Happenings Around These Parts Lately

 Here is a little bit of what is happening in the small moments of my life lately.  I sorted my bags of beans and rice into clean jars. Then I got inspired and taped the bag labels on the jars. Just a small piece of organization in my home that all the cupboards and shelves wish that they had.

 This is a snapping turtle caught by my nine-year-old son with the help of his older sister. This turtle was caught in our 'creek'. It's not really a creek. It is the drainage water from the neighborhood and yet a snapping turtle lives in it and so do crawdads. We love our creek and it has provided hours of entertainment for these suburb-bound kids.

While my nine-year-old was catching snapping turtles, my 16-year-old was off for the weekend checking out a college. Eeek! How has this happened? How have they grown up? Because the oldest was off checking out a college, I can't even believe how much joy the catching of this snapping turtle in our yard brought me.

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 I am finally getting brave enough to venture out on my own and purchase flowers and plant them. I think of my flower friends and gardening in-laws who have come alongside me to help me learn how to plant things. I've learned  a few things, especially how important water is to growing things. As in, you must remember to water your plants.

I can't even believe how happy it makes me to have planted flowers in my yard. I'm not very good at gardening because I am not too good at paying attention to when it is time to plant and taking advantage of good weather. So, I love my perennial bushes and trees that provide most of the color in our yard. But I am so excited about this small amount of flowers in my yard. It is a huge accomplishment for me.

This pictures is simply because it happened to be green shirt day for us and it wasn't even St. Patrick's Day! Three of the kids randomly selected green shirts so my oldest son put on a green shirt and told me that it was green shirt day. He even got wet mowing the lawn and changed into a second green t-shirt. The best surprise of the day was that Daddy was wearing a green shirt. He leaves for work before any of us are awake and so we never know what he is wearing. So it was a fun surprise that he, too, was wearing a green shirt. So we had to take a selfie to commenorate this very important moment.

What's happening in your world?