Treasures After the Storm

Well, we decided to go this afternoon and check out the stream now that the rain has stopped (it ended sometime last night after dumping a total of 5" on us). The water was getting back down to normal levels (but the "waterfall" is gone). While looking around in the water, Morgan found a couple of treasures. The first one I think someone will be missing...

The next one was more exciting, I thought...

Emma told me that everyone (whoever everyone is) wants to call him "Tiny Tim" because they don't want to call him just "Turtle". We did finally get him to come out of his shell when Morgan got an old margarine container to put him in.

After that he was just fine to let us hold him. We also liked watching him crawl around. He actually could get going pretty fast when we let him. He must not have gotten the memo about turtles being slow but sure, because he sped right off the edge of our little patio table. Good thing he has a hard shell!

Here's a picture of our two quite different treasures together:

We let the the moving treasure go back into the stream after taking pictures. Hopefully we haven't desensitized him to the danger of Toyotas, though (a lot of animals here in Oklahoma seem to have a problem with that).

Home in the Rain

Well, we're sitting here at home watching the rain come down outside. Leslie and Talmage are in Utah for the week, so I have Morgan and Emma. On Tuesday (the first day on my own without my sweet wife) I got the kids to school and I even did Emma's hair with a bow. (See, Leslie?)

Tuesday for work I went to visit a plant in Kansas. I found out that afternoon on my way back that Morgan had had to be picked up from school by one of our friends because he was sick. I took him to the doctor and, while we waited for an hour, Emma came down with a fever, too. Sure enough it was the flu. It has been pretty mild, but obviously they couldn't go to school. Wednesday was the one day I absolutely could not stay home with them because I was having a meeting with people who had come in from Indiana and Houston to hear the results of my recent research. So, our good friend Janna (who had picked Morgan up from school the day before) watched the kids for the day. (Thank you!)

Today I was able to stay with the kids and do some work at home. We have been amazed at all the rain we've gotten. It has been raining pretty hard for at least the last 12 hours. We have a (usually) small stream behind our house that we normally cannot see from inside. This afternoon, we noticed that we could see water rushing down it, so we went outside to take a few pictures. You can see the bridge our back neighbor built. It normally stands three or four feet above a small trickle of water below it. Not today!

The kids insisted we take a picture of the "waterfall". Our kids were just down here standing on the downstream side of the "waterfall" looking for hairy caterpillars on Saturday. There is usually no water there...

This isn't quite as much water as we saw a couple times last year, though, when the water actually came up into our back yard. Anyway, we are back inside enjoying our warm house and looking out at the rain again. Morgan did want me to take a picture of his hairdo, though, before his hair dried out.