Garden Shoes

Wow!  My maternity leave is just about over with.  The Conductor got two weeks for daddy leave.  He took one week of his FMLA leave after the Sprout was born and we wisely decided to use his other week about 2 1/2 months in.  This gave us time to get to know our little one's quirks, how he is in restaurants and on car rides and so on.  We were hoping to do some family vacation type stuff and since we were blessed with a good baby, it was a lot of fun.

We didn't do anything too wild with an infant, of course.  But we did have a few over nighters. For our first one, we went up to Baraboo, WI, home of the Barnum and Bailey Circus.  My sister lives there so it was nice to have a visit.   And she's funny, but no, she's not a circus clown.

The Sprout got to have his first train ride.  The Conductor was in his element - he is the 257th most important man in model railroading, after all.



The train ride was at a historic site which also featured a blacksmith demonstrating the technique.  He had all kinds of doo-dads that he had made stuck in the ground and all super cheap!



I spied these things, which he said were tent stakes.



But I was thinking of my garden shoes.  I keep them on our enclosed back porch.  Although it's enclosed, we still get the occasional mouse.  Ew!  I have a perfectly reasonable totally irrational fear that I'm going to put them on and have my toe bitten off by a mouse that decided to turn my shoe into its nest.



So, the blacksmith said tent stakes, (at $2 a piece - can you believe it!) but I saw this:




So, for four bucks, I'm going to try hanging them from the tent stakes outside the porch door.  They're rubber shoes so they can handle getting wet.  I'm hoping it'll keep the mud and dirt outside.  Too bad it won't keep the mice out...