August Recap

Hmmmm, I thought I was just four months behind in blogging, but turns out its five.  Lets see if I can remember, well, anything. 

Looks like this was the month that my parents came for a visit.  We went to the Volo Bog State Natural Area, which is the only remaining open water quaking bog in Illinois.  Don't know what a bog is?  I didn't either.  Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia.

After we hiked through the bog, we took James on about a 3 mile hike.  I'm pretty sure we told James he had to look out for bears, which explains this:

 

Honey spent a lot of time with her favorite grandkids (ha!), including a sick day at home with Claire while I went to work and a 45 minute painting session (5 minutes of painting and 40 minutes of cleaning up).  Honey did a much better job of capturing their week here with a wonderful book that the kids received at Christmas.  The details of what we did every day aren't so important at this time, just having the opportunity for my kids to spend time with their grandparents is what really matters.

Garden Tour

Chris' parents were in town visiting this weekend so we took them to the Chicago Botanic Garden.  We haven't been there in probably close to seven years (the first summer we lived here?), and that is so unfortunate because it is a beautiful area and not nearly as long a drive for us as it is to the Morton Arboretum.  It was a beautiful day!

 

 

 

Chris Catch Up

We celebrated Chris' 33rd birthday (in May) with a trip to the Morton Arboretum. 

He scaled mountains (or rocks)

Crossed treacherous waters full of...tadpoles

tadpole hunter

spider(boy)

we got lost in the maze...again (3 times and I still can't find my way through)

Claire did was she does best, hang out and be cute!  

And then she pooped one of those poops that went everywhere (literally, everywhere, including on me), and it was time to go home!  

I baked a cake the size of Texas:

and Chris got exactly what he wanted!

In other non-birthday news, Chris was on the development team for a new oatmeal product, and it is yum!  Go out and buy some if you haven't already.

And in between playing with James non-stop and creating new oatmeal, I keep him busy with an endless number of projects, like this:

One of these days I'll run out of things for him to do...maybe not! 

Backyard Visitors

Our neighborhood has resident deer.  This year we have a doe and twin fawns that we see almost daily.  On Saturday we were getting ready to leave and noticed out the kitchen window that the fawns apparently took a liking to our backyard and decided to take a little rest. 

(excuse the glare, I took these photos through the window)

I had to shoo them away once they started nibbling on the plants in the backyard.  Come to find out they instead ate all our hostas in the front! 

Baby Birds

A robin built a nest in the oak tree in our backyard.  It was too high for us to tell if there was actually anything in there, until the baby birds started peaking their heads over the side.  10 days later and they look like they are ready to leave the nest (hopefully I can capture them before they do)!  Here is what they looked like a couple weeks ago.