sucker for succulents

♪ Money.. burns a hole in my...pocket ♫

I think of those lyrics from the Dean Martin song every time I watch my girls scurry around a store just SEARCHING for something to spend their money on, even though they don't actually need or even want something. They just FORCE it. Usually, that's how my girls spend their hard earned birthday money.

Well for her tenth birthday, Sidney got a nice crisp ten-dollar bill in her card from my grandparents. She had me hold it in her wallet until she knew what she'd want to buy with it. Sidney's a bit of a planner. Alyssa's more the kid who will nickel and dime her way through her money.

Walking into WalMart a few days ago, Sidney had a light go off in her brain and KNEW what she'd buy with her ten bucks.

SUCCULENTS and CACTUS plants.

 the three plants with the red and yellow flowers on top are the three new additions to her already existing succulent garden planter.

 under major inspection by the girl with the green thumb

Sidney gets passionate about stuff without me really understanding why or where she got the idea from, but I love it all the same. She learns so much, she ends up becoming an expert on the subject and just amazing me with her brain, once again. I love the way she thinks.

By the way, planting poky painful cactus is no joke - wear gloves. Mom may or may not have been poked a hundred times in the process of planting three small cacti.

Something Sidney taught me recently was about aphids, and how ants "use" aphids. It was fascinating.


Here's the long story short from wiki.answers.com :
Aphids exude a sweet liquid which is a good food source for the ants, who look after the aphids and 'milk' them with their antennae to get the honeydew. The ants protect the aphids from other predators, and will even herd them around, moving them from one colony to another.

I learned this from Sidney, only after she spotted the ants on my mom's blackberry bush "herding" the aphids - by walking around on top of the aphids, but not eating them or harming them - it looked something like this:

When Sid explained it to me, I thought she'd made it up. She didn't. She just listens and learns and remembers. Thank God.