Drawing and Gardening and a new fan...

Mike told me awhile ago that he had a dream that Arianna (she was a newborn) was drawing on the walls. Well, it is getting closed enough. She decided to be artistic on the ceramic tile from the kitchen. It is a good thing that it was easy to clean. I took away the crayons, and told her that she needed to draw on her notebooks (has 3 of them). She was not happy as you can see below.

She needed reassuring that we loved her and she wanted to be hug. We were not angry, but we need to decrease the possibility of scribbles on walls and such. After a few minutes, everything was fine. (She will get her crayons back).

See, she is with daddy now. All is well. I still think one day (not too far) we will find some art work...

Then, we went to Burger King so Mike can have all four Star Trek glasses. She looks adorable :)

We had been in our house a bit more than two years and finally I decided to do something in the strip between the driveway and the fence. It is a space of about 35 feet long by 5 feet wide. As always I forgot to take a before picture, but basically it was grass (with some bare spots). The picture below is some of the grass that I rip. That was the hardest part.

While working I saw this beautiful purple finch. Maybe he is looking for some new spots to hide!

Here are two pictures of the strip. It is not finished, I still need to plant 7 of the 26 plants that I bought. Need to put some soil, flattened, and add mulch, so it is still half way. What do you think?

I am adding three rose bushes (one is a vine) and a beautiful Blushing Bride Hydrangea. Love flowers!


Thanks to Dave and Tiffany (and Glenn) for coming so fast to our rescue and helped Mike to install a new ceiling fan!!! Love it. Thank you, thank you!

New growth and bird and future fix...

Here are my seedlings for future tomatoes! I don't know if they actually will work ( I started a bit too late) but I am giving it a try. Even if 5 work, that will be plenty. So, let's hope so.

Here is a new bird that I have not seen before- it looks like the one called Indigo Bunting, but I am not sure. I love my yard!



And with old and sometimes new houses, here is the next thing that we are going to check - the gutters! Hopefully, it is just leaves or something easy to fix. And this is the reason that instead of paying someone to do the yard (the strip that I keep talking)...I started yesterday by ripping the grass!

Mother's Day

For Mother's Day we celebrated by having a grilling party (hamburgers and hot dogs) with Mike's family. (For my mom, we celebrated during the week by going to a bead store and having some sushi/Chinese food and ice cream sundae.)

While outside in our grilling day, there were many birds that came to visit and here are a few pictures of them (the picture below has 4 different birds: Blue Jay, Cardinal, Morning Dove, and ? don't know - we called them the helmet bird)

Grandparents chilling and playing with their grand kids...

I like this sequence of Glenn. He really liked to play with the ball -I know it is pink, but it is Arianna's ball -:)

I wonder what he is trying to do?


Mike and Mom playing with Arianna while Aunt Ann is trying to take a nap.

I wonder what was funny? Maybe a good joke? I am glad that you are enjoying the day.

After eating, we gave mom her presents. I hope she likes them! Happy Mother's Day!

Anniversary Date 11th yrs!

Our anniversary is on May 3rd, but since Mike was in final's week we postponed it until May 9th. No problem, the day was beautiful and we went to see Star Trek in a IMAX screen at Batavia... The movie was great, I loved it and I am waiting for the dvd.
Then, we went to Naperville to eat at a Thai Restaurant that we used to go quite often about 5 years ago. The place was pretty much the same, with really good food. We stopped at Border's and bought some magazines and a few books for Arianna and went back home to our squiggly. Thanks to her grandparents, Ann and Barry for babysitting :)
Happy Anniversary!

Scarlett's Birthday

On May 8th, we went to my sister's house to celebrate Scarlett's Birthday # 7! I can't believe how quickly time is going...

This time I made the cake and try to decorate it. What do you think?

Arianna waiting for some cake!!! She likes either vanilla or chocolate, this time was vanilla with some strawberry filling and cream cheese frosting.

Here we are about to sing the birthday song..

They take joy in cutting their own cake. I guess that means they are getting older :)


Scarlett about to have a yummy slice of cake.


I think we can say that Raven liked the cake!


Scarlett opening some presents. I hope she enjoyed her day!

Flowers, Kids and nature

Here is a very clean bird (American Robin). It looks cute after finishing taking a bath. I actually took pictures during the entire thing. He or She splashed a lot, and seemed to really enjoy the water.

First, I thought the dove was injured or something, but thank God it was just taking a nap or rest.

How about some Blue Jays? It is a really beautiful bird, although not the nicest. I kept hearing his call and it turned out we have about 5 of them! We saw them at Mother's Day.

Now, this is a remarkable vine "Clematis". I planted it about three summers ago, the second summer I thought it was not coming, but gave me 3 flowers only. This time around it looks around 15 flowers so far, yippee!

Our first rose that I am going to plant this weekend (depending on the weather). It is called "Chicago", let's see how it does...

I bought 3-4 azaleas and 1 rhododendron. I love the color of this one, beautiful yellow.

All these tulips were bought on 2008 at Holland, MI. My mom helped me putting them on the ground and you can see how beautiful the look. The yellow tulips (third photo down) now looks more orange. Really amazing change of color.

Two weekends ago, my nieces (Raven and Scarlett) came to stay for a day/ night. They were playing outside for awhile.


All that play, I guess she was ready for a nap...