Still Catching Up

Here are some more random pictures and soundbites from our life ;-).

A local town hosted its first ever "hat walk".  I got very few pictures, and most of them were not of my girls-BAD mom!  Here are a few I did snap.

Sari and her friend K strolled hand in hand

Mimi and L were inseparable

Mimi holding our raffle tickets.  She won a poster.

The walk as it got started.  The lady with the red hat won overall.

As a family, we won second place for our hats/outfits and got a book on the history of the town.  I wish I had a better picture of Mimi-she put a lot of effort into her attire.  If you look closely at her hat brim though, you will see a ridge that runs around it in the middle of the brim.  The hat was hanging up, and when Mimi got it down she slipped and the brim caught on a hanger and the WHOLE outer 1 1/2 inches ripped off!  I spent that morning hand sewing her brim back on, which was necessary because it was her Easter hat...but Easter hadn't happened yet.  Nana would NOT have understood how the hat got ruined before the event she was meant to wear it at.

Year after year, our yard is infested with Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers.  They tend to "locally infest" meaning they like our yard and they are happy to just live here and eat my greenery to shreds.  And while I tend to take a very passive view toward critters outdoors-that is after all THEIR home- with these critters it is all out war.  In their full grown size, they have no predators.  They taste awful and hiss, and secrete a yucky bubbly stuff and make a HORRIBLE crunch if you step on them-as me how I know.  Their one redeeming factor is that the younger nymphs are pretty.  They are black with neon stripes down them-red, or orange, or yellow.  Which doesn't stop us from killing them in droves, but the other day I snapped these pictures before they went to meet their maker.  (It was, after all, them or my rosebush.)

Speaking of critters, it is spring, so the outdoor critters are busy, well, getting busy...if you know what I mean.  Our recent escapee indoor (now outdoor) cat got busy with about half the town, and of course ended up preggers.  Her name is Noel, and we named her that because she was born exactly a week before Christmas.  So in keeping with tradition, she decided to pop her kittens out exactly a week before Easter...meaning my wee hours of Palm Sunday were spent sitting on a cold bathroom floor with a laboring cat.  in the end we have 3 kittens (and if you are local we will have them available for free around the end of June).  Here are a few newborn pics.

There is one orange one, one all white one, and one that was born white, but now has a black nose, black tipped ears, a grey tail, and I'm thinking her feet will turn too.  They are almost 2 weeks old now-I'll have to get some new pictures posted!