My hopes are dashed. I had this great vision of 1 long post letting you all know about our gardening adventures, complete with pictures of the glorious finished product, all green and thriving. But that's not going to happen. Read on and weep with me.
Andrew started the project like a real man. No shovel or rake for him- he needed a tractor! He sang "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" 24 hours a day for almost a week until Emma actually asked him to stop! Apparently our dog Daisy is a farm dog at heart, because she was up on that tractor like a shot, and wouldn't get down until he was done. Frank was a pretty good helper, too.
Once Dad was done, it was Mom and the kids' turn to finish it off and bring it to "fruition". I have 4 inch square clumps of green onion and carrots from my 2 little rugrats "helping". But at least these plants are growing! (More on why that excites me later.)
This was the final product after all of our hard work.
So we've been watering for a couple of weeks, and had great success getting plants to come up. We were super excited to watch each little canteloupe, squash, and pepper plant come up this last week. Even Frank could spot a new plant, and would scream at me until I came to look at it. It was an awesome family activity, and it's been great to be able to spend time outside with the kids every evening doing something worthwhile. I've enjoyed teaching them things that I learned in our gardens growing up. It's kind of been like 1 big science experiment for us.
But alas, our little garden was not to be. In the short span of 2 days, some mysterious critter has eaten every scrap of greenery in our garden except for the carrots and radishes. Even the tops of the green onions are chewed off like mowed grass! Everything else is just GONE. It's not rabbits because we've got rabbit fencing up. It's not birds because the plants haven't been ripped up by the roots. I haven't seen 1 worm or caterpillar, and no bugs of any sort, either. We managed to thoroughly stump the experts at the nursery today. What will eat anything in a garden except radishes and carrots? Anyway, we had to start all over again this afternoon. The kids and I ripped up the furrows and re-planted the whole thing.
So this is what it looks like now. We had to buy tomato plants to experiment with pesticides. We didn't want to re-plant everything only to have it get eaten again, so we had to install some plants to play with. Hopefully this time it'll go smoothly, and we'll be sick of eating squash soon. (One can only hope it's sometime before December, at this rate!).
We also had a little get-together for Frank's birthday at the Thatcher park before we came home. A big THANK YOU to everyone for the gifts, and for coming. There isn't 1 gift that he got that isn't well-used already! 
Come to think of it, Frank does look pretty small compared to all these big people!