A mish-mash of things from our past few days

To kick this post off right, I'd like to crow a little about my newly organized, tidied pantry! Thanks to my mom, who was getting rid of excess stored stuff, I have a bunch of new tupperware containers for holding the seemingly endless bags, boxes, and piles of food for a hungry, growing family. Hooray for a pantry that's organized enough for me to find what I'm looking for!

Next, you won't be surprised that Gregory was "pretty sure" he could move this entire felled pine tree out of the yard for me. He heaved and tugged, but that tree is still there! It was good of him to try...










Henry's Ingredients for Fun

One dump truck

One soccer ball

One empty plant container from the greenhouse

First you put on your hat. Then, check all around you to see if anyone noticed that your hat is actually a flower pot. Give a "who you lookin' at?" glare to anyone who laughs.




Then go about your business. You've got style and you know it.

It rained almost 4 inches over a couple days earlier in the week. In no way did we need 4 inches of water, and the water had a hard time figuring out where to go. There were (and still are!) puddles everywhere. We had a really warm, sunny afternoon once the rain stopped, and the kids had an amazing time wading (splashing, frolicking, running, jumping, laughing) in the water. The other kids are not shown participating in this fun activity, since they both shed their clothes for puddle jumping. You can HEAR the exciting fun in the video below.

And last, but not least, we had a family movie night a few days back. The movie was "Marley & Me", which wasn't the best family movie night choice of all time, but the kids enjoyed eating pizza and popcorn on the family room floor, and they liked (but didn't love) the movie.

Weekend Update

What are we up to this weekend? Well, for starters, we're hoping that our house doesn't pick up and fly away. It's been oh-so windy. Look at our pretty pinwheel. I am sure you can guess that we didn't install it face-down in the forest. It blew right off its post and was thankfully stopped by the trees. Otherwise, it might have ended up over at cousin John's house.

In a turn of events that will surprise no one, Lily has been delightedly picking each and every daffodil that blooms over at the old house. In this handful, she also has some forsythia flowers. This picture was taken Friday, which was Pajama Day at school. It was ENTIRELY too hot for fleece jammies that day. I think it must have been 80 degrees - you can tell by Lily's hot, flushed cheeks.

I nearly stepped on this puff adder over by the wood chip pile. I think it is about ... oh, maybe 2-1/2 feet long? It tried very very hard to convince us that it is a big, scary, dangerous snake. It puffed itself up as big as it could, flattened its head like a cobra, hissed and puffed, and even curled its tail into that impressive little curlicue. But ... we didn't run off screaming. We just stood there and admired it, and came back a while later to take pictures.

Lastly, I'd like to show off the tiny bok choy plants that are neatly lined up in the garden. There are several things already growing out there, including this bok choy, some swiss chard, collard greens, lettuce, and sugar snap peas. Yay for spring gardening! It'll be weeks and weeks yet before we get to EAT any of this stuff, but it is very exciting to see things getting underway.

ETA: Lily made this really pretty drawing of an oriental rug during the day today. It was so nice I couldn't NOT post it.

Rare Good Advice

I got this strangely sage advice from my fortune cookie the other day. I thought I would share with you all so that you, too, could be enlightened.

The Science Fair and Other Stuff

Lily answers the age-old question, "Do plants need a nap?" Her answer is "No." The science fair was really great this year, with loads of really nifty projects by lots of kids in every grade. It's not a competitive science fair, there are no awards or places. It's just an opportunity for kids to do a project and display it for the whole school to see. Lily was SO much more independent with her project this year than in the two previous years that she has participated. She really did a wonderful job!

And here we have a couple of happy farm boys on what might be their mutually favorite piece of equipment (though Henry might make a good case for the quad being even more fun than this tractor).

Busy, busy mommies don't get around to posting as often as they should.

So … what have we been up to since the last post? A little of this… a little of that. We are moving the garden this year, back down to the old site near the farm house, where the garden always was when the farm people were living here. It's a big, big job to move it – re-tilling ground that has been growing grass for the last 10 years, putting up new fencing (digging lots of post holes!), plus the usual garden set-up. But it's coming along. There are even some things growing in it already! We have bok choy and collard greens already sprouted in there. Gregory planted a row of sugar snap peas, but we haven't seen them poke their heads up out of the dirt just yet.

Lily finished up her science fair project. It wasn't a perfect set-up because we unwittingly used a seed mix, which had different varieties of marigolds in it. So there was no reasonable way to make comparisons between the growth of her two groups of plants, since there were vast, unavoidable differences in the basic size and shape of the different varieties of marigolds. Oops. But that's a scientific learning too, and she did a nice write-up making the most of the data she did have.

And check out this blast from the past! Here's Henry wearing an outfit that used to be Gregory's.

Edited to add: Gregory has just returned home from his first spring soccer clinic practice. It was rainy and 37 degrees, and this boy ran his little legs off for the entire 45 minutes of practice. He had a great time, and came home VERY rosy-cheeked.

Easter Egg Hunt!

Happy Easter! It was a beautiful day here in Michigan, and we celebrated by having an Easter egg hunt in the back yard (since, as you might have seen from a previous post, we had so many cheery Easter eggs to hide and look for!).

Lily and Gregory with their baskets, searching around the newly felled trees.

Here's little Henry, finding an egg all by himself! Henry's eggs didn't hold up too well, since Henry was so excited that he dropped and tossed his eggs into his basket.

Gregory's off and running toward another potential egg-finding spot.

Just a nice little girl in the sunshine.

Lily and Henry worked as a team to find eggs in the rock retaining wall under the deck.

Lily walks the pine tree balance beam in her search for Easter eggs.

Henry had a grand time. He certainly didn't need to be told twice what we were doing!

Spring Break Wraps Up

To celebrate Spring Break, we took a trip to the Grand Rapids Public Museum, which has a temporary exhibit about dinosaurs. The museum was having a special on family memberships, and for just $20 more than we were gonna have to pay to get in one time, we got a one-year membership. Woo-hoo!

Along with our brand-new membership, we got some coupons to ride the carousel. Needless to say, everyone wanted to do that immediately!

Check out that long-legged Lily! Too much taller and her toes will be dragging. And do you think Henry enjoyed his ride?

The dinosaur exhibit was entirely geared toward kids, and our kids had a ball! Lily and Gregory dug through a bin full of dry rice to expose dinosaur bones. At right, Henry is checking out one of about a dozen animatronic dinosaurs that were all over the exhibit. That one is a life-sized Albertasaurus.

There were also lots of crafts and activities for kids, all dinosaur-themed. A favorite for both kids was a kirugami project - cutting and folding paper to make a dinosaur that could stand up. Gregory started out standing to cut his out, and quickly abandoned that idea and sat down under the table to finish up (of course, right??). And as you can see, Henry lost interest somewhere along the way.

Timmmm-berrrrrrrr!

There have been eight very tall, dead red pines lurking near our house for quite some time now. We have been meaning to get around to cutting them down so that they didn't fall down on the house ... but somehow hadn't gotten to it yet. Then one day, Gregory was telling this fantastical story about seeing a tree fall down outside his window during one of his afternoon naps. It seemed like ... just a funny thing to say, maybe? But as he described in ever-greater detail what it looked like crashing through the other trees in the forest and then springing back a little as it hit the ground, it started to be a little alarming. HAD he actually seen a tree go down? I took a look outside, and there was indeed a recently-fallen, dead red pine tree at the edge of the forest, right where he could see it from his bedroom window.


ALARM! Time to get the other dead trees cut down!!!! So, Grandpa spent an astonishingly short time with his chainsaw, and all the trees were safely down. It was amazing to feel the impact as those seemingly-spindly trees hit the ground. It would have been incredibly bad if one had fallen on the house.











Here's a little video clip of one tree going down into the forest.

Spring Break

It's spring break and Ray took the whole week off. So what are we doing with our large chunk of time together? Nothing, and it's AWESOME. No trip (no packing, driving, parking, flying, jet-lag, or $1200 worth of plane tickets). No home improvement project. No massive landscaping event. We're just hanging out! I took the older kids to a movie yesterday (Monsters vs. Aliens - cute, but has some of the same cruder humor that the Shrek movies have). We've started reading Harry Potter all together in the evenings.

Henry the Tidy: Probably the least well-known of the kings by that name, Henry the Tidy likes to keep a damp wash cloth on his high chair tray during meals so he can wipe his hands and face often.

All that tidiness (and a double ear infection, snotty cold, two teeth cutting, and a grimy cough) wears Henry out, and he has to crash now and again.

Our cute little guy saw Daddy wearing this camo hat today, and got all excited and started telling us (in Henry-ese) that Daddy was wearing "Papa hat! Papa hat!" Then HENRY wanted to wear the "papa hat".

Wiiiiiii! We're having so much fun! Spring break has included a fair bit of Wii play time. Happily (as we only have one nunchuck controller so far) the kids think it's lots of fun to watch each other play Wii Sports. And cute little "Me Too" sat up there and drummed while Lily played Guitar Hero.





And, because we had so much time... we did some pretty labor-intensive Easter eggs! During the boys' afternoon naps today, Lily and I made an absurdly large pile of stickers out of blue painter's tape and freezer paper. Then this evening, we stuck those painter's tape shapes onto hard-boiled eggs before dyeing them. The tape "mostly" kept the dye from getting on the eggs, so we "sort of" had white shapes where the stickers had been. There was some bleed-through at the edges, but the eggs still turned out bright and cheery! Gregory could not resist making a goofy face for the picture on the left. We tried. And on the right you can see Lily applying some of our tape stickers to one of her eggs. This really was a very fun project and great for the kids. And look what a fun, happy Easter egg collection we have now. Doesn't it make you want to come over to our house and have an Easter egg hunt?