Scattered Thoughts . . .

Another new season is upon us and the wildlife around the house is finally starting to come alive again. For the most part, our neighborhood has been devoid of song birds for the past few years. We see the occasional sparrow or robin during periods of migration (like now... it is the season for migrating birds) and we can hear some songbirds (although, not a lot) chirping away as the sun comes up but we really don't have the numbers we should have here around our house.  I know we have a couple of monstrous crows living in a nearby tree. Since these particular crows are quite aggressive, songbirds can consider that enough of a threat to find trees elsewhere. We also have a lot of cats in the area and those are clearly dangerous predators. Additionally, I sometimes see a Red Tailed Hawk in our area. These factors definitely limit the number of songbirds that settle down in our neighborhood so it comes as no surprise to me that seeing them is a bit of a rarity. This morning...

It is hard to believe but the grandchildren will be turning five this week!  When we arrived back home after gymnastics and lunch, we started preparing a birthday dinner and a nice birthday cake, however , the kids did not know that we were having a little birthday party in their honor nor at all... Sheila and Kenzie made a delicious cake for dessert not realizing it was really a birthday cake for her and Lukey. The cake was a very moist yellow cake with a chocolate buttercream frosting. When they finished with the cake and cleaned up the kitchen a bit, then I made a pretty good chicken parmesan dinner with bowtie pasta and a broccoli and tomato salad. I have to say that dinner was pretty tasty! Even Kenzie found that she likes chicken parmesan! While clearing the table, the kids were distracted by Liza outdoors so we could setup the birthday cake, light some candles and put a few presents on the table... When we were ready, we signaled to Liza so that she could herd the k...

Do you think she knew where the camera was located? We started off our Sunday by bringing little Miss Kenzie to gymnastics.  I think Kenzie looks forward to Sundays all week long just so she can go to gymnastics again! We were excited to be accompanying her as well. This was the first time that Gee and I managed to make it to gymnastics. The past three months have been exceptionally rough with home problem after home problem and health problem after health problem. These constant problems overlapped and negatively impacted everything in our life. Needless to say, we've been looking forward to some "fun time"! After gymnastics, we headed to Dick's Sporting Goods to buy some new life vests for the kids to use at the lake this summer. They've outgrown the life vests they used last summer so we needed to find some new ones in a larger size. After purchasing a couple of new life vests, we ventured across the big parking lot to have a delicious lunch at The...