Our garden in progress...

Well my home improvement efforts seem to be best out in the yard... I hate to decorate, paint, clean house, but I LOVE to get dirty in the yard! And the girls love playing in the dirt too :)

"Abby Pumpkin Smith" as Kenna as named her, is watching over things! We had something eat up our strawberries last year, so maybe she will keep pesky animals away! This year in our small garden we have tomatoes and bell peppers!

We are adding a bigger raised garden this year where we hope to do cucumbers, green beans, and pumpkins (and more if we can fit it in!) I haven't put the raised bed kit together yet, but it's pretty awesome - made of recycled plastic and can be put together in lots of different shapes/sizes! :) Our compost bin on the right has been neat, but boy is it hard work to turn that stuff!

And our first fruit tree! Belle of Georgia peach... we'll see how this goes! Would love to have fruit this year, but I'm not holding my breath. Looks and smells beautiful though! :)

Kenna's latest penmanship paper...

This week the kindergarten class made flowers out of styrofoam cups... very easy:

paint a styrofoam cup with tempera paint - inside and out

heat oven to 225 degrees

put the cups on an oven safe baking sheet

20 seconds (?) in the oven....

the edges curl out and make this pretty flower shape!

then glue colored grass, tissue paper, whatever, on the inside!

attach a stem and voila! :)

Her teacher attached their flowers to their latest penmanship piece and hung them on the wall!

Every week they work on bible verses (usually in their journals) or beautiful sayings such as this :)

The rainbow!

March 11th...

My coworker from school texted me late in the afternoon as she was driving through North Richland Hills to go see the awesome rainbow outside! There was a double rainbow briefly, and then the single was pretty bright for about 15 minutes! Couldn't even get the whole thing in the picture... Misty and cold outside so they didn't want to be outside for long, but the girls LOVE rainbows!

They're back!

Our resident snakes started making an appearance this week... rough earth snakes that are really pretty cute (I know that makes some of you cringe!) and this time we found them in the front! Last fall we found about 4 different ones in the backyard along our foundation under the grass line...

Sunday we found one in the front flower bed (I was actually pulling some weeds while they played!) and we have seen him there several times this week, then Tuesday evening I practically stepped on this one walking in the front door! He was right in the middle of the front walk... biggest we've seen yet! And of course Kenna was all about holding it, until... he pooped on her! She threw him in the bushes - I'm sure he will be just fine in there...