I have been madly working at cleaning and decluttering our home the past few days. I do this often and in spring we usually end up donating a whole bunch of stuff of ours. Since spring came so late this year, I feel like I am only just doing my home spring/deep cleaning now. We are having a yard sale this weekend to hopefully sell a lot of our clothes, toys, books and other things that we just have way too much of.

We changed our nature shelf to a summer theme now too. The girls found some shells and we bought two new willow tree ornaments, one with a shell and one with some lillies for our summer theme.

We put The Sun Egg, Gerda Muller’s Summer book and Stella, Star of The Sea on the shelf too.

The girls made the plastic butterflies a few weeks ago.

And we put up Kesa’s lentil/pea sunshine.

The girls have been very creative with play doh these days. They opened their own bakery in their room and make tons of tasty treats for us to eat. I joke to Autumn and tell her I think that she mixed up the sugar with the salt because her dough tastes very salty.

They also spend time making really amazing pictures out of play doh too. Autumn’s princess on a horse blows my mind!

We spent a day in the kitchen together and made minestrone soup and bread sticks and they were soooo yummy! 🙂

This was the first time I let Serafina help with bread. It was very messy, but I think it is good for the girls to use their hands and be creative in the kitchen. Autumn is a master bread maker already!

Kesa’s caterpillar bread stick. So cute!

We also made Chocolate Cherry Almond Granola, without the cherries.

We finished up our gnomes that we made out of wood. We gave them different colored hats with sharpie markers. They are having a lot of fun with them. I am always encouraging simple toys, imagination, being creative and making our own play things.

I’ve been enjoying baked apples. I cut the core out, sprinkle them with cinnamon (I like a lot of cinnamon), put a little water in the bottom of the pan, cover them up and bake them at 350, until they are soft, about 45 minutes to an hour.

It is just like apple pie, without the crust! Soooo yummy!

I am also into fruity herbal teas, toast and cereal a lot because with it being summer, I am not cooking as much. I love sprinkling cinnamon on my toast with peanut butter. This is my kind of breakfast!

We still paint here and there. I want to get more seriously into this sometime when I can afford to buy real art supplies. I have always wanted to paint.

We have still been outside as much as we can.

Serafina was sad when her puddle dried up, so she took off down the sidewalk and found some puddles at our neighbor’s house.

I am happy to see my girls playing imaginatively much of the time. They love to turn a flower upside down and play that the flowers are fairies. They can play it for hours.

Life is beautiful! 🙂