Tinker:
Tick and the duck (BFF):
the flock that Roger loves to shepherd:
mass multipliers:
(one of the many that have come and gone in the last year) 
and some recently multiplied ones:
wild lion and giraffe – wait, no, that’s Avery and her cousin Ella!
I’ll call this last one “poppycat.” It’s not part of our menagerie – it’s not even alive – but it has a little animal story to it. We used to have this picture hanging in our bedroom before we moved to “Miller Hall.” Before Avery could say real words yet, she had learned a “mew” sound that she would say whenever she saw a cat. One day when I was holding her in my bedroom, she pointed at this picture and made her cat sound. I thought maybe she’d seen a cat out the window, but no, it was this picture of poppies. So many different times, when the two of us were in my room together, she would look at that picture and remind me that it was a cat. Eventually she learned the actual word, and she would still point to the flowers and say cat. Later, when she was really communicating better, it was fun to talk to her and try to find out what made it look like a cat. The black centers of the two main poppies were the eyes, and I think she pointed out the ears, but I can’t remember where they were….. She did let me know that the tail wasn’t in the picture. I guess the cat is looking at us pretty straight on. I don’t know. I’ve tried and tried to see the cat in this picture. Can you? It reminds me of a picture that my (Moyer) grandparents had hanging in their house. I remember looking at that picture as a little girl and thinking that it was a child, dressed in red, sitting on rocks. I always imagined that she was sitting on a high rock overhang by a lake or pond. I wondered how she got up there – and how she would get down. A couple of years ago, I found a little metal pill box with the same picture printed on it. Then I realized: the child is sitting in a big armchair. Wow. The romance and the story completely left that little girl (or was it a boy?)
Coming soon….. 26 chickens and, maybe just maybe (!) a couple of guineas…
I see the cat. I didn’t at first, and then today I was messing around with the colors in the picture, and it kinda popped out at me. Not how I was expecting at all… but basically what I see is that the center poppy is the cat. All you see is his head. The darker triangle in front is his nose, and the flower’s center is one eye… the other eye is made by the shadow of a petal but is mostly turned away too far to see. And the petal on the left side of the poppy is the cat’s ear.
See? See? Oh well.
Where is fuzzy? Remember that cat that hangs out on your porch? : ) And what about all the cicadas, crawdads, and newts your children have been bringing home?