I Spy With My Little Eye

Despite all evidence to the contrary, we don't spend the entire weekend in the pool. Most of it, yes -- the vast majority, even -- but sometimes we do find alternative ways to amuse ourselves. Even in the 100°F-plus heat.

Someone got Shae a pair of these Sunny Patch binoculars for her birthday (there is also a boys' version). I don't know why we haven't gotten them out already, or how she even found them in the 80 bajillion metric tons of toys in our living room -- don't ask, you don't want to know -- but apparently she's been learning about binoculars while she's been on "safari" at school or something, because she knew exactly what to do with them.

She headed up into the cornfields behind my grandparents' house and tried to see what sorts of trouble she could get herself into. She didn't see much, but she enjoyed being allowed to run wild in the high grass and the soybean rows. At least, I think they're soybeans -- I'm honestly not sure. Maybe it's alfalfa? I know it's not corn this year (that, I can identify), and I'm pretty sure the farmer practices nitrogen-fixing crop rotation. Anyway, she didn't see much back there except dried corn husks from previous summers, but I came literally face-to-face with several locusts. Make a note: it really HURTS when a locust flies into your face repeatedly.

She also smelled my grandparents' butterfly bush ("it doesn't smell like anything"), which really puts mine to shame. Theirs isn't as tall as mine -- the one in our yard is about 12 feet high, no joke -- but it's much bushier, and it has tons of purple flowers. I love my butterfly bush, but it am partial to the purple-flowered ones, and I especially love the rainbow ones, which I have never actually seen in the wild, but they always look so pretty in the nursery catalogs.