This Dog...

...is smelly, I tell you what!

Da boys

Hangin' out with a new park friend.
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Hats

....Evie will only wear Jack's.

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55 degrees

...and quite mild outside.  Despite the rain spells, it's getting harder and harder to convince myself that we're still in the winter!

Farmer Flood Superheroes

There has been a lot of flooding here recently, and while we are safe from the water ourselves, not all of our friends have been so lucky.  Last week I took Jack, Caiden and Rebecca to a nearby farm to help them harvest as many crops as they could before their land went underwater.  (I left Evie with Auntie Alison -- she's a bit young yet to be out in the muddy, rainy fields!)

In the car on the way over I explained the situation.  The kids decided they were Farmer Flood Superheroes, and they were going to rescue all the plants!

They look thrilled to be here, right?

Second attempt was not much more successful!

The view from the farmers' front yard.  Normally there's no water to be seen here!

Looking over from their front porch.  Those are their greenhouses in the middle of the river!

Here's the farmer loading up blue boxes of produce to bring in from the fields.

Naturally, once we reached the fields the kids were much more interested in digging up worms, smashing clumps of dirt, explaining how cold they were and so on....  So it was up to me to dig.  We stayed for an hour and dug up one box of potatoes!  Considering the amount of Other Activities we were also doing, I'm proud we got this many out of the ground!

Here they are being totally proud that "we" dug up all those potatoes!  Also being freezing.  ;)

Once they knew we were heading home, they were in high spirits over how much "we" had accomplished.  :)

"We" dug up the whole row from where I was standing to the end of the field!

This was after wiping as much mud off my hands as I could manage.  I got REALLY dirty!

Making our way to the farm house to wash up....

Of course we had to take a closer look at the flood before we left!

That's a mostly-submerged fence in the middle of the shot.

They were very smart (knowing they're in a floodplain) and oriented their greenhouses to let the floodwater flow right through them!

Cooooooooooooool.

Just before we left, we found this forklift!  It was the icing on the cake to the whole visit.

And look!  It's growing GRASS!

Then it was time for a change into dry clothes, and a snack of granola bars, apples, cheetos and doritos on the way home.  They earned it!

Dishes

Our dishwasher went on the fritz last week and while I've been looking for our home warranty to cover the repairs (which I finally found, thank goodness!) I've been washing the dishes by hand.  Jack caught wind of how much work this is and he has been my devoted dish washer since then!

You can't really see the sink full of dishes that he's working on, but I thought this picture gave a good idea of his dedication to his job.  He's legitimately saved me several hours of work so far!  :)

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Jack and Evie's new room!

This is the ceiling color in progress on Jack and Evie's upcoming Big Kids Bedroom. I'm very excited about this!
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