Life’s been busy here these last couple of weeks with many good things. My son finished first grade last Wednesday. I’ve also enjoyed some special moments with family. My husband’s Aunt Rose and her sister Dorothy came into town for a visit. I always cherish our time with them. They are lovely, funny, and wise ladies!

Over the holiday weekend, I visited the Denver Zoo twice—first with my son and then with my husband and son. Both visits were delightful! The animals were active and entertaining as you can see below from the some of the snapshots I took with my cellphone.

You probably noticed from the pictures that my son is wearing a sling. About a week and a half ago, he had a bike accident and broke his collarbone. We were concerned about how painful the injury was and how this would affect his summer. To our relief, our family doctor told us that Hayden’s collarbone should fully heal within six weeks. He can begin resuming many of his normal activities here in the next week or so (with the exception of hanging from the monkey bars, which he’ll have to wait to do until he’s fully healed :).

Hayden’s been such a trooper about his injury. My heart aches for him, though, because he hasn’t been able to participate in some school and summer activities that seven-year-olds long to be a part of, including Field Day. His teacher was so kind and thoughtful. She still assigned him to a team, and he was given the same ribbons that his team received.  I was gifted with a precious moment during the event. A girl in Hayden’s class gave him one of her blue ribbons because she felt so bad that he couldn’t participate. It was a sweet and endearing moment that touched both Hayden and me.

Garden Markers 

In the middle of all this busyness, I’ve been working hard with my family at our community garden plot. We began planting seeds for cool season vegetables in early May, and today I put in the last of the plants. 

We have a 15′ x 15′ plot, and as you can see, we share borders with three other gardens. We planted onions, carrots, radishes, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, beets, kale, eggplant, sugar snap peas, tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, cucumbers, zucchini, basil, a mammoth sunflower, and more. (Whew! That was a mouthful!!)

Below is a snapshot I took today of our garden.

This last week, Hayden and I worked on a project for the garden—homemade vegetable markers. I picked up two packages of small rectangular wooden boards at Hobby Lobby for the project and used supplies we had at the house, including exterior white paint, assorted colors of acrylic paint, and scrap wood pieces for the posts. The project cost me about $5.

We put a coat of white paint on all 12 boards.  After the paint dried, I penciled in the vegetable names and Hayden drew the pictures. Because of his injury, painting was a bit difficult for him, so he asked me to do the painting. He had such a great attitude about it, and he did a fabulous job with the drawings!

For the final step, I used a hot glue gun to attach the posts (mine were about a foot long) to the signs. Below is a sampling of the markers we made.