Saturday

 The boys were at the Larry and Cheryl's house last night through this afternoon, so we had a nice relaxing day.  Ben stayed home from work and we just putzed around.  It was nice and quiet.

Wednesday: composting worms

 I haven't talked about my composting worms in a while, but the last few months have been an adventure.

For Halloween, the boys got huge pumpkins and I put them in the composting bins.  They were too big, but I left them in there anyway.  A few weeks later they were decomposing, but not fast enough to bring the bins into the basement like I normally do in the winter.  So I left them outside and brought in the one bin that had a few worms but was mostly castings waiting for spring plants.

I killed all the worms in the garage over the winter.  The pumpkins molded.  It was a small disaster.

I put some worms from the backup container in one of the bins.  They died, probably due to the mold.

I combined the two compost bins into one.  I left that full one in the garage.  I started over with the worms from the back-up bin.  By this time I had about five worms.  If I killed them I was going to have to get more from Nathan.

They didn't die!  They got bigger.  They slowly multiplied.  Things were going well.

I finally decided to deal with the bin that was still in the garage.  I was expecting a massive, moldy mess, but to my surprise it wasn't moldy and it actually looked like pretty good compost.  While I didn't have a ton of extra worms, I threw a few worms in to see what would happen.  They lived!

So now I hopefully have two worm bins going again.  Hopefully starting from a small number of worms doesn't affect genetic diversity too much.  I'm glad to have two bins right now, because it's the middle of summer and we're going through fruit like crazy.  Isaac had a watermelon for his birthday and we made strawberry jam today.  

I'll admit, we almost make enough food scraps for a third bin.  I'm just not sure if I want to deal with it.

Tuesday: DeBoer's south - donut tour

 The boys had swimming lessons today.  Joshua ended up with a different teacher because his old one was "stuck".  I have no idea what that means, but he can't come next week either.

I got a picture of Isaac jumping off the board today.  He did it three times and I think had fun.

We went to DeBoer's South for donuts.  They had plenty of donuts, but they also had so many other good looking things.  It was the best chocolate cake donut I've had so far.  And the almond thing...delicious.  I love almond things.

Horizon chased a bug for quite a while this evening.  He had lost track of it on the streamer but I was thinking that something was going to crash at some point.

Monday: relaxing

Today was a rather relaxing day...in that we didn't do much.

Joshua decided to make his own sandwich for lunch.  While I personally think that only a few bites would be good, he declared it "delicious."

Sunday: fireworks

As Joshua said, "There are fireworks everywhere!"  Sometimes I feel bad about just watching other peoples' fireworks and not giving any of our own, but at the same time they were pretty continuous last night.

Giraffe watched from the door.

Isaac and Ben are working on a big tower.  They started with a very sturdy base.

Friday: Dutch Village

We started out the day with a brief trip to the library.  Isaac didn't need any books, so I had him read.  Imagine my surprise when I find him reading like this.

Then we went to Dutch Village.  It was a slightly "cool" day (high in the low 70s) and we didn't have anything else on the calendar, so it was a good day.

It did get a bit busy, but we also left a bit after it got busy and came back in the late afternoon.

We went on the swings a lot.  One of the things I love about Dutch Village is you rarely need to wait in line for the rides.  (Well, as long as you plan the ferris wheel early or late in the day.)

We were the only ones on the Ferris Wheel for a bit, so we got an extra long morning ride.

Pumper ducks.  These make me laugh...the kids love them and it's just a bucket of water, some ducks, a pump, and some tube.  They pumped and pumped and pumped.

And then to the pumper train!  Well, we might have done the swings in the middle; as mentioned, we did them a lot.

I forgot to bring a snack so we bought some cookies.  Joshua especially loved them and *almost* choose more cookies instead of fudge later on in the day.

Swings!  We often sat on yellow and orange.

Thursday: easy day

 Today was a pretty easy day.  There were a few errands to run, but nothing big happened.

A lot of cleaning didn't happen either.  I'm not really sure where most of the day goes most days, but Ben is nice enough to not complain about it.