This morning was such a simple and beautiful morning.  The air was still a bit crisp from the cool night, fog was hovering in the valleys, dew was still dripping from the grass, and the sun was just beginning to creep it's way through the trees in distance on the horizon bringing with it the promise of a stunningly beautiful day.

And little did we know, it would be more alive with nature than we've ever seen before!  First thing after breakfast, my coffee cup had barely rested on the table for a moment, when Alex, fully dressed (including gardening gloves), asked begged to me to go and observe his vegetable garden.  I managed to hold him off long enough for Mr. Sun to rise a little higher, and then we set off into the backyard to check on our little plants.

After checking on our plants, which were doing quite good (well most of them), we headed down further in our yard by the landing at the creek.  I can't quite explain it, but there was just something different out there this morning.  Two days of spring rains had made everything the most beautiful green I think I've ever seen.  And the birds seemed to be singing in perfect tune, a simply mesmerizing song.  It was quite an inspirational scene.

That's when Alex and I began looking around and noticing new things.  First we found that a newly identified wildflower was sprouting up all over.  We gathered some Philadelphia Fleabane which we brought in with us after our walk.

Then Alex, before I even knew what he was doing (I was too busy being mesmerized), turned over a rather large rock and began jumping up and down with excitement.  He had found a really large cricket, and a neat looking centipede which we later, after observation, identified as a Stone Centipede; quite commonly found under rocks in Kentucky.

Then something super neat caught our eyes.  There was a small colony of ants with their eggs that were in panic mode trying to move all their eggs.  I took a quick video on my camera.

No sooner than we had returned the rock to where it was, we noticed the cutest little Eastern Chipmunk sitting very close by on a dead tree trunk in a brush pile.  I was amazed that he let me get pretty close to take a photo before he ran off.  Click on the below image and hit full size to see the cutie closer. 

So next, two friends of mine, Cindy and Melissa, had both recently seen Baltimore Orioles.  And I was just saying how I do not ever see them around my house.  Well, you guessed it, a male and a female both landed just about directly over me in a tree for just a split second belting out their beautiful songs and then flying off.  I sure wished they would have hung around long enough for me to get a picture!  I just kept seeing flashes of orange flittering from tree to tree in the distance.  You can imagine my son was nearly waking up the rest of the neighborhood with his unbridled excitement through all of this!

And the ultimate icing on the cake of the morning, was when we headed back inside to upload our photos and videos, I was looking out our side window at the edge of the woods and saw what I thought was a medium to small-sized dog standing there.  Well, I was wrong, upon closer observation, look what it was!!!

A Red Fox!!  I only saw him at a distance, but oh how cute!  Without realizing that the window was opened I screamed for the kids to come see.  Well, evidently he's got pretty good hearing because he took off quite quickly before anyone else had a chance to see.  This was the first time I was the one responsible for scaring off nature and not my kids!  And this is the first time I've seen one of these, but I now know they live back here in the woods.

My husband was at that point, from all the noise, thinking somebody must be hurt! LOL  I simply said, "Nature is alive this morning!"