Ten on Ten for June 2011

I follow a blog called A Bit of Sunshine.  Rebekah has a challenge each month to take one picture for each hour for ten hours of the day on the tenth of the month.  It sounds simple enough, but can be harder than I thought.
This month I woke up with the idea that I would have a theme for my Ten on Ten.  I would photograph flowers or plants around the yard.  I also imagined that I might get a photo of the wheat being cut.  Well, I started out good and then went back to my old standbys of Ray and kids.

  7:45 A M   I love Hostas, I have been trying to grow them for years with minimal success.  This year every plant from last year returned, so maybe my luck has changed.

8:45 AM   Hollyhocks are a plant from my childhood.  I remember them growing in yards at farms all around my home in northern Oklahoma.  What I didn't know was that the one plant I bought would grow a lot bigger than I would remember and try to take over my garden.  Now we dig out all the extra plants and allow two each year back by the fence.  I still love them.

 9:50 AM  Day Lilies are another plant from my childhood.  We have the fancy colored ones, but the plain simple orange ones above are what I remember.  They have the tenacity of the hollyhocks and will also take over the yard if you don't pay attention.  The fancy ones don't do that.

 10:45 AM  My mother was an Australian War Bride and in my childhood, she pined for the tropical plants of Queensland.  When the world got smaller and exotic plants were imported as house plants the Kalanchoe was one of the first plants she bought.  I remember her saying, "At home these are weeds, they just grow by the side of the road."  I will always have a Kalanchoe which was a cutting from one of her plants to remember my mother by.

 11:35 AM  When my parents moved to Kansas from Oklahoma they bought a house.  Since my Dad was a farm boy and my mother was a gardener they planted things.  One of the things they planted was a southern magnolia tree.  These trees grow very slowly, but if you hang around long enough they are beautiful.  After Ray and I moved back to Kansas and moved into this house, Mom and Dad gave us a Magnolia Tree for an Anniversary gift.  I was never sure that it would survive, on year it froze back to the root.  But 30 years later it is a beautiful tree with beautiful flowers which will keep coming on until late July.

12:30 PM   Kokopelli,  we are addicted to yard art, that is all I can say.

1:45 PM   Wyatt is getting past the cheesy smile stage.  He still needs a little work on posing for me too.

 2:20 PM   I am still confused why such a sweet face is actually named Destructicon.

3:20 PM  One of the joys of being a rural mail carrier.  Getting to pull nails out of your tires and plug the hole at the end of your work day.

4:45 PM  These two are water babies to the utmost.  Wyatt would never get out of the water if given a choice.