Remembering My Moms

                             

 My mom and mom-in-law before they were moms!

Hope everyone has a very happy Mother's Day!

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I'm probably the last person that didn't know about this app, but I just found Merlin, Cornell University's app for identifying birds and bird calls. 

We live out in the country and have many, many large oak trees on our property. The bird song out here is beautiful and I'm always curious about which birds I'm hearing. Once the trees are completely leafed out as they are now, I can hear more birds than I can actually see. This app can listen to and identify birds by their calls. Even with the traffic noise on the Farm to Market road that runs in front of our neighbor's properties, it can hear and identify "who's out there". Just on a short walk this morning, it found 5 or 6 different birds, none of which I could actually see, but could hear. You can also take a picture of a bird and it will identify it. I almost feel like I have a new toy! I've never known much about birds, but living out here has made me curious. We see blue jays, northern cardinals, mockingbirds, eastern bluebirds and sparrows a lot and I'm somewhat familiar with their calls, but this app found painted buntings, tufted titmice (titmouses?) and carolina chickadees. I think I'm going to really enjoy using this. Maybe it will get me outside and walking more! 

Happy May!

 

Stormy Weather

We had an "interesting" night last night as did most of North Texas. An EF-2 tornado did a lot of damage on a path 30 minutes north of us and continued down to the town that we live just outside of. It must have just missed us. We have several large oak trees that are down and large and small branches everywhere, but we are fine. Our house is fine as far as we can tell. No obvious damage from the wind and large hail. About noon today, we drove down our county road about a mile and the damage was much worse. Unfortunately two people were killed, one up north of us and one south of us. Quite a few houses were severely damaged. We have a little room under our stairs and the hall next to it has all interior walls, so that's where we stayed. We're very grateful that it wasn't worse and are praying for those who were so hard hit.

It Was Grand!

 The weekend, that is. We kept our 2 youngest grands over the weekend and it was a really good visit! Our property has lots of wildflowers and they love going out to pick them. They picked me some sweet bouquets.

They like to help bake when they come to see us and requested a "chocolate cake with strawberries". We got it done! They added ingredients and held the mixer. I thought I had a picture of it, but Pop (my husband) took the picture with his phone, so I don't have it to show. It was pretty-a square one layer cake with white frosting and diced strawberries on top. We made cupcakes with the leftover batter.

They are growing so fast! RC our granddaughter is reading so well, she spent a lot of time reading to us. They both love to sing and especially love to sing sea shanties when we are in the car! During Covid, a number of people started putting videos of themselves on the internet singing sea shanties and people loved it. Our son and daughter-in-law played them a lot for the older siblings, so these two grew up listening to them. Nathan Evans is their favorite singing "Wellerman". They also love to sing out at church which makes us really happy. They are the last of the grandkids, and are the only little ones, so we cherish our time with them!

It Was Good!

 We had a wonderful day yesterday. The church service was uplifting with newer songs and some old hymns too. Hubby and I sang on the Praise Team and enjoyed it so much. Our church building was packed full-so good to see so many people there!

Our daughter hosted Easter dinner yesterday and it was wonderful! She doesn't know it yet, but I may have just passed the torch for this holiday! Our youngest local grand is 13, so there weren't any little egg hunters to hide eggs for out here in the country. She fixed a ham and roasted pork tenderloin with several delicious sides. I brought sweet potato casserole and a coconut cake that I made. Our oldest granddaughter and her boyfriend were there. He works in a bakery, so they brought several different kinds of bread-all delicious. It was so relaxing and we really enjoyed being with family.

Our little grands stayed home this year and hunted eggs in an egg hunt run by their big brothers' 4-H group. They did a great job and our other 13 year old grandson took photos of all the kids with the Easter Bunny. He and his 11 year old brother are getting to be quite the photographers! We will get to keep the littles (4 and 6 yrs old) this weekend. 

The weather is picture perfect today-I sat outside and kept our "teenaged" chicks company for a while. They are Leghorns and can be so goofy and funny. I'm looking forward to the fresh eggs later this year!

Everyone have a great week!

Happy Easter!