Thankful Thursday

Last Thursday of May! Here are the things I'm thankful for this week...

1. Learning how to plant a tree. Last weekend, our HOA enlisted volunteers to plant a few new trees in our neighborhood. Since the trees were a bit heavy, they asked for family groups to lift them into place and such. We showed up and helped finish getting the hole ready, put the tree into place, fill everything in and mulch and water it. We were home again in about an hour and enjoyed the experience, having never planted a tree like that before. 

And now, when we pass the tree along the greenbelt, it makes us smile knowing that we helped with that. 

2. Photo scanning app. So, I've been working on organizing all our photos. I finally have them all in order and such, both digital and print photos. Even my negatives are organized, lol. So I started looking around recently to figure out what to do with all the print photos beyond just having them in boxes and albums. I contemplated taking them to a scanning service place, but that's pretty spendy and I'd need to sort them all before taking them to decide which are worth scanning. 

So, instead, I found this photo scanning app by Photomyne and it's FABULOUS. I just snap a picture of up to four pictures with my phone, and the app crops them and cleans them up and saves them. I can add details (like date, location and people) and load them from there to my computer. It's quick and easy, and I've been able to go through stacks of pictures and add them to my digital collection. I'm just getting started, but I'm having lots of fun reminiscing as I go through these old pictures. For example, here's a shot of Noah and my gram back in August of 2002... 

Aren't they adorable sharing goldfish crackers?

3. More daylight hours. While summer isn't my favorite season, I very much appreciate having more daylight hours. Micah and I enjoyed some of them earlier this week as we walked to a nearby park and saw geese families and cool looking little birds...and Micah worked on his handstands...

4. My personal cleaning crew. This week I finally tackled a spring cleaning project that had been on my list since the stay at home orders first went into effect back in March. Together with my cleaning crew, I washed/scrubbed down the kitchen cupboards and drawers then applied some wood polish/conditioner. (It's useful to have three strong boys who can reach the tops of all the cupboards, lol.) They still look like old kitchen cabinets, but at least we know that they're cleaner. ;P 

After that, Noah and I went through all the cupboards and drawers to weed out unnecessary things (though we didn't have too many since I'd purged not too long ago) and do a bit of reorganizing. We found a few duplicates of things that Noah will now take with him to his apartment in the fall and rearranged things to put like things together better...

Noah and I were pretty happy with ourselves. :) Among other things, we grouped mugs all together and wine/alcohol glasses all together...which made us happy since they'd been across a few different cupboards before. 

And those are some of the things I'm thankful for this week. :) Mostly, we're pretty good here...just hanging out and taking things day by day and knocking things off to do lists little by little.