Sometimes you just need a nap

This picture doesn't need many words. Notice the ONE American flag sock. That's just all you need in June.

Birds Birds Birds

Bird nests galore!

Every year we have a family of orchard orioles in our front oak tree. This year I got a good picture of the nest with the fledgies on it. They make a hanging nest and the babies were bright yellow. Not the best camoflague. They fledged this week and are now hanging out in the neighbor's big oak tree safely away from the cats.

A prothonotary warbler moved into one of our nest boxes. You can see her sitting by the box with moss in her beak. The nest is made mostly of green moss. Soft, I guess! I think she is incubating now.

While watching the orioles I had noticed a pair of blue-gray gnatcatchers hanging around. I finally found their nest in a crepe myrtle right near the orioles' oak tree. It is gorgeous. The outside is papered entirely with lichens held on with spider webs. It's quite a feat of engineering. They have four babies that I expect to fledge any day. You can see dad gnatcatcher looking at the camera. They are tiny birds, smaller than a chickadee. The nest is also tiny.

Cub scout Blue and Gold

The cub scouts have a Blue & Gold banquet every year. There is a "dad and lad" cake bake and they auction off the cakes to raise money for the pack. Translation: you spend an entire day working on the cake to buy it back for $50 while dad and lad are nowhere to be found. Ok, they helped a little and we did take a few pictures to capture the moment but they're in another file somewhere, right now, along with the awards pictures from the banquet. Overall I had a great time and Aaron had fun while Dave and Julia were mostly miserable and would rather have been at home. Alex.....luckily the tentacles stayed concealed and he had fun running around and "guarding" our cake for the silent auction. He stood behind it and refused to let anyone else bid on it.

It was a lovely cake!

Tentacles

Alex forgot the word for the boy parts.....you know the ones.....testicles. He calls them tentacles. Needless to say, we've run with this.
For example, "No, you can't get on my shoulders. I don't want tentacles on my neck (see the post about Alex never wearing pants)"
"Tentacle alert" - when the pants depart and he goes streaking through the house.
There are just so many possibilities with this one.

Isn't she pretty?

A 2-wk old pearl white Leghorn napping on the side of their container. Isn't she lovely and fluffy?

Alex and the computer

Alex finally got his own computer CD-ROM game. He's been wanting to play the big kid games but he can't manage. He is thrilled with it and quickly learned to do everything on it. Today he was playing and just got too tired to continue. He took and hour long nap on the computer chair. (Yes, on any given day if you drop in on us Alex will most likely NOT have pants on. He just hates pants.)

Kids

Saturday was actually a beautiful day. It gave us some hope that spring might someday occur and it might quit raining everyday. I thought these were cute. We were moving the chickens out to the chicken-tractor and the kids all climbed on top.

My sweater

Admire it. Yes, it only has one sleeve and no trim. Someday I hope it will. It looks like it will be the right size if I never wash it or block it (who knows, it may even be fine with washing). The bottom is rolled up in this picture so it looks short but it should be fine, especially with an inch or more of trim all the way around.

Snow

This was our second snow of the year. It poured snow for a couple of hours and then was gone shortly after. Our back woods, which are normally golfcart trails have been so flooded all winter it is hard to imagine them being passable. The kids had fun and got a day off school.

.....more chickens

We got more chickens. This time a few cute layers along with 20 meat chickens. The meaties rapidly got disgusting looking. They are fat, dont' get around well, and poop all the time. Exciting. Apparently that is their job. We refer to them as the "fatties" because they get so big so quick. Right now they are in a baby pool on the bar but will be moving outside today! We'll see how the processing goes. They dress out at 5lbs. in 6-8 wks. That is very fast in the chicken world since it takes a layer about 4-5 months to begin laying. I don't think I'll have a problem killing them just out of mercy!