Blah-dee-blah

Once again, we're all pleasantly busy with nothing exciting to post.  Tomorrow is the firs t day of May and May will likely be our busiest month of the year.  School ends May 30th and before then we have school picnics and concerts.  The kids have field trips and field days.  Logan starts baseball.  I need to get both kids signed up for summer camp.  My work has a major inspection at the end of the month and I'll be going in early and/or staying late often.  Work has a major fundraiser and I need to get an information table ready for Bowling for Rhinos, as well as getting some stuff together for the Favorite Animal Contest.  I should actually be working on some of that stuff right now, but I'm procrastinating and writing a blog entry instead.

Kaylin has been decorating the house with awesome, cartoon-y drawings of all of our pets.  They are really good and super-cute.  I'm trying to get her to draw something for Bowling for Rhinos (a rhino bowling or with a bowling ball stuck on his horn) but being "forced" to draw something isn't fun.  Kaylin is also hanging out a lot more with school friends rather than just the neighbor kids.  She's also on the phone with friends a lot.  I still find it amusing that she's almost 12 and barely talks on the phone.  By that age I was probably on the phone hours each night.  I suppose her entire lifetime of Gene and me treating the phone like it's a horrible inconvenience and groaning every time it rings has rubbed off.  Oh, and she's not texting, emailing or facebooking at all, so it's not like new forms of communication have replaced the phone, she's just not on it.

Logan has been spending his Sunday evenings at pitching practice.  He starts "real" baseball this year (as opposed to coach pitch) and his coach is teaching him how to pitch.  I don't know if he likes it or not because every time I ask him a question about ANYTHING even slightly personal he gets offended.  For example, I could say "Do you like pitching?" and his reply would be "Urgh! Why do you ask me questions about EVERYTHING? I don't know!"  Uh, sorry? I usually get the info I want eventually.  I just have to listen.  He hasn't offered up anything about pitching yet, though.  Logan's been my little birding buddy.  We've gone out many times and while he mostly likes riding his bike, throwing rocks in lakes and being outside, he does have a genuine appreciation for the birds.  He found my first of year Sora at Emiquon a couple weeks ago, but his favorites are still the hawks, eagles and owls.  Can't fault the kid for that!

Meghan and I deviated from our usual birding loop on Saturday and went to Lake Evergreen and Lake Bloomington in McLean county instead.  It was nasty outside- windy, cool and rainy.  The birds were hiding, so it was a bit disappointing.  I did see my first of year osprey and yellow rumped warbler.  We watched a pair of bluebirds take food to their babies and watched a group of tree swallows hovering as they fought the strong wind.  My highlight was a large flock of goldfinches that took off at the same time in a flash of yellow.  I love goldfinches and have never seen 30-50 of them together.  We headed into town and went to Ewing Park, but it started raining so we headed back to the car.  We gave up on birding and went to Miller Park Zoo instead.  It wasn't a total bust of a trip, but we'll have to go again on a nicer day.

I had a setback with my foot after working two days training someone on my former "string."  It was pretty bad for about a week, but is now back to how it felt before the training session.  Despite the pain, I'm glad it happened because I now feel I have proven to myself that constantly working on the concrete in that area was what caused my foot issues and that I definitely made the right decision to switch areas.  I'm sure this statement sounds ridiculously obvious to non-keepers, but we get pretty attached to our animals and it was a big deal to me to leave them and move to a different area.  It was an incredibly hard decision and one I really made as a last effort to keep my job.  I'm really enjoying my new area and animals, enjoying the improvement of my feet even more and have no regrets about my choice.