Summer Is For Growing

I'm actually having trouble comprehending how it got to be August, how summer got to be nearly over, and how Michael Jr got big enough to ride a bike on his own. He wants to practice non-stop. His first question almost every morning is, "Mom, after we eat breakfast can you watch me outside on the sidewalk?"

Gussie wants to take over all the garden and yard duties.

But honestly, I'm not letting him! Other than the strawberry patch, nothing else that I've attempted since we've been at this house has been very successful. This year I started a bunch of different flowers from seed and decided to plant most of them on the front hill in the sun, which required hours and hours of moving actual soil into that spot to replace the concrete-like clay. And it is actually working! We have 6-foot sunflowers, 3-foot high zinnias, marigolds that have turned into bushes, a tomato plant that is actually producing tomatoes instead of just leaves, and very happy borage and calendula. So I'm not letting Gussie take all the credit.

 The kids are apparently also trying to grow some birds. They were eating muffins on the porch the other day and noticed the sparrows in the bush eyeing the crumbs, so they dumped the rest of the crumbs off their plates onto the porch and backed up into the doorway to watch.

This picture has nothing to do with anything. Gussie and Michael decided to pick up all their toys with tongs yesterday. And Gussie prefers to wear nothing but a diaper pretty much every chance he gets.

He also really likes watermelon.

I was moving another year of pictures from my computer to a separate hard drive yesterday so my computer would actually work again, so of course the kids wanted to see every single old picture I had on the hard drive. Luckily we only got through most of 2012 when they saw the couch picture and got distracted because they wanted to recreate it right away. So here is the original from August 2012:

And here is August 2014:

And then this happened: