Happy Birthday Will and Gopher Tales

Tuesday July 7th is my youngest nephew's third birthday. I can't believe he is three already. I remember going to visit him the day after he was born. He was so small (only 8lbs vs. his brother who was over 9 1/2lbs at birth). I immediately thought he looked like my mom. Maybe it was just the chin.


Today we braved the crowds of children at my sister's house for his 'friend' birthday party. Since I work late, and Jay is busy on Tuesday evening. It was actually a lot of fun, since we were able to just hang out outside and the kids were busy on the trampoline and the slip and slide (I totally thought slip and slides had been banned! They seem so painful and dangerous! Thankfully no one got hurt today.) Here is Will blowing out the candle on his darth vader cake. I may submit this cake to the Cake Wrecks website. I think for what my sister paid for it, I could have done a better job and I have NO cake making experience. Oh well, it did taste alright, though not that much better than what I usually make with a cake mix. Will had fun and he was pretty excited to get his Star Wars cake. He also seemed pretty pleased with the Cars big boy underwear we bought him, since he is fully potty trained now!


When we were getting ready to leave for the party we opened our garage door and Jay spotted this little guy sitting half way down the ramp in our garage. Immediately he said "Close the door, so he doesn't go in the house!" I did and came around into the garage from the front door. Jay had tried banging to get him to run away but he didn't budge. He then got a broom and tried poking him. He still didn't budge. We really did not want him in our garage, so I used the broom and gently pushed him out beside our garbage can beside the garage. We decided to leave him there to die and I figured I could use a shovel to put him in a garbage bag and dispose of him later. We were quite shocked, when we got home to find him gone. I was glad I didn't have to worry about possibly touching a dead gopher, and glad he was either gone or maybe someone's cat had come and eaten him or something.

After supper I took Kiwi out for a pee to the backyard and she went straight toward our window well by the patio. This isn't typical for her so I went over to look and the stupid gopher was in the window well. He still looked pretty sick and I wondered how he had managed to crawl around the house and fall into the window well?! I brought Kiwi back inside then a little later decided to go check on the gopher again. It had crawled into the corner of the window well and it looked a lot more alert. All of a sudden it started digging at the side of the window well and managed to burrow under it and out of sight. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know if he is digging some tunnels under our patio, or under our deck, or maybe he really is sick and will go die under our deck and make a terrible stench. Or maybe he will dig up my grass. I tried calling animal control and they said to call the SPCA if it is still alive (at this point I thought he was living on borrowed time), or once it dies call City Sanitation. I left a message for the SPCA so we'll see if they call back next week at all. I really should have just killed it, but the claws looked pretty scary when you get close to it, and I have a hard time killing a living creature (especially when I know that I would probably have to kill it with a shovel....and probably would have to hit it more than once :P). I don't want it hurting Kiwi, and she seems just stupid enough to chase after it. Hopefully we can get it moved, or it will just move on, on it's own. I also don't want it eating my shrubs that have nicely grown back after being eaten by the rabbits last winter!!!!