Tag Archives: toad

Teamwork?

Jane was squatting down on the driveway trying to catch boxelder bugs. Happily babbling away and telling me all about it she’d inch forward, reach out to grab one, miss, giggle and repeat.

Enter Clara.

Clara clomps in front of her, surveys the situation, and smashes a bug flat.

“Oh, Clara! Jane was trying to catch one of those!”

Clara reassess, moves her foot off the smashed bug and offers it to Jane.

Jane carefully picks up the flattened boxelder bug and runs to me with it excitedly “telling” me all about it.

I was still wondering if that was a good teamwork or if Jane is just a really easy going kid, when they found a toad.

I had a moment of pause when Clara went to help Jane catch it.Clara, Jane and Toad

The toad and I were both happy that the teamwork was a bit more conventional this time!

T is For Toad

Ivy went looking for bugs under logs and found this toad.

Note: My daughter's not jaundiced, she just likes to be a dandelion fairy!

Shortly after the big discovery Ivy ran for the house to show Clara. When I walked in Ivy was headed up the stairs, toad in hand.

Me: “Whatcha’ doin’ Ivy?”

Ivy: “I’m going to play with my toad!!!”

By the time my camera and I wandered upstairs to see what was happening the toad had peed on Ivy and the carpet.

This didn’t surprise me because not only is pee a toads M.O., the play room is the only room left in the house with carpet. Murphy’s law strikes again!

After the toad met a few of the locals…… and was completely unimpressed… …Ivy brought him back to his little toady hideout.

Toads, cameras and kids it makes for a hoppin’ good time!

Yard Work


I don’t like yard work, I think I could blame it on the child labor that was extracted out of me growing up, but I think my mom might read this so I won’t. Instead I would just like to say, (Mom and Grandpa are you listening?) That I do have SOME standards!

1) Green is good. Well unless it’s purple (creeping charlie), yellow (dandilions), white (clover), or brown (well this color isn’t good but the cow pasture from the neighbors floods parts of our yard with…umm… “dirt” and it’s brown and there isn’t much I can do about it).
2) It should be short. Unless short means that I have to mow it more than once every 7 (or 14) days, then it can be a bit longer. Or if I lose a kid in it, then it’s time to mow, but they yell really loud so that takes some serious length.
3)I want to walk in it barefoot.

Ok fine I have ONE standard, but it’s something right???
So that leads me to my problem. I have too many thistles, and since this directly violates standard number 3 I have been trying to do something about it. The problem is my lack of an other standards are making it sort of difficult. A weed killer you say… well then I would have no lawn (see standard number 1) . So I have been digging thistles, a LOT of thistles, three wheelbarrows full and counting, that kind of a LOT of thistles. Now I have about half my lawn thistle free, Horray! New problem: driving the wheelbarrow is getting difficult due to all the ankle breaking holes left from the thistle removing. This leads me to my big problem with yard work. You spend time, lots of time (if you are a certain kind of person all your time, if you are me as little as you can get away with) because it’s always SOMETHING, and what do you end up with, a short green thing you can walk across…

While I have been digging thistles, Ivy and Clara have been playing on a blanket together while storm wanders around the yard (she finally figured out it’s not a good idea to catch the thistles I throw on the pile). See…

Oh right… so what’s actually happening is that Storm is eating sticks and grass and creating lawn shrapnel all over the blanket while Clara has crawled off the blanket in search of her own lawn to chew on and Ivy found a toad.
Just after this picture was taken Storm and Clara noticed the toad and both tried to eat it.

Tomorrow I’m going to work on the flower beds!