It might be just a sneak peek of spring.

How we have missed our Barefoot Prancing...

....Fairy House Building....

 ...Digging in the Dirt Sciencing....

 ...and Tire Swinging.

We are eating up this little burst of spring because we know it might only last a day or two before another snow or freezing temps hit again. 

Watching the Days Go By

At times, as any mom will tell you, being at home day in and day out with the little creatures becomes monotonous, repetitive.  The minutes and hours of these days tend to blend into each other.  I walk around the house listlessly, picking up a toy I just put away, sweeping the floor that was clean a minute ago, folding clothes just to find them in a messed-up pile on someone's floor.  I have learned by now its much easier not to get upset about these things, as they will all reoccur again tomorrow; I just trudged through doing these routines over and over.  I engage in kids games for 3 and 5 year olds, create with play dough and paint, read ABC books ad nauseum.  Occasionally, I run into another adult for a brief 5-minute conversation in between picking up and dropping off older kids.  Those brief moments leave my mind unstated in all of the grand things in the world I want to do and conquer, if it were not for these little ones I love so much. The sameness of each day can become a heavy blanket mixed with the weight of boredom and love and I just can get trapped in this mind set of blah. Blah.  Blah.  Blah.   Luckily, there are other moms out there who can do a pretty good job of giving me a virtual slap across the face to get me back to reality and stop moping when I read about their stories and what they do.

Today, my slap-across-the-face was brought to me by Anna Maria Horner, a mom of 6, fabric designer, and, based on her blog, a down-to-earth person.  I was moved by her recent post about her oldest daughter leaving after what I presumed was the winter break to go back to school.   I was near tears as I could feel the emptiness of her daughter not being there any more, not only grown up, but now gone again after time they got to spend together. Sigh.  One day, my little babes will be headed out that door.  And I won't have to worry about picking up toys or folding clothes (well, at least until they come home for a break I guess...or start bringing their own children around...).

These creatures, they do grow up.  They do stop play dough and games.  They learn to drive and don't get picked up and dropped off any more.  Even worse, they do leave and come back only for visits.  The moments of drudgery and repetition can be what my day is about or they can just be minor little fillers of days filled with my kids, watching them grow and learn, playing and painting beside them.  My moments that before seemed to drag on forever now had a very definite limit to them, counted and limited.  I felt the odd sensation of not having enough time, not enough days to get in all the ABCs and picking up of little toys before they were all gone.  Sometimes, a change in perspective is all that is needed to change the attitude towards those monotonous, repetitive actions. I was certainly thankful for my change in perspective and found a little smile as I picked up the blocks from the floor for the 10th time today...I do not know if I will ever get to smiling about the folded-now-unfolded clothes on the floor...that might take a little more time and a lot more perspective changing....

Christmas Baking

Having the kids actually at home the week before Christmas this year was fun because we got to throw aside the schoolbooks for a little while and focus on the real important stuff, namely, baking lots and lots of Christmas yums. 



We all love baking.  Smoosh was busy reading his model railroad magazines, so he didn't want to have too much to do with the baking - only the tasting.  Squeakers really stepped up this year and helped with adding ingredients.  She only put her finger in the batter twice this time.  She loves baking.  Beans got to make a full go of getting her own pan of bark going.  We only burned 2 batches of cookies and attempted a new recipe for peppermint bark and chocolate bark.  Maybe next year we will have it down for actually sharing our goodies with others?  We do love baking, though we are not quite so fond of the cleaning up.

Maybe we can entice Daddy to do it if we offer some cookies?  We'll just scrape off the burned parts.

The Tree

Who doesn't love their Christmas tree?  Each year, everyone we know has such fun traditions of getting the tree, when they get their tree, how it is decorated, and so on.  We don't typically have any tradition that would lock us into a timeframe...it might be said that I am bad with being on time or doing anything in a timely fashion...but our one big tradition is to rotate who puts the star on each year.  Squeaks was finally old enough to get her turn in the rotation. 


After the star is on, the decorating begins.  This year, the ornaments suffered more casualties than ever before.  I have learned to expect this each year and try not to get too attached to anything I don't want to see shattered on the carpet.  I also try to get only softie ornaments that will survive the harshness of eager holiday hands.  At the beginning of the season, I couldn't quite figure out why all the ornaments were taking such a beating....

...it certainly wasn't from the dogs.  After the "Huck you be the X-mas tree and wear this skirt" incident, both dogs preferred be as far away from the tree as possible...Huck didn't seem to mind too much and I think I even heard Callie asking if she, too, could pretty please have a X-mas skirt blanket.  But once it belonged to the tree, they had nothing more to do with it.




In time, I started to notice that other creatures were lurking around the tree who might be responsible for the ornament destruction.  In fact, our tree took on a whole new life to these creatures.  They started simply with building little reading nooks, complete with a pillow and a pile of books near the tree.  After all, Christmas tree lights are superb for reading up on squids and model railroads.  It then increased to two little cave-like areas for the creatures now with blankets, stuffed animals, and more pillows to make their quarters comfortable.  Soon the books needed a place to stay, so the limbs became bookshelves with magazines and books shoved in amongst the ornaments.  This wasn't enough, though.  While reading, of course one needs to have their numerous stuffed squids nearby and so the tree became an unusual habitat for several stuffed squids.  Not to be outdone, a few stuffed kittens were added as well.  Needless to say, the tree just had enough of this not-being-treated-like-a-tree business and fell over as the ornament gods called a few more ornaments back home.  I only discovered the book-shelf and stuffed-animal-humane-society functions of the tree once it had fallen over.   Much to-do was made over trees being trees and not bookcases....trees not being suitable for stuffed animals once inside, though perhaps living animals outside while still planted.  The pine needles and chunks of ornaments made happy-rattling noises once the vacuum cleaner sucked them up.  I think I actually heard the tree release a sigh of relief once the lights and ornaments had been removed at the end of the season and it was placed back outside.  It was safer out there than it was in here.  Next year, I am just putting lights on the tree and perhaps a perimeter of some sort to keep the little creatures away.

Merry Making

Ok, ok, so the holidays are done, but at least I am in the same season with my blogging now!  There is hope that I will catch up!

We all love that day after Thanksgiving when we get to pull up the boxes from storage and rediscover the Christmas decorations that have been sleeping for the year.  The whole house lights up for the month with Christmas and winter poured out everywhere.

Christmas becomes more fun each year as there are more little ones to share it with and the older ones appreciate the joys of decorating.  Everyone participated in bringing the decorations out of the box this year!  Not only that, but Beans actually stayed interested for more than 20 minutes and helped decorate the entire house.  Sadly, Otter is growing out of the magical Christmas age and while he enjoys the ambiance in the house, he is much happier be in the background doing something else...quite like his father.

Fresnel who?!?!

We found an online thing on how to make a solar oven to bake cookies outside.  Otter got the directions for it and eagerly started cutting the box up.  Then he came to the part of a "fresnel lens."  What!?!?  I had no clue what this was and found online that has oh so many uses, first used in lighthouses.  It is a magnifier as well, apparently quite popular with the far-sighted elderly population for reading.  We had quite a bit of fun when it arrived in the mail.  Not only is it good for lighting the path for sea vessels, magnifying large-print books, and making cookies outside, but, man oh man can it make some already goofy faces even goofier.

Yes, Otter did get the solar oven made with the lens.  But he didn't make cookies, he made a melted cheesey-delciousness ham concoction of some sort.  And we thanked Augustin-Jean Fresnel for making that technology possible.

Devil's Lake

I was happy with my decision to keep the kids home from school the minute I made it.  I knew there would be grief about it and I knew several people would not understand.  I also knew that there would be struggles and learning, give and take that had to occur from all of us.  But, sometimes you just got to go out on a limb and do what you feel is best for your group.  After a long summer of adventures with our neighbors, school season returned for everyone and we faced the task of learning how we were going to learn.  I was still not set on how our days would be working, but I did know I wanted to take advantage of learning on the go and being outside.  The first week of "school," Joe took the day off and we all headed up to Devil's Lake to do some lessons, have some fun, and enjoy being a family as we began this homeschooling thing together.  (This post is picture heavy - I had a hard time deciding which ones to post, so they all made it!!!).

...adventure buddies assigned.

Adventure bags ready....

Walking sticks are an essential tool of adventuring.

Collecting weather data at the bottom of the hill. 

Lunch at the top...

...cannot beat the view.

Looks like the adventure buddies needed  to get reassigned.

Sharing lunch with some Daddy-long-legs.

Add collecting weather data at the top of the hill.

Can you see the toad on the moss?  He was a very patient amphibian and endured some good-natured poking and prodding.

Where's Squeaks?!??!

Baby cutie pie.

Baby snapping turtle cutie pie.

They followed mussel trails and grabbed some mussels out of the water!

What's not to love about this?

There are cons to this homeschooling thing.  So, maybe Smoosh won't ever learn how to sit in a seat for extended periods of time.  And Otter will have to suffer through not having a locker or being around his flocks of adoring female fans all day long.  Squeaks might not even know what the inside of a classroom ever looks like.  And Beans, well, who knows what she will miss out on as she is so happy wherever.  We have (and will have) days where nothing gets done and there is yelling and clouds in the house that make the grass look so much greener over there at the brick school.  There are definitely things my kids will not be learning here at home that I don't have the capability or resources to teach them.   On the flipside, the pros, so far, have outweighed those cons and what I can teach them and give them now I hope will make an impact that has far greater outcomes, not just for their brains, but for their hearts and souls.