Fun, fun, fun times!

So much going on the last few weeks. For one thing, we have one very excited 5 year old. Can you tell why?

She has been bouncing off the walls for several days since the tooth loosened. Everyone that has come within 5 feet of her knows that she has a loose tooth, and this morning I had the honors of pulling the wiggly little bugger out. Now she skips around the house with that silly grin on her face. :o)

In other news, my friend, Sonja came out to visit a few weekends ago. We had a lot of fun together. Michelle was so excited to play with Helen again. I think they only had one disagreement the whole weekend--that is a truly amazing thing for best friends. We went to the park, and of course, we had to visit the Mall of America. That was a fun day. The shopping was fun, but just being with my friend and talking was the best part. I so wish they lived closer to us and Sunday morning good-by's were really hard. :o(

I've mentioned before that I believed we had raspberry canes on the property. Well, I was right, not only do we have raspberries, but black caps and blackberries as well. The raspberries and black caps started to ripen just about the time Sonja and the kids arrived, and I've been picking ever since. The first few days of picking I only got about a cup or so, but now I get about 3 cups every other day. The raspberries are tapering off a little bit, and now the blackberries are starting to ripen. Many of the berries are pretty small, but considering how little rain we've had this year, it's pretty amazing that there's any berries there at all. I think I'm going to make a sign to put by the mail box naming our property Berried Treasure. It's so neat each time I go out and find new berry brambles in different areas. They're sometimes hard to distinguish from the rest of the underbrush until the berries start to ripen, but now that they are, I keep finding them all over the place. They're like a surprise gift God has left just for us to enjoy. So fun!

We've been finding other treasures as well. We have day lilies, daisies (my favorite flower :o), black-eyed Susans, peonies, butternut trees, a chestnut tree, grapes, rhubarb, and all kinds of wild flowers. A friend of ours pointed out that we even have a few illegal plants up on the hill that I'll be clearing out this week. (Yikes!-You know we've always wondered what the previous owners of this house were doing with a garage that has double barred windows and doors.)

On one of our berry picking adventures, Michelle pointed out a beautiful monarch caterpillar so we now have a science project going. We've watched him (or her?) eat up milkweed leaves, leave droppings (eew!), make himself a "ladder" of webbing to climb to the top of our jar and then loose his skin and turn into a chrysalis. It's a cool green color with a black and gold stripe and tiny gold dots on it. The gold looks like actual gold. You can even see his wings through the chrysalis. Pretty cool.

Well, I'm going to close this here so I will still have time to get some of the other pictures we've taken this week onto Picasa. Hopefully by next week I'll have some great butterfly pictures to post. :o)

Till then, God's love and blessings.