Rite of Passage

We have to talk
A secret whispered
Clothes washed out
A drawer opened
A calendar marked
A goodbye hug
Greeting young woman.

Family Dinner

Baked chicken? Obrin didn't seem to know what to make of it.
Fried chicken tenders (resembling a certain nugget of the Mc family), he gobbled down quicker than I can yell Diiiinnnner!

Some Pool Time and Critter Contact

Obrin's Here!

This afternoon, Obrin (our boy from the Fresh Air Fund) arrived by bus to a high school about 30 - 40 minutes from our house. It was a scorcher out there in the parking lot, but it was all smiles and breezes when he stepped off the bus.
Right this minute, he's being given the tour of the place by Rosie and some of the others. For an 8 year old little boy far from home, he sure seems brave and friendly and endearing.
When asked what his favorite color was, he prattled off about ten different hues, including different shades of the same color. When we inquired after his favorite animal, he replied tiger (James' fave, too), and informed us he wanted a baby tiger all his own that he could raise. I'm sure Mom will be on board for that! 8-)

Frankenstein's Dog

Sunny was due to have her stitches removed today. So I took her to the vet and sat in the waiting room, biding time till it was our turn. In the chairs across from me were two towhead boys, both with missing teeth, patiently waiting for their dog to be released from the exam room.
It's been my experience that under normal circumstances, boys and dogs are magnetically drawn to each other. Evidently, Sunny knows this, too, and took one look at the youngsters and began lurching over towards them.
What I saw was my sweet yellow lab walking over to the boys with a big smile on her face and a wag of her tail.
What the children saw was a duct-taped, slobbery plastic cone collar flapping around and sounding like hillbilles playing the saw. They saw a shaved and swollen and red ear with wiry black sutures poking out of it every which way. They saw four feet, all with missing fur from being chewed, attached to an almost 100 pound body that couldn't seem to walk a straight line.

As she approached them, they involuntarily flinched and their faces wrinkled in undisguised disgust.

Taking a look at her from their eyes, I couldn't say as I blamed them......

A Day at the Beach

A week or so ago I packed the kids into the car and we headed to the beach. It was a perfect day, with great waves for boogie-boardin', shells to find, jetties to walk. We got to spend some time with Grammy, bought Hermit Crabs, and built castles in the sand.
Here are a few photos to prove it ....

Fence Fights

The fenceline between our lower field and the neighbors' manicured lawns runs along a hedgerow. With any luck, your collective memories are scanty as mine and you won't remember from last summer when I proudly posted that my girls and I patched it all up so the horses could graze in that field once again.
Not that our patches haven't held nicely to the effects of wind and weather and the push/pull nature of errant vines. I'm sure these are all new areas of the fenceline that have recently become red-carpet invitations for my horses to walk on through to where the grass is, quite literally, greener and weed-free.
Invitations with the not-so-surprising result that a neighbor woke up one early summer morning to a new, adorable lawn ornament in the form of our yearling colt Pippin.
After sheepishly collecting him, we returned him to our upper field where, all summer, along with his Mom Genevieve and his baby brother Finnegan and their six goat friends, they have chewed what little grass there was down to nubs. At this point, what with all the heat waves and grazing going on, we look like dirt farmers.

So I ordered some new fencing materials and waited for the perfect day low in humidity and high in childhood summer laziness, and ordered the troops outside to put in a couple hundred feet of fence.

You'll remember, I'm confident, the wails and moans from the cherry tree branches debacle. Similar effects can be obtained when mandating that their behinds get busy constructing a fence.

But get busy they did, and over two days' time they pounded in t-posts, measured distances, lugged wire panels into place and fought battles with little wire clips.
The big boys got to feel like the men they like to think they are as I handed them my keys and asked them to drive up to where the panels had been deposited, tie them to the back of my car (which is a wannbe pick-up truck) and drive them back down to where we were working.

At long last, after much toil and sweat and a healthy dose of bickering (I called the blue pliers!) the fence was complete and we turned the horses into the field. One mouthful of that sweet long grass and their eyes rolled back into their heads in delight.

We then took the kids into town for some water ice, where their eyes rolled back into.... oh you get the point.

Good job kids!









This is the field they were grazing on....

And this is their new and improved field.