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Fun Times, Discoveries, and Improvements Abound

This past week was full of fun times (mainly for the kids who enjoyed their last full week of school thanks to fun activities planned by their teachers…they have Monday off for Memorial Day and then only have three days of school left after that), fun discoveries (of the insect and reptile variety), and fun improvements.

I love that summer means fresh berries!
I’ve discovered that my favorite part of my daily walk/run is walking through this part of the park in our subdivision. The trees are my favorite!
This was a fun discovery: this is apparently a moth called a flannel moth (I have an app on my phone that helps identify insects). He was about the size of the top half of my thumb and hung out on the side of our house for a couple of days.
I’m so grateful for this beautiful home that we live in!
This was a fun game to watch. I was afraid there would be tears if she lost, but as luck would have it, Paul went bankrupt first. When Abigail realized she won, she said, “Yay, yay, yay! Oh, but it’s okay…maybe you can win next time!” In addition to trying to get her to be graceful about losing, we’ve also worked on having her try to be a graceful winner. It’s nice when that shows.
This was a fun experiment with water, orange juice, pectin, sugar, and orange zest…
I made orange marmalade!
It was quite tasty! I put the half jar right into the fridge and the two full jars eventually went into the freezer.
I probably took ten pictures…this was the least blurry. She’s always on the move!
This was the day after I saw the flannel moth. We went back to check to see if it was still there. Not only was it still there, but there was another one hanging out with it! They were both gone the next morning.
Paul got this picture of the anole. I think it’s cool that he was able to get a picture of it while it had its dewlap flared out.
She told me she wants to be a puppy doctor when she grows up.
Taking her puppy’s blood pressure.
This was a funny discovery. Last week, Paul spread some of our compost onto bare spots in our yard to propagate grass growth. He had mentioned that he had seen stuff sprouting from it, but I hadn’t had a chance to see anything yet. Well, a couple of mornings after a big overnight thunderstorm, I went out to the front yard and discovered probably close to ten of these plants. My plant app said it was a gourd of some type. I was perplexed. I started pulling them out and noticed that one of them still had a seed present. It was a pumpkin seed! I had forgotten all about our Halloween pumpkins! 😀
I love how peaceful our backyard is.
The birds enjoy the serenity, too.
Nothing like a nice dip in fresh water on a hot day (I change the water out every day).
She made sure the carnivores and herbivores were separated and that they had appropriate food to eat. At first she was concerned there would’t be enough lettuce for the herbivores, but then she decided the three stegosauri could share the head of lettuce. She also insisted that they say a blessing on their food.
One fun improvement: The grouping to the right of the bulletin board used to be the two sea turtle pictures and a wood anchor decoration.
I decided I wanted something different than the anchor and was happy to find this white sea turtle. I think it fits better with the decor than the anchor did.
I also decided that I was going to slightly rearrange how some of the stuff in the loft was organized. I pushed the couch all the way to the wall (before, the Mickey table was between the couch and the wall). I also moved Abigail’s kitchen to a different wall (I put it where the car garage was before, so I swapped the placement of those two things), and moved her tent farther out of the corner (it has a “skylight” that she likes to pop her head out of and I was always afraid that she’s bonk her head on the corner of the white cabinet).
The kitchen’s new home. I also moved the Mickey table to the outside of the couch.
It feels a bit less cluttered now.
Joseph had Primary activities on Thursday, so Abigail and I went to Freddy’s to get frozen chocolate custard with peanut butter sauce as a treat.
I love my mini-me!
Freddy’s has really good fry sauce (in fact, it’s the only fast food place around here that offers it)…and they started bottling it! When I bought it, Abigail was concerned that I would put it on her frozen custard. I reassured her that I would wait and use it for other stuff.
She wanted to pretend that she had a paper route and was ticked that I wouldn’t let her ride her bike inside. I convinced her to pretend that she was part of the Pony Express instead. She seemed pleased enough with the change of plans.
My tennis shoes were wearing out and I felt like before spending good money on a new set, I really ought to go to an actual shoe store and have them do a foot analysis (where they watch you walk and they have you stand on a special board that shows how you distribute your weight along with seeing how your arches are). It was nice getting one-on-one service where the salesperson took the time to do that and was able to pull out just the right type of shoe for me to try on. Here are my new running shoes. They are called Cloudrunners and they feel so good on my feet!
This is the happy face of a girl whose feet (and knees…and hips) didn’t take a pounding when she ran.
This was my stats from my walk/run last week…
And these are my stats from last night. I managed to shave off an entire minute off of my time! The right shoes really do make a difference!
Abigail drew this at school and her teacher labeled things after asking Abigail to tell her about the picture. I wish I had a front-row seat to whatever is going on in her head! It seems like quite the entertaining place!
It was fun to come downstairs after a quick nap and see this happening.
We tried out a new frozen custard place.
It was pretty tasty! Both kids approved,which doesn’t always happen. 😂