No longer need goggles to run the garbage disposal

What to the untrained eye may appear as two white pipes running along a wall is actually a 4PM-7AM non-stop work session and the removal of goggles from my kitchen drawer. Okay, I didn't really have goggles in the drawer but I was tempted many times.

Bless the dear sweet skin on the fingers of my husband. I have gotten a very forceful back spray each time I use the garbage disposal since we moved into this house. I flip it on and wet treasures come flying out of the opposite sink. Apparently it had much to do with how the disposal was vented. Well, while plumbing the basement he installed an entire new vent line for the upstairs kitchen. He started this project at 4PM and finished as the boys and I were waking up the next morning. There wasn't much left of his hands from the PVC cement and many other fun things he did (I was asleep I didn't see much of it) but my kitchen sink runs like a Rolls Royce. He reinstalled all new pluming under the kitchen sink, re-plumbed the dishwasher and vented that sweet thing like nobody's business. It has never looked, ground, or sounded better AND I don't have to wipe off my face every time I use the garbage disposal. Oh that sweet man. The only unpleasant treasure was the abandoned putrid mouse nest he uncovered in the wall behind our dishwasher. That left much to be desired. By like a good man he took care of that along with the venting. Once again, just another project in the past few weeks by Mr. Jenson.

My Dad asks... "So is Jonathan a plumber or an electrician today."

Well in this very moment I would call him the cable guy. He just finished running and installing new phone lines and cable lines through the house. When we moved in we were the proud owners of one single solitary phone jack. Now we have phone, ethernet and cable running rampant through our home. Now we just need a TV and cable service to go along with those wires... not likely any time soon. This past weekend I would have called Jonathan more of a mason. He completed the plumbing in half of the basement and we poured cement over his handy work. While the cement has been curing he has re-wired the basement outlets and light switches and hard wired the fan in our bedroom. (The pull chain busted inside the fan. Due to our absence of A/C our only source of survival at night is ceiling fans. In order to keep the fans going and turn out the lights we were having to unscrew the 5 light bulbs. A little tricky for a short pregnant lady.) Following are a few pictures of his work in progress:

I would label this picture "Mr. Manual Labor." You see in order to completely redo the plumbing in the basement there was a lot of cement that had to be removed, old pipes taken out, old drains removed and filled and new lines put in. This is Mr. Jenson during one of MANY MANY MANY cement removal sessions. Notice the fine white coloring of his hair. This happens each time he puts in another "session." The fine cement ash spreads very quickly and thoroughly throughout the house. A few days ago I asked Adam to take something downstairs for me. He opened the basement door took a few steps down and said, "Mom, there's a cloud in the basement." Yep, that's a usual around our house. I used to dust. Until the cement removal ceases I think I shall start dating the blind slats each time I walk by and draw smily faces on the piano.

These are Jonathan's cave man tools that he retreats to his cave and makes lots of noise with. This particular session was the removal of cement in the closet under our stairs... yes there are pipes looming everywhere.

Through the fine haze you can see a patch of dirt that was once old plumbing covered in cement. After Mr. Manual Labor dug it all up and laid new drains and plumbing it will someday be the drain work for my new laundry room. I was really sad to discover that all of the plumbing work had been covered by dirt before I got a picture of it. Under this trench lies much blood sweat and tears. It was soon covered with cement.

This is a glimpse of the man cave.

This dazzling picture is just for kicks, and yet another project of a few weeks ago. Due to the removal of various walls and the design of our new bathroom we (I say we... Jonathan) had to relocate the clean out on our chimney stack. He cut a hole in the cinderblocks and moved the clean out door here. I missed how he did it, but he did a good job relocating the hole and filling in the old one. Just another day in the life of Mr. Jenson

Three In One Morning... Our Best

Matthew perched and concentrating very hard as one by one the monarchs crawled up his arms and neck to take flight from his head.

With all of our butterfly hatching three emerging on the same morning was our best. We only had one cocoon that didn't survive to become a butterfly. All the others made it. I was surprised how many we actually saw metamorphose. It makes me feel a little more guilty smashing butterflies with my car now that I know the effort required to become one. It has been an amazing miracle for all of us to watch egg after egg hatch, grow, spin, sit, and emerge. I have a feeling we may have a few more rounds of this in the years to come.

"Mom, our caterpillars turned into raccoons!"

When Matthew's very first caterpillar made its cacoon he came running into our bedroom in the morning and yelled, "Mom, my caterpillar turned into a raccoon!" Dad's response was, "Wow, those are some caterpillars." For the life of me I cannot get him to call it a cocoon. It doesn't matter how hard I try, or how many spin their little magic. According to Matthew they are raccoons. The funny thing is Adam calls them the same thing half the time. Oh these sweet little boys.
The monarch cocoons become very translucent just before they are about to emerge. You can see the butterfly under the very thin outer shell. It is SO AMAZING TO WATCH THEM CHANGE!

The Last of the Swallowtails, the First on the Monarchs

The morning that we woke up to find our last black tiger swallowtail had emerged and said goodbye to it we also discovered the arrival of our first monarch. I love the monarch cocoons. They are so beautiful. I have never looked closely enough at them to see the small specks of gold that surround their cocoons until we started hatching them.

This is a picture of three of our critters at work. The first butterfly to emerge, one in its cocoon and the other as Jonathan says, "tying his back end to the lid."

Adam's Black Tiger Swallowtail Greeted Us At Breakfast

There is something about a beautiful butterfly sitting next to an empty cocoon that is very thought provoking over a bowl of cheerios in the morning. The power to change, the empty tomb, miracles, unfound potential... The Lord did a number with the metamorphosis of butterflies. Waiting for us at breakfast at last was Adam's butterfly.

It was interesting to me to watch the butterfly's wings dry as it slowly became more active. The other interesting thing is that they always climb upward towards the boy's heads. After we watched it for awhile and were confident its wings were dry, we took it out on the deck and let it fly.

The Beginnings of the Butterfly Project... Matthew's Emerges

I can't count the number of times as a child I caught a caterpillar, put it in a jar with a stick and hoped with all my little girl heart it would turn into a butterfly. All those years I failed to get one solitary butterfly to emerge. Needless to say I was a little skeptical when the boys wanted to try, but I was awestruck with the results. Adam and Matthew were helping me in the garden when they found several caterpillars munching on my dill. I told them to pull them and they informed me they were going to keep them. We put Matthew's caterpillar and Adam's caterpillar in a jar and decided to try our hands at cocooning. I was shocked when within a few days Matthew's had munched enough dill weed to form a crysalis. Adam's did likewise a few days later. We waited and waited and waited. Matthew's turned brown and I thought after being brown a good week it was a gonner. I was so surprised to find otherwise.

We had spent the entire evening outside as a family hauling mulch around our fruit trees. Jonathan had shredded several huge limbs that had broken in a wind storm and we were needing to get the mulch on. We worked like dogs. We were all tired, hungry and dirty and came in to find within our jar had emerged Matthew's first little miracle.

The success with the first two black tiger swallowtail caterpillars turning into cocoons spurned us on to try our hands at monarchs. This is the monarch set up on our countertop. We found several milk weeds with various sizes of caterpillars and eggs and tried our hand at hatching.