The yard

I took these pictures right after we got back from the States and have been meaning to blog about them for the past month.  Time is just flying by right now, it’s crazy!!

The plants in the front of our house are somewhat out of control.  Admittedly, I have NO clue how to trim roses or my rosemary plant that is taking over.  I trimmed the rosemary bush WAY back, but it’s growing like crazy again.  And Mark put mulch down and we pulled all the weeds.  Looks much better!

(before)

(after)

I don’t know what this flower is, but it smells AMAZING!  We can open our front door or front windows and it makes the whole living room smell good when it’s in bloom.  (Right now they’re all dying and falling off the vines and getting EVERYWHERE!)

This is my wisteria that I planted on our fence.  It started with two small plants and is now much bigger.  And in the past month since I took this picture, it’s probably grown twice as big as this.  I decided to plant some flowers underneath them.

Here are a few pictures of some of the flowers I planted below the wisteria.

I got the area for my garden ready and filled it mostly with beans, since we eat them a lot.  I planted a few carrots and onions too, and also some squash.  I tried to plant some tomato plants, but I don’t think any of them are growing.

(the start of the garden)

(a week after planting my beans)

I started my squash out in a pot but then decided to move it to the hill behind our house.  It sprouted pretty quickly, and now these plants are over a foot tall!

Can anyone tell me how to deal with my rose bushes?  They produce beautiful flowers for a little bit, but they’re really out of control and I don’t exactly know how to control them.  And how do I keep the petals from falling off and getting all over everything else?

The Butterfly Palace

Today we took Abbie to The Butterfly Palace in Branson.  It was really neat and she loved telling her daddy how a butterfly tickled her arm when it flew past her.  (It actually tried to land on her but she kinda freaked out.)

They had a little “rainforest” that you could walk through that had a lilypad pool (see below) that you could walk on.  Abbie was trying to catch the fish and flowers that were projected on to the carpet.

The butterfly room was really neat.  There were lots of butterflies (mostly shipped in from tropical locations every week) everywhere!  You can see them flying around in the picture below if you look closely.

Abbie was enamored by the butterflies.  She loved pointing to them all and watching them fly around, but it scared her a little bit if they got too close so she was ducking and running a few times, which was a little entertaining.

(12 weeks pregnant and I look and feel fat.  Ew.)

They had lots of butterflies, but they also had LOTS of orchids, which were beautiful!  I love orchids!  And I’ve never seen so many kinds!  The room was like 90% humidity and like 90 degrees, so the flowers apparently like that climate.  (No wonder mine always die..)

I took lots of pictures of the butterflies.  Here are a few of my favorites.

They also played a movie, that we only watched part of thanks to my dad getting a phone call and Abbie, who didn’t want to sit still for any significant amount of time.  But of the part I did see, it said that butterflies on average have a lifespan of about a month, except for some that migrate from as far as Canada to Mexico in the fall to mate and then they fly all the way back up to the States and Canada.  That process takes about a year to do, so those ones live longer and scientists don’t know why they live longer or migrate to Mexico yet.  It’s hard to imagine a butterfly (monarch to be exact) flying all the way from Canada to Mexico.  They said they fly around 12kph (around 7.5mph).  Crazy!

And they had a little frog/turtle area.  Abbie liked watching the turtles move around.  They also had a mirror maze, which Mark would have LOVED!  It was pretty big and it took me a while to get Abbie and I out of it, but I finally figured out that you went out the same way you came in.  I thought there was a separate exit.  Oops.

After we finally un-latched Abbie from this bear she found, we headed out.  We went to this HUGE fabric/ quilting store, which might have been the highlight of this trip for me, but more on that later.  =)  Overall, The Butterfly Palace was a success!!

Springtime in Italy

The Spring is by far my favorite season in Italy.  The Italian countryside is just gorgeous and so vibrant with all the colors.  Italians LOVE flowers and that was one of the first things I noticed about Italy – everyone here has flowers.  Most houses have at least a couple window boxes full of flowers and most yards are beautifully landscaped with flowers of that season.  Our neighborhood is a perfect example.  Since the weather has been so nice here lately (high 60’s almost every day and sunny), I’ve been wanting to get out and shoot the neighborhood.  I finally took Abbie for a walk one afternoon and took pictures of the neighborhood flowers.  Abbie obviously enjoyed the walk because every day since then she’s been asking “Heppa mommy see fowers?”  She’s cute.

This is our neighbors front yard.  He does a great job with his flowers and changes them all out a couple times a year.  I LOVE the colors of these!

Another neighbor has a HUGE hydrangea bush, that I just notice they completely trimmed down.  But now it’s getting large buds on it again.  I wish I was going to be here to see it bloom.

Roses are big over here.  Ours aren’t blooming at all yet, but these ones were.

I don’t know what these flowers are, but they smell good and they’re really pretty.  They’re cascading down another neighbors fence.

These are pretty, but I was mainly just playing with my camera.

Abbie loves smelling the flowers.  She’s funny because it doesn’t matter what she smells, she’ll take a big sniff of it and say “MMMM.”  And she points at all the flowers and says “Oh piddy!”  (Pretty)

This tree is what I wanted to take pictures of mostly, but by the time I got around to it, half of the flowers had fallen off already and the ones still on the tree were wilted.  But I still think it’s beautiful.  I thought it was a cherry blossom, but friends here have been calling them tulip trees.  Anyone know what type of tree this is?

A little old lady tends to this huge garden.  She spends a LOT of time in it during the summer, and I saw her out there getting it ready to plant a few times.  Or maybe she’s already planted it, I’m not sure.  But I love all the daffodils around it, and I saw a few tulips also.

Here’s the road leading to our house.

I just can’t get enough of this weather!  Hopefully Abbie and I don’t get sick when we go back to the States.  It’ll be at least a 30 degree temp difference, if not more.  I’m going to try to bring some Springtime weather home with me.  We’ll see how that goes!