Memorial Day Weekend With Grandparents

I know it's been two weeks or so since Memorial Day weekend, but I'm slow.  Hopefully I can get several posts done and get pictures uploaded onto facebook.  We'll see, today is a busy day for me :)  Anyways, back to the topic at hand.  Joshua's parents drove up to spend Memorial Day weekend with us.  They started early early Thursday morning (or late Wednesday night however you want to think of it)  and got here Thursday evening.  Really long drive, but we were excited to have them visit.  While they were here they (Joshua and Todd) worked on the front flower beds (cleaned out the grass looking plants that I'm not a really big fan of) so I could plant my flowers, yay!!  Joshua and I bought flowers and put them in the Monday after his parents left.  I got three different kinds of impatiens (not on purpose) and pansies.  The plants are bigger now than in the pictures I have, but I don't want to take more pictures right now.   The two pictures to the right of the text are the left and right flower beds respectively.  The red and orange flowers are shade loving impatiens (normal) and I hope they do well because they get more sun than I thought they would.  The pink is a special kind of impatiens that likes the sun, I hope it gets huge because it was supposed to have 2-3 feet of space around it.



Orange for Joshua



This is a sun-loving impatiens! It's loving life.

Cave Rose

 We also went and did the 'Lost Sea Adventure!' which is a tour of a huge cave.  It was fun especially since it basically took no effort to get to the start of the cave. I like caves and they had cool stuff to do while you waited for your tour to start.  They had a little nature hike and a glass shop (Allen didn't go in that one) and some gift shops.  The nature hike was supposed to be self-guided, but they didn't have any papers to guide ourselves with so we just hiked and enjoyed the scenery.  I'm not used to trees that are so tall and huge that aren't pine trees.  There were a few pine trees, but most were deciduous (fancy word I know).  


Miniature Grand Canyon

During the Civil War they used the guano (bat poop) from the cave to make an ingredient in gun powder, I don't remember which ingredient.  At least I think that's what the tour guide said, Allen was a little distracting or I was looking at something in the cave and not paying enough attention.  At one point they turned off all the lights so we could experience "true dark," Allen was okay for a few seconds and then started to get upset; I can sympathise I'm a light loving gal myself.  Where they took us there weren't a ton of active cave formations (too much use by humans over the years), but the ones that were there were expensive if you decided to touch them (government fines), not worth it. Not that I would have wanted to touch them anyways, but I thought the fines were a good deterrent.  Another thing I learned was that if you go far enough underground it's not possible to get drunk something to do with how it affects the oxygen level in your blood.  Kind of cool, and a little ironic since one of the things in the cave was a moonshine still. 



Fish jumping out of the water for food

Trying to climb out of the boat

The final part of the tour before we hiked our way out of the cave was the "lost sea"  It's a 2 acre underground lake and you get to ride over part of it on a boat that has a glass bottom in the center.  They stock the lake with rainbow trout and feed them dog food every time they take a tour out so the fish are huge and taste awful.  They were pretty cool and we got some cool pictures of them.  Allen liked watching the fish and decided he was going to get in the water to join them so he started trying to climb out of the boat.  He didn't get far, but it was funny.  We distracted him by letting him play in the bottom of the boat.  He liked the glass bottom and entertained everyone in the boat by how excited he was watching the bubbles.  When we finished, we had to wait for the other half of our tour group so Allen (tired of being carried) decided that it was the perfect spot to practice walking.  He also wanted to hike his own way out of the cave, but he wasn't fast enough to keep up with the group so he walked part of the way and the rest he was carried (much to his disgruntlement).  After we were done with the tour Allen found a water fountain and had a blast playing in it.  It was really cute and we got some awesome pictures.   All in all it was a fun filled weekend and we discovered that Allen practices walking for grandma and grandpa better than he does when it's just us.  Little show-off :)  (Sorry if I didn't catch my grammatical errors, for some reason I was having issues today.)




Walking with Dad



Water is so much fun!

'Bout Time! The Garden, Bug, and Pest Chronicles

One of the best things about this house is that we have space to put in a garden.  We tried to pick the sunnyest part of the yard that we could and a place that had enough drainage that our garden wouldn't drown when we get the torrential downpours that seem so commom here.  We planted squash, broccoli, three kinds of lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and jalepenos.  We also planted bell peppers in our pots (not shown below).  Our jalepenos never came up so we probably need to get some new seeds.  Right now we have squash, maybe one cucumber, lettuce, bell peppers, broccoli, and our tomatoes surving.  Now I'll tell you the story of what they've had to survive.

One weekend we put in a garden, actually Josh put in the garden and I watched him dig and shook dirt off of grass clumps. 



Digging the garden.

It has a border!! Go Josh!

 Then we bought what we needed and planted.  After a few days Josh came home from work and noticed nibble marks on a squash plant.  He also noticed that our cucumbers were coming up!  We discussed what to do about nibble marks and decided we needed a fence.  Sadly, before the fencing materials were bought all the leaves on one squash plant and all of the baby cucumber plants were eaten.  The fence was put up and the squah plant made a comeback, and one more cucmber plant made an appearance. 

The fence: sqaush on the left end tomato on the right.

We thought the tale was headed for a happy ending, then Sarah watched a bird land in the garden head to the squash plant and snip the leaves off with it's beak and fly away taking the leaves with it.  Now we have netting on top though we don't have a picture of it to share.  Stupid bird, we thought it was just the rabbits and gophers.  

We have these random patches of strawberries growing in our yard.  There's no order to where they pop up, in the middle of the yard, on the edge of the yard, underneath a small grove of trees... you name it.  Some patches are bigger than others but we're keeping an eye on them to see how big they get and if they'll be any worth eating or making jam or something.

 

 

 

Our gopher family is pretty fun to watch.  There's a little one, who got picked up in the first picture, and he's pretty cute.  They pop up every once in a while and we watch them go around our yard eating clover or leaves/grass or whatever it is that they're going around eating.  The little one does eat clover flowers, apparently they're pretty good.