This post is brought to you by the color Orange.

Yesterday was a muggy, overcast day - the first in almost two weeks that was cool enough to hit a park during the day as Ains has been requesting (for almost two weeks). There just happens to be a park across the street from the library and Aunt Ria (It is how she's referred to at all times, so it has become her name.) and her kids were there, so that was the park we went to. I had business at the library after all (or rather, they had business with me - we got a library membership because it was supposed to be cheaper than buying books *sigh*).

Three hours at the park, one hour of that on swings. How do their bums not go to sleep?

Aunt Ria helped two of the girls figure out how to cope when there are three swingers and two swings ...
and she helped my Intrepid Explorer on his adventures.

To escape an interesting extended family that was gathering at the park, Aunt Ria took some of the kids over to play on some large rocks.

I stayed and swung the other kids that were with us and most of the kids of the family that was gathering at the park. I've never seen a family like that, but that's a story for another forum. Boy howdy.

We had a sporadic picnic lunch, bites grabbed between bouts of playing.

It's nice to hang out with someone who you can trust completely with your kids, and who your kids trust. I loved looking over and seeing this.

Then it was off to a few stores for supplies. Just Ains and Gray and me while Hannah stayed and played with her cousins.

We found some treasures in Michaels craft store (was there ever a more beautiful word than 'clearance'?). We were getting in the car when I snapped this picture.

My pirate girl and my backpack monkey having a sword fight.

When we went to pick Hannah up, my sister talked us into going to a sushi restaurant with her. (Pregnancy cravings for her. I just wanted to try sushi. It was gooood.)

Ainsley got her first crack at chopsticks. Very cute stuff. The next two pictures are horrid because of my over-active flash and then my absent flash, but still funny.

First you pick the sushi up with your chopsticks - use two hands if necessary.
Then, when you get it most of the way to your mouth and it starts to fall, you use any means necessary to get it the rest of the way.

It's worth it.

Then home to bed.
It was a long, fun-filled day.

County fair.

Last week was our county fair, something not to be missed even for raging hives. Livestock exhibitions, art shows, food that's rarely part of our diet, and a rodeo. Very exciting.

Well, she's not the best one to ask. Ask Grayson.

Maybe not. Maybe Hannah?

Yeah, there we go. Now that the rodeo's going, maybe Ainsley's gotten more into it.

Then again ....

(The next night, when I forgot my camera, was the crowning of the rodeo queen. All of the contestants buzzed the arena on their horses in pretty outfits and waving the beauty queen wave. By the third one, Ains had perfected the wave and was beside herself with excitement. Very cute, but not captured for posterity.)

Cute snapshots of the rodeo - the smallest contestant

and the tallest contestant (almost seven feet tall).

Painting with flowers. And stuff.

Yesterday, I was weeding in my garden and the girls were playing in their butterfly garden when I was asked for some help. It sounded roughly like this. "MOOOOOTHHHHHEEERRR!!! Ainsley picked my sunflowers! They're going to DIE." When I got over there, I saw that Ainsley had picked one leaf off of one of these flowers.

(This picture was taken days ago. I don't make my girls pose for blog photos in the middle of a diplomatic engagement.)

I told Hannah that one leaf would not a dead plant make, but that I could understand her frustration. I asked Ainsley why she'd picked the leaf. "It not leaf, Momma, it paintbush."

"It's not really a paintbrush, is it Mother?" asked Hannah. "You couldn't paint with it, could you?" Well, I don't know, so let's find out. Hannah grabbed her own leaf (without any of her sunflowers dying), I reminded Ains not to pick any more, and we went inside and got painting set up. The most important part of setting up painting for the girls is setting Gray up with his own project.
Here, paint sparkly glue onto a coloring page. (I'm a creative mother.)

Then the girls got going with their leaves.

Sure enough, they could be paintbrushes.

This brought on questions about what else could be used to paint. The flowers in the vases on the table, maybe?
Certainly.

The orange peels Mother's picking up to throw away?

Yep.

The buds that were picked too early?

Especially the buds that were picked too early.

Then Hannah remembered her recently bloomed zinnias and ran out to get some.

She is reaching in in that funny way because she was in a hurry.

The sprinkler was on its way back.

We ended up with many 'process' sheets (it's the process, not the product) that really highlighted practice, experimentation, and creativity, a few of which are on the wall. We also ended up with two 'product' sheets that the girls wanted to put up on the wall.

One was a paper Hannah made with two different flowers that looks startlingly like the night sky on the Fourth of July.

And the second was one by Ainsley that is a vibrant mixture of red, pink, and orange that really is quite pretty on the wall in that strange modern art style.

All in all, it was a smashing success, born from the desperate attempt of a mother to diffuse a potentially deadly* situation. Crisis averted, art produced.

* "deadly" - little girls screaming and crying over misunderstandings and killed sunflowers while a little brother looks on in confusion

Do you need a baby carrier?

One of my favorite bloggers, Holistic Mum (home of Thankful Anyway Thursday), is gifting a baby carrier. Head on over there if you want a chance at receiving it!

Visitors and owl pellets.

I had two friends from college visit today with their kids. This made Hannah's day, week, and, possibly, month.
That child suffers having a hermit for a mother.

Ainsley was friendly, but aloof, staying on the porch or in my lap the entire time.

That child takes after her mother.

Grayson surprised me by not only playing with Shannon, but even climbing onto her lap.

She wouldn't let me take a picture of him in her lap. She has a thing about pictures. Even when she's cutting my girl's hair, I have to crop her out. She's gorgeous. Why are we women so hard on ourselves?

And I got to meet this girl - older by years than the last time I saw her, so almost a whole different person - who is absolutely charming.

She informed me that she can talk to cats. She uses her ears and her hands. So sweet, and it appears that she's correct. She got one of the little nearly-feral kittens to cuddle up in her lap and purr like it was her momma stroking her.

But the visit had its awkward moment. After they came in the house, I was getting Shy Ainsley settled in the living room when I hear Shannon's voice from the kitchen. "Is this a bag of owl pellets on your counter?" Crap! Forgot to move those. Welcome to a homeschooler's house. Owl pellets on the kitchen counter.

The day we sold our house, I gathered up owl pellets from underneath their favorite tree. Have you ever seen owl pellets? I always pictured them as smooth balls of fur that you neatly dissected to find interesting bones. Not quite. They're ragged lumps of fur that have interesting bones popping out of them at all angles and fall apart if you don't treat them kindly.


Our dissecting a few months ago turned up these bones -

All little mice, though I was hopeful for some rabbit bones since there was a rabbit foot nearby.

When I gathered this last bunch up, there was something right next to one of the pellets that hinted at what might be in them -

So I'm on the lookout for bones of my cat's catnip mouse. That should be fun. Do you think owls get high from catnip?

I have some extra owl pellets, so here's an offer you'll only see on a homeschooling blog - if you want a few of these (I don't have a lot), email me your address at unprocessedfamily at gmail dot com. If you're one of the first few to email me, I'll send some your way!

Snapshot Sunday 08-02-09

I can't remember if I sent you over to look at the update on the baby bird we found on the ground. Did I? My brain's going in too many different directions these days. If I didn't, go here.

Now for snapshots.


Cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you have kids, go check this book out.

A present from a sister. It's apple butter, chokecherry syrup, blackberry syrup, and apricot syrup. A box full of the stuff.



This one ties into last week's snapshots.

How it began.

Other snapshots -

SunnyDay Mama is joining us again!
Heart Rockin Mama
Rinnyboo
Ramblings

Just think about something else.

That has been my daughter's advice. "You only want to scratch when it itches," says Hannah, "so don't think about it itching. I'll help you think about something else. How did you get it anyway? It looks so itchy."

I have hives. I have had hives for quite a few days now. They are not receding quickly - one of my legs looks (and feels) like it has red plated armor on it. My back is covered also, itching the worst in that little inch square that I can't scratch. An allergic reaction that is pretty clearly tied into freshly mown grass and didn't show up until after I turned 32. The itching got so bad last night that I was taking a cold shower at 3 am.

Distracting myself from it seems to be one of the best things for stopping the itch, just as Hannah suggested. Enter Ainsley and Grayson, my knights-in-shining-armor for the task (Hannah's visiting grandparents with her daddy).

The day started out with Grayson hitting me on the head with a curtain rod that I was supposed to put up in the girls room the day before. That'll teach me to procrastinate.

Then it slowed down with some cuddling and nursing and stayed slow for awhile...

and then got more interesting.

I really should double-check when Ains says she's put something away. She is, after all, not even three yet.

After that it was computer games and puzzles and laundry. The itching intensified during laundry, so we went back to puzzles, then stirring the ice cream in the freezer, then gathering eggs. Then dishes, more itching, so out to the flower garden for some posies for her and some weeding for me.



Then back inside to arrange them. With frustratingly enthusiastic help from a little brother.

(picture removed for editing)

(old spice bottles make fantastic little vases)

Then more computer games, and dancing to the beautiful music on the games (Poisson Rouge rocks, my friends).
Then tasting the almost frozen ice cream, which the cat thinks is yummy, even if it includes three different types of fruit.

It was yummy.

Very yummy.

A delicious treat for a hot evening. Evening came so quickly today, which is a great happenstance when you're covered in hives.

Then, when it gets dark, the porch light goes on and we go out on the driveway. Ainsley rides her bike, Gray rides his tractor, and Mother curls up in a chair with her laptop. Absolutely lovely evening. Ainsley points out the pegasus in the sky. I can't quite see it, but she sees it clearly. It has an Ainsley riding on its back and the Ainsley is wearing a skirt. I need to add that to my star chart, it seems.

Now they're both asleep, having worked hard distracting me all day. And the itch is coming back. I feel a cold shower coming on. And not a cold shower for a fun reason either. *sigh* I'm getting old.

Sometimes I really miss Oklahoma.

During thunder-storm season in Oklahoma where the air turns green right before a storm and the thunder rolling in shakes the trees in their roots.

I miss the lightning-bugs that are absent in Idaho.

But on nights like tonight, when I'm sitting on the porch, watching my kids ride their bikes around, and not one of us is being eaten alive by mosquitoes ...

right now I'm not missing Oklahoma at all.

Errand day.

Today was designated as 'errand day'. You have to have a designated errand day when you live in the country. A day that is filled to the brim with hitting all of the stores 'in town' that you need to hit which takes strategic food/drink/entertainment/allowable treats planning on my part. It's an art and I'm a struggling artist.

It went more smoothly than I thought it would. After the first store we stopped and had a picnic at a really pretty cemetery. Did you know that cemeteries used to be the happenin' place for locals to gather and mingle over picnic lunches? That's just a little historical trivia for you. We go to cemeteries because Hannah absolutely loves reading the stones, finding out how old the people were, and imagining their lives. Sometimes crying over ones she finds especially touching. Her imagination and storytelling go into overdrive at a cemetery.

After lunch, we went to Shannon's Hair Dressing Emporium for Fairies and Princesses and Ainsley got her hair 'finished'. I'm sure some of you noticed her hair in this picture yesterday.


She thought it was time for a new hairstyle. When I asked her why she'd done it (she'd cut off most of the hair in the back of her head - a new one for me), she said "Me look pitty. Me cut off hair, look pitty, now nobody decognize me."

So Shannon did what she could, while reassuring Ains that she wasn't 'fixing' her hair, she was just 'finishing' it for her.

I tried to get a picture of it, but the girl rarely holds still.

It's short - very short - and it accentuates how similar she is to her daddy, but it still is not short enough to cover all of the 'damage'.

Shannon asked "Were you mad?" No, hair doesn't really bother me. If you experiment and it doesn't work, the hair will grow out or grow back or you can cut it again or dye it another color.

Once we'd finished the haircut it was time for my least favorite store to enter with kids - The WalMarts.

After thirty minutes of going up and down aisles, simultaneously trying to check things off my list and keep Grayson from throwing everything from the cart onto the floor, we got done and went to the checkout line. After thirty seconds of loading the contents of the cart onto the belt I realized that Grayson, king of unloading and loading, would happily do it for me so I stuck him in the back of the cart and set him to work.


It was a beautiful thing. For thirty seconds. Then he started throwing them out the other side of the cart onto the floor.

Meanwhile, the cashier saw the toilet brush that Gray had put on the belt and said to the girls "You're getting a toilet wand?" All Ainsley heard was 'wand'. Wand wand wand wand WAND!!! Wand. And so it was that the first Toilet Fairy was born.

I informed her when we got home that she was now the Toilet Fairy and as such was in charge of Toilet Scrubbing and General Bathroom Cleanliness. She informed me that "Me not Toilet Fairy! Me not scrub toilet or .... what you say, mommy?" General Bathroom Cleanliness. "Me not DO DAT!!! Me just fairy with wand." And off she danced.

After WalMart we met with our real estate agent, who I am more in love with every day (if all goes well, we are signing some Very Important Papers tomorrow), went grocery shopping, and bought chicken feed.

When we got home, the pool had warmed up nicely, so there was pool play - it's a daily occurence with this bigger pool.

View from outside the pool:

View from inside the pool:

While we were goofing off in the pool, Matt was mowing the lawn. He stopped the lawn mower right before he was going to run over this little guy:

Remember me telling you how cute these little buggers are (he's a baby Killdeer)? Oh, they're cute.

He found the momma (with a broken wing, natch) in the garden and set the baby down close enough for them to find each other. Ten seconds later, the momma's wing was healed and she had all of her babies herded to safety. I really need to do something about those weeds.

The house won't get cleaned tomorrow - we have plans.