The bright yellow center with the beautiful soft hue of pink wrapping itself around the petals!
I am enjoying sharing this month in BrightSquares and as I am putting together this post it is also making me SMILE! So I am also going to share this post as my smile post for this week as well. I can’t help myself but to share what I have been capturing within the last few months as the blooms have come and gone in my garden. I believe the colors of the flowers will show their glow and beauty as I share and I hope you will enjoy them too! 😀
As the bright sun hits this beauty it’s soft pink glows. A week later, this is the same flower! Look how deep pink it became!
Brilliantly flowers can morph and change as they age on the vine. I just had to share this rose as it bloomed and hung around to change it’s colors. I only have 3 rose bushes left in my garden, and am thankful I am getting some flowers. Last year a good friend gave me a bearded Iris which I planted in a container. This Spring it has really blossomed and I’ve shared a photo or two in another post but will share more here as its so amazing how tall and pretty Iris can bloom!
This is my wide angle shot and I almost have a triple bloom of flowers. I will take the double bloom! Such beautiful contrast, bright white against the purple hues!
I am so happy to see this Iris thriving so well. I wasn’t sure what color they would be and what a surprise as it reaches towards the sky! I Love walking outside to see them and will share a couple more photos.
Bright white sure shines through in my photos! Look at that deep purple, I just love it so ❤
Since I want to make sure to keep to the theme of making my photos square, it is cutting off some of the flowers but I like how eclectic they turned out and so I am going to leave them as they are. I don’t mind it not being exactly centered or perfect, they are unique just like you and me! (I do not use a photo editor and don’t plan on it keeping things as simple as I can to complete my posts.) I hope you can see the rays of beauty jumping out from the flowers I may have one or two more to share! 😀
More of my beautiful yellow and pink flowers with various degrees of blooming!
I hope you enjoy my brightsquares of beautiful flowers that have been blooming in this month of April. They bring me so many smiles and fill my heart with joy each day I can smell their rose perfume. I will end this post here and thank you for visiting my vibrant brightness and beautiful smiles.
Welcome to my weekly smile and I finally got out for a morning walk. There are storms here this week and lots of cloudy skies. I love weather and this week my smile goes to winter rain and cloudy skies! It’s been nice and cool as well. I am enjoying the cool weather immensely. I will say that the hardest thing I am having trouble with is fitting in walking. I think I am a bit lazy and so procrastinating is part of the problem. I always feel better when I get in a morning walk, but I have been using excuses like its too cold out to walk. I’m a bad girl, but finally this week I told myself just go out and walk! And I got this cool photo which I thought I would share. What makes you smile this week? I have more to share!
I took this photo the other day on my ride because the clouds looked so cool!
One more photo of some clouds and I can tell you that we could probably count the cloudy days here as we get a ton of cloudless sunny days. So that is why I love it when some weather blows through our area. We don’t get snow here, only in the local mountains at higher elevation. I’m very grateful for this weather as outside activity is possible all year around. I like to make a big deal about the weather when it arrives. It rained like cats and dogs last night, even hailed a bit too. We have had so much water that the arena at the barn has a lake in the corner. I’ve shared many photos of this giant puddle (lake) is a better description. We will be getting more rain tomorrow, so its to rain most of this week which we really need. I hope this helps keep us from drought conditions. I think I’ll pull up an old photo and share here of the arena with my horses in the water. I have a fun upside down photo that my phone flipped after I took it.
Fun to reminisce and share this photo once more. I did not flip this photo but my phone did with the mirror image in the water! Pretty COOL!
Here’s a right side up photo. My horses Love the water. They will dig a trench to help drain this corner! The rest of the arena is usable. 😀
It is fun to reminisce and its great to have these wonderful shots full of memories!! I am so thankful I have a ton of great photos to have and to share. I have some fun smiling photos of my grand kids that my family sent that I want to share. I think I’ll just share with less explanation. Haha, I also have a time limit here to write trying to fit in this smile post today!
Teddy’s first visit to the playground! I think he is having a blast and I’m Smiling from ear to ear! Hi Alice and Teddy! 😀
With this last year being as crazy as ever the kids haven’t been to any playgrounds which is totally understandable. I am so happy they are able to get outside a bit now. YAY! and I always love to see them in action. I will end with one kitty that you can guess where he is in the photo that my son sent. It is a good ending to all the smiles I am thinking about this week. I hope you all are smiling or I hope what I share brings you a smile. Thank you for visiting!
Welcome to my weekly smile and I have a lot to smile about. I had the most fabulous weekend and I am so excited to share. My daughter and I were able to travel to stay with my son and his beautiful family and celebrate my grandson’s first birthday! I am in grandma heaven! It has been over a year since I have been able to visit and stay the weekend. I am planning on visiting a lot this year as I miss my grandbabies so much. My grand daughter is not a baby any more at 5 1/2 years old and she sure can be silly and enjoys making her baby brother laugh. She is in kindergarten and doing well. She attends virtually at this time. We started out our weekend by visiting the Desert Botanical Garden and I wanted to share some photos. In the photo above those very bright cactus are all made out of glass which is at the entrance, beautiful! 😀
It was perfect weather at the gardens. Teddy with his Dad, Alice looking adorable and Teddy in stroller!
I like to take random photos as we walk, which includes interesting foliage!
My son, wife and Alice getting so big, such a sweet family! ❤ ❤ ❤
We had a great time at the garden and we could not have asked for better weather. The winter in Arizona is perfect and the best time to visit most anything outside. There were so many beautiful plants and flowers and many were blooming. What a fun afternoon! I have to thank my daughter who so thoughtfully planned and booked this outing. I am so happy we were all able to do something together and enjoy the beauty of the desert. I hope you have enjoyed our little adventure as it sure makes me smile! 😀
I have more to share and am so excited we were able to help celebrate Teddy’s first birthday! I wanted to share a few more photo’s of his special day. I have to say that I did not take a lot of photos instead enjoying as much time with the family. I was asked if either my daughter or I wanted to make the cake and I volunteered and made a confetti cake with vanilla frosting. Teddy absolutely loves strawberries and so I put whipping cream in the center of the cake with cut up strawberries. I then lined around the top strawberries I cut in half. I was holding Teddy during the singing “Happy Birthday” song, so my daughter shared her photos so I can share with you. As soon as Teddy got close enough to the cake (Alice helped blow out the candle since Teddy is too little) he grabbed one of the strawberries, so adorable!! ❤
Teddy turns 1 and is eating a strawberry, his favorite!!
I realized and knew strawberries have a lot of water and I tried drying them off really well and they still lost some water on the top of the cake. It tasted delicious, I would share with you but we just about ate the whole thing! It tasted like strawberry shortcake, haha. I cut up the strawberries thinner and smaller for in the middle of the cake. I’m just a home cook and baker, but it is made with Love ~ the best kind of food I think! ❤
I had so much fun last weekend and as anyone that follows me knows I just can’t get enough of family togetherness with miles in between loved ones. Some day that may change but for the long term future my Grandma heart is in Arizona. I am always going to dream of living closer to them, we will see what the future holds! I want to share a few more photos of fun with the family. Just can’t SMILE enough!! 😀
Teddy walks all over the place now! Me and my selfies with Alice and adorable Teddy
Best ending ever! How can you not Smile, they make me laugh and I cried when I left! ❤
Thank you for visiting my smile post for this week. I want to thank Trent who host’s our smile’s and I absolutely Love to share. Not only is it fun to have a place to document my Life and the happenings as I hope it will be fun to go back and visit these fun times. Alice cried when I left, which in turn made me cry. I will be back to visit as often as I can make it happen. I feel so grateful for my family, and I Love each and everyone of you so very much. Here is to many more fun visits and maybe someday I’ll only be around the corner instead of a state away. Someday……
Welcome to my weekly smile! This little tree topper makes me SMILE!
I really want to participate in this weeks smiles and I have exactly 15 minutes to write this post! Haha, you would think that its easy peasy but I like to put some thought in the lay out and what photos I want to share. And then I re-read my posts over and over again for many reasons. Continuity, spelling errors and I may not be grammatically correct most of the time but I want it to sound like me! (I’m a little OCD, Lol) And sometimes I get stuck and my sentences or thoughts flowing out may not make a lot of sense so I have to rewrite the sentence so things flow like I want.
As I quickly put this together I am hoping it flows nicely and well, if there are errors then that’s what it is as I want to be spontaneous and share my happy week. Today was a beautiful day and I was able to go out on a trail ride. I share so many photos of my ponies which I will today as well. But they sure make me smile over and over again! I wish Zack was a bit more calmer in his box stall as he still gets a bit upset when he can’t see Chloe across the aisle. She will go outside her box stall in her run and stand behind the part of the box stall next to the opening to her barn stall. I took a photo of her stall so you can see the opening and she stands behind this.
You can see the opening to the back paddock in Chloe’s stall. She stands behind either side of the opening and Zack can’t see her!
Miss Chloe looking out and across the barn aisle is Zack . He can see directly in her stall until she disappears!
Zack getting a treat and he is mostly happy!
There is never an ideal situation for these ponies unless you have a lot of money and can afford your own horse property. One day there will be open paddocks where I use to keep them here as people do eventually move to either other areas or other stables. There is one woman here moving to Texas but she has a box stall with a run, which is more expensive than where Zack is currently living and if I move him he won’t be able to always be able to see into Chloe’s stall. So I think I will have to wait for open (outside) pens or paddocks.
These ponies always bring great joy to my life and now that my schedule has settled down I am able to get into a routine with them which helps them be calmer and more at home. Well, my 15 minutes are up and I have to get going to work. I hope you are all having a great week and thank you for visiting my smile today! Here is a goofy photo of Chloe and she is sending you a kiss!
Table is set, turkey in the oven and sides waiting to be baked! What are you thankful for?
Welcome to my weekly smile where I not only wanted to share some smiles, I also wanted to share some thankfulness. I am truly thankful for being here today with good health and a loving family. I try and stay positive and optimistic in these difficult times where family is spread apart (missing my family and grand children in Arizona) and knowing they are only a phone call away or even a video chat. Speaking of video chat I had fun visiting last weekend and my granddaughter took me to her room which she was so proud of cleaning! They have their Christmas decorations up and she was showing me the tree and all the ornaments. A cute snowman and a pretty Christmas village. It was a great time and chat. So thankful for technology!
Baby Teddy is crawling all over the place and pulling himself up and walking along the couches. He is starting to say dada, and is growing every month. He is 9 months old now and I am hoping I will be able to visit at least once here soon. I may need to get tested if I fly there, but what ever it takes to be safe is no problem at all. Here are a few photos, so adorable!
I was going to crop these photos but decided to leave them. I was looking at the kitties at my house on right side of the photo. Teddy is making a silly face, thought these were cute!
What makes you smile? As we give thanks here for Thanksgiving today, with a bountiful of food and good times. After we ate, the 4 of us were all in the kitchen together as my hubby tore apart the bird for leftovers and I was putting away food and then started washing dishes. The fine china was hand washed and I had help with drying and stacking to put back in the cupboard. It was such a great feeling as I said aloud, “what wonderful help in the kitchen!” As all this was going on, my daughter was preparing dessert. A peach cobbler was put in the oven. How can you not smile! 😀
Dinner is done and after the clean up, peach cobbler fresh from the oven! Yum!
I feel like I have so much more to say but that I will save for another day. I really wanted to get these photos of our day together shared as another Thanksgiving has elapsed and I know that no matter where you are or what you are doing we all should be grateful for another day. I hope you and your family have had a wonderful day the best way possible as I know this has been a crazy year. My sister’s and brother all group text and stay in touch so of course it was a Happy Thanksgiving and Love to all! I’ll end with a few more photos of the day!
Another cute Teddy! I think he is looking at us and dinner! YUMMY!
Mylife-and-Horsestories 