more from may

(Now that it's June!)

First my obligatory garden pictures. :) Ben and I put alyssum seed along one side of our house last summer. The ants must've carried some of the seeds around the corner, to the crack between our garage and our driveway... we have little alyssum plants sprouting up everywhere!
I'm thinking I need to get at least one additional trellis for this clematis. It's gotten even bigger since I took this photo, and is spilling out over the sidewalk!

All of our plants have really liked the weather this spring, and have gotten much bigger than they normally are at this time. Last year, I thought our coreopsis plant was dying. This year, it's huge, with tons of buds and blooms!
I know that foxgloves are only supposed to come up every other year, but mine should've bloomed last year and didn't, so I thought the 2 plants I had were gone. Well, this year, they came up, and my 2 plants turned into a dozen or so!
I have 2 lady's mantle plants...
and they, too, are HUGE this year! (This is just one of them, which was about 1/4 the size last year!)
I have 2 types of salvia in the front yard, that are different shades of purple. These have also spread like wildfire this year....

Pincushion flower:
A wild rose:
The bunnies love all of our plants! Thankfully, they haven't been eating too many of them, but they do love to hide in them. Nick spotted this tiny baby bunny the other day, no bigger than my fist:
Not sure if this baby is the same one as above, but we spotted this one the following day:
I was happy to get my hair cut last week ~ this is much cooler on these hot, humid days!
On the 26th, Ben and I had a playdate with our friends Karen and David. :) They came down to our house, and first we went to Portillo's for lunch, yum:
Next we went over to the splash park and the boys cooled off for a bit:





When we heard thunder rumbling in the distance, we convinced the boys to get out of the water and to try out the playground equipment for awhile:

Soon it became clear that we were going to be pretty wet if we stayed at the park. We headed back to our house, and got inside right as the skies opened up! It POURED for quite awhile, but the boys still had fun playing with all our toys....

On Friday afternoon, Emm headed up to Wisconsin with a friend, for the weekend. That night, the boys and I walked over to the park for awhile:


On Saturday, the 29th, George and I took the boys to a forest preserve we'd never been to before, Pratt's Wayne Woods. Ben liked checking out the cottonwood fluff in the grass!
We saw some geese and goslings:
and this interesting bug. We thought at the time that it might be a male mosquito, but when we got home and checked online, it turned out to be a crane fly:
Nick spotted several crayfish in the various ponds we hiked past. Here he and Ben are watching a few of them:
A few minutes later, we were a bit surprised to see this large snake slithering along the rocks! It's the biggest one we've ever seen in the wild. (I know snakes can get quite a bit bigger, but I'm used to little garter snakes, so this one seemed HUGE!) We did some checking on the net about this guy, too... turns out he's a western foxsnake:

We watched this redwing blackbird for a few minutes:
We also spied a frog, a turtle, and several fish.

It was such a beautiful day! Here Ben is emptying pebbles out of his shoe (while Mom is watching nervously for more snakes, LOL!):

I liked these pretty little white flowers:
After our hike, we headed over to Lou Malnati's for supper, and enjoyed some delicious pizza!

On Sunday, another beautiful day, the four of us drove over to the Indiana Dunes State Park. We checked out the nature center first:
Then we hiked through the woods for about a mile...

Finally we could see the lake up ahead... what a view!
The boys had a blast at the beach! (George and I both agreed that the water in Lake Michigan was icy cold... but Nick and Ben didn't seem to mind!) They both love to throw rocks into the lake ~ I think it's a boy thing, LOL!


Ben loved playing in the sand, too:


On our way home, Ben declared that it had been "the best day ever!" :)

We had a fairly quiet Memorial Day. The forecast called for storms all day long. It did rain and thunder for about half an hour in the morning, but then the sun came out, so George was able to grill for supper after all!

Nick and Ben, chilling, and waiting for the food to be done:
Supper out on the patio. We had a very yummy, summery feast... hamburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, sweet grilled onions, chips, pasta salad, pop and Koolaid:
Later, for dessert, we had a patriotic red, white, and blue treat... mmmmm....
And that brings us to June! (Can't believe it's here already!)