Juliet - who loves to have her face painted! She chose the fire butterfly and then posed for her shots.
The girls down at the brook - throwing sticks in the waterfall to see them go over
False Hellebore shoots - the leaves are perfectly accordion-pleated as they appear.
One of Dad's girls on an alder catkin. They collect pollen from them, and other wind-pollinated plants at this season when there aren't many flowers out.
I am taking a couple of minutes to update with more than just a few pictures. Life is busy here, as always. I don't know what we would do if there was nothing to do! LOL... that sounds funny. Johann is running through the kitchen calling for me to be his potty buddy so the crabs won't get him... He calls spiders crabs. While he was on the potty he chattered away, telling me that if I found a crab on my bed I should call him so he could kill it with his foot.
Phil is sleeping - he has a migraine. He had the tummy bug that has been going through the house yesterday, poor guy. Glady started the parade a week ago, and it has been working it's way through us all. So I'll let him get some rest - it's a quiet day, no shows, so he can take a little time to recover.
Dad's off training to become a census mapper. He went straight to Laconia from Concord, where he was drawing blood at the nursing home. He lost a full time job, but would up with 4 part-time ones! He actually likes it, though, because he has more time at home during the day to work on the garden and his bees and the like. He and the kids were able to tap our maples and make syrup this spring - the first time in the almost 20 years we've been here that we have bothered to do this! We ended up with a couple of gallons. The kids loved it, too.
The girls have gone off to school. Glady is excited because the Lego Robot enrichment program is afterschool today. She is in the gifted programs, so a few times a year she gets to be part of special programs like this one. Juliet is in occupational therapy. She has a form of kinestethia that means she doesn't balance well, or write easily (we were afraid it was dyslexia, but testing ruled that out.), and feels like she has to move all the time to keep track of her place in the world. That's why she is such a wiggle worm. Pippa started her very first chapter book last week - a Pony-crazed Princess book her Aunt Pam had given her. She told me she wasn't going to read chapter books until she was in third grade and I said no daughter of mine was going to wait that long - and once I showed her the book she realized that she could do it! Her teacher sent home a note a couple of days later saying that Pippa is now "an excited little reader".
I took them down to the brook on Tuesday looking for frog eggs. We didn't find any, so we'll try again next week. We did catch a bunch of tiny dragonfly larvae and caddis fly larvae and some snails to put in the little aquarium. I had moved all the fish to Dad's big aquarium, so we can keep pond critters in there without them all being eaten.
It's 8am and I need to finish up my morning routine. I've been really blessed recently by being able to download podcasts of Marla the FlyLady and Dave Ramsey to my iPod. It certainly helps the dishes become less of a chore when I have something to listen to! They have inspired me to try a little harder to keep my house and get even better than I had been. In almost twelve years of marriage and ten of kids you would think that I would be further along than I am. I have a shiny sink 6 nights out of 7 - and Phil helps a lot, there. My bed is made every day - but the laundry lives on the couch more than I would like (Phil calls it Mount Washing-done). I rarely can look around and not see something that needs to be done. Somedays it overwhelms me, and I think I just can't do it all. I hate that I get sick all the time, and have to take naps almost every day. I don't know if I really was stronger before, or if that's just what I remember, but I certainly feel like my body can't take what it used to. I get so tired.
Johann has decided to make a finger puppet by himself, so I am off to rescue the carpet from glue!
