We thought we may have had a gold medal winner with this one. Turns out we don’t. A sunflower grown in the Netherlands holds the record for being the tallest sunflower in the world. It measured 25 feet, 5.4 inches. Okay, that makes Ashlyn’s flower seem like a midget. But, before we knew that fact (what did we do without the internet?), her flower looked enormous. It seemed like it was growing right before our eyes. Ashlyn has been very proud of her plant, having grown it from a seed in a little dixie cup from Grammy. All the crazy green around the bottom includes Evan’s pumpkin plant and Drew’s watermelon plant (and a whole bunch of weeds–I’m just not so into gardening in this season of life).

Just some pictures of our trip to Maryland these last few days. We did lots of “fun stuff” as Evan would say–my niece Audrey and nephew Bohdan’s baptisms, the Maryland Science Center (very cool–we’ll be back there again using our membership to Franklin Institute to get in free!), walking around inner harbor, touring the USS Constellation (a Civil War battleship), touring a submarine (boy, are they tight quarters!), the National Cryptologic Museum at NSA (lots of war stuff and decoding gadgets), and the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore (Evan and Ash rode a real camel!!). Loads of fun! I’m beat!