Close ups

Here are some more close up pictures of our caterpillars. There are actually 8 of them!

More Birthday Pictures

Grammy spent the afternoon with us yesterday and above, she is showing Chris the "crazy putty" she got him for his birthday. And then apparently, she was in Holly's chair so Holly squeezed up there with her...

Chris got a laser tag game from us for his birthday so the boys were trying it out, much to Grammy's dismay...

With my nine year-old...

Visitors!

I went to water the parsley this morning and we found 7 caterpillars hanging out on the plant! First we thought they might be monarch caterpillars because they do resemble them but after looking up some more information, we found out that monarchs will not survive if they eat parsley. We actually have 7 black swallowtail caterpillars! Instant science experiment in our backyard! If you click on the picture to make it bigger, you can see them more closely.

Got Green Juice?

Happy 9th Birthday Chris!

Happy 9th birthday to Christopher!! We spent the morning of his birthday at Novice Champs where Chris was swimming breaststroke. It was his only event so between the hours of 6:30AM and 12 (when he did his race) Chris had a lot of hanging out time. He did great though and qualified for Level II in breaststroke...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zwDTMl3Vgk

And then... Alexander Hamilton, his name is Alexander Hamilton. And there's a million things he hasn't done, just you wait, just you wait...

It's What's for Dinner

One of my favorite things about the garden is being able to go out, pick some vegetables and have them in our dinner about an hour later. Here are a couple recent dishes where at least 50% of the meal came from the garden. The first is a chickpea pasta with cashew cheese (also with basil from the herb pots outside) and kale (from the garden) and cherry tomatoes (unfortunately not from the garden this year). On the side is roasted eggplant, zucchini and green peppers, all from the garden...

The second dish is a kale pesto that also has oregano and basil from the garden that is going to go on a sourdough, tofu, zucchini sandwich for dinner tonight...

Finally, with our endless supply of cucumbers, I made a cucumber, pineapple salad with lime juice and cilantro (recipe courtesy of my friend Leatha)...

Touring Lenexa

We decided to head over to our old stomping grounds this morning for a tour of our old hood and a nice (hot) hike on our old trail. Our old street basically looks the same except the trees have gotten bigger. Chris said he remembered our old house a little bit. Jonathan was completely confused as to why we were on this random street! Here are the boys on the lookout for any scary creatures on the trail...

We saw several trains while we were there and it is amazing how different the boys are when it comes to trains. Chris was slightly obsessed and Jonathan gets excited for a few minutes and then could really care less... While we were over in that direction, we stopped at Shawnee Mission Park and had snacks by the lake. It was beautiful and we got to see the paddle boarders and dogs swimming on the dog beach. We also stopped by the radio controlled landing strip where a couple guys were flying their remote control planes. Once again Christopher said he wanted a remote control airplane, as he has said for the past four years. One of these days buddy!

Later at home, Kasey was sunning herself and waiting for that baby bunny to come back to the step...