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Spring Discoveries

We’re at the time of year that I really do love (even if the pollen does make me a bit sneezy). There are pretty flowers, interesting insects (and things that eat insects, haha), and the weather is warm but not yet oppressively hot. We had a decent week. Abigail was fully better, and Paul was as well (for the most part). Joseph seemed better, but then Wednesday he had a bit of a set back (after school, thankfully). I kept him home on Thursday and he has been so much better since then. I guess it was the virus’s last push. Consequently, we didn’t do much out of the ordinary.

I almost stepped on this guy when I was finishing one of my walks. Those are some impressive antennae!
I love seeing the wildflowers growing everywhere.
I’ve started walking/jogging to the park in our subdivision and back. One of my favorite parts of the park is the path that winds its way through these big trees. The shade is much appreciated on warm days!
I love it when the grass greens up again. My flowers are looking especially awesome right now, too!
My roses are beginning to bloom, too. Normally they bloom before now, but we’ve had a kind of chilly start to spring.
I pulled up what I thought was weeds…only to realize they were baby oak trees (see the acorns at the bottom?). It was cool to see (I think I’ve only seen diagrams in textbooks). I didn’t think about it until it was too late, but I suppose I could have planted these in pots (I’m not too sure what I would have done with them once they got bigger, though) just to see what happened. They ended up in the compost with the weeds that I’d pulled.
I found this anole lizard while I was unwinding my hose.
I kept gently shaking the hose to see if it would jump off, but it essentially dug in its heels, haha.
It finally did jump off and run into the mint.
The cool thing about anoles are they can change color, from brown to green. I sat there and actually watched the change happening for a bit…I wish I could have watched until it was completely green, but I didn’t want to freak it out.
Abigail’s teacher made them bunnies out of pudding containers. It was so cute!
Abigail was pretending to be an explorer. She’s wearing my dad’s old hat (there was one time we were visiting Mom and Paul needed a hat, so he borrowed that one and Mom told him to hang onto it) and borrowing Joseph’s binoculars. She told Joseph he needed to be a wild animal that she could look at. He asked her if he could be a sloth, haha. She agreed. 🙂
I was grabbing some food for dinner last night and I got caught in commuting traffic. As I came to a standstill and sat there for a bit, I couldn’t help but snap a quick picture of my view. This is about a mile from home. 🙂
One of the things that has been a bit of a struggle is that even with some pretty hefty weather stripping, water will still get into Paul’s office (under the door) whenever we get a big storm. Instead of dropping some serious change on a storm door, Paul bought a screen door (because we feel that we really just need an additional layer in front of the door along the bottom to stop the water from coming in) and gave it a quick coat of white paint. While the screen is obviously not solid, it should slow down the water enough to keep it from coming in. If that doesn’t work, then Paul has plans to get plexiglass and replace the screen with that…which still would be cheaper than a storm door. I love that he thinks outside the box!
Joseph created a blanket and pillow fort in his room. He has a loft bed, so it was easy to tuck the blanket into his bed frame and then drape another part of the blanket across his desk chair and I think he closed some of the blanket into a drawer of his dresser. He then used some of his bins to prop up his pillows. The Christmas lights were already up (since we wanted to add more light to the underside of his bed because his desk is under there). I love this kid’s creativity!