From The Past: August 22, 2008

Yesterday as I stood on my parent’s back deck, I thought I saw something green move on the fence out of the corner of my eye. As dad spoke, I kept looking past him to the fence to see if the green thing moved again. It did. I walked over and saw that it was a huge praying mantis. I didn’t want to disturb him, but I did want to get a good picture of it close-up before it ran off.

Dad scooted him onto his hand. The mantis held a dead bumblebee between its two front legs.

He jumped from dad’s hand and in the process, dropped his bumblebee. I tried to lay the bumblebee next to him, but I think he just wanted to get away from us!

This afternoon, dad took my mom and me to a friend’s house to see a flower bush. Dad had told us about the size of the flowers, so we wanted to see this bush for ourselves.

The flowers are about as big as my head:

These would make excellent flowers for a centerpiece. They are called Dinner Plate Dahlia.

Dad’s friend also has a nice garden full of corn, different varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, sunflowers, and he even has one good sized watermelon.

I took a picture of mom standing beside one of the sunflowers so you can see how tall it is:

It was hotter than blazes out there, so we didn’t spend a long time wandering around, but it was nice to go somewhere with mom.