WILD, WILD Animals!

Of all the places my family and I have lived, I'd probably have to say that the home we had, for just a short year, in southern Indiana was probably my favorite. We lived there between Yip and Yap's 2nd and 3rd birthday. Our home was on a dirt road, in fact it took a couple of miles of dirt roads to reach our house and my front yard was full of apple trees! I had away neighbors that were less than a mile away but I couldn't see any of them from my house because of all the trees between our houses. 

We had one particularly awesome neighbor, John, who kept mowed trails through his woods and built bridges over the deep ditches and streams. When the boys were little he'd let us wander through his woods. 

I decided to make a little detour and show the boys where they used to live and as we drove by John's house I told them stories of their wanderings through his woods and of course, we were all looking towards his trees and you wouldn't believe what we saw! 

His backyard was full of concrete critters! 

He'd made a short faced bear. 

A saber toothed tiger and a wooly mammoth!! How awesome! 

We stopped and asked if we could check out his creations and he was more than happy to show us around. John had started cutting out flat plywood animals and put in his woods, just for fun. Then he just started building bigger and better and more realistic creatures. (John's retired after all!) 

He was telling us that his mammoth is true to size and I was amazed by the hair. How did he do that? John was telling us that for the longest time his mammoth was just painted wood and concrete and then he took tires from the junk yard, cut them into strips, nailed them on and painted them to create hair. Isn't it awesome? 

But by far the coolest was the Bigfoot! Okay, it's not exactly a Bigfoot. John modeled it, full size, after an ape that supposedly existed in China at one time. 

You can see just how HUGE it is! How cool to have your own sculpture garden! I was telling John that if we hadn't moved away I'd have been down the road helping him build his giant creations. I'll definitely have to check up on John and his critters again. Right now he has a couple logs in his front yard that will become a bear! This gives me an idea about what I want to do when all my kids are out of the house someday!