splishin' & splashin'

that might possibly be the longest slide show ever, but it's been awhile!
we went to my mom & dad's farm at the beginning of july...as you can tell from the pictures, we spent a lot of time on the tractor and in the creek...during one of our wagon rides, elli and i hung our heads off the back of the wagon and pretended to be laura and mary ingalls in our covered wagon going across the country...we played in the creek and found lots of rocks to bring home...

about 3 weeks before our weekend at the farm, one of the hens at my mom and dad's (the white one that elli calls "spirit") started sitting on her eggs (this was the first time this had happened)...a couple of days later, "red" started laying AND sitting in the SAME BOX as spirit...so the two continued to incubate (together) about 10 eggs (spirit's were white, red's were brown)...
so...21 days later (july 5th) they were due to hatch...this was the weekend we planned to be at the farm...so...while we were at the farm, the first chicks hatched...over the next two days, a few more hatched, giving the two proud mama's 6 chicks to share...it's the craziest thing...though they seem to only be sleeping under spirit now, they were all huddled up together for quite awhile...and the chicks still stay close to both hens...during the hatching process, we got to let the kids hear one of the chicks peeping from inside an egg...and then they got to see it hatch...ralphy still wants to listen to every egg he sees!

so..since then, we've done some caving (the tame kind - not the extreme kind that ralph and i did in colorado long ago...), we've relaxed poolside at schmidts' and at ralph's parents' subdivision pool (elli is getting really brave in the water and ralphy is trying to keep up), we've played in the creek (ralphy really likes crawdads!) and hung out "down by the river" (i can't tell you how much sand we bring home each time)...

summer is so wonderful!