Party Time!

We started the week off with a combination Mother’s Day and Tania’s Birthday Party. Jeff & Brooke hosted a whole gang of us, and we had a fabulous time! Great food and greater friends… superb.

Softball Tournament

Ashlyn and Bryan’s school is in a Christian Softball league. The playoffs were this week, and we got to attend!

Bryan played outfield, third base, shortstop and catcher. (not all at the same time…)

Ashlyn was out sick for the tournament (Sigh!) but got to participate in one post-tournament fun game, where she played shortstop.

Ashlyn gets a hit!

Both grandkids hit well, stole bases like outlaws, and scored many times!

The kid’s school placed 3rd in the double elimination Tournament. They were really fun games to watch! [In my opinion, Major League Baseball players perform so well that in a perfect game, nothing happens! These kids had errors all over the place, but that kept things moving, kids scoring, and the game fun!!]

Deforestation

Our kids live on several acres of beautiful pine forest. There are thousands of trees! And that’s a bit of a problem… with too many, and when the trees are too crowded, the forest is not as healthy. So they had the Department of Natural Resources come out and evaluate… and were told that LOTS of trees should come down. Partly for tree health, and partly for fire safety. So a Forestry company spent about 5 days cutting trees and chipping them into tiny pieces. The larger trees were bucked into firewood sized pieces, but most of the smaller ones were chipped and spread out over a wide area! The only really big trees to fall were dead or dying.

Here are a couple pictures of beautiful trees.

I filmed some of the week’s thinning. The video is rather long – it starts with the guys chipping up the previous day’s cutting, then moves to limbing and bunking up logs, then cutting down some of the biggest trees on the property. A lot of the video is run at high speed so you don’t fall asleep. Feel free to fast forward even more if you’d like – I’ll never know!