Painting with friends

Today we had a nice afternoon catching up with some friends that we haven't seen in a while.  And the kids (well, the girls, at least) created some artwork a la Jackson Pollock.  Lovely way to spend an almost-summer afternoon.

This one is my favorite:

Yarn Along

Yarn Along with Ginny @ small things

I finished J's summer top that I spoke of last week!  Well, almost.  I finished the knitting.  Now I just need to sew up the sides and weave in the ends.  I'll get that done today or tomorrow.  Pictures to follow.  I'm still working on the Baby Surprise Jacket along with a bunch of other ladies in this knit along.  It was going along fairly quickly but then I got to a part in the pattern that I just couldn't figure out and had to wait a few days for further instructions.  I kind of lost my momentum, but hopefully now that I think I know what I'm doing I will get back into it.

I tend to get bored with knitting projects pretty quickly.  So I've found that if I have a bunch of different things to work on at the same time I actually do much better.  I can just switch to a different project  when I start getting tired of one.  So I am also working on a Five Hour Baby Sweater with Patons Classic Wool in winter white.  I know this will take me way, way longer than five hours.  But that's okay.  I still have at least two months before baby comes.  And I doubt baby will be needing it for a least two months after that.  I have time.

We are still really enjoying The Little White Horse.  I'm also still reading Simplicity Parenting.  Great book!  And we are reading some character development stories out of Everyday Graces ed. by Karen Santorum and The Children's Book of Virtues ed. by William Bennet.  My kids have been rather restless lately and common courtesy is a bit lacking around here.  I find that reading stories about other kids behaving or misbehaving helps get my own kids back on track much better than me harping on them and nagging at them. And it's much more fun for me.

Peaceful Morning

It's 8:00 and the kids are all still sound asleep after a very busy day yesterday.  And I don't think they will wake anytime soon.  We had an early morning and a late night with a lot stuffed into the middle.  It's days like this that I'm so glad we don't send our kids to school.  I love that we can let them sleep in on a Tuesday and catch up on some much needed rest.  I also LOVE that it gives me a couple of unexpected (and also much needed) hours of solitude.  Ahhhh.

Weekend

We spent this past weekend picking strawberries (30 lbs!) and making jam.  I think I was able to make almost enough to last us the year.  When I count the blackberry jam that I'll make later this summer, we should have more than enough to support my kids' pbj habit.

While the kids and I were making jam, my husband was in the city at the final interview and tryouts for Jeopardy.  So sometime in the next 18 months he may (or may not) get called to be on the show.  Whether he gets the call or not, at least he didn't leave empty handed.  He won the mock game at the tryout and won the Wii Jeopardy game.

She can pump!

T can pump herself on the swings!  M taught her.  I feel happy for her and proud of her, and also a little guilty.  My older two kids didn't learn how to pump on the swings until they were seven, or eight even.  They didn't need to know how.  I was always there pushing them when they needed it.  C, my third child, learned a little younger.  She was maybe five years old.  I just assumed that she was just keeping up with her older siblings.  Maybe that is what it was.  Or maybe it's that I just didn't spend much time with her out on the swings.  Maybe she learned because she had to.  After all,  I was busy with T by then.  And now, my little just-turned-three-year-old T has been so neglected in the swing pushing, that she has had to learn to pump for herself already.  She seems happy enough, though.

National Colonial Farm trip

Yesterday we braved the rainy weather and headed over to the National Colonial Farm.  They were having a "green" homeschool day.  There the kids learned a little about recycling, planting native trees, grasses, and flowers, and worm composting. 

J and C weaving coasters out of "plarn" (strips of old plastics bags.)

C getting as close as she dares to the worm colony.  Believe it or not there are about 4,000 red wigglers in there!

Unfortunately, the sky opened up before we were able to get to the far end of the farm.  That's the one place they all wanted to go.  At the far end are some old mulberry trees that they remember climbing and harvesting berries from.  Since we just planted a mulberry tree in our backyard, they were very excited to go see these old trees again to help them imagine what our tree might look like someday.  I could be wrong, but I don't think the mulberries are quite ready yet.  So maybe it is just as well that we didn't see them yesterday.  We will plan to go back sometime in the next couple of weeks (maybe with Daddy) on a sunny day to really explore the farm again and visit those wonderful old mulberry trees.

Yarn Along

Yarn Along with Ginny @ small things

I'm still working on the Baby Surprise Jacket and I think it's coming along pretty well.  I am worried that I've made some fatal error somewhere along the way and I won't discover it until I'm trying to fold up the finished product.  But for now I'm taking Elizabeth's Zimmermann's words to heart:  "Knit, and keep calm."

I'm also trying to finish up a little summer top for J that has been kind of a thorn in my side.  The very first garment that I ever knitted was this exact pattern for T a couple of years ago.  When I started it, I promised all the girls that I would make them one.  Big mistake!  The pattern is not that interesting and I've gotten so bored with it.  The first one wasn't too bad...it was very small and fairly quick.  C's took a lot longer and J's is taking forever!  Not because it's so hard or even that big.  It's mainly that I am so tired of working on it that I rarely do.  If I don't finish up soon, though, J will be too big for it and C will have two.  So, I've promised myself to work on this little summer top every day until it's finished.

I'm reading The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge as a read-aloud to the kids.  Sometime last year I saw a preview for a movie that is supposed to be based on this book.  I thought the kids would want to see it and I wanted them to read the book first.  J received it for Christmas, but the print is a little small and it's just a bit above her reading level.  She wasn't interested.  M could probably read it to himself easily.  He still likes to listen to me read, though.  We are only a few chapters in and already I have to stop myself from reading ahead on my own.

Commiting to this house

 When we moved in here we thought that we would be here about two years.  Definitely no more than five.  Well, SEVEN years later we are still here and have no plans to move.  That's not to say we wouldn't love to move somewhere else.  It's just that we have to stay where Ray's job is and our house isn't worth what we paid for it.  So it really doesn't make sense for us to move.  The problem with thinking that you are only going to be in a house temporarily is that it makes it very hard to really invest in that house.  There are so many projects that I would have done six or seven years ago if I had known we would be here this long.  I look into my tiny backyard with no shade and no privacy and think, "If only I had planted a few trees when we first moved in..."  Well, I don't want to be here in five years thinking, "If only I had planted something even five years ago."  So this past weekend we planted a privacy hedge and two trees.  This is what our privacy hedge should look like in five years:



This is what it looks like now:

If we are still here in five years, I'll be so thankful that we didn't put off committing to this house any longer.  If we move before I see this row of sticks turn into a real hedge, then we still had fun putting it in and imagining what our yard could look like. Either way we win.















 

As I said, we also planted a couple of trees.  A mulberry tree that actually looks like a little tree already.

And a Royal Empress tree that is actually just a tiny stub of a stick protruding from the ground, barely distinguishable from the mulch.  I have high hopes for this tree as it is reported to grow up to 18 feet per year.  We shall see....