Seashells by the Seashore. Kinda.

*sniff* Look how grown-up she looks when she wants her hair fixed.


I snapped the picture right away since she usually pulls out any hair clips/bows/bands as she walks away from having it fixed (and the fixing is always at her request, go figure), but she left these in for almost an entire hour.

We went down to the now-burned-out cattail pond to explore. Hannah told us that we had to take bowls because there were "so, so, so many shells" there. This was based purely on her experience in the canal earlier this week. Danged if she wasn't right. Thousands of shells, littering the ashy ground.


Gray, who cannot see a bucket next to him without trying to fill it up, even got in on the act. Though it was clods of dirt he added to my bucket, and not shells.


Kid has a good arm. My bucket was a foot away from where he was picking up the dirt and throwing it - while strapped to my back - and he made it into the bucket on most of his shots.

This is what the puppy did every time I sat down.


Hannah found this bird's nest in the center of a patch of burned down cattails. How random is that? It's drier than the cattails were, but it's barely scorched.

Sooty girl.

Now I'm going to add this pile of books to Library Thing before I box them up. Fun times.

What food independence looks like in our house.

For my RUN group -


Earlier this evening, I could have snapped a picture of Ains eating peaches beside Hannah who was eating an ice cream cone and a bowl of peas. Ains showed no interest in the ice cream, but grabbed some peas when she was done with her peaches.

Ahhh...

warm weather.

Throwing a constellation party.

Any ideas?

Hannah wants to throw a constellation party. I need ideas. Star shaped cookies are, of course, on the list already.

Nothing to do with the moon, this is a "stars only" party, so ideas based on the constellation stories - maybe I should research more deeply different culture's constellation stories - would be ideal. It will be an evening party because star-gazing is mandatory, naturally.

The party could be for only kids her age, but we really want to invite a family or two that we know, so the party-goers would be adults and kids from 1-9 years old.

What have you got for me?

Farmgirl ABCs.

So awhile back, Steph posted this amazing post. Take a few minutes to click over and look at it - it will rock your world.

When I saw that post, I thought "How cool." ... ... That was it. I never thought of doing it myself, that's for sure. I don't have her eye for seeing detail and pulling it out.

But then yesterday I looked up in the sky and saw this -



I've never seen plane trails cross just so before and I thought "That's a cool 'X'" and took a picture. Then I turned 45 degrees to the right and saw this -



30 degrees to the right of *that* was this -



so I wasn't getting a total 'wildlife/nature' theme as Steph had. She saw details, I saw the ones that smacked me in the face. But I was suddenly inspired to try to find the whole alphabet. So throughout the rest of the day, I walked around with a camera taking pictures of letters around my farm (and some of my neighbor's machinery that's parked on our boundary).

Some were surprisingly easy (Q), some were ridiculously easy (how many Os do you think you'll find on a farm, hmm?), and some were very, very difficult (R and G).

When Hannah noticed what I was doing, she asked to help, so I put her on charting duty. Thus was born an unlooked for 'lesson' in letters - especially the obscure letters that she rarely has an opportunity to use, much less seek out in farm machinery. As part of her job, she would tell me which letters on the list we still needed to find, help look for them in our life, and cross them off when we found them. By the time we got done, she could write any letter in the alphabet without hesitating.


She had so much fun trying to find the letters, that she set a lot of letters up (none of which ended up in the 'official list' - those are all 'as found' shots - but some of which ended up in the 'alternate' shots) and she really got a kick out of trying to find letters in the animals, some of those shots ended up in the official list, some very silly ones ended up in the 'alternate' list.

By the way, do you have any idea how frustrating it is when your pen won't work?


The pictures are not totally unaltered - I had to rotate a few to make the letters stand out. This activity was the most fun I've had when looking at my place. For hours after we got done, I was seeing letters *everywhere*.

Now I'm having visions of creating an alphabet panel made up of these on my wall.

So head over to my farming blog for my Farmgirl's ABCs. Please! And enjoy!

Today we...

ran ourselves ragged having fun.

We're supposed to get another bout of colder weather in a few days, so we're making the most of this warm spell.

First things first, fill up the pool so that the cold well water will be warm by afternoon.

(Please don't tell her that's not a pool. I think Hannah's figured it out, but Ains is still thrilled with her little 'pool'.)

Hannah and I stopped to look at birds in our huge pine tree.

House Finch.
European Starling. (This is really a European bird. It was introduced to NYC in the late 1800s and spread over the country from there. Very aggressive, dominating bird. Aren't field guides great?)
I think this is a Chipping Sparrow, though I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. It doesn't match the description of any of the chickadees in the field guide, but it doesn't have obvious white eyebrows as Chipping Sparrows do, either...


Ains thought we were boring, so she went and got 'Oreo', the kitten that Hannah and she are trying to convince their father needs to become a house cat.


Then the girls went to check on the new babies, Katrina and Karl.
We said hello to the pony...

and then went back to the house. While I worked on packing boxes in the bunkhouse, the kids played outside.


As I said, Hannah seems to think our 'pool' is boring (can't imagine why), so she went to go see if the irrigation canal had water yet. No luck.


But look what we did find...


The canal headgate has lots of these little creatures swimming around when the canal's full of water. We've never thought to look for their shells when it was dried up, but today we did. They're now on our Very Precious Things table.


I love how both of Ains' feet are off the ground in this picture.

Then lunch on the porch for some, naps for others, reading 'Pippi WalkingStocking' (Ains' title), playing with the 'new' toys discovered while reorganizing boxes, watching the hippo and dog sing 'In the Jungle' on YouTube, dancing, and eating oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies.

Hannah and I worked on a really fun letter project which I'll post later while Ains followed us around with the pony's halter saying 'Ride Pincess! Ride PINcess. RIDE PINCESSSSS!' Grayson thought her hilarious, which made her think she was, in fact, hilarious, so she amped it up for him. She was, in fact, hilarious.

When Daddy got home, it was pony-riding time. Hannah worked on controlling the reins...

while Ains worked on leading. (That rope is headed right over to my hand. I was 'just holding it off the ground' for my independent little girl who would have not appreciated me holding it to help her keep the pony on the straight and narrow.)

We went for an hour long ride (good exercise for us leaders), then home again, home again, jiggety-jig, dinner, and both girls passed out on the couches while watching Island Princess karaoke.

We done good.

Hannisms.

Hannah: (asking her father to help her down the stairs to the basement) "Father, catch me before I tumble head over petticoats."
One of my husband's favorite games is trying to figure out where she learned all of her sayings from - this one was from one of the leprechaun books.

Hannah: "Mother, you're such a nice mother that I've decided to let you help me find my husband when I'm older."

Heh. My plan is working out perfectly.

The girls found our last jar of jumbo olives from our winter recipe project. Have you never found a need for jumbo olives? Now you have.


Hannah: (in a huff after apparently having had a disagreement with her sister) "It's really hard not to call people dummies sometimes, isn't it, Mother?"

Oh, sweetie, that never gets any easier.

Matt was singing Island Princess karaoke with the girls the other night. He was singing the prince's part when Hannah told him he was 'not quite right'. "Oh, I know", says he, "I need to practice a lot if I'm going to be a prince." "But you can't be a prince," says his little girl, "because Sarah's not a princess and if you become a prince you can't be married to her."

What to do on a snow day.

Computer issues and time issues have been conspiring against me. No posting for almost a week.

Think the computer issues are resolved - for now - so here's what we did on our snow day last week.

Yoga. "Namaste. The light in me sees the light in you. Bow to me, I bow to you. Namaste."


I'll take this over "Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam" any day. I love Gray in the corner of the picture, trying to copy the girls.


Going on a bear hunt. They're going to catch a big one.



Grayson rides in the doll stroller. There was much giggling.


Ainsley wanted to be a puppy. Hannah taught her to 'sit', 'lie down', and 'be a princess'.


Gray fed the dog.


We went outside to chore and saw this - the owls out hunting in the daytime. The overcast sky made them comfortable. The angry tiny birds made them head for cover after an hour or so. That's one of my favorite things to watch in nature - ticked off tiny birds, smaller than an owl's or hawk's head, chasing those big birds away from their nests.


How to keep a five-year old and three kittens entertained - give her a lunge whip and tell her to walk in a circle.


Back inside, needing to warm up, the bathtub became the beach and swimming was the order for the rest of the day.


And so we spent our snowy spring day.

Snapshot Sunday

How it began.

Steph's up.

Sadie's taking a turn today!

Sunnymama is here.

Gina's joining in.

Heart Rockin' Mama is here!

Here's Rinnyboo.

And Kyre.

Ramblings is joining in today.

I am so glad spring is finally here.