Here are some highlights from the past few days. My dd and I decided to bake bread the old fashioned way, without a bread machine (ha ha!). That's pretty major for us. My daughter participated in a lot of the work, including kneading the dough for a full 15 minutes. Then, the dough was divided and placed into two loaf pans.













Boy that dough did rise a bunch! DD couldn't believe it.













Here are the results after baking.. truly golden!



this bread turned out to be yummy!











While I am speaking of fruits of our labors... of the sunflowers we planted earlier this season, the first one bloomed on Sunday. Our son noticed it immediately upon our return home from church. See how big it is?
















And here are some regular visitors to our yard: a couple of sandhill cranes. They come by a lot this time of the year. They make a fair amount of whooping noise, and they ain't shy one bit. They walk right up to us. I noticed them from the window of the school room today. They are nearly as tall as our daughter!














Finally, daddy tried to design a squirrel stumper modification to outfit our "squirrel stumper" bird feeder. Prior to this design change, I'd say the squirrel was stumped for only about three days; then he figured out how to get to the bird seed. Will this ingenious engineering solution save the day?



We have had regular visits from a cardinal couple, a blue jay, a dove, and another bird my kids call a "hoppy bird" because we can't identify it.

That's all the news for today. Stay tuned!