Six Month Check Up

 I am not a consistent blogger. I am sorry. But here is a selection of the goings on in the Oliphant clan.

In April we rescued (from an kind but not prepared rescuer) a momma cat and her two kittens.

We were on a Lord of the Ring kick, having recently seen the Hobbit, so momma cat is Rosie Cotton (Rosie for short), and the two kittens are Fili (the white one) and Kili (the darker one).

What we didn't know was that Rosie was already pregnant. In June we had 5 more kittens join us. They also are LOTR names. The white and gray one is Arwen (the only girl), then the two orange ones are Pippen and Merry. The gray tabby with socks is Frodo (always the fattest) and the dark gray stripey one is Aragorn. If anyone's interested, we need to find them new homes soon. VERY soon.

 In late April we took a trip up to Chimney Rock state park. It was  a beautiful view, but it wasn't nearly as green as it is now. We climbed to the top, and Andrew promptly climbed on top of this rock and assumed the position.

Of course the other two youngest needed to have their picture taken, so here are their respective poses.

We've had an incredibly wet summer. The wettest on record. By several inches. For the month of July, our area has received 14 inches of rain, 10 inches above normal. I've never been so thankful to live on a hill. Flood warnings happen weekly, sometimes daily. It feels like we've gone from one extreme to the other, between Arizona and North Carolina.

 Here is the result of all that rain, combined with a humdinger of a storm about 3 weeks ago. We lost a tree in a microburst  that felled several trees in the neighborhood.

You can see how close the tree came to smashing the Suburban. We're still working on storage and the garage and haven't been parking the cars in them yet. I didn't see the tree fall, but when we got out to check things, the topmost branches just scraped down the side of the car, with no apparent damage. Thank goodness for small miracles. We did lose power for 24 hours, and the modem died a couple of days later because lightning struck nearby and we had a power surge while the power was out. But all in all we escaped unscathed.

The butterfly bush almost didn't survive the micro burst, either. But this bush has been covered by these big yellow and black butterflies. They are not really afraid of us or the car, so we can go out and be surrounded by butterflies.

There has also been a tremendous sound coming from the trees for the past week or so, especially at night. I wondered if it was cicadas, but then the other day I found this little guy hanging out on the kitchen window, and realized it must be tree frogs. Thousands of them.

I added this picture because it showed two things: Benji losing his first tooth (the second came out a week later) in May, and at the end of May he had tubes put in his ears and his adenoids out. It's been the summer of surgery, because next month Peter is going in to have his tonsils and adenoids removed. Apparently he also has a deviated septum, so that surgery will happen next year so he will have plenty of time to recuperate. The doctor said we could do it all at the same time, but Pete would be pretty miserable with his throat sore and his nose packed with gauze for two or three days. So we opted for waiting, especially if the deviated septum didn't really need surgery.
And soon we'll have Sarah in to have her wisdom teeth removed, since they are messing up all the work the braces did.
Lots of goings on. Hope your summer has been more fun and less eventful than ours. :)