What's on your fridge?

Answer: Easter candy, parakeet treats, and a handsaw.
Question: What's on top of the Redhage's refrigerator?

We were just cleaning off the top of the refrigerator and found some interesting things. These are especially funny because the parakeet died last spring and the handsaw has been missing for about a year now.

Visiting Wisconsin

We just got back from a great trip to Wisconsin.

Dan's vicarage church (St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Union Grove) asked him to come back to preach for their Mission Festival, so we all got to see lots of friends and family again.

On Saturday, we went up to Sheboygan to see Great-Grandma, and we also got to visit with other relatives over apple crisp. Michael enjoyed sitting in the old family highchair next to Great Aunt Pauline. We also were able to spend a lot of time with our good friends in Brookfield, as we stayed at their house for 3 days!

The kids had a wonderful time together, and the adults did too, especially since the children kept each other happy and entertained!

Here we are at the apple orchard Saturday evening. We picked a whole bushel of apples to share! They are so good!

Little Explorers

Some explorers traveled through our house on Columbus Day! In this picture, you see the captain looking through the spyglass while holding his remarkably accurate globe. The navigator is working on a map of the places they have been. Both are wearing fashionable seafaring hats made of the latest weekly advertisements.

The explorers awoke to find a truck and box blocking the hallway to the playroom. In their quest for an easier route to their toys, the explorers decided to travel the other direction, through the dark office, and found, quite unexpectedly, a wonderful room filled with robot toys! Unlike Columbus, these explorers were able to continue on through the Stairwell Canal to end up in the real playroom soon after.

Off to the Black Hills!

We headed off to the Black Hills for the fall pastors' conference last week. South Dakota sure is a long state! We were pretty happy to see the Missouri River and know that we were at least halfway there. The scenery changes dramatically as you cross the river into the West.
While we were in the Hills, we spent a morning in Spearfish Canyon. Dan got to give the kids a little rock climbing lesson. Even Michael tried it! David enjoyed learning about the different kinds of rock. We made sure to climb on the nice solid granite rather than on the crumbly shale or limestone.
The kids also liked seeing where the road builders used dynamite to blast away parts of the rock. They thought that sounded like fun!

The Marigold Barrel

Our marigolds are finally blooming!

These are some marigolds that we started indoors last winter from seeds saved from our flowers in Indiana the year before. Only two plants really grew well in the barrel, but once they got going, they really bloomed!

Fruit Fly update

Finally, here are the results of the fruit fly experiment!

If you click on the photos, you will be able to see the flies more clearly. The apple cider vinegar caught many more flies than the wine, much to our surprise. We thought the wine would smell more like fruit than the vinegar, but I guess the vinegar does smell like rotten fruit....

At last count, there were over 100 fruit flies in the vinegar, and about 30 in the wine. There was, however, a house fly in the wine but not in the vinegar. If we could only catch more of those!

After this experiment, and some colder weather, there are only a few fruit flies in our kitchen now.