Random photos

I forgot to post the photo of Graham and Charlie with the "Penguin" at the Aquarium of the Pacific.  The boys look so happy here:

Graham bought a souvenir from the aquarium with his Christmas money.  These are like mini lego blocks.  Gosh, it was quite the challenge!  But we did it - our mini shark:

The boys are getting more adventurous.  We hike up a little cliff by Terranea resort and get a very nice view of the water/waves:

By the way, did you know that there are "male" and "female" flowers on the pumpkin plant?  It needs cross-pollination to produce the fruit.  Who knew!  And since we have no bees, we will need to help the "boy" flower do its job, so to speak.  This will definitely be one way to teach Graham and Charlie about the "birds and the bees". Ha!

It has been really warm these past couple of days and unfortunately, I spotted spider mites on the pumpkin plant today.  URGHHH!!!  I had to cut off a lot of the leaves so hopefully the plant will still survive. And hopefully the mites will not ruin the rest of the plant. It will be sad to have to start over and dump out the whole lot of soil too!  And just as I had spotted a "female" flower yesterday too! Fingers crossed!

While we are on the subject of plants, look at my ginger plant! It is coming along nicely. I planted another ginger root but no sprouts from that one (yet??!):

Maybe we can get the boys cooking with some ginger some day.  Charlie is wanting to cook now after seeing Graham cook his mushrooms.  So glad Charlie has the incentive to do so! And so glad he wants to cook broccolli :-)

And this year, we have decided to use Graham's calendar:

I normally would make our personalized photo calendar.  But how can you pass this up???  Too cute!

As long as Charlie doesn't start thinking of writing his 7s backwards just like Graham. Oh wait... too late!  I blame Bobby as he said he used to do the same thing when we was a kid. :-P