Park Bliss

Today I had a "day off", my friend Joanna watched the kiddos for me. And so after I ran some errands I drove to a park in peoria called Forrest Park that was much bigger than I had imagined it to be. It has all these wonderful trails through the preserved natural forrest so there were all kinds of fun critters running about. The deer let you get so close you can almost pet them, but the wild turkeys didn't want you to close, although there was quite a large flock of babies with them. And either a badger or beaver ran right past me as I was crossing over a bridge, he was pretty quick and since I only got a glimpse I couldn't tell. It's not quite as exciting as the ranch in Montana, but for Illinois I was pretty happy with the idea of being in a forrest surrounded by wooded creatures for the afternoon while going for a walk and just sitting quietly and listening. O, and it was nice to be taking some nature photos again.

Swimming Fun

Over the past week it has officially become summer to me because now it seems it that every day must involve some type of water activity...It started down at the Lake of The Ozarks in a very dirty and cold lake. The intention of the weekend was to go water skiing....unfortunately it was the first trip down with the boat and apparently the boat decided it didn't want to work, so that left the paddle boat and some floaty things. It was still fun and I was able to spend some time trying to get my kids back into the swimming thing...Last year at this time I couldn't keep Kylie out of the water and this year I had to do a lot of work to get her in for even a little while. And Owen was more than happy to just hang out on the dock playing with a noodle. But thankfully I have been to two more lakes and a wonderfully clean swimming pool since getting home from the Ozarks on monday and Kylie is now back into jumping in quite frequently, and Owen is getting used to me dunking him under and having him swim to the side :) We are also getting nicely tanned and maybe a little burned along with Ky & Owen's hair starting to look more white than blonde...really cute.
And in the past couple of weeks with all the warm weather and thunderstorms my garden has now exploded! The squash is beginning to take over, my peas have climbed as high as the fence and my cilantro is begging me to make salsa....soon very soon.

The Parade

So this evening the Turkey Festival came to an end with the parade. I was expecting something similar to the parade's in Ennis (Montana) since the towns are nearly the same size, and they were similar, except in Tremont there are endless tractors and in Ennis there are horses and more antique cars. And there were the truck or car fulls of people just driving along in the parade for no reason that any of us could figure out. We were situated on a candy gold mine corner for the kids, you can see Kylie's purse is filled to the brim in the pictures, and there were two more grocery sacks full by the end of the hour long antique fire engine and tractor parade.
I did find out the results of my run and it was better than I had thought, 26:30. Next year I'll train a little longer than a week and see if I can improve that a bit..
I just realized that I never actually had any turkey at the Turkey festival, that just doesn't seem right somehow...

Trukey Festival

Last thursday was the kick off day for the annual Turkey Festival in Tremont and so the kids and I have been going to all kinds of fun festivities. It's all of our first experience even though I have heard about this for years...
So far we have done the merchant's day downtown and even had uncle Doug in town for a few hours for the fun. It mainly consisted of free popcorn, lemonaide, and snow cones...well at least until they were shut down by the health department...oops. And then a magic show at the library, which I felt was very loud for a library experience but nevertheless the kids actually made it through the whole hour...kind of. Then later we hit the carnival and did some fun rides and games which won Kylie some really cheap toys, one which made THE most annoying noise on the planet, so I conviently left that at a friends house :) After that I attended my first Miss Tremont Pagent in an un-airconditioned high school gymnasium..did I mention it was hot and humid that day??? Not exactly Miss America...but I definately think the girl that won was a pretty good representation of the small town all american farm girl...perfect for this community.
So today I started off running in the 5k race and did alright, I'm not posting my time, we'll just say I have room for improvement and I wasn't last....:) Although the times will be posted on the internet at some point.... But in my defense I haven't been running much, more walking and only signed up a week ago to do this. I did have a really fun time and it has now motivated me to do more races, but with more training than a week...:)
After the 3 mile run there was an all you can eat pancake and sausage breakfast, so yummy and since I only have little ones, I could feed my whole family breakfast for $5, love this town. Although if they would have seen Owen eat they may have wanted to charge me for him...
After that it was face painting, the petting zoo put on by the 4-H club, shopping in the country store, and antique corner. Now I am home, exhausted and should go take a nap, unfortuneately my weedy garden is calling me.....which I am eating fresh lettuce every day from!!! I will post pictures soon. I had no idea how much I would love playing in dirt at my age, so now I have dreams of even bigger and better gardens in the future...ya know when Kylie and Owen get old enough to pull weeds :)
Tomorrow is the parade, I am told it consists of a couple of Tractors and a couple of horses and lots of candy....sounds perfect.