Pooped!

So today we were pooped.  This is my friend that Maddie has in my room with me each night.  He kept me company through all the heart difficulties last year.  Maddie makes sure he's in the room each evening, just as she has her entire menagerie of friends with her as well.  Of course, sometimes when my door opens, they'll all be sitting there, looking up at us as if to ask, "What took you so long?"  Or in this case, he's just there on the door knob, waiting for me to open the door so he can say, "Howdy!"

So yeah, today was a day of more relaxing.  We earned it.  Not to say we didn't do anything.  Mom was out there being a bee again, pollinating those pumpkin blossoms.  We've been harvesting some fruit from our garden too - the blueberry bushes are really producing a lot again, so that's pretty exciting.  Mom literally picked the blueberries off the bushes, and then went straight to the kitchen where she made blueberry pancakes for everyone, and talk about yummy!  

We've got tomatoes off the plant too, nice and red.  And the small chili peppers are starting to turn bright red.  We'll pick some of them off the plant and place them on the window sill in the kitchen, where Maddie can just grab one for a quick, spicy treat.  I have not had one of those yet, but I might soon.  The pepper plant is pretty prolific.  There's a tongue twister for you to try saying three times fast:  "Pretty prolific pepper plants."  I just tried... and failed.

Anyway, I was writing today some.  We were also battling squirrels.  They're a bit vulnerable when sneaking up the two flights of stairs to try and steal mealworms.  So Maddie gets a kick out of having a container of water and if they try to steal someone else's food, she startles them, watches as they quickly go down the stairs, and times her release of water just as they hit the ground below, trying to splash them from above.  

We did have some rain showers today, and that's always nice to cool things off.  We had LEGO Star Wars too, where Maddie is going through the nine Star Wars movies one by one.  it's been pretty funny.  We had taekwondo tonight, of course, because it's Monday.  Maddie was back with her fellow students, having just seen a few of them at Forward Conference too - it's been a busy month.

While Maddie was sparring and swinging about nunchucks, Nana and I were shopping at the grocery store, amongst other places.  It's been a new tradition to stop and get her a Jamocha milkshake.  Okay, I'll have one of those too.  Anyway, at the grocery store we were getting all kinds of new gluten-free options for Mom to try at home.  Of of these options was a thin mint replication of the classic Girl Scout Cookies, and they were gluten free.  Mom was really enjoying these tonight.

It's mid-summer, and we're moving forward with the gardening, of course.  The juro spiders are getting larger - slightly - and we're still hunting those.  You can't eradicate them completely, but they are invasive and are bullying other insects and arachnids around.  There are fewer hummingbirds around lately, and this has been noted online with a few groups that Mom is a part of.  We have a few, but it seems they're not as big in number as last year, at least not yet.

It was a calm day, and we'll go into another calm day tomorrow.  We read tonight, and laughed heartily at Constance Contraire's line about why it was in particular that Mr. Benedict chose locker number 37 of all the other lockers:  "Maybe it's because 1 through 36 were already taken?"  It's a fun read, and we're marching along through this one, a good bit into this second book.

We said our prayers tonight, and we got to bed to get some rest.  We're up a little later, but we can all sleep in a little tomorrow.  A little!