Insights on Spiritual Health and Nutrition From Rocket

• If you eat all of your vegetables, your boobs will go away.
• Jesus has a hole in his heart that needs to be filled with broccoli.
• Jesus made drive-thrus and loves them.
• He also loves vitamins and protein.

An Update On Charlotte

This weekend, we decided it was time to release Charlotte from captivity. Although we enjoyed our time with her and her babies, we thought that she might be happier raising them in the wilderness (actually, to tell the truth, there was one member of our family that wasn't exactly "tolerant" of her differences). So we drove a couple blocks from our house, into the mountains, and set her free. I laid her down on a rock, and we all said our goodbyes. I could tell that even that one family member (I wont mention any names) was getting emotional during the fairwell. Then we walked back to our car and buckled the tearful kids into the car and before driving away, that one family member and I decided to go back and say one last goodbye. But she was gone. I haven't heard from her since then, but I imagine that she is happily carrying around her quickly growing offspring around on her back... occassionally eating one or two... but being a good mom for the most part. Before she knows it, they will be big enough to crawl off her back and start lives of their own. I can only hope that one of them will come back to visit me. And if they do, I will catch them and trap them and release them a month or two later.

This is Charlotte on the evening that we released her.

Hello, Kitty.

While I was in Colorado, with Rocket, for my mom's birthday party, Matt stayed behind with Roxanne. He spent the weekend romancing her in every way. They went on dates, snuggled, and then he bought her a kitten. When I came home, I met the new family member that no one knew much about. No one knew his name, his age, or even if he was a he or she. But Roxanne didn't care, and Daddy was her most favorite person in the whole world now... well, except for Kitty. We still haven't named the little rascal, but here were the kids' ideas. Roxanne came up with: KittyMine, MineKitty, NoNoNotRocket'sKitty, DaddyGetItForMe, and ILoveDaddyMoreThanMommyNow. Rocket came up with: Booty, Jerry, Jack, Booty, Pirate, PooPoo, Hello Kitty, and Booty. Feel free to cast your vote.

Itsy Bitsy Spiders

About a month ago, the kids and I discovered a wolf spider hiding in the rocks in our front yard. She was about an inch and a half long and was carrying an egg sack attatched to her abdomen. At first we thought that she looked scary, but then we put our prejudices behind us and welcomed her into our home. It's a good thing that we did that, because we discovered that she had a fun loving, yet sometimes shy personality. Knowing that she had babies on the way, we tried to feed her well. Usually we would find flies buzzing around in our windows and catch them by spraying them with hair spray and then killing them. Charlotte (that's what we named her) seemed to enjoy the flies and never complained about the taste of hairspray. Sometimes we would feed her other spiders too, but she was not as eager to eat these. After a couple of weeks, we started to grow impatient with the anticipation of babies spiders and began to think that maybe they were never coming. I researched wolf spiders on the internet and discovered that sometimes they will wrap pepples or shells up in an eggsack and carry it around as if it is babies, but really it is not. I began to wonder if Charlotte had done that and faked the whole pregnancy just for the attention. I decided to wait a little longer before giving up on her. Sure enough, sometime on Sunday night, Charlotte had her babies- around 200 of them. They crawled out of the egg sack and now she carries them all around on her back. They completely cover her entire body except her eyes and mouth and legs. She is a devoted mother to her babies. I will probably release her back into the wild soon, because I'm not going to start a spider ranch. On second thought, maybe that could be a good business venture. Anyone interested in a good natured baby wolf spider?

This is a picture of Charlotte carrying around her hundreds of babies-click on the picture to look closer (they are tiny)!

The Story of My Mom

This last weekend, I traveled back to Colorado for my mom's surprise 50th birthday party. In honor of the special occasion, I put together this little story and displayed it at the party. Now I am posting it here for you to enjoy too!