Peonies are one of my very favorite flowers, along with lilacs and lily of the valley. We cut a few and took them to Snacks' teacher on his last day of kindergarten. Today I got around to cutting a bunch for our dining room table. You can't beat fresh cut flowers from your own yard.

I think I've finally talked Snacks into letting his caterpillars go. He reported that one didn't survive last night, and I'm guessing that we don't have the right leaves for them to eat. We've tried maple, birch, rhubarb, lilac, Virginia creeper, hosta... they don't seem to be eating any of them. He is sad about letting them go, especially the babies that hatched from the eggs he had, but I explained that they had a much better chance of surviving in the woods than they do in his little plastic box, and he seems to understand.

We think we'll drive them back to Dodge where we got them so they can find their old homes. I'm not sure about letting them go in the yard since I don't want to be introducing some caterpillar species that we don't already have in our neighborhood, just in case...

I told Snacks we could look into getting some fish when we get back from Idaho. He seems to be ready for pets of his own and I think I can handle a couple of goldfish.

I've been busy with my latest project of figuring out exactly how much everything we eat costs. I've gotten sort of fanatic about it--comparing prices between several different stores and figuring out how to get things at the best cost. I'm probably driving John crazy following him around telling him the cost of everything he is putting in his mouth, but it is truly fascinating to me!

For example, I can make a loaf of organic sourdough bread for $2.22, while I used to pay $5.75 for a genetically modified loaf from Great Harvest. And I can make a quart of organic yogurt with milk from cows on pasture for $1.88, when I used to pay almost $5 for a quart of organic yogurt from cows in a CAFO.

Most of our food is actually much more expensive than what we could otherwise buy, since we're buying eggs and fresh milk straight from a farm and I insist on buying pastured meat, so I've been having fun figuring out the cost of each serving--this should help me lose weight really fast. It's definitely cut down on the amount of food that the worms get--we salvage and reuse a LOT more than we used to.