The great outdoors

I've seen some strange things in my back yard, but I have never seen a brick baby.

Josiah loves his little sister. He wanted to give her something new to play with in the back yard in case she was tired of swinging on her swing, so he made her a baby using bricks. He even drew features on the bricks with chalk--a face and clothes.

Grace? She loved it! She sat near her baby, played with her baby, and ran back over to her baby when Josiah made crying noises as the voice of the baby.

Josiah has been anxious to start raking leaves. I told him he could rake whenever he wanted to, so he got busy. Here he is adding to his pile. Note the blue milk crate, the birdbath, and the plank hanging out of the tree (near the upper corner of the photo). I'll say more about that in a minute...


I think he has mostly raked a pile of pine straw from the tired, neglected landscaping. Do you see the green leaves around him on the tree? This is what our trees still look like:

Our trees always seem to be the last ones to drop their leaves on our street. We only have these two trees, but I think these should keep him plenty busy based on what I've seen today. After he added to his pile, the first thing he did was to plop once into the little pile of leaves. Then he was all business...He began using the milk crate like a wheelbarrow to transport the pile of leaves from where it was in the photo above to the (empty) birdbath. He would fill the birdbath with leaves, push them off to make a new pile beside the birdbath, and then refill the milk crate and meticulously repeat the whole process over and over again...Well, until he ran out of leaves! When he tired of this, he perched the milk crate on top of the plank sticking out of the tree and used a tennis racket--yes, a tennis racket--to fill the milk crate with leaves. This didn't work out exactly as planned, though, and...

CRASH. Back to the birdbath...