out of their bodies, wrapping it around the food, digesting it and then pulling their stomach back into their bodies. Bet you didn’t know that did you?
Yes, it’s a starfish but it’s a special type of starfish. Any guesses?
We also saw this guy swimming around in a nearby tank.
And two different types of water turtles. I remember part of the explanation but not all of it. Look how different they are…
They have pointed little noses as to breath when they surface. She even has names for them all. They are very tame and love being handled. You could just tell how much she loved them all.
Here is Brenda and my sweet friend, Lisa, and all the kiddos.
Next it was on to Hands On where the master artist Sethman drew two of my boys with startling likeness. Is this amazing or what?
That’s my oldest on your left and my youngest son on your right with the artist behind them. Let me see if I can find the picture of my youngest behind his image. It’s spooky close to exactly the way he looks.
Here’s baby girl painting a rainbow.
Here are some of the girls playing grocery store. I think of the four hours we were there they stayed there for three of them. Something about girls and shopping!!!
The entire day was amazing. I think it was about three field trips tied up into one. We had just as much fun as the kids did and hope to get to see Brenda again soon.
These guys are definitely BFF!!!!
And because I know Lisa will read this at some point….look what we found yesterday!!!
We have never seen an anole shedding its skin before. We were amazed. To add to the difference between Fla and SC here are what acorns look like here. At home they are huge but here they have friends….fuzzballs and they are tiny.
Oh, and for those of you who were unlucky enough to see our “critter” we found in SC I finally found out what it was…..check this blog out…http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2008/07/giant-maneating-flatworms.html
I’m just glad I didn’t know what that thing was when I picked it up. Cold chills!!!
Since I began this post several weeks ago I’ve traveled home to SC for a week long visit leaving left my new user name and password in Fla. So there was no blogging while I was gone. But I was personally able to touch and druel over The Scooper’s classroom nook.
Then we came back to our last soccer game and began a 5 day battle with the upper respiratory crud. It’s been rough on my oldest who has had a fever for 4 days.
I’m thrilled to have a new blog site all my own. I’ve loved HSB but it was time to move on. Time to spread my wings and fly. I hope some of you will still drop by to see me. I can’t wait to see how the new blog design will end up.
Back to Soccer…here’s my baby…my 6.5 year old, size 3 shoe wearing baby…
I don’t know why I love this picture of her. Maybe it’s the look of concentration on her face as well as the signs of the young woman I see her becoming. She’s a mess, this last born of ours. I love the way her hair curls around her face when she’s hot. She can put her pony tail in all by herself now. Quite an accomplishment until the day we visited the Super Cuts. Now she’s sporting a sweet bob again and a trophy.
She was so excited to have her first trophy and toted it around everywhere before we convinced her it belonged on a shelf.
Baby girl and I are diligently learning how to read, my least favorite schoolish thing to do. She’s doing very well I might say but because I find it grueling so does she.
Coming home to FLA has been a bit of a smack in the face. REAL school instead of fun field trips. No friends instead of terrific friends and then a bought of sickness. But SC soothed our souls with 38 degree nights, campfires and lots of visits with my sweet friends.
We’ve made our own little campfire set up since returning. It’s not our big pit we had in SC but it’s a nice iron looking thing that fits a little better in our gated FLA neighborhood. But I wonder still at the house God has for us here. After my hubbie left SC to return to FLA my boys kept the campfire burning in the back yard for three more days. My second-born loves the woods, chopping down limbs and fanning the flames of the campfire. My heart wants him to have those things here too. He’s a boy after all!!!
So we continue to wait and watch…keeping our hands out of what belongs to God…our lives.
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