Mike and Debbie's Updates

Here is the latest addition to the bird family in our back yard. This guy just showed up last week. I put him in the blog then, but I have better pictures now. He is a Nanday Conure. He is a he to me, but who knows? He is very loud and comes about 3 or 4 times a day for sure. Sometimes he comes even more. My sister, Pam told me a lady she knows had about 5 that come to her feeders at her house. So maybe they do migrate. I know they have them in Pennsylvania too.
A couple of days ago a neighbor thought he would just go in the back yard to see if he could catch it. I think he saw me in the house and decided he should get out. He came to the fron door and rang the bell. Told me what he was doing. I thought maybe it was his, but he definitely said it wasn't. I told him he was pretty quick because he hangs out with the red-winged black birds and is way more skittish than he was on the first day. He left and I noticed not long after that there was a very underfed dog that looked a lot like a German Shepard type of dog. I chased it off and realized that the dude who was in the backyard must not have closed the gate. I am going to remedy that today. Anyway, just thought some of you might like to see this little guy. It was windy in some of the pictures. The best ones are taken from upstairs.
Hope you all have a great day!

Debbie

Hello! Well, on the last post I got a comment about not having pictures, so here you go!
Look at Michelle, doesn't she look good for being 8 months pregnant at Christmas? Got that leg up and you can't even tell she is pregnant, but how many of you could put your leg up like that at 8 months?
I believe this next picture is of Preston reading a book with me. We found this
Dr. Seuss pop up book and got it for him for Christmas. Dr. Seuss was always a favorite of mine and then when we had kids my kids loved them too. Now Preston likes it pretty much too. Thanks to my Aunt Jerry, because she got me hooked on them when I was a kid. I think you can see he was really entertained. Rach and Jon are on the couch too and they listened and made fun of me reading it to Preston, but he liked it as you can see. I must say Preston really loves reading and it is easy to get pictures of him since he is still at that time.
This next picture is of the Christmas cactus Mike's mom gave me. I have never owned one and I have to say it is beautiful in bloom. It also seems to be easy to start more plants from it too. I must say this winter I have moved my plants in and out all winter. I just about have it down pat now. I can cover them really fast at night now and I can move them inside if I have to really fast too. This plant stand it is in for this picture is one of the things we brought back from Doha. It was made in Pakistan and it is one piece of wood they care. It folds up when you take the bowl
out.
These next few pictures are of our latest visitor at the bird feeders. He is a Nanday Conure. I had to spend loads of time looking up parrots online to figure out what kind of parrot he was. You know when he comes to hang out and eat, because he makes a really loud screeching, loud, noisy call or sound. He really is something else. These pictures were hard to get and since then I haven't been able to get any more. It is funny how he hangs on the feeders when we have some that have loads of room for him to stand beside
and just eat out of, but so far he doesn't go to those. At first all of the other birds around left when he came screeching in, but now he runs with the red-winged blackbirds from what I can tell. I think he is accepted by all of them now. His head is black by the way. If you go to your search engine and type in nanday conure you can see really good pictures of him. For those of you who got me the bird pole and the feeders, "Thanks!". I love to watch them. We get about 10 different types of birds now. It is really cool to see them out there.
Next is Preston waiting for some one to come to the house. Probably Jon and Rach or Jay and Danielle. He is so cute. He loves when people are coming to visit. He gets so excited when he knows someone is coming. Note his shoes he has on. Those are his Elmo house shoes. My Mom saw them while we were Christmas shopping and said he really needed them. She didn't even know they were Elmo shoes or that he loved Sesame Street now. She did so good. Don't know if he still likes to where them, but he sure did while we were all there for Christmas. I am guessing Jon was
who came over since he is in the next picture. They are pretty good buds, since they get to see each other so often. Preston is having a snack of gold fish (the crackers). That boy does love his snacks. We all had such a good time getting to spend time with everyone for Christmas. Mom got to be around Preston more than she ever has, which was nice. We got to play some games and got to visit for longer than just a short weekend. We didn't get to visit with any of our friends while we were there, because we were just way too busy.
If you notice in this next picture, Preston is holding something towards his shoe. Well, Elmo has a mouth on this shoe and Uncle Jon taught him that Elmo was hungry and you end to feed him. He had so much fun feeding Elmo. He is entertained fairly easily. Of course, sometimes needing to feed Elmo isn't necessarily a good thing, but he doe forget things when they aren't around as much. I am sure Michelle is fairly glad of that. We stayed with Jon, but came back and forth to Michelle and Chris' each day. I probably should say we just slept at Jon's basically.
Jon got a new pet. Maddie now has a play mate besides Crazy, it is a little miniature dachshund puppy. As you can see in this next picture he sure liked sleeping in Mom's lap. This little guy's name is Tank. Maddie does love playing with him. He can run circles around Maddie though. Of course, she can two steps and be where Tank is in about 10. He is one fast little puppy though.
In this next picture you can see that Jon, Rach, Preston and I were all enjoying the Dr. Seuss pop-up book we got him. Good books.
These next few pictures are of Jon reading
books with Mom. In the one picture where it looks like he is falling asleep he really isn't. I caught him in the middle of a blink. He always reads right before bed. This was after his bath and just about bed time.
Just the other day Mike found a bargain at Sam's while we were out shopping. He found a weather station. As most of you know I am a weather person. Well, it was on sale about half price, so we got it. I am still learning things about it. We have had lots of different weather since we got it though. It has been pretty warm, then windy, rainy, cold and
windy again. I do know you can set alarms on most any single part of it and we were playing around with it the other night and I decided we should set one of the alarms. Well, at 3:30am it went off. I was awake already, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I now know it was the alarm we set. It was the night it rained all night here and I guess the barometric pressure dropped enough for the alarm for it to set off the alarm and it did. I was totally awake after that so I read for a while. The entire day actually. I don't think I turned it off yet, so I need to read more so I
can sleep all night next time it rains. LOL!

Well, this is the weekend for the deer hunt. Jon couldn't get off and Clint hasn't made his appearance, so Chris can't go either. Mike and Jay are going though. If they get anything we will have some pictures to show off. I will hopefully have another reason to make a new post. Of course, when Michelle has Clint we will definitely have a reason for a post too.

Well, I am just about out of things to tell ya'll
about. I am going to have to haul in all of the plants tonight, so I better get back to work around here, so I can do that before the rain starts tonight. Of course, now that I have said that the sun finally came out hopefully for all of what is left of the afternoon. The parrot has been here about 5 times while I have been making this post. He is noisy so you know when he is fixing to make his appearance.
Here is the final picture. Preston has his taggy blanket and his Elmo shoes on, so he had to be tired and happy. He is also flirting with Rach. He is good at that.
Hope everyone had a really good evening and a great weekend! If these pictures don't stay in order I am sure you will be able to figure out the explanations that go with them.

Debbie

Hello everyone! Hope you have all had great Christmas and New Year's holidays. I know we did. We spent Christmas in Lafayette. We were busy the entire time. Shopping, getting errands run and enjoying family. We never did get time to visit with friends, so hopefully the next time we are there we will. It was so nice having all of the kids together. My Mom got to come too. She really enjoyed seeing everyone and getting to be around Preston more than normal.
We enjoyed getting to see Preston experience Christmas. We all had a great time watching him and all of the new things he does. There is something new every day we see him. We are all waiting for Clint to be born now. I believe that is the next big event. I believe Michelle is more than ready. Her due date is 2 weeks from today.
New Years was very nice here. We really did nothing special, but saw a movie... then when we got home we thought we would spend a nice quiet evening. Well, out here where we live apparently everyone does fireworks. Seems no one has a problem with it or anything. The show lasted from dark till about 1am. These were all individual families doing their own thing. We went upstairs and raised our blinds so we could watch and they were really pretty. It was very loud too. It made for a nice night. Needless to say we were very tired the next day, but it was worth it.
Mike had a relative move to Houston in December. She called a week before Christmas. We decided we would get together soon after the new year. She, Jay and Danielle came out for supper on Sunday and we had a real nice visit. The last time we saw her was when she was about 6 yrs old or so. She has grown into a really nice young lady. Hopefully we can get together again soon. We have quite a bit of family living here and we get to have company come and visit too. It is really nice. We really enjoy seeing friends and family way more than we ever have in our married lives.
I guess that is all for now. Keep in touch!

Debbie