Kittens vet visit and update

The kittens now have names. The larger one is Felix and the smaller, Flurry. They had their first visit to the veterinarian today. Felix got his first shots and a clean bill of health. Flurry on the other hand did not gets shots because she is too small. The vet also has concerns for her size. He thinks that the people we bought the kittens from might have exaggerated their ages a bit and also that Flurry was developmentally delayed to only 4-5 weeks. We'd already figured some of this out and had a few scares with Flurry already. She seems to have digestive problems and feels so uncomfortable sometimes. We've been giving her baby kitten silk replacer and very watered down canned kitten food. Nothing seems to agree with her though. Sometimes Flurry is well enough to play but then later she may go downhill fast. It's a mystery and we hope we can find out what's wrong so she can grow and thrive.

Environmental Science merit badge

I ran an environmental science workshop for boy scouts in our troop. I planned to do this ins a few shorter sessions over multiple days. It was hard to find a date that all interested scouts could do so I finally settled on doing it in a long one day workshop. I found some ideas online for how to do this. I made sure to have everything very organized and ready, all experiment items in labeled bags, all timeline materials cut out, a schedule that needed to be followed and 3 pre-requisites the boys needed to bring on the day. I wasn't sure how well this would work but it went great! With a few minor exceptions the boys stayed on task and all earned the merit badge by the end of the day! I was very pleased, the day went much better than I had anticipated.

Kittens

It happened in now way anything like how I thought it might happen IF we got kittens...but get kittens we did. Two of them, one a good size and one a very small kitten. They're littermates, the person we bought them from said the little one is just a runt and is doing all the same things as the bigger kittens. There were 5 to choose from. We chose the two that we did because they were regular kittens, some of the others were a breed called munchkins (meaning short legs). Also it seemed like the larger one was the most friendly and the tiny one just needed us! No names yet but here they are!

Cooking merit badge

Tristan did all the cooking today. He made three meals and a dessert with his JetBoil backpacking stove. This is part of the cooking merit badge. I was glad to have a day off from cooking! He made oatmeal with fruits and nuts for breakfast, Asian vegetable and tofu soup for lunch and a mac n cheese/ ravioli combo with spinach and corn for dinner. The dessert was choice of two different flavors of pudding. All the meals for this requirement had to be made from lightweight, portable, non-perishable ingredients.

Independance days festivities

We did some needed shopping on a rainy 4th of July, then the town celebrations on the 5th including library book sale and yard sales, some historical demonstrations, parade, selling popcorn with the boy scouts and watching the fireworks. Finished off the long weekend with a visit to my Mom on the 6th.

Tristan selling popcorn with the Boy Scouts

Marching in the parade

Hayley and Becky's baby Shane watching the parade

Becky, Hayley, Shane

Watching a blacksmith at work

 

Troop 69 in the parade

home from scout camp

Tristan is home from scout camp. This year he was the senior patrol leader at camp so had additional responsibilities. He is pretty tired so I don't have many details yet. Did get one fun story "everybody's pottery things blew up in the kiln!". Also somehow he took the geocaching merit badge not basketry even though he'd done the paperwork for baskets and bought all the needed baskets. I don't think he was able to complete the geocaching badge since he hadn't done the prerequisites but hopefully he had fun anyway. He enjoyed the pottery merit badge and the motorboating one. Have to wait on any more updates since he fell asleep.

Meanwhile I did the 2 large loads of laundry he brought home with him!

babies everywhere

We had torrential rains last night, that seemed to help everything grow at hyper speed. Plants are much bigger today, small tomatoes and peppers have suddenly blossomed and tons of baby tadpoles hatched in our pond!

baby tomatoes

baby apples

baby peppers

 

baby tadpoles

and more baby tadpoles

and more baby tadpoles!

New reality show, 1,900 frogs and counting. see how the Frogger family manage their large brood on a day to day basis.

Garden update

The gardens are growing well. before too long we'll have a lot of fresh vegetables and fruits. So far from the garden we've had a few strawberries, a little lettuce and some chard. A lot more is growing, and growing well this year. getting an early start on planting doesn't always pay off, depending on weather, this year it seems to have worked well to plant early.

little garter snake in upper gardens

wood frog in Tristan's garden

big garter snake in lower garden

Transplanted spinach plants

Colin's garden

Tristan's garden

Hayley's garden

"Tristan" species strawberries, yes we bought them because of the name!

my corn is getting big