Kindergarten Graduation

Today was Reed's Kindergarten graduation.  It was cute.  They sang some songs and each child took a picture accepting a diploma.  Here's my big boy...

Here we are with our little graduate

with Mimi and Pepaw...

and Gammy and DadDad...

and here he is with Mrs. Sain.

I cannot say enough about Mrs. Sain.  She has made is first year of school absolutely wonderful.  It took so much off of my shoulders to know that he had such a sweet teacher who loved him so much!  Thank you Mrs. Sain!

And to our sweet boy - your daddy and I are so very proud of you.  You have done such a great job at school - listening and learning SO much this year.  You are going to be a great first grader and I am so excited to see all the great things that you will do!  Love you little man!

Memories

Brian just came in and as we was putting on his boots getting ready for the day, a memory flashed back to me.  About 8 to 12 months ago, Hudson was just toddling around and he would always put toys in Brian's boots.  Brian would start to put them on in the mornings and only get it half way on and have to take it off to dump out some random toy.  Giant legos, action figures... anything that would fit got dropped down in his boots.  I reminded him of that this morning and he smiled and said "We need to write that stuff down, don't we?"  Yesterday I was realizing how big Hudson is getting.  He's losing a lot of his baby fat and really starting to hold converstations with us.  It's great to have certain freedoms, but also very sad that I'm losing my baby so quickly!  And Reed... oh, gracious.  He will be a first grader next year.  He is such a smart, sweet, helpful child.  It seems like the days of baby and toddlerhood are SO long ago!  The days of him constantly carrying around his plastic elephant that he called an "et", the days of when he couldn't find something and he would say it was "hino" (hiding). Where has the time gone?  I am so crazy about my sweet boys and all the great memories they have given me.  Here's looking forward to making many more memories along the way!

Two super cute boys + a juicy watermelon = 

The beginning of a fun summer!

If you'd like to read about it...

Brian has done a couple of new posts on his blog about our garden(s).  Read about it here.  I really like what he titled the latest post. :)

Mother's Day Weekend

I've had such a great weekend!  Yesterday morning, Brian took the boys to breakfast and then to the store.  Both boys picked out flowers for me and Reed got me the sweetest necklace.   We worked outside in the garden and then spent the evening at Brian's parents for his mom's mothers day.  This morning after church, we took my mom out to lunch at Miyako's where she and I shared some sushi and filet mignon - Yum!  After a nap, we headed out to the garden to get the corn plants on the ground.  Since rain was supposed to be on the way, we wanted to get as much planted as possible.  For the next couple of hours, Brian dug holes and Reed and I planted the corn plants.  (Hudson played in the dirt, drank our Route 44's from Sonic, sat in the tractor seat and yelled at everybody to look, repeatedly stepped on various plants and cried a lot for whatever reason the moment called for.  He was quite helpful.)  We cleaned up and went to eat where both boys ended up on my side of the booth for dinner.  I had the best Mother's Day that I can remember.

To my sweet husband - Thank you.  Thank you for giving me these two precious boys and making not only this day, but our lives special.  I love you like crazy.

E-I-E-I-O...

After so many plants, I wasn't shocked when Brian came home with these yesterday...

Ten baby guineas.  They are so stinkin' cute!  The boys loved them!

The guineas eat bugs and will help with our snake issue - Yay!

I'm beginning to accept it now... Folks, we're quickly becoming a farm.  We cut, bale and sell hay.  We will soon have "crops".  Brian is getting a new tiller as we speak (the old one was having issues) and today he'll be tilling so we can get the corn, pumpkins and canteloupe planted.  I've been weeding the garden the last couple of days and Brian and I spent some time yetsterday walking around discussing where things should go.  A corn field here and a chicken coop there... Chickens??  Why, yes we'll have chickens. What kind of farm would we be without eggs? :)

As I was sitting in the garage yesterday watching the boys play with the guineas, I saw this bag and the name make me laugh out loud.

Evidently I'm becoming a farm wife. I didn't know how much I would like all of this, but turns out, I do! I guess as the saying goes, if the shoe fits... (or in this case, the hat...)

The Good, The Bad and The Crazy

First we'll start with the bad stuff... 

Brian found a copperhead in the studio the other night.  Is was super windy outside and the wind blew the doors wide open.  Evidently, the snake was attracted to the warm building, so he crawled right in.  Brian had gone over to let the dogs in for the night and he saw what he thought was one of the boys plastic snakes... until it moved.  He came back in the house, changed his flip flops to boots and after trying to chop the head off with a blunt garden hoe type thing with out any success, finally got the snake outside and chopped the head off with an ax. Yikes!

Now to the crazy stuff... Brian came home on Friday and told me (and I quote) "I did something today that you're going to roll your eyes at."  Honestly, he does stuff all the time that I think is silly/funny/weird/crazy, so I had no idea what to expect.  Evidently, he had gone to a local nursery and they had plants on sale.  They had quite a few left, so he offered to buy ALL of them if they gave him a deal.  The boy came home with 7 flats (just keep in mind that a flat is 12 plants) of pumpkin plants, 5 flats of canteloupe and hundreds of corn plants.  When I say hundreds, I am NOT joking.  Amongst these gillions of plants, we have a few varieties.  We now will be growing regular sweet corn (like corn on the cob that you eat), ornamental corn (the pretty multi-colored corn that you see as decoration around Thanksgiving), some other kind of colored corn and popcorn.  The two pictures below show what he came home with.  He had to go back and get more because it wouldn't all fit in the bed of his truck and the enclosed trailer.  Seriously.

(Just a side note, since he bought all the above plants, he has also bought a lemon tree, and orange tree and two blueberry bushes.) 

Here is a (far away, but current) picture of our garden now.

To plant all of that stuff that he bought, he's going to have to plow up a lot more land but I'm sure he's all about it.  He told me yesterday that we 'needed' a hay baler.  Have mercy.

Lastly, I just had to include this because it's the good stuff.  :)