Growing Like a Weed

Jack felt a bit taller to me this weekend...sure enough. He's grown an inch in the last month! That explains the constant eating that he's been doing lately. lol

Garden Flowers

A few of our radishes started to flower. We figured we had to enjoy our flowers, radishes or not! lol

Our Version of Parkour?

When you have a severe shortage of climbable trees in your backyard...

But on the bright side, you don't have very far to fall.

Friday Five

It's a 3 day weekend! Bring on the fun and mini break, please.

13 more days of school for the boys. 14 more for me. Yay!

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You can tell things are winding down with school for the boys. The teachers are all feeling a bit rushed to finish whatever they can before the end of the year. The big boys continue to plug away at their family life units. Jason is doing some research on colleges in his AVID class. Shawn's class is quite a few chapters in to a new novel. Jack's teacher is trying to do as much as she can with teaching them fractions. Busy, busy, busy.

And still, the boys are all doing well. I'm quite proud of how all of them are doing. I know they are all trying hard to do their work and get good grades.

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Jack continues to ask to go to a store on the regular. We are still trying to avoid public places as much as possible until everyone is vaccinated. We just don't want to take chances with their health. We will all be so excited when we are all vaccinated. (Although we will still take precautions for a long time to come.)

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Shawn, Jack, and dad have been going out each afternoon. They're doing all kinds of fun things, but mostly, I think they are just enjoying being outside. Jason even managed to go outside a few times this week, too. 

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Right now, we have 8 known chrysalises outside! We had one chrysalis accidentally get destroyed, which made us all sad. We still have lots of caterpillars in the milkweed, too. Yay!

Garden Update

Everything had a growth spurt this week. :)

Our peppers are turning red.

The flowers (still can't remember the kind) is about to bloom!

Cucumbers

Corn is getting so tall! It is probably over 2 feet tall now!

Way Back Wednesday

This week's Way Back post is a re-run of a post I wrote way back on 5/29/2010. They are SO tiny!

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Listening to Their Momma Like Good Little Boys...

We got the boys' new lenses today. I spoke to both Shawn and Jason at length about NOT THROWING THEIR GLASSES WHEN THEY GET UPSET ALREADY!!! I carefully explained that throwing said glasses will scratch the lenses again, and we just can't be running to the store every few months to replace them. They listened to me closely and have agreed to take care of these, their third pair of lenses this year. They swore up and down that this would be the last set we'd have to get until their next eye exam in November.

Ahem.

So they thought.

And thought.

They were hard at work trying to figure out the best way to protect this round of lenses and keep their mother happy.

They did come up with an ingenious plan, I do have to say so myself.

Here is Jason modeling their new idea...

With a plan like this, there is no way the lenses will get scratched this time.

It is not, however, a perfect plan, and Jason has started to realize their thinking was a little short sighted in the last picture.

Hehe.

Seeing might be a problem!

Octopus

Jason working on his octopus art.

Lemon Pickers

Jack picks 'em. 

Shawn smells 'em to make sure they're good. lol

It's Hammer Time!

These two were in heaven. Dad gave them hammers and a cinder block to break apart. I think they'd hammer cinder blocks apart every day if we had them!

The Good Kind

Caterpillars that is.

The circles are chrysalises on the brick wall. That's
a new place to find them. We've found 3 there so far!

Friday Five

Can we all say it? FOUR more weeks of school! FOUR more weeks! Can't wait!

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Jack has decided he also needs his shot, so we can go out and do things. He told me he wants to be like his brothers.

He also wants to go to Target.

I can totally understand his desire there. It has been forever since they've been there.

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It looks like Jack will earn a trophy for his reading! They had the option of earning 60 points for a small trophy, 80 points for a medium trophy, and 100 points for a large trophy. He got himself to the medium trophy. He has 1 week to see if he can make it to the large trophy! It might be a challenge, but he is going to try. You can do it Jack!

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Let's see...Jason has been building some cardboard weapons this week. He spent lots of time planning and executing his plans. They have moveable parts and everything! This is cool stuff for 13 year old boys.

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Shawn has decided he is in to baking, or more accurately, watching me do the baking while he tells me what to do. He is interested in it, but doesn't want to get messy. He'd much prefer I do the messy part. LOL. Anyway, last weekend was brownies. This weekend, we'll be working on banana cupcakes. Yum!

This Week's Garden Update

We had lots of growth and some invaders this week.

corn

tomatoes - almost time to stake them!

Flowers - still can't remember the kind. We're going to be surprised!

carrots up front, beans in the middle,
radishes close to the net, and lettuce under the net

Poor lettuce that had a caterpillar problem

Look at that radish!

cucumber

We had a bunch of cabbage butterfly caterpillars eating all of our lettuce. We managed to get them all off and put a net on as many of the plants as we could. This is a quandary - here we are butterfly/caterpillar lovers in the milkweed, yet we are clearly not lovers of the caterpillars in the lettuce. What to do, what to do? lol

Way Back Wednesday

One of my all time favorite pictures of Jack - this week in 2014.

Chrysalis

We have quite a few chrysalises outside now. This one was one we got to watch being formed.