Birds, gardens, and deck demolishing

We have had this very sweet wren working on building a nest in our elegant bird house outside our front window. I got some fun video of the building. Shortly, there were two wrens building. Here is a close up of all the sticks they managed to get inside the house!

Here is the house itself - pretty fancy, eh? It was here when we moved in.

Look what greeted us this morning! What a beautiful sight mixed in with all of my house plants.

Out front, our irises are going crazy.

This is Lemony, Elise's honeysuckle plant. After Elise's ballet recital, we asked her if she wanted flowers, and she said no, she wanted a tree. She really wanted a lemon tree, but we felt that wasn't very appropriate for Colorado, where it would have to live inside it's whole life. Our compromise - a lemon honeysuckle. the flowers are cool - pink outside, yellow inside. Now where to plant it?

The garden is going great - the salad garden is taking over! Some are even bolting already. :-(

Potatoes are coming up:

Here come the beans:

Peas have lots of flowers - soon we'll be eating fresh snap peas from the garden!

I am so proud of the tomatoes I grew from seed:

Here is a wide view of the garden:

Now the fun part. We took off the deck this weekend. I say we, although I did none of it (I was doing garden jobs....)

Here is the deck more or less before we started. It was original to the house (1963) and was falling apart. We have never used it, it was in bad shape when we moved it. It also had no shade, and no way "down" to the backyard (go back inside and down stairs or out the garage) so kind of useless to us.

Owen started by taking out screws and knocking off the rails:

One side of the railings coming down:

My kids the demo team:

John hard at work:

Here is some of the floor coming off:


Pause while we hold a fun dragonfly, believed to be Greenie's baby:



The results:

On to the next project!

(First in line - get a dumpster and get rid of all the wood!!!!)

New visions..... and old news

Yes, Owen finally got glasses. We knew it was only a matter of time. Everyone at the opthamologist kept telling me that genetics doesn't play a big role in nearsightedness, Well, I don't believe them.

Isn't he cute?

Most of the pictures on the blog today were taken by kids. Here are a few chicken pics taken by kids, I promise to post a better update up soon.

The girls by the tree next to their house (see pop, or poop, door in background).
The girls basking in the sun:

ELise taking a pic of herself

And one by Owen, in her lovely outfit:

Maybe the same day? (or not! - same clothes) with war paint child 1:

child 2:

Here are the teacher bags I made this year:

Red (Kindergarten) Bag:
Detail:


Red-Orange Stripe (3rd Grade) Bag:

Detail:

My first salad from the garden of the year (a few weeks ago!):

Owen eating an orange-mango popsicle:

Look at how tropical it looks out here!!!!

The kids took a few pics of the beautiful irises out front:

And this, this, is a photo shoot done by kids. It reminds me of a stream-of-consciousness-type shoot, and I only put a fraction of them here!

Enjoy. There is no meaning.

Here is the GLOVE. A creation by Owen. Too cool, it is removeable, and retains it's shape after removal.

It seems I have gotten into the habit of leaving you with a video at the end of the blog. Well, here ya go - another kid creation.