End of Summer 2012

Besides all the fairs we visited toward the end of this summer, we also had a few other things going on...

Kittens

Our cat, Leinie, disappeared this summer so we decided to keep an eye out for another kitten to replace him...although he was truly irreplaceable :-/  Anyway, I got a call from my mom at the end of July while she was at work (at the local vet clinic) saying that someone left a couple kittens in the parking lot.  Turns out that the kittens were only about 3 weeks old and I was going to have to teach them how to drink milk and really work with them for a while...not exactly what I had in mind, but once the kids saw them there was no turning back!

 

This is from the day we brought them home

 

This little one just laid in my hands and put his paws by his face-too cute!

 

Then he fell asleep!  Even cuter!!  (Pics taken by Morgan)

 

This is what they look like now...6 weeks later.  This one is Mittens. (Named by Morgan.)

 

This is Bo.  (Named by Blake.) I've struggled to keep this one alive, but he/she seems to be doing really well now...it's just a lot smaller than the other one.

They are so cute and playful and we have all fallen in love with them!  They're in our mudroom for now, but should be moving into the barn sometime soon.  I actually walked into the mudroom the other day from outside and found Rich standing there with a string and a kitten playing with it at the other end.  He had this look of "shucks, she caught me" on his face.  I just said "Hi Rich! Watcha' doin'?".  With a smirk and the deepest voice he could muster he responded "When are we gettin' these darn kittens outta here!"  Such a tough guy!  LOL!  I'd have moved them already, but after working so hard to keep them alive, I'm afraid of losing them :-/

 

$2 Movies

We made it to two $2 Summer movies at a local movie theater.  The $2 is really an awesome deal since it comes with a small drink and small popcorn!  (You can see how big the small popcorn is.)

We saw Madagascar 2 and Megamind, which was a lot cuter than I expected! :-)

 

Morgan's Lost her first Tooth

She didn't technically 'lose' it, she actually had to have it pulled.  The new tooth was coming up behind the baby tooth and it wasn't pushing it out, so I took her to the dentist to have her first tooth pulled.  It didn't seem to phase her and she seemed to like showing off the hole it left ;-)

I gave her a Tooth Fairy pillow and a Tooth Fairy book after we got home from the dentist.  She also got a dollar from the Tooth Fairy that night, which she was super excited about!

She lost the tooth next to it a couple weeks later.  We were having lunch at a friend of mine's house while watching her 2 littlest ones and Morgan complained her tooth hurt.  I checked it out and her tooth was barely hanging in there.  When we came home she had a little cotton candy that she had gotten at the fair the night before and it fell right out...never thought she'd lose a tooth in cotton candy! ;-)

 

Mackinaw City and Mackinac Island

The women of Rich's family decided to take a trip to Mackinaw to celebrate the return of his cousin from a 9 month deployment in the Navy.  So we left early on a Monday morning and made it up to spend the afternoon shopping in Mackinaw City.  That evening we went to the Dixie Saloon to have some celebratory drinks and headed back to our 1 bathroom, 4 double bed suite with all 8 women.  It was a bit cozy and getting going in the morning with 1 bathroom was slow, but we eventually hopped aboard a ferry to the island and made it there just before noon.

 

This is the Mackinaw Bridge taken from the ferry.

 

The Grand Hotel on the island...not a cheap place to stay and a 10 year wait to get married there!

 

The Fort on the Island

 

I love how cute the streets are and with no vehicles, it quite a frenzy of bicyclists and horse and carriages.

 

Arch Rock...

 

...when looking through the arch you can see that someone made this with stones on the beach.  It was pretty neat to see since we were there right after the Olympics ended. :-)

 

A neat looking team of Percheron's for one of the carriage tours.  We took a carriage tour as well, but we had Belgian horses pulling ours.  If you are ever to visit Mackinac Island, definitely take the tour!  The history you learn on it is well worth the price of the ticket...and it's really quite entertaining too! :-)

 

We came back the same day that we went to the island (short trip!) and stopped at The Cross in the Woods.

It was a long 2 days, but SO much fun!  I'd go into more details, but this post is going to be long enough ;-)

Other exciting news is we got rid of the bats in our attic!  If I knew it were as easy as it was, I would have had it done last year and saved myself a few sleepless nights of wondering if another bat was going to get into the house :-)  An former neighbor of ours does pest control and all he had to do was find the hole they were using to get into the attic from the outside, put up a PVC pipe at a special angle where they can't get back in once they leave, caulk around it and after a few weeks take the pipe away and fill in the hole!  :-)

Besides ALL that, the garden has kept us busy as usual.  I don't know that I've ever eaten as much zucchini as I have this summer, but I've found some new delicious recipes, so I've enjoyed eating it!  It feels nice to not let it go to waste, but I have had to give some away.  We also gotten a bunch of yellow beans, yellow squash, green and orange peppers, cherry tomatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, sweet corn, pumpkins (that were super early!) and potatoes from the garden.  We still have more of just about all of that (minus the cabbage and yellow beans that I've cleared out) plus sweet potatoes, popcorn and butternut squash....we won't be going hungry anytime soon! :-)