Mini Vacation

My hectic summer work schedule has ended - I survived with only minor mental trauma - and we celebrated by staying with family and taking Zari to the Maine Wildlife Park.  If it involves animals, we all enjoy it. It was a nice secluded, open space. "Crowds" were extremely manageable - and they had a nice variety of animals. About halfway through we turned around to look and see what made this horrendous honking...only to find a rogue goose walking around as if he owned the place. Shortly after we found the peacock enclosure. They had a male and female and a few baby peacocks, funny little things that look like baby chicks with long necks. They had a feed machine and for .25 cents we fed the...chipmunks. The peacocks wanted nothing to do with our offerings, but those chipmunks were aggressive hoarding our corn...I saw one even take the corn directly from a young child's hand. Am I the only other parent that thinks that was stupid? Anyways...I took a few hundred pictures of the turtles sunning themselves, then we visited the fish hatchery where we all had a great time feeding the fish. I've always loved feeding fish at fish hatcheries, seeing them swarm and jump is very exciting and Zari enjoyed it very much...that is, when her food actually made it INTO the water. We need to work on teaching her to NOT throw like a girl. Because right now she's definitely got my arm! Lucky for her she has Doug's legs. :)

Sadly the day after we returned from our mini vacation my parents-in-laws dog died. The morning after Doug explained to Zari that Rusty had died, and that means he's not coming back. Unfortunately being 2 years old this obviously isn't satisfactory and she's asked me a few times now where Rusty is. Today when dropping her off at my MIL's she saw Grampy's truck in the driveway and said "Grampy and Rusty are home!" ...er...no.

Tomatoes! 3 plants fell over during the hurricane, and I had to harvest 4 completely green ones (currently residing on the windowsill) because a branch of one plant broke off while I was trying to stake it back upright..but everyone seems to be doing well - and we had no damage to our home. A piece of my neighbors tree fell on a fence...honestly I don't know WHICH neighbors tree it is, but the branch is mostly in our yard...and on this fence that is owned by the guy next door.. anyways no one has done anything with it..possibly because no one else but me realizes it's on this guys fence. OH WELL

I hope Bruen's Tree Service is keeping track of the referrals I've been sending them..our neighbors in the back had a couple very large trees fall on their neighbors fence and HOUSE. Scary stuff!

So back to tomatoes.. I have a small stash of harvested tomatoes...Unfortunately it's small so I don't think I have enough to really go through the trouble of making salsa or sauce and canning it... But I'm also chomping at the bit to make blueberry jam. I wish home canned food lasted longer than a year..for all the work I'd like it go last a food 5 years rather than the 1.

I'm getting the furnace cleaned tomorrow. It's hard to believe it's that time of year again. I should probably clean all the Cheerios out of the registers before he comes tomorrow... I wonder if he'll find any crayons or cat toys when he goes to clean the filter?

We took a break on potty training while we were away...when we got back to our normal schedule on Monday Zari ASKED her Grammy if she could use the potty, and then went on to put so much pee in the potty that Grammy started to worry a little bit because she wasn't STOPPING lol
I believe she asked the other Grammy the next day if she could use the potty too..She's coming along, that kid. :)

I put a top sheet in her crib...She's had a fleece blanket that I've caught her ACTUALLY USING...so I thought now would be a good time to introduce a sheet as well. I bought a down comforter for this winter...it's an LL Bean comforter I got from Goodwill, it's been washed and dried twice and it's still in one piece so that's good. She loves "my" green blanket that is an "alternative down" lap blanket..it's really good for playing hide and seek and peekaboo with. I like it because it's "Martha Green", from my massage office when I had such a thing, and the warmest lap blanket we own. Doug is forever trying to steal it, but I won't let him. But I DO let Zaria. She's so spoiled I know. ;) Anyways I think because of her green blanket love she'll hopefully take to the down comforter just as well. Exciting times in her crib! I still cannot get her to use a pillow to save my life. She'll read like 2 pages of a book on a pillow and then toss both out of the crib.

One last Zari tidbit... We went shopping at Old Navy the other night and she saw some pink shoes   and asked for them! She's on her third pair of pink shoes now...We've tried to be very careful about not pushing pink on her...and she doesn't care about it for anything else, but when it comes to footwear she really likes her pink shoes. Her favorite color is actually green... She's very happy to use the green crayon, to search for the green car that lives by my MIL's house, to eat a green (pistachio) muffin, receive a green balloon, etc.

Well that felt good, I had a lot swimming around in there. Thanks for the mind dump everyone! And I hope you had fun reading about my daughters pee, and her favorite color and her love of pink shoes. =P