Skink Update AND... Our Garden Pea'd!!

This morning there were some strange sounds coming through the monitor from The Skink's room. I went up to get her, and found her loose and roaming about, happily playing with her toys.

*Sigh* I'm afraid the crib will no longer contain my sweet Skink. Just to prove my theory, I put her back in it (I don't usually leave the side down for sleep-time - I just did it to get some pics of my little Houdini at work). This is what I witnessed:

Clearly, it's just as easy to climb out when the side is up. Nobody is safe, now...

And speaking of climbing, our peas are climbing and...
pea-ing!

Look! It Pea'd again! Thank goodness it was outside.

And our deck-garden plants are growing like weeds... but amazingly, they AREN'T weeds - they're actual non-weed-type plants, and my daughter and I have kept them alive. Not only that, but...

The tomato plants are giant... and flowering!

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
And the ever-so-famous song (on YouTube) that goes with this infamous classic film... LISTEN NOW

And the sequel... Attack of the Flowering Cantaloupes! For this movie, I can just see the vines wrapping themselves around people  while the melons consume them from the feet up.

At any rate, so far this has been a great experience for Iraq. She has felt very proud that the very seeds she planted in little cups have grown to this point. In the next few days she'll be munching on those peas... and what a great way to get my picky-eater to eat her veggies! LOL! She doesn't want to eat anything green right now, but I have a feeling she won't bat an eye when I serve the things she grew herself. Hmmm... is that a little like eating your pets?? Aaack! Forget I said that!

With that, I must share a story from my own childhood. I must have been 8 or 9 years old, and we were visiting my grandparent's lake house in upstate New York. My uncle grew a lovely garden, and one evening he proudly served broccoli from it. Of course as children we are instructed not to play with our food, but how many of us can say we did as we were instructed? Pppffffttt! Not me!! I dissected that broccoli like a frog in biology class! I was fascinated (and a little repulsed) to find little, green worms on almost every interior branch of my veggies.

Of course I immediately took my discovery over to show my mother. Soon everyone was inspecting their broccoli a little closer, and not one piece was free from the little, boiled garden invaders. Yes - they had all been boiled with the broccoli, so I am sure they were quite clean at least.

To my childlike horror, I noticed that my grandmother was still happily eating her broccoli! I marched right up and demanded to know why she was eating worms! She smiled gently as she swallowed her bite and simply said, "I like meat with my vegetables!"

What a woman! She is currently a very youthful 101 (and a half) years of age. Who would have guessed that the fountain of youth came in the form of garden worms?

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