Mama Please?

Matheson: Mama, may I please have five dollars so I can sit on that Longhorn for thirty seconds so you can take my picture?

Mama: No, but you can enjoy watching someone else's mommy pay five dollars for her child to sit on it.

Strawberries.

Last fall we planted a large bed of fresh strawberries, that I looked forward to immensely.  They survived through the exceptionally cold winter involving mounds of snow and below zero temperatures. When spring came, I cried for joy that they were still alive and looked forward to an abundance of amazing Oregon strawberries.

But at the first sight of a red berry, I became terrified that other critters might get to them.  I am not that generous, so we bought a net to put over the strawberries so that we would be sure to be the only ones enjoying our harvest.  One day I we realized that we were not really getting enough berries.  Five a day does not seem sufficient enough to feed a family of four. I thought maybe the critters had found their way through our heavy barricades.

Then one day, we discovered that birds and squirrels were NOT our problem, but grubby hands of  two little boys who have no strawberry self control whatsoever. We learned that every day when they went out to play they found themselves at the strawberry bed, and every day they put their fists through the net and pulled out every strawberry they could find, weather white green or red, and as they pulled them up through the net, they smashed them with strawberry juice everywhere. Very little fruit was actually getting into anyone's mouth. Although the children were filled with joy, my heart would sink at each green strawberry that got eaten that never got a chance to be filling my tummy with goodness.

I fought with them relentlessly.  I squealed, I threatened and I tried to punish. But they would NOT stop eating the green strawberries. I begged and pleaded. One day I just gave up.

I gave up when I decided the best thing to do was to look at my two year old's face and fists, covered with red juice.  I decided to listen carefully to the small voice saying "mama I like strawberries" as he shoveled about eight green ones into his mouth. I suddenly thought that the sight of this child brought me so much more joy than any strawberry could bring me.  Even an Oregon strawberry. So I will always be able to hold this memory in my mind of the greedy children and laugh.  So maybe I did not get to enjoy very many strawberries from the garden, but the strawberry garden gave me something a memory to cherish.

zucchinis

We have a fairly decent sized garden in our yard.  This is our second big garden. This is also the second time that rotting pumpkins have been dumped into the bed of dirt at the end of the growing season. And the second time that random pumpkin plants have popped up all over our garden once spring came. Pumkins are actually very beautiful, so Isaiah removed some of them and re-planted some in various places all over our yard, outside the garden, and in the garden.

The other day we noticed that many of the pumpkin plants were producing zucchinis. And we planted two zucchinis in the yard before our pumpkin plants decided to make zucchinis. So now we have over six zucchini plants that are giving us at least five zucchinis every day. What am I going to do with all these zucchinis?

A fish

This is a bird that just caught some easy lunch from a fish hatchery. Isaiah wanted me to take a picture of it but I did not have my zoom lens, so this is what he gets. I was going to say something silly about this picture but the more I look at it the more I kind of think its kind of interesting.  Maybe I am just weird?

Isaiah suggested that the bird was trained to take fish from the hatchery and deliver it to a nearby restaurant for their customers to enjoy.  What do you think?