Baby Micah is 10 months!

Yesterday he marked the milestone...

(This is especially for Granny Cheryl and Ari...so glad to know that you're reading! :) )


I'm still a bit yucky, but much better. I can easily swallow fudgesicles and fruitsicles and other cold goodies. I even tried a hot baked potato for lunch. Maybe by tomorrow, I'll be back to normal?

My parents have the kids :)

and I have strep throat. :(

The habenero chips didn't work. But the pencillin is finally beginning to kick in. And I've ODed on enough Motrin in the past two days, that I should never have to feel pain again.

Now, as long as I don't cough, yawn, talk, move my head the wrong way, close my eyes, swallow or breathe, I feel fine. ;)

Hopefully I'll be up and running by the beginning of next week.

Sore Throat Remedy

My dear, sweet husband, who was very concerned about my sore throat, brought home some Comtrex (miracle medicine!), popsicles and these chips:

He swears they will burn the soreness right out of my throat.

They at least numbed it so that I could swallow comfortably for the first time in days. Who knew? :)

Growing a Garden

Yesterday evening we broke ground on CG's garden. Our tomoato seedlings are developing nicely (I think, nothing has happened yet), so we thought it best to prepare the soil for other seeds. We'll be planting cucumbers and carrots, too. We also have high hopes for a tiny pumpkin patch and a few canteloupe. CG and her daddy dug into and turned over the topsoil and then added some generic fertilizer. We honestly don't know exactly what we're doing :) but we sure are having a lot of family fun in the process.

Easter Picts: Beautiful Girls

Taken in front of the church:

Taken after church with their cousin, Elizabeth:

CG's garden: the beginning

On this day, CG thought it best to begin her garden. Sensing that she'd want to do this very thing, I read up on what we needed to buy and do before we planted her veggies. Santa (thank goodness for him!) had given her a garden bucket with gardening tools at Christmas and brought her a copy of Grow Your Own Pizza.

Last night we went to Lowes and bought seeds of her choice: tomato (she says she hates these but she's kind enough to grow them for me :), cucumber, pumpkin, canteloupe and carrot. An ambitious, if not a bit intimidating, list, don't you think? But really, how hard is it to put a seed in the ground and watch a pumpkin grow? For generations people have been growing their own fruits and vegetables...so it can't be hard, can it?

Since this morning we were blessed with a bright and warm sunshine, we went ahead and planted the tomoato seeds. You have to plant them in their own container (we chose an egg carton) to let the seeds adjust to the air temp and grow a bit. Then you plant the seedlings in the ground.

So this will give us a bit of time to prepare the ground for our garden. Matt will be helping CG in the evenings to plant, weed, water and harvest her bounty. He doesn't know anything either...but we figure as long as we stay one step ahead of her, we should be fine. :)

Here are some more pictures from this morning:

Happy Spring!

Spring Magic

by CM Barker

The World is very old;

But year by year

It groweth new again

When buds appear.

The World is very old,

And sometimes sad;

But when the daisies come

The World is glad.

The World is very old;

But every Spring

It groweth young again,

And fairies sing.

You would think it is Christmas with all the excitement in our home today. My kids have been waiting for the day ever since winter began. They are delighted that spring has officially sprung!We began celebrating the day by copying this poem into our comp books. And soon we are headed out to an Easter egg hunt.

Then we will do what CG (who colored the above fairy, by the way) has been waiting for since the end of last year: buying seeds to plant a tomato, cucumber and carrot veggie garden and seeds for a whole field of sunflowers! I don't have a single green thumb so this should be quite interesting. :)

Happy St. Patty's Day!

Whatcha doing today?

We are...

listening to some streaming Irish music and drinking minty green hot chocolate. Last night, I tinted the milk green so when the kids had cereal this morning, they were a bit surprised. I will say, though, that cheerios floating in green milk don't look all the appetizing. But we salvaged it by warming it up, stirring in some hot chocolate mix and flavoring it with peppermint extract. I had planned on making shamrock shakes, but didn't have any vanilla icecream in the freezer (and I'm not one to load up 4 active kids and go to the store for icecream--even if it is for a tasty treat :) ).

The girls also copied an Irish Blessing in the their books and learned to draw shamrocks.

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face.
And rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

And that's the prayer for all of our friends today! :)

What you can accomplish without a computer...

• Reading: I have about 7 books on my reading shelf...I read a little bit out of all of them.
• Housework: Matthew wanted me to mention this--he's so excited by the clean floors!
• Friendship: I called a few friends and had a real, non-email conversation with them.
• Reading with the kids: We read a lot more of the Burgess Bird Book for Children. We read mostly in the evenings which is typically the time of day I'm working on design projects.
• Bird Watching: You can't read a book like that and not start observing the birds flitting around your yard! Besides in some of our readings, we discovered that the hummingbird weighs less than a penny. And did you know that they can fly backwards and upside-down at the same time?
• Organization: Okay, I really didn't do much of this...but it would have been a good idea. ;)
• Cooking: I made tried and true family favorites since I didn't have inspiration from allrecipes.com. Which means we had tacos, spaghetti and take-out pizza.
• Bedtime: I got to take my time tucking each child into bed. That's always a treat for them and me, but sometimes I rush through it so that I can start on a project. This week I was able to laugh and sing and simply enjoy my girls as they prepared to drift into dreamland.
• Bible Study: I started a new Kay Arthur study on the book of Acts. I'm really going to enjoy this one.

And now my computer is fixed. A local place took it apart, cleaned out the sand (yes you read that right)--I suppose it's one of the things we deal with when living in the country. I thought they'd brush away cookie bit or crumbs from a chicken nugget. Nope, it was sand. I'm not even going to think about how it made it's way there.

So now I'm back online. But I'm still going to enjoy my newfound simple (nondigital) life. :)

Dear Friends, if you need me

call me.

My computer died. :(

Hopefully it will have a new life by next week.

Our Family Flag

Even though we've also begun a family bird study, CG and I have been studying Besty Ross together. Today we read about the time Betsy took her best friend down the wharf and looked at all the flags on the docked ships. CG and I discussed how a flag is representative of a country or a state with a rich meaning. We talked about the history behind our own American flag and our state's flag, too.


Then I had CG design a flag for our family. We talked about how any elements she chose needed to have some meaning. Here's what she came up with:


Green because we live in the country surrounded by lots of green trees. Blue because all of the kids' eyes are blue. The cross because we love God. There are 6 flowers because we love nature and each flower represents each member of our family.


Just for fun we digitized it. CG morphed herself into a bossy art director :) and tweaked it a tad by adding flowery rainbow-colored stars ( which she meticulously showed me where to place them) and switching the blue and green border around:

She really liked the designing part of creating a flag. She could have easily just drawn a picture of something she'd like to see on a flag, but she took the time to carefully think through the use of visual graphics and color. Not too bad for an 8-year-old!

All I can say is...

Yuuummmyyy!

We started our bird study today

We have decorative black iron colums holding up the roof over our front porch. Don't these bird feeders make an exeptonal accessory? You know you have a housefull of girls when you use a purple ribbon to tie a birdfeeder to a post. These feeders are made from an old water bottle. I picked up the feeder part at a homeschool convention years ago.

We also placed seed inside a clay tray an laid it out on a stool. The seed is an assortment of sunflower seed, finch food and dried fruits. According to the package we should attract every backyard songbird created by God. But with our lazy dog napping on the porch and aimless wandering around, I just hope to see a bird.

We also began reading the Burgess Bird Book for Children. I just love how Thornton Burgess weaves science into his personified creatures. Tomorrow we will do a bit of research on the bird anatomy and read a few more Burgess stories.

Our Sunday

Today, these darlings:

collected nature (moss, leaves, bark) while hiking the trails at:

Then they came home and eagerly viewed the moss through our field microscope,

then added a few drawings of the moss to their nature journals.

My nature lovers are excited that spring is coming. Tomorrow we will begin a study of birds. We'll put out our bird feeders and dust off our identification guides. Look for some colorful pictures of our backyard birds soon!