The Hendricks Family Experience

Craft room

Happy Birthday and Happy Mother’s Day to Stephanie!

This little project has taken a back seat to some of the outdoor projects since the weather turned nice. However, the weather got a little too nice this last weekend, so we hid out in the cool basement and worked on Stephanie’s craft room. This is the new and improved scrapbooking corner of Steph’s craft room. Lots of drawer space for small stuff and room for all of the machines (some of which came along on our anniversary this year).

We also built a little carpentry project too. Stephanie wanted a little magnet board. I was not satisfied with the tiny ones you can buy, so we built our own with some poplar pieces, a 24×48 sheet of steel, and some smoke, sawdust, and sweat. We haven’t tried anything like this before, but it turned out OK. Nobody lost any fingers, and it looks pretty good for a first attempt.

The next steps are to add some more shelves, and to get Steph an art table with a built-in light box.

Baby bird

While we were out watering our new plants on Saturday, we found a little surprise in one of our impatiens baskets hanging from the porch. A bird flew out of it, and when we looked in, there were a bunch of little eggs in there. The mama bird was protecting the eggs, and there was also a male flying around as well. We thought that was pretty cool, but then we went back to look a little later, and one of the eggs had hatched! A little mouth popped up when it heard our voices, looking for food. We’ve had to put a ban on everyone going out to look so the other eggs can hatch and the parents don’t kick the babies out. We’ll post more pictures if we can get some.

Clematis closeup

Me and Chris have a little addiction to plants, especially beautiful flowers. This is a picture of some clematis growing in our neighbor’s yard. The flowers are about 4 inches across and the whole vine is about 5 feet tall and the entire trellis is covered with these blossoms. I have never seen a clematis like it before. It is so beautiful here in New York. You can grow so many different kinds of plants. After living here for more then a year, I realize that Utah really is a desert. It is so green here in the spring, and even the grass on the sides of the road will stay green all summer long. I know it was green in Washington but there was not enough sun (imagine that) for some kinds of plants. We were so busy moving last year that we were unable to fulfill our planting urges, so we have gone kind of crazy planting the last few weeks. We have been moving and removing some of the old bushes to make way for some more color. Admittedly, we are having a little too much fun. Every time we get done planting one set of plants we swear we are done, then the next thing you know we find more cool things to plant. Right now I have 4 or 5 plants sitting on the porch waiting to be planted when the rain stops. We also made a spot for a little garden for tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. We were never successful growing a vegetable garden outside of Utah and I have missed having the fresh vegetables. Tomatoes are supposed to do well here if we can keep the critters out. I can’t wait for fresh tomatoes, it has been way too long. We will post pictures of the yard when some of it starts to fill in. We just hope the deer don’t eat anything in the meantime.

We’ve taken some other pictures around the garden – click here to view more photos from the set.