I had a little help planting the pots on the patio this year.
Her mama helped, too, and also enjoyed snapping a few pictures with my camera.
The one photo I still need to get it the finished product.
Everyone needs a little help like this once in a while.
I live very close to the Snake River Canyon. In fact, there's nothing between my back patio and the canyon but a couple of fences, Evil Knievel's jump and a bunch of cows.
Fairly recently the city has developed a walking trail along the canyon rim for the enjoyment of anybody who wants to walk there, so since I had my whole brood, minus PB home for Mother's Day, we decided to make use of it.
So we walked one way.
And some of us ran.
And we took in some of the sights at that end. This is an area called Pillar Falls. It's further down river from Shoshone Falls that I've shown you before. You can see that the canyon...and in truth a lot of the area around where I live is very rugged and wild...kind of like my boys, lol.
Then we turned and walked the other direction toward the Perrine Bridge.
The Perrine Bridge was named for an early businessman in the area here.
The trail will actually take you right under the bridge where you can hear the cars going over.
And then you can look back the other way at the bridge. It's a pretty walk I'd never taken before. Amazing what you can find in your own town.
While the little boys were "riding" around the pasture, the other horses and people were just hanging out, waiting for the adventure to be over before they headed to a different corral. As is sometimes the case, boredom sets in.
"Hmmm. This blueish greenish thing looks interesting."
"It doesn't smell too bad."
"I wonder if it's edible."
"I only want a little nibble."
"Just a nosh to get me through to the next corral."
Things are blooming in my yard. I walked outside the other morning and noticed that all my flowering trees, with the exception of the two apple trees, have blossoms on them.
My ornamental pear.
The flowering almond.
The plum tree is just LOADED.
And there are even a few flowers on the baby peach trees LS Boy planted last summer.
The peonies have started emerging and while they aren't blooming yet, seeing them is enough to start the yearly debate between my husband and I about whether it's pronounced PEE-uh-nee or Pee-OH-nee.
Since we had some extra kids here for the holiday weekend, we decided it would be a good time to go cut a Christmas tree. Actually, this was my only goal for the weekend. I wanted to get the tree decorated while the college boys and DDIL#4 were here. The thought of decorating the tree with just The Girl made me a little sad. So we headed out, going in the opposite direction than we have done in previous years. It is closer to our house and we thought we'd be out and back in just a couple of hours. Um, no.
It was a beautiful day and we outfitted ourselves in the most stylish winter wear we could find.
We found a great tree, but realized that getting it down the hill and into the truck was a little problematic since it was in the middle of a patch of dead aspen trees. We had to push a couple of the dead trees down so we could drag the tree though.
The cutting began and then stopped because the chain came off the chainsaw. Luckily, we had the little tool we needed to tighten it back on.
The men huffed and puffed and, with the aid of gravity, managed to man-handle it into the back of the truck, where we had to tie it in.
The bed of the truck is 8 feet long. You can see that we had more tree sticking out the back of the truck than we had inside the bed of the truck. Without tying it in, it had a tendency to want to teeter-totter on the tailgate.This is where we stopped and had some tasty hamburgers for lunch.
What DH and I learned on this adventure, is that we have an inflated sense of how tall our living room ceiling actually is, because when we got it home, we had to cut another 6 feet off it to get it in the house. So the chain saw came out again. Finally we got it into the tree stand in the driveway and then hefted it into the house....no small feat, since LS Boy had a migraine and was moaning upstairs. We stood it up in the corner of the living room and started tweaking its position.....and the tree stand broke. Seriously??
I was beginning to doubt whether or not we were ever going to get this thing done. The tree stand had a spike in the center of it that went up into the trunk of the tree to hold it in place and that was what broke. We had to cut off another section of trunk to insert another tree stand. (We have several saved from years past....luckily.) DH thought he could spread a tarp under the tree trunk and saw it off in the living room, since no one was very anxious to drag it outside and then back in again. So the chainsaw came out in the middle of my living room. We got the new tree stand attached, but the house smelled like chain saw exhaust for the rest of the day, even after opening the doors and windows for an hour.
Still with me?
We got going on the decorating. While DH and the kids strung the lights, I started un-boxing the ornaments. And wouldn't you know that the first one I grabbed was PB's tiny shoes ornament? Every year I buy a few ornaments that go with events that happened during the year. The year PB was born I found a miniature ornament...a pair of teeny, tiny shoes. Since he was only 3 1/2 pounds at birth, I thought they'd be perfect. I guess I should have figured they'd make me a little weepy with him gone this year.
In the end, we got the job done, even if we finished at 10:30 that night. It was much more festive having several to help, and we needed some boys here to set up the annual reindeer ambush. I'm not sure The Girl could have done it right.
Whatever we had to do was all worth it to get this shot of The Girl wearing PB's "Mad Bomber" hat out in the hills.
The Guys were home from the hills for a few days and during that time they did a few necessary things around here.
The apples were ready to be picked. This is the Red Delicious tree.
We have a baby Golden Delicious tree. It has wire around it right now so when we turn the horses into this area to eat the grass down, they won't trample the tree to death. It makes picking a little difficult. The advantage here is that you can eat a few while you are picking them.
My mom comes to Sunday dinner every week.
When she walked in this past Sunday she had a little pod in her hand and opened it to show these seeds.
I had no idea where they came from but she let me know that these seeds would give someone hollyhocks like this one. So I'm willing to share the hollyhock goodness. If you are interested in giving them a try, just email me at callan86@hotmail.com and I will send you a bunch of these seeds. I know they are fairly hardy and are perrenial in my zone. You do need to be aware, though, that they can grow to be about 6 feet tall.
I very rarely accompany the men in my family on their various forays into the wilderness. Reason number 1 is that I don't really care to be in the backwoods with no indoor plumbing. Reason number 2 is that they are usually chasing a beast of some kind and that's just not in my lexicon of fun. So an added benefit of the cabin is that they can chase things and come home and take a shower and get a meal and I can enjoy the outdoors as well. Since the river is so close to the cabin, the boys have been known to wet a worm or two trying to catch fish.
There hasn't been a huge amount of success in this arena, but at this time of year, the Kokanee Salmon are swimming upsteam to spawn. It's really hard to get decent pictures, but those three dark blobs in the water are very red salmon.
AP Boy had brought his fishing gear along and tried his best to tempt them with some fancy lure or other, but they weren't at all interested. Still, it was nice to be able to watch him try.
And looking away from the river was this gal.
We have some bikes up at the cabin. My DH has a bum knee that he keeps limber by using an exercise bike at home and goes on rides at the cabin with whoever he can get to accompany him.
When my mom heard mention of a bike ride, she said, "I used to ride all over the place when I was a teenager." Now keep in mind that my mom is 76 years old and hasn't even looked at a bike in over 40 years. Not to be deterred, she decided that the old adage, "It's just like riding a bike..." had to be true.
AP Boy helped her figure out the helmet.
And helped her get it fastened.
And held on to the back of the bike to get her started. In the end, she decided that perhaps the adage wasn't as true as one might think.
So DDIL got on the bike and took off. AP Boy and the SPGB tried to keep up, but couldn't quite manage it.
This made my granddaughter a little sad. She wanted her mom, and AP Boy sympathized.
It's no secret in my family that my husband loves being a grandpa. He is incredibly patient with the grandbabies and just really loves spending time with them.
At whatever level they are.
What is it about little girls and swings? The SPGB just loves to swing, whereas the SGB really didn't enjoy it all that much. I remember as a little girl just loving to swing. I felt like I could touch the sky. Getting photos of my husband and the SPGB on the swing is a little problematic. I kept trying to focus on her as she came toward me and ended up with about 48 blurry pictures.
Then I tried focusing on my husband and then snapping the picture when she got back to him. Better, but then I ended up with a sort of bizarre looking creature that was half grandpa and half grandbaby. Sigh. I tried it from one side and the swing chain kept getting in the way.
I tried it from the other side and got all kinds of sun flare, which would be nice in some other instance, maybe, but not this one. It was an interesting experiment and fun to catch the pictures of DH with the grandgirls.
After all, who would want to miss Grandpa climbing up into the fort and sliding down the slide?
