Who needs to travel miles to visit a butterfly garden when you can step right off the back deck into one. Every year my husband and his big fat green thumb plants so many beautiful flowers and plants specifically to attract the most unique species of insects in our back yard. We had more butterflies this year than ever. When you peered into our flower garden there were always dozens fluttering about the tops of the flowers. It is so beautiful….I wish they ate mosquitoes! Alongside the flowers and butterflies we grew and ate our own tomatoes, raspberries and blueberries (but not many before the birds gobbled them up). You will never hear these words out of my mouth…”I wish my husband watched more sports on television”…LOL.
Here are a few amazing pictures he took of them. (A good camera doesn’t hurt either)
Mine as well get a bit of a head start, eh? The boys are very anxious to start and I am ready so here we go!
Wheat is beginning 2nd grade while Lake is beginning 1st. River…well, he thinks he is in 2nd grade, too. We’ll see what gets accomplished with him. I made him a desk between the boys so he feels special, too. 
…after going to the beach, then getting some more swim lessons under their belts, we went to the pool 2-3 times a week. The boys are swimming like fish now without floaties. Time for swim team!!
Well, I guess it’s time. For the longest time, we just couldn’t do it. When you give a baby boy that first hair cut, they instantly age about 2 years. This was our youngest and last baby boy, it was just too hard to say goodbye to those baby days. But he is 3 now and we had been talking to him about it and he cool with it, indifferent really. From his expression in a few of the pics you’ll see that he wasn’t too cool with it once the process began but it was too late. We knew for a long time we would donate his hair to the Locks of Love charity and had researchd that they needed so many inches to be able to use it and 10 was the magic number. So, we sectioned his hair so as to get the maximum amount of length to donate. He did not like the many pony tails but once they came off he was happy. It left his hair very choppy and a mess so I did what any good mother would do and took them all to a professional that afternoon. That was a hefty bill. This was River’s first hair cut ever and the older boys have only had a handful each themselves and the first time all three were cut in one sitting. We don’t promote hair cuts very much in our house…the boys have the liberty to wear their hair however they want and they usually opt out of cutting it which is fine by us. So now they are all freshly cut just in time for soccer and I am suddenly a mom to three big boys instead of three little toddlers. I will admit that although the last photo shows River with his nice little hair style holding up the pony full of hair just before it went into the envelope it still took me several weeks to physically put the envelope in the mail.
Man this is my favorite part of summer…picking hot, fresh tomatoes off the vines. We eat so many every summer by the end of the summer we do not want to see tomatoes for a long time. Luckily, that passes and just in time for Spring. Wheat is the only one who lacks the love affair with them. Lake and River will eat them like apples. Here’s some pics of our routine mornin’ pickin’…can’t you just taste them!?!?
Little man turned three today. We were in Atlanta for a large homeschool expo to purchase all our curriculum for the coming school year. We had a fun day of shopping for school things, climbing the wall, eating, more shopping, swimming in the indoor pool, and then some ice cream in celebration.
Ok, so this post is honestly my way of redeeming myself and my family for the awful things that took place in our back yard today. I was sitting at my desk working this morning when the boys came running into the back door crying. Lake began screaming and crying saying something so terrible happened. I quickly made sure everyone was alive and then began to listen to him. As it turns out, last night Jason pointed out a birds nest on a limb on one of our dogwood trees in our back yard. Today, the boys got a bit curious and wondered if there were any baby birds or eggs in it so they started grabbing the limbs in an attempt to pull them down and take a peek. Well, needless to say, the nest came crashing to the ground…about a 10 foot drop. It was indeed full of baby birds so they spilled out all over the grass with all of the contents of the nest. When I went out to look, all I could think of was how I had no idea what to do to help and also wanted the boys far away from this so they wouldn’t catch any icky diseases or anything (my ignorance kicking in here…but I am paranoid about diseases carried by wild animals). So, I began to freak a little, especially because the baby birds were crying out and their little flimsy necks extended like I should feed them something. I had Wheat run in the house to fetch a pair of gloves for me to put on so I could pick them up, not sure what I was going to do with them when I picked them up. I also had Lake get my mom’s dog out of the yard and enclose him in her fence. While I was giving the older boys instructions, River lost his balance and fell forward stepping directly on one of the baby birds. More screeching, then silence. Oh wow. My son has just stepped on a helpless baby bird and killed it right in front of me. I started crying and he started crying and here we are with a dead baby bird in my hands and then two more crying on the grass. So what the heck do you do in this situation?
Well, I got Jason’s ladder out of the barn and climbed up to the top and began trying to arrange the nest back onto the limb where it was. My thinking was that if I could put it all back just like it was, maybe the mama would come back and just forget that she had three in there and not wonder where the third one was OR maybe I would put the dead baby in there with the other two and she would assume he/she just choked on a worm or something. So I fixed the nest back onto the limb as well as I could but in no way even comparable to how it was originally. I thought it would work. I put the babies in it and left the scene, hoping the mom would come back, say “what’s up?” and then fix everything or grab the babies in her mouth like a mama cat does with her kittens and haul them off to another nest, like their Summer home. Well, their placement lasted about 10 minutes. I came out of the house to check on them and saw they were all on the ground again. They were crying again….well, 2 of them were. Those two had now survived two plunges to the ground. I knew I could not make their nest stable enough for them and didn’t want to attempt it and have it fail again and send them plunging a third time. So, I turned to my most faithful friend….Google! (You guys thought I was gonna say God, didn’t you? Well, He is really number one:) I found some things on rescuing baby birds and what to do and how to do it. At the same time, I thought maybe I needed to hear all this from someone who really knew this would work because I surely did not want to go to the trouble of all this for it not to work. So I found a number for a wildlife rehabilitation professional in our county and gave her a call. She basically said all the same things that I read online. Part of me was hoping she would just come to my house and take them away and I wouldn’t have to worry about it any more but tha wasn’t the case. So, I began my project.
- Get a gallon milk jug and cut the top out of it (I left the handle part attached to have something sturdy to hang it with).
- Cut small holes in the bottom of the jug. Not too big so a bird leg doesn’t fall out, but big enough for rain water to run out easily and not collect and drown the birds.
- Cut small holes in a few places around the edges to attach the twine or rope to.
- Line the bottom with paper towels (which I did, but I also placed what was left of the actual nest down into the jug hoping it would help more).
- Lastly, hang it near where the original nest was and place babies inside and wait.
So, I did all this and while doing it thought I could take pictures to perhaps help someone as ignorant as myself learn all this, too, in case they ever found themselves in this situation. I was mad that I did not know already how to deal with this and felt at some point that it should have been taught in school. LOL I also realized that very few people would go to this extreme and many would have probably left the birds on the ground to be a snack for another wild animal but those types of things don’t happen here. Every heart beat is worth saving, yes?
Well, to make a long story short….(if short is even possible at this point) I made this way more obsessive than it needed to be but I also really needed to justify all the time I had spent on this all day while neglecting all my many other responsibilities. So, I set up my video camera on the tripod on the back deck and recorded no less than three hours of footage pointed at this nest in the tree. At some point in the late afternoon, I brought the camera in the house and rewound it and watched it, fast forwarding mostly. What I ended up seeing was the most miraculous thing ever. After about 2 solid hours of tape with absolutely nothing happening, you see the mama bird come hopping down a branch with a baby lizard or salamander in her mouth and she hopped on the edge of my milk jug and bent over and fed it to one of her babies.
One of our favorite things to do in the summer is visit Jason’s parents in Ooltewah and go hiking in the woods. They have acres of untouched wild blackberry bushes and we fill our bellies!! This year we found a giant mushroom the size of River’s head and a box turtle which we shared some blackberries with. He already had the juice all over his mouth so we knew he had been eating the berries as they ripened and dropped to the ground. At the end of the day, River couldn’t hold his head up and passed out in the rocking chair. It was a fun day!
