Happy Father's Day!

As a day for remembering our Fathers and all our Father Figures we just want to send out a HUGE thank you for all of the special men in our lives!

Father's Day for us was pretty uneventful. We had a nice visit with our new home teachers and then when they left I got busy making Mike's father's day present ... a banana cream pie! (I'm not a huge fan of bananas but Mike loves them so I thought it was a fitting "not quite a father" father's day gift) I made a crust from vanilla wafers and decided to try out a new recipe for the filling - it was delicious (and super easy)! We're so glad that our friends Dan and Ashley were able to come over and enjoy it with us.

Looks tasty - right? I may have made the novice mistake of buying WAY too many bananas. I thought the recipe called for seven bananas, not four and I originally planned on making two and having more friends over but everyone already had other plans. Oh, and we got bananas in our Bountiful Basket on Saturday. I sense that several batches of banana bread will be part of our near future. 

 

 

  
(Don't tell Mike I put his pie on the ground to take a picture of it)

As promised, here are a few pictures of our garden! Please excuse the little hooligan weeds that refuse to stay out of our designated garden area.

Our carrots are finally coming up! They're still to small to see (they're in the row closest to the camera) Hopefully we'll get some tasty food!

What I'm most excited about - STRAWBERRIES!!! Hopefully we'll be able to keep the pesky birds out of them. I can only stand guard and chase them all away for so long. Our neighbor suggested investing in a net - any suggestions?

Someone spiked our lettuce!

Question of the Day: what is this plant? I went out to dump our grass clippings last week and found this little beauty (haha - it's pretty big compared to the rest of our garden). There was the shell of some kind of gourd or squash next to it so maybe it's a volunteer from some kind of discarded produce? Or maybe it's just a monstrous weed!

Catching Up!

Ok - so here's a brief update of our life recently. If it looks familiar to some of you that's because it's the same email that I sent out a few days ago. Enjoy!

Hello Family and Friends!


Just thought that I'd take the time to write everyone to let you know that we're still alive :) We are :) We've had some worries about floods in our area but we aren't close enough to any of the major water ways for it to be a problem for us. Our garden (as well as the weeds) are starting to come up - we should have spinach before much longer YUM! (A huge thanks to Mike's parents for helping him plant the garden while they were here over Memorial Day weekend and I was stuck at work - hopefully by some very substantial miracle I'll manage to keep at least some of it alive long enough to eat some of it.

Michael is getting into the swing of things for the new semester (which is probably a good thing because midterms were last week). He's doing quite well in all of his classes, he was a little worried about his Sports Med class but that seems to be the least of his worries now. He's staying busy with work (loading trucks in the early AM for FedEx and Sports First Aider through the school) as well as with homework. (I'm trying to be a good sport about all of these picture taking outings but three hours of exposure time for one photo is a lot of patience for this girl!) I've officially been approved as a University Studies Major (about time for me just to settle down and pick something - right mom?) So I'll be graduating in April 2012 with a minor in Home and Family Living, a minor in Marriage and Family Studies, and a cluster in Interpersonal Communication. I'm looking into becoming a Certified Family Life Educator so hopefully additional classes won't push back graduation any further. For right now though I'm working full time, still as a receptionist at Rigby Chevrolet. Definitely never a dull moment around here. Anyways, just thought I'd give you an update on life around here since I've been neglecting our blog. (which I've resolved to be better about ... maybe ....) So all of you people are now holding me accountable for doing so. You can check it out at www.keepingupwiththefeiks.blogspot.com Maybe I'll get Michael to post some of his photo assignments for you. Hope you're all having a great week!

Love,

Lara and Michael


P.S. Mike gave me a brief lesson on how to use his super fancy camera with lots of buttons so hopefully one of these days (after I've weeded) I'll post some wonderful pictures of our garden.