Snapping Green Beans

It's funny how the simplest things can become the most fantastic moments when you're two and half years old. Like wearing your pajamas all day long, carrying around a mini tape-measure that your Daddy gave you, and snapping green beans with your Nana.

Wordless Wednesday - Ring Around the Rosie

A few random things...

Is it just me or is this summer going by extremely fast? Here are a few random things that we've been up to around here over the past few weeks...

• I made my first homemade cherry pie and pie crust. Both turned out great, however I had forgotten to take a picture of the finished product. It's long gone now.

• Ben was working in Wisconsin for all of last week. He made it safely home to AZ late last night. We've really missed him. Bless his heart, he was only home to pretty much sleep and had to leave again this morning for a few more nights away. We let Hannah wait up for him to get in a little Daddy Time. His summer work schedule is always crazy like this. Thankfully it'll all slow down by the fall.
  

• Operation Potty Training is in full swing around here. I'm pleased to report that it's going great. Hannah has stayed accident free for a few days now - even during the night! I think that we may have finally gotten it. I hope...

• Our Fourth of July didn't exactly go as planned, but we all made the most of it!

• Ben and I celebrated another anniversary. It was simple and sweet - just what we wanted. I was also surprised with an iPod Touch - something that I've been wanting for a long time. I'm not a very tech-savvy person. Thankfully it's user friendly for people like me.

• I'm in a reading slump. The positive side to this is that I'm on an audio book kick (thanks to the above mentioned iPod).
  

• Hannah had her first Movie Theater Adventure complete with her very first cherry ICEE drink - we all went to see Disney/Pixar's UP (which is very cute by the way & may have made me cry...thank you hormones). She loved them both.

• Hannah and I took a little road-trip up to the Phoenix area to visit one of my old friends and her sweet little family. We had a great time visiting, playing, and getting a little baby holding time in.

• I've managed to kill all of my tomato plants. The birds also keep eating each little strawberry right before they are ready to be picked. Honestly I'm surprised that they both made it this far. The good news is that my bell pepper plants are still growing strong! Now if only I could keep Hannah from feeding the little peppers to our dog...
  

• Also the new Mama Bird and eggs in the front yard have disappeared. It happened sometime last week during a really bad monsoon storm. I hope that at least Mama is OK somewhere. We had grown kind of fond of her.

• We hit the 20 week mark in my pregnancy - we're half way there and should find out next week what the gender of the baby is!

Well, that's about all for now. I'll keep checking in sporadically. I hope that you're all having a great summer!

Wordless Wednesday - A Good Spot to "Read".

The Old Little Nest...

Yesterday evening I noticed that a New Mama Bird has claimed the vacant nest in our front yard tree. I couldn't help but wonder if she's the Old Mama Bird from last summer. Or maybe she's one of the little baby birds that had hatched then and is now all grown up laying her own eggs!

One thing is for sure - she's super jumpy. Hannah and I had just walked past the tree to our mail box when she came hurling out past us at full speed. In fact, that's how we discovered that she was even there. She kept her watchful eye from our neighbor's rooftop. And I made sure that we kept our distance from the nest, but from what I could tell there seems to be two or three eggs inside of it.

Today we kept looking out the front door/window to check up on her. She's just been diligently sitting in her spruced up nest. I'm really looking forward to watching more baby birds hatch from our yard this summer!

Wordless Wednesday - It was time to pick more flowers...

A City Mouse...

I like to think of myself as a semi-tough girl. I grew up in a small town and don't mind getting my hands dirty. I'll take out the trash. Mow the lawn. If there is a bug in the house, I will squish it set it free outside. In my youth I was in 4-H and even raised a few pigs. Yet I still shudder as I type this.

On Wednesday evening Hannah and I went outside in the backyard to water our plants and feed the dog. Well our Lab's crazy behavior should have told me that something wasn't right. He kept growling and barking at the large planter we just started using about a month ago to keep his dog food in. Then he would run over to me - give me a "look" and then race back over to the covered planter. So I distracted Hannah with picking flowers out of our flower bed, and went to go check things out.

Ben had left a small shovel out on the patio so I grabbed it - thinking that it may be a snake curled up because it was pretty cool that evening. (Not that I would have been brave enough to do anything about a lurking snake. But that shovel made me feel safe.)

After looking around some I decided that there was absolutely nothing there, yet our dog was still going crazy. I shrugged it off and decided that I should go ahead and fill up his food dish. When I lifted up the top this is what I found:

A city mouse feasting on dog food. How he got inside there - I may never know. But guess what I did discover. A mouse can jump. Did you know that? I did not. Well that's what this little guy did. He jumped right up at me and I nearly had a heart attack. Unfortunately for me him, it is a pretty big planter and he couldn't quite jump his way out of it.

So I did what any sane person does. Placed Hannah inside the house in case it was an attacking city mouse and then kenneled up the dog so he would not attempt to eat said mouse and get violently ill. Then I took a picture of it with the camera. For blog documentation purposes.

In the next few minutes I debated on what to do. Then I called my husband. After a failed attempt to "remove" the mouse per his instructions, I called it quits and created a "No Rodent" policy for myself. I can only imagine how ridiculous I must have looked. Me with my shovel, the jumping mouse in the planter, our dog barking frantically, and my sweet two year old daughter glued to the closed patio door inside of the house yelling at the top of her lungs and giggling as I jumped from fear, "It's a dirty, dirty mouse Mama! You see it? Oh no! Get it, get it!"

If any of our neighbors heard the commotion, I'm sure that they thought we were a bunch of loonies. Yes, this was a job that had Ben's name written all over it. I wasn't made to be that kind of tough. So like a good husband, he handled it when he came home. Just one of the many reasons that I love him so. And now we've turned our backyard into a D-Con Zone...which freaks me out because I didn't think that we had a "dirty" backyard where mice would roam. I'm putting my mind to ease by classifying this as a lone incident where only ONE very hungry mouse just happened to come into our backyard searching for food. At least I hope.

P.S. For any of you that may be wondering our dog did get fed that evening. We had a brand new bag of the "good dog food" out in the garage. Part of me kind of wonders if our picky dog had actually coerced the little city mouse into crawling all over his yucky food, so that I would throw it all out and feed him "the good stuff" that he loves eating. It makes you wonder...