Happy Graduation, Happy Father's Day, Georgia wildflowers, the McLelland Family Farm, and kids who put metal things in electrical outlets.

First of all, I wanted to say CONGRATULATIONS to our dear sweet sister, sister-in-law, and aunt ANNA!  She has just graduated with a master's degree and we are so proud of her.  Unfortunately we were unable to make it to her party but we are sending lots of love cross country to California from Georgia!  Can you feel it?

And today of course is Father's Day and I would like to wish all of our fathers - Grandpa Steve, Grandpa Matt, Grandpa Jack - a very happy Father's Day!  We, uh, sent you some cards but they probably won't get there until Tuesday or so.  Sorry.  We still love you tons though!  I helped the kids make some cards for Mike for Father's Day, in addition to the cute ones they drew, wrote, or scribbled.  The following 3 pictures are some of Mike's favorite photos so I thought I would make him a cute, but not toooo cutesy, keepsake (sorry to use mushy words honey) from each kid.

Gotta love that scrunchy face.  Ginger now has a similar one when you say, "Smile!"

Wyatt and his piercing stare.  Here's looking at you Dad!

And of course, sweet little Ginger.

And now, as I promised in May, here is the Father's Day book that Shane made for Mike at school.  It's so cute, I love it!

Here is a survey that Shane's teacher filled out with Shane's answers about Mike.

This is actually from last Thanksgiving.  I just thought it was so adorable that he was thankful for his "Dab."

Okay so here's the cover page and book (following) - enjoy!

When I asked Shane what was going on over there on the left hand side, he told us that was Mike with his hands around a "bad guy's" neck.  Now we know what he thinks Mike does at work.  Also really like the spelling of "jale" and "pulys ofsr."

This is a picture from today.  Here's Mike, chilling with his peeps, driving to church, in the beautiful blue burb, biking backwards.  Just kidding.

The boys really wanted me to take pictures of them being scary.

Here's really scary Wyatt.  I can't keep a tie on that kid.  If he does wear it, it's usually zipped down and hangs to his knees.  His teacher usually hands it back to me after church.  Silly boy.  Maybe one day he'll wear it.

Hmmm. . . . not so scary.  Here's the new smile face.  Kinda looks like the one up top of Shane with Mike in the swimming pool.

Mike sure loves the burb.  He was laughing at me taking so many pictures.

This one is a little blurry but still shows off these two cute little boys.

Now on to the pretty wildflowers in the backyard.

I found this beautiful flower in the backyard near the fire pit.  I thought all we had back there was thorny sticky weeds.  I actually found two of these flowers.  Shane picked them for me and I had to take a picture.  Then I Googled to try to find out what they are.  It was easy to find.  You all probably have seen them before but I had no idea what they were.  This is a purple passionflower.  I guess they grow wild around here.  We've also got wild blackberries and strawberries in the backyard.  They're hard to find in all the weeds though.  I think I might look for some more of these and let them grow.

This is a better picture that I found on the internet.  My camera isn't too great.

As many of you know, we have been trying our hand at raising laying hens.

These are the new additions, cochins.  Mike found them from a craigslist ad.  They were free from a cochin breeder.  We got 13 little chicks but we lost one last night.  We had a severe thunderstorm and a few power surges.  The light bulb burnt out and they were all pretty cold this morning by the time we discovered the burnt out light.

A little closer.  You can kind of see the feathers that go all the way down to their feet.  Cochins are very feathery, or is it hairy? I don't know.  When they're older, they look like they are wearing petticoats all the way down to their feet.

Here's a picture of what our will look like.  Well mostly.  I can never remember exactly what color Mike said they will be.  They're all black except for one brown one.

Here's the revamped chicken coop.  It now stands a little taller with the feeder and waterer hanging underneath to keep it somewhat protected from the storms.  Nothing like cleaning out a big bucket of wet chicken feed.  Yuck.  This is Sooner's old dog house.  We did use it for the Tyson meat chickens that we had for awhile.  We had 10 of those.  They came from a Tyson chicken farm nearby that was hit by a tornado.  A bunch of them got out and I guess Tyson doesn't let them back in.  Let me tell you, those Tyson chickens ain't right.  I know that they have messed with them genetically but they sure did stink!  They also never really pecked and rooted around for bugs.  Our other chickens scratch and dig in the dirt all day.  We started with 10 of the Tyson meat chickens, one died early on, 3 more died several weeks later when something got in there.  Maybe a possum.  Mike has already killed two possums this summer, one trying to get in the coop and one that was living in the garage.  Yuck.  Mike butchered 2 Tyson chickens about two weeks ago and the last 4 last week.  We kept the first two and sold the other 4.

You can sort of see our older 7 laying chickens behind the feeder.  Our friend, Stephanie hatched these from her laying chickens.  They are Arakana or Americana.  I don't know my breeds very well.  I think there at least 2 roosters in there.  They'll probably have to go.

Another view. So right now, we have 7 older laying hens (I think they're about 6 weeks old) from our friend and 12 cochin chicks that are maybe 5 days old.

Don't know if I posted a picture of this before.  The boys "jungle gym" that Mike made.  Now it sort of serves as a place to stack firewood too.

A view of the back porch stairs.  You can see the compost pile that has at least one squash plant  (don't know what kind yet) and a tomato plant.  And more stacked wood that needs to be split.  On the other side of the rounds there is some split wood that WAS all stacked neatly until the last storm.  At least half of it fell over.  Yea, we get to stack it again.  I smell an FHE activity coming up.

Here is our new grow boxes that we put in this year.  I say we but I meant Mike.  He did most of the work.  He did a great job don't you think?  About half of the wood we got from the culled wood pile at Home Depot for 51 cents a board!  Gotta love those deals.  Haven't found any since of course.  We have tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, cucumbers, strawberries, onions, squash, blackberries, and a blueberry bush that might make it.  Now all we have to do is keep beating back the forest.  Sometimes it feels like its encroaching way too fast.  It's hard enough to pull weeds, but in Georgia, a lot of those weeds are trees.  You can't even mow over them.  We need a brush hog.  And there's poison ivy growing right next to the driveway.  I already had a little fun with that this year.

Now change subjects.  When Mike and I got up Saturday morning, look what we found behind our bedroom door!

We asked Shane and Wyatt who did it.  Shane was adamant that Wyatt did it and Wyatt didn't seem to know who did it.  I guess it could have been Ginger but I kinda doubt it.  In case you can't tell what that is, I'll tell you.  It's Mike's bolo tie with the metal tip stuck in the electrical outlet.  Nice.  We thought it was the storm that caused the electrical surges but I guess it could have been someone else . . . . 

A close up.

 Whew, I guess that's about it for now.  Too much talkie talkie.  We love you all.  Congratulations again Anna!  And Happy Father's Day to all the dads.

The end of kindergarten.

The end of school has come and gone and I thought I'd still blog about it 3 weeks late, because that's what I do. My sister-in-law, Leah was in town for a  few days during the last week of school and I got to go to Shane's end of year kindergarten ceremonies.  It was soooo nice to go by myself. Thank you Leah!  I was able to get a few fun pictures of Shane.

Here's my little GQ guy walking into the gym with his hands in his pockets.

Where's Waldo?  Uh, I mean Shane-o.  Can you see him to the left of the teacher with the white sweater?  He looks bored.

Finally Shane's turn.  They posed for a picture looking my direction but I couldn't get my dumb camera to take the picture.  Boo hoo.

I thought this one was cute.  Shane was waving and smiling at me.  They sang a cute song about going to 1st grade to the tune of "New York, New York."

And finally, kindergarten commencement is finished.  I'm so glad he still wants to wave to his mom and yell "Hi Mom!" as loud as he can in front of his friends.

This is Shane with his teacher, Mrs. Andrea Sandmann.  The parents were invited back to the classrooms for a graduation brunch and for more awards.  Here he is receiving his award for the number of Dolch sight words he learned this year - 293!  He really is a good reader - too good sometimes.  Good job Shane.  Got the camera to work on cue this time.  Yea!

After he sat back down by me I asked him to show me his trophy and here's what I got.

Here is his beginning of the year picture.  So handsome.  And he's wearing the same thing as he did for graduation ceremonies.  Oops.  I'm not so creative in the clothing department.  Oh well.

Shane's so cute.  I love that round head.  This is the picture that I snuck.  Tee hee.  When we talked about it Mike didn't want to order kindergarten cap and gown pictures.  Can you see him rolling his eyes?  I sort of agreed but that night, I couldn't sleep and I kept thinking about it, because I wanted them.  Now I admit they're very cheesy but I couldn't resist having an end of year school picture of Shane.  So I filled out the order form while he was at work and sent it to school.  And I only got the $10 package so he wouldn't be too mad when he found out.  We passed up 6 or 7 other school photo ops throughout the year and the school yearbook so I didn't feel too bad.  It was sort of ridiculous how many school pictures they want you to order throughout the year.   They sent home order forms about every other month.

Here is Shane's class.  Mrs. Sandmann was his teacher Mrs. Jancarek was the parapro.  I think that is short for para-professional but don't ask me what that means.  The kids called her "Miss J" all year because I guess it's hard for them to say Jancarek.  I'm not really sure how it's pronounced either.  I was disappointed that there were no names on this photo other than the teachers' names.  I need to sit down with Shane and have him tell me who they all are and write their names down.  I only know one or two kids.  For some reason Shane buttoned up his shirt all the way to the top, the little poindexter.  If you can't see it too well, I think you can click on the picture and make it bigger.

 A couple of my favorite Shane-isms from kindergarten this year:

"Mom, I'm not first-grade ready yet," he tells me last OCTOBER.

One day I was helping Shane do some math homework that he didn't finish at school.  When I asked him why he didn't finish at school, he replied "I have too many friends and I have to talk to them."  This was also the reason for not finishing his lunch.  A couple minutes later he got stuck on a math problem and asked for help.  I told him he could use his fingers to come up with the answer but he doesn't like to use his fingers since Mike keeps discouraging it.  Shane says, "No thanks Mom, I don't need any manipulatives."  Except it came out sounding like this, "No thanks Mom, I don't need any ma-ni-pull-a-tives."  Since when are fingers manipulatives?  I guess much has changed since I was in school.  After a few visits to the school I realized that the teacher are ALWAYS talking grade evaluation standards to the kids.  No wonder he knows all these technical terms.

Now a funny one from yesterday, not exactly about school, but still funny.  Shane and Wyatt have been begging Mike to play baseball with them.  After Mike got home from work last night they were playing catch in the front yard.  Shane has a pretty good arm and he threw the ball to Mike.  Mike says, "Great throw Shane.  What kind of throw was that?" to which Shane replies, "That was an uppercut Dad!"  We have no idea where that came from.  Just his cute little brain I guess.

 We are so pleased with all that Shane learned this year.  He is a happy, healthy five-year-old boy who has been promoted to the first grade.  I know I couldn't ask for more.

Ginger's hair . . .

. . . is SO fun to play with! Especially when you get it wet. When it's wet, you can make it into any shape you want and it will just stay. And now that it is a little longer, I have attempted, three times now, to do something with it. It's always complicated by the fact that she pulls everything out of her hair. The following hairdo lasted approximately 5 minutes. Didn't even make it to the suburban. So I knew I had to get pictures fast. One girl in my ward trained her daughter to leave bows, hats, headbands, ponytails in her hair. I still can't figure that out. I would have to follow Ginger and pull her hand down every 5 seconds or so. I can't do it. Or won't. Still, here's the evidence that I HAVE TRIED.

She's actually trying to get away from me in this picture.

And yes, she does have red hair. You may have noticed from these pictures. Fitting for a girl named Ginger, don't you think? She's adorable and very opinionated these days and loves to yell gibberish as loud as she can, especially at bugs and the chickens. What a funny girl. We love her, even if she has messy hair.