Faith, Family, Food and Fun: Fun times with Cousins! (and catching Japanese Beetles!)

Ok, I'm slowly getting all the vacation stops blogged. It's taking longer than I thought it would, but ya know...sometimes life (like mice in the pantry!! EEWWW!!) gets in the way of my computer time, LOL.

So after visiting my sister, Rachel, Ethan and I headed south to visit Ron's folks. We were there from Wednesday evening through Friday lunch. We couldn't leave before Friday lunch, because Grandma and Grandpa always go to a Pizza Hut buffet for Friday noon meal...and we CERTAINLY didn't want to miss out on THAT!

When we got there on Wednesday evening, Ron's sister Martha and her son Nathan were already there. Her son William arrived shortly after we did. It was great to visit with them again. After dinner, Mary, Martha and I went to the Ladies Aid meeting at St. John. It was great to see Aunt Melba and cousin Beth, and other ladies from St. John. Aunt Melba served a delicious lunch...crab dip on crackers and an apple dessert with cool whip. MMMMMM..

On Thursday afternoon, Ron's sister-in-law Krista came over with 3 of her kids, Adam, Sarah and Hannah. Rachel has been DYING to see Sarah for a long while, and Ethan and Hannah are big time buddies too. Nathan, William and Adam had a grand time hanging out and playing ball in the back yard. When they weren't bluetoothing and texting on their cell phones, LOL

While there, we discussed Lester and Mary's Japanese Beetle problem. These pests were busy eating away at the grape leaves and destroying the plants. Mary had to go into town for a dentist appointment and stopped at Wal-mart. Oh, did we laugh at her when she came home with a couple of little plastic bags with a yellow plastic ...thing...on top. It looked very much like this.

So, Martha and Lester puzzled over the assembly for a few minutes, and then took the two things out back to hang them up. They drove a stake into the ground, while leaving the trap on the golf cart. When they went to get the trap, it already had a couple of beetles in it! OK...we were surprised, but still a bit skeptical. They got both traps hung up by about 4 that afternoon. We weren't expecting much, especially considering that, according to the packaging information, the traps are most effective between 8am and 3 pm. We went back to check them at around 9, and by golly...there were a stunning number of those bugs crawling around in those bags! We weren't laughing at Mary any more, LOL. There were probably 50-75 of them in each bag that evening. The next noon, before heading out to Pizza Hut, I ran down to check again, and there were more than double the amount from the night before. I still have to call them and see how the whole thing ended up and if they got bunches more or not, but I will admit that I was wrong and those little $5 traps from Walmart work well! Here's an interesting article about them (and the how/why they work)

Japanese Beetle Trap

Ok, so on to a couple of pictures from our visit.