It happened twice the last couple weeks. Late in the afternoon, over a spot in the yard, hundreds of dragonflies have gathered, swarmed, and then disappeared. The second time, I was able to catch a video. From what I’ve been told, they were most likely congregating to hunt and eat abundant insects that were also […]

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What good could come from you taking your iPod outside and risk having the dog eat it, I asked… So, I was wrong. Not too bad, not to bad at all. (Though the dog still has a hankering for a metallic apple.)

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I’ve mentioned a few times in previous posts that I decided to try a new tomato variety this year, but that I’d withhold any judgement on it until I had ripe tomatoes. Well, it’s judgement time – but first a little background. With the vast selection of tomato varieties available every year, the fact that […]

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We were on the fair grounds for less than an hour last Thursday morning when Lulu first spotted the slide and what she had only imagined from my stories became an actual vision. With the bombardment of new sites and sounds though, she seemed content with just walking by the first day with a promise […]

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After wrapping up Peanut’s check-up last Wednesday, we were off to spend the rest of the week at the Iowa State Fair. I would be helping my family exhibit cattle in one of the beef shows and the DW was excited to introduce Peanut to some of our friends we only see while at the […]

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Another month means another check-up for Peanut at the UIHC. In addition to the normal check-up with Peanut’s GI doctor – more on that in a bit – we were also fortunate to run into one of Peanut’s old friends – Nurse Jessica. Jessica was one of two nurses that spent a huge amount of […]

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Here’s a recipe the kiddos had to try simply based on the name alone – but don’t be fooled by this recipe, the site has a lot of unique “grown-up” recipes. Unfortunately, I only found this site after the writer quit updating it with new recipes. It has a great system of rating the healthiness […]

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The last update on the kitchen was over a month ago when I left the DW with two 5-gallon buckets catching water from the sink while we waited for the new counter-top to arrive. Luckily for her (actually, luckily for me) things were like that for less than a week – it was supposed to […]

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We had plans for Saturday afternoon/evening that had to be canceled last minute. The kiddos were looking forward to it and rather disappointed, so the DW and I thought we’d pull the tents out of the closet and go camping. I use the word camping rather loosely. You’ll notice we didn’t even leave the back […]

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With four kiddos running around, I’ve come to learn there are many funny-scary-humorous-interesting-never-know-what’s-next aspects of parenting. Sometimes, it’s simply their perspective, and how they express it, that keeps us on our toes. Here’s just a few examples from this week… During supper one night the conversation somehow turned to 90’s music. Potato Boy was listening […]

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