Beans and Bats

We got the garden in on Monday. We have bush beans, pole beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupe, pumpkin, squash, zucchini, eggplant and gourds ("Gourds??" asked John in disgust). Yes, I want gourds to paint. Nathanael wanted to grow hotdogs and I'm not totally sure he understood the explanation for why we couldn't.

We also planted sunflowers, marigolds and zinnias around part of the perimeter. We had a slight problem when it was time to plant. Rebecca and I had begun seeds several weeks ago in the little peat pot green houses, but the sunflowers, gourds and cantaloupes were outpacing everything else and we moved them out early, filling their spaces with new seeds. It all got confusing very quickly and we had to do seed identification to figure out which plants were which. I think we've got it figured out, but this could be interesting!

Yesterday I took the kids to the Bat Encounter at the River Museum, since John Mark and Becca will be studying them in Zoology in the fall.

It was pretty cool; they had live bats to display and they had a receiver so we could hear the bats as they echo-located (or whatever the verb is). Even Nathanael was impressed! Can you see the bat in the photo with us? She was hanging upside down on the branch. She is a large fruit-eating bat from some other part of the world and was very curious about all the people around her. Apparently, bats are very beneficial creatures to have around, since they eat thousands of insects a day- especially mosquitoes. The bats we have here are called Large Brown Bats, but they are actually quite tiny and pretty cute. Maybe we will build a bat house this summer and take care of our mosquito problem!

Today is the Day of the Songbook, so I'm off to church to work on it. We've been slowly chipping away at the house and the laundry. I have a good feeling about this!