Happy Mother's Day & What's Up

First I wanted to say Happy Mother's Day to my Mom.... love this picture of her taken a couple years ago when she treated me to a couple weeks in Destin FL (I love the beach)

Brandon will be taking me to the zoo... it's the last day to see the panda twins before they are taken to China to live.  I'm a crazy person yes I picked the zoo for my Mother's Day treat - a kid at heart when it comes to animals.  Pandas, elephants, anything from Australia & of course owls are some of my favorites.  They were so cute when they were little - I hate that I didn't get their earlier but I'm getting to see them that's all that counts right.

The past 12 months have been really challenging.  Having my elderly aunt (who's a fellow "sicky") & dealing with a new blood condition from lupus.  It's branching out from my kidneys to "party" elsewhere in the body & it's no fun.  I've never felt such profound exhaustion before.  All my life I've been a person who didn't require lots of sleep now I have what I call "Rip van Winkle Days" where I do little else but sleep - literally 14-17 hours a day no sooner waking up from a several hour nap to immediately fall back asleep.  This is so NOT ME!  Adding this to the other health problems that I've had for years has forced to realize my physical limits.  Denying it just filled me with stress & frustration.  I have good days & bad days.  Right now even though the doctors haven't hit on the perfect treatments to give me I'm doing ok.  To tweak my outlook I started looking for "One Fun Thing" to do daily... it's a relative thing depending on my energy/pain level for the day but it really is helping me stay positive.  On a bad day it may be to just sit out in the yard but that's ok.  The next day it may be to go somewhere (as long as I don't get too close to other people since I pick up EVERYTHING).  I wear masks sometimes but for some reason breathing in my own exhale gives me asthma (and I'm not going on O2 if I can help it lol) so I'm always scoping out who is around & assessing the risk then making mad dashes away from people.... scientific probably not but so far so good.  If I do something one day the next is "pay the piper day" where I lay low & rest because I have no choice.  Hopefully the treatments will start working soon - auto immune problems are so hard to deal with & control.

I've been enjoying the flowers & shrubs waking up in the garden.  The roses are going like gang busters.  The boys used to buy me an heirloom rose bush each year when we lived around the corner from Natures 5th Season in Lawrenceville.  They closed that location & in 2012 closed the Dacula location too.  These roses come with us when we move.  Here's photos of a few of them

This opened to look like.... 

This beautiful peony looking rose that smells amazing

It's bigger than a grapefruit  

This climber will be covered in a few days with pink blooms

that smell nice on the front porch

This one is peach and doesn't look like much

but the smell is heavenly

To protect them naturally (we had some aphids) I released some 

Lady Bugs that Pikes Nursery was giving away last week.

Per the directions I stored them in the refrigerator until

evening & I watered prior to their release so it would be

a good environment for them to stay

Eating the aphids right away  

Get on out you last few stragglers 

It took no time for them to start moving around & "getting frisky" 

to create more aphid eating bugs.... 

Can you tell it doesn't take much to make my "one fun thing" list

I was able to create a few mini books that EMI Scrapbooking will be kitting in the near future.

Here's a sneak peak using the new lines by My Mind's Eye

Hope you have a happy mother's day