Author Archives: Heather Shoberg

About Heather Shoberg

I'm many things... I'm a wife, a mother, a book lover, a movie lover, a photography lover, a music lover, a coffee lover, and a chocolate lover. I have cute aggression and I'm an introvert. I love mangoes and my favorite flower is the sunflower. I got married in Converse sneakers and love fairy lights. I love the mountains and when I was little I wanted to be an astronaut.

September Caterpillars

At the beginning of summer when we went to pick out plants at the nursery, I don’t remember Enzo grabbing milkweed, but apparently he did. All summer we’ve watched this plant grow and grow until finally it flowered and honestly we’ve kind of forgotten about it. We’ve been busy and haven’t been spending as much time out front. Last week, however, Josh sent me a picture of something very surprising!

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Neither of us realized we had milkweed, so obviously seeing a milkweed caterpillar was a big surprise since that is all they eat. As soon as I got home I went to the front to look for it and low and behold, there were about 6 or 7 more caterpillars on what we realized was milkweed. I’m not going to lie, it was really exciting – I love monarch butterflies! Some were still pretty small, and others were bigger getting ready to do this…

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I was hoping we’d be able to actually see the whole caterpillar to pupa process, but alas, at some point he completed the process and we discovered another pupa that we had missed close by! We have three that we know of currently.

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Very unfortunately, however, we were hit with heavy storms and to my great dismay, two caterpillars did not make it to the pupa stage. As for the other caterpillars that had been on the milkweed… well we looked briefly this morning, but couldn’t find them anywhere. We were running late and the mosquitoes have been fairly obnoxious lately, so the kids and I could only look for a few minutes. Hopefully we’ll find that they are safe tonight. Otherwise, I’m crossing my fingers that the butterflies will wait to emerge until we’re all present. I read that they typically emerge mid-morning, so please let it be on a weekend! I don’t want to disrupt them, but part of me is tempted to carefully move them (according to instructions) to hopefully ensure that these ones survive. If nothing else, we will next year. I also was unaware that you can get these awful little yellow aphids on milkweed and ours is rather infested… not to a point where there isn’t enough food for the caterpillars, but still something we’ll need to watch next year since the plan is to plant more milkweed. 🙂

Why don’t we do this more often?

A couple of weeks ago, we decided to walk down to the river with the kiddos and do some fishing. Well, the boys fished. Phoebe can’t be trusted with a fishing pole yet, and I’m indifferent. Plus, someone has to keep an eye on the munchkins to make sure no one falls in. It’s about a 15-20 minute walk with the kids depending on the route we take. We probably could have ridden our bikes, but chose not to this time, and I can’t remember why. Old age is creeping in, apparently – I can’t remember anything lately.

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We met up with Josh’s sister Leah and her son Malcolm for a bit since they are close by. It was a beautiful day and the mosquitoes weren’t terrible yet. Since these pictures there was major flooding, but I think even that has gone down now too. See where Enzo’s standing? The river covered this area completely and went almost to the road. It tends to happen every year.

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The kids stayed interested in fishing for a little bit until we found another area where you could walk right into the river! Phoebe wanted to splash, so I told the kids they could take their shoes and socks off to get their feet wet. Well, about 5 minutes later Phoebe started pulling her pants and undies off informing me that she wanted to sit in the water, but (thankfully) didn’t want to get her clothes wet. Ha ha! Before long both kids had completely stripped and we scared off another mom and her older kids. Heaven forbid small children be naked. Yeah, yeah, I know there are creeps out there, but every now and then I like to encourage their innocence if I’m safely nearby.

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We snacked while the kids dried off and Josh kept fishing. Nothing was caught, but it was relaxing and a nice way to spend the afternoon. Who knows, maybe we’ll do more of that this weekend… well, maybe. The mosquitoes are out in full force and Enzo and I tend to get eaten alive. We’re off to the State Fair on Friday, though, so that should be a lot of fun and then Josh and I are going to see a special showing of The Neverending Story at the movie theater! Woohoo! Maybe I’ll actually have more to post about next week. 😉 Ha ha.

When Less is More

I had my yearly checkup and apparently stress is contributing to slightly high cholesterol. Wee. How can I be old enough to worry about crap like that? Oh wait, I shouldn’t worry… that’ll just make it worse. There’s been a lot going on, to say the least and I’m stretched pretty thin lately. I haven’t picked up my camera lately and seem not to have time to keep the house clean between one thing and another. So… I need to re-prioritize and I think that means blogging less. I think for a few months I need to completely focus on my work endeavors and then see where I’m at. With so little time I like to focus on my family when I can and my own personal needs, so… yeah.

As far as the kids go, despite there being more stress and chaos in the house than usual, Enzo has been doing great in preschool lately, which also seems to coincide with his preschool teacher leaving and a new teacher stepping in. He’s been having so many good days and has been bringing home more worksheets and seems to be learning more. I can’t even tell you what a relief that is.

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Things I want to remember about right now.

Enzo
- Has an ongoing imaginary game/story where we travel to outer space. Typically it’s him, me and Phoebe since we usually pretend we’re in a spaceship on the way home from preschool, but now and then Josh is allowed to also come. My job is to drive the spaceship and Enzo is in charge of “Pewing” (sp?) bad aliens. They can usually be found on meteors and Enzo uses a special gun that shoots fish that eat the aliens. The fish also have the powers of expansion to eat and/or destroy anything in our path.

Phoebe
- Has started telling little white lies like asking her if she washed her hands and her saying she did when she very obviously didn’t and other little things like that.
- Is a tad bossy and adorable at the same time. She often holds up her little hand and will say, “Just one minute” if you ask her to do something. It’s all in the inflection and hand motion.

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With luck this next year will give us much more time together and the current chaos will make it all worthwhile.

6 Hours

We are a tired household. I think I remember feeling rested… once.

For a while now, Enzo has been staying in his bed all through the night. He used to come to our bed at some point during the night, but then that all stopped and he now happily stays in his bed all night… until 4:00am. I am thankfully asleep at this early morning wakeup call only because he usually insists that Josh come and get him and that it is time to wake up. No. No it is not. It is extremely difficult to convince a 4 year old that it is in fact still time to sleep and it is often around this point that I start to hear whatever whining or crying begins when Josh pleads with Enzo to please just go back to sleep. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Normally I wouldn’t sleep through his waking, but I too am often tired because of a tiny little human who likes to dig her feet into my stomach, back and ribs and often pull my hair while sleeping. She started waking up and wanting someone around 1:00am a while ago, but gradually that time has moved up until now almost every night at 10:00pm she wakes up and calls for me. I usually attempt to tuck her back in and get her to stay in her room, but even if she dozes off, within minutes she climbs out of bed and makes her way into our bedroom. So no more late night reading or late TV watching. Also, we have a king sized bed, so how is it that I end up with a mere 6 inches of sleeping space?? Not only do I have her burrowing into my side, but Uzi also insists that he needs to sleep on me.

Something’s gotta give. At the very least I’d be satisfied if she Phoebe stayed in her bed until at least I’m ready to go to sleep, however, we still don’t know how to get Enzo to sleep in until it’s actually time to wake up. No wonder he gets cranky, he’s gotta be tired. There’s got to be an answer, right? Anybody? I guess it’s time to consult the Google and then sort through the dozens of different ways to go about getting sleep again.

I will not adult this weekend. Nope.

I’m kind of done with rain right now, so I’m glad to see that the forecast is nice for this weekend. We don’t have anything planned, but I’m going to try and get a few things done around the house, which unfortunately includes lots of cleaning and washing dishes by hand because our water softener is on the fritz and not working. So we have this awesome white film on EVERYTHING. My hair also feels gross thanks to all the build-up of minerals and whatnot, so it’s not something we can easily live without. Time to call the repairman. Also Josh hit debris that fell off of some guy’s trailer this week so the car needs fixing. Thankfully it’s drivable, we’ll just have to rock some duct tape for a while because money doesn’t grow on trees. If it’s not one thing it’s another, am I right? Oh, and the pictures have nothing to do with anything, really. It’s random day!

Okay, enough complaining, though I really do miss childhood some days and wish I could just not adult for a month. Don’t you just miss the good ole days when you had zero bills to pay and could do pretty much whatever you wanted during the summer because you didn’t have a job and there was no school? Those were the days. Okay, so they could get a little boring and not being able to drive and having no money could sometimes be a downer. However, hindsight is everything. If we could have a do-over I’m sure we’d all appreciate those carefree days so much more than we did when we were actually living in the moment.

In the meantime, I’m all for making the moment count now and not sweating the small stuff. Sure, I could be super stressed about stuff, but instead I’m going to stare out the window on this gloomy day and appreciate that it is Friday. I’ll pick up my kids from day care and take them home where we’ll hang out and give myself permission to not worry or think about things that “should” worry me because it won’t do any good. We’re very lucky in that everything seems to work out, so I’m sticking with that attitude and I’m confident that things will in fact be awesome.

Now, if you’ll excuse me while I go poop rainbows and vomit glitter, I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. MAKE IT SO.

Dino and Bunnies

Every day adventures