Rockabye-bye

Something sad happened today. The big garbage truck came and hauled off our glider that rocked all of my babies for 6 years. The other night I was rocking Afton and every time we went backwards, the back of the chair would crack and recline farther, and farther, until I was lying flat on my back and had to sit up before it went even farther. Oh what a hard piece of furniture to say goodbye to. She served us well.

Now another goodbye story. Over the summer, I would put our plastic pool under the swingset's slide and the boys would slide and splash for hours and create a massive mudbath. Toward the end of July I left the pool out for at least two weeks b/c of summer heat, rain and vacations. When I finally made my way out there to dump it out, I discovered dozens of tiny tadpoles. I couldn't bring myself to kill all of those froggy babies, so I decided to let them grow into frogs which the boys would love to witness. They started growing little legs and I noticed that we had tadpoles of different ages and stages. After about six weeks it was turning into a tadpole hatchery and I was tired of worrying about Afton falling in the pool, AND (yes this is a massive run-on sentence) I was hosting a playdate at my house with lots of toddlers the next day, so I captured every tadpole and transported them into a bucket. We made it a family event to bring the tadpoles to the ditch down at the dead end of our street. It turned out to be quite the adventure.

Look closely and you'll see them around the edges...

Here I am ready to pour the babies into the ditch/creek while watching out for live snakes because I was standing on a snake skin. GEW!

(I didn't know that Josh was taking pictures.)

During the playdate the following day, one of our little friends saw this tiny toad inside the top pole of our swingset. There are two of them in there, and I have no idea how they got up that high. I'm so happy that we have two little friends to hang out with after saying goodbye to the many many others. We said a little prayer that our babies will be safe and smart and hide from that snake or any other potential predators in their new home. I'm a little scared to go visit them though...We'll have to bring a weapon of some sort. Maybe a pitchfork?