Family Schooling Summary: Hiking on a windy spring day

Some homeschool friends of ours live near Lake Linganore.  We visited the Y family's home this week and they took us on a beautiful hike.  The kids especially liked climbing on the rocks and sending things down the little creek that fed into a bigger inlet.

My Dash: Week 14

I have been working on gathering photos and stories for my grandma's 90th birthday in a couple weeks.  She is on the left in this picture- Central Park 1945, "Fishing for sailors" she said.

 Goomie and I at my dad's childhood home in NJ I think.

Goomie often took us on outings to see local sights and sometime took us on longer road trips with her too.  Here are some pages from my childhood scrapbook:

I never met my Grandpa Paul (Goomie's husband), but she told me about how he worked with the cavalry in WWII and we both loved horses.  Goomie went out of her way to take me to see horse related shows and events. 

Farm Fresh: Garden Update -- Onions, Carrots, Rhubarb, Asparagus, Peas, and Radishes

The weather this week was alternately rainy and cloudy. Perfect for planting early spring veggie starts and seeds.  I put down bone meal through out my beds.  Then I planted these rows with mixed onions and carrots.

 The cabbage and cauliflower plants are progressing nicely.  I planted some African Marigolds around between them, but they seem sensitive to the cold (40s). A couple plants died.

 In one corner I planted Argenteuil Asparagus and the Rhubarb.

 Growing rhubarb from seed has been easier than from roots (so far).

 This is my amazing spinach patch that overwintered.

 The land in the front yard is much rockier than the back for some reason. Maybe it was all rocky fill dirt when the house was built. I am going to try to build up the soil with straw bale gardens and hope that in a couple years it will be built up enough  to plant in directly.   The best sun is in the front and we will try to extend out from the existing landscaping over time.

 My original strawberry plants have multiplied and are doing great in the front landscaping.

 I finally figured out what these beautiful flowers are - Hellebores. Some varieties are poisonous, but they are great because they grow fast early in the Spring.

 The ground cover of Periwinkle is growing like crazy and looking beautiful.

 I am still not sure what these ornamental bushes are, but they are starting to get their spring blossoms too.

Family Schooling Summary: Jumping on the Bed and Cake Decorating

This is a funny bedhead picture of L eating her cereal. 

Here she is 2 days after a big face bruising fall off the bed. Since we got our new mattress, we keep having to "remind" the kiddos that no monkeys are allowed to jump on the bed. 

Chicks first day outside. Shortly after this picture was taken it started to rain and we had to take them in. It's important to get them out early and start teaching them to forage. As soon as the thermometer says 60F or more we need to take them out for practicing on the grass. Next weekend we can move them outside completely.

 We got a new friendly rooster this week -- I hope he stays friendly! He is from a neighbor who had a about 15 extra roosters.  If all goes well we can hatch some chicks this summer.

 Here is a little cake that A made in her cake decorating class at co-op school.

Pajama Day at Brewster's Ice Cream

You know the spring season has officially begun when all the ice cream stores start re-opening or having parties for their customers.  Everyone who wore their pjs to our local Brewster's on Saturday got a free waffle cone with 2 huge scoops of ice cream.   Yes! We went at lunch time so everyone was hungry.

Farm Fresh: Garden Fence and Chicks Growing

 This week I finally got the garden all fenced.  7 ft T-posts and 6 foot fencing will discourage the deer and buried chicken wire will hopefully deter the groundhogs. I also need to keep my own livestock out, but they are not too hard to deter.  It is still a temporary fix because we plan to triple the garden's size over the next couple years.

 Chicken wire still needs to be buried on the frontside and wrapped up on the inside. A couple of home chipped piles of mulch are awaiting spreading.

 Hubby has been working on getting the woodpile under control.  He took this week off from his real job to work for me at home. He chipped tons of smaller sticks and stacked and split several piles of larger logs.

 He used the new tractor rake to work on clearing a path to some wood behind the barn.

 Here are a few of the stacked logs waiting for our future need or for people from the ward who are looking for some firewood.

 He borrowed a splitter from our friends and started loading up the next log shack.  We are thinking that each full log shack might be enough for one winter... We will have to see how that goes. In any case, we have plenty of wood for a long time.

  I have been carrying plants outside to get acclimated (the second time for the cabbages).  I planted some under row covers about 3 weeks ago. But then the temperature last week was down in the 20's and killed 3 of the 8 plants. I have a bunch of replacements ready.

 On Saturday, I replanted my cilantro outside in the herb bed and a row of leeks along side there. I planted a couple other rows of leek starts mixed with beets in the main garden (per recommendation in the book Carrots Love Tomatoes).

 Big bunches of daffodils are blooming in the herb bed and other parts of the landscaping - so pretty!

Everyone says meat chickens grow incredibly fast. I guess you need to see it to believe it.  I use the red bulbs in their heat lamps to keep them calmer. 

 Look at them! They are a little over 2 weeks old and already have half their feathers in.  They are supposed to be able to go outside no later than 4 weeks old.  Most chicks can go out after about 6 weeks.  We can already tell that there are quite a few feisty roosters mixed in here.  That is normal since it is a straight run.  They are generally a lot lazier than the layer chicks - very quiet and sleeping a lot-- which make sense since they are growing so fast. Now that weather is finally getting warmer we can bring them outside for short spurts.  The books recommend that they start going outside no later than 25 days old in order to become the good foragers that the Red Ranger variety is known for being.  We will plan to keep 3 of the hens and try to breed some meat chicks of our own next year.

  Garden goodies under the grow light inside - tomatoes, zinnias, and marigolds are visible here. I have so many plants that I have turned off the timer and just been rotating through my plant sets around the clock 8-10 hours per set.

My Dash: Week 13

My post last week about playing with friends reminded me of some funny games that we made up as kids. One was called "Zero zero".  To play it one person was it and stood on the front porch (also the "jail") and counted to "one o'clock, two o'clock... etc until midnight and then said loudly "midnight zero zero" which meant that they were coming to catch everyone hiding in the yard and try to put them in jail.  The bushes by the mailbox were usually "safe" and everyone tried to get there before getting caught.  Human chains from the "safe" out towards whoever was running towards it were allowed.  Tagging people out of jail was allowed. I can mostly picture us playing this game at dusk on summer nights.

We also had a game that we called "chicken" which was played either on ours and our neighbor's swing sets. The person who was "it" had to close their eyes and try to catch everyone else. Only the person who was it was allowed to let go of the swing set. Everyone else had to be touching the swing set at all times.

On those same two nearby swing sets we also played "berry wars".  Which involved gathering whatever "berries" were on the trees and bushes that season in our sand pails and then throwing them at each other. Usually a girls team  on one swing set and a boys team on the other.

For one summer, I think I was about 11 that year, my mom babysat a girl named Erica and I think a couple of the neighbors.  We played a game called "Bead store" together every day that year.  It involved everyone bringing their favorite beads and buttons. We each set up our own tiny shops. Then we traded each other for what seemed like hours.

We had a series of kiddie pools in our backyard.  I remember the first one was large, but only about 2-3 feet deep.  After awhile we upgraded to a 3-4 foot deep pool that fit on a similar footprint. Marco polo in such a small pool was perfect. We played that and dolphin divers a lot (jumping and diving in the water trying to look like dolphins obviously!).

There was a huge sprawling wooden castle style playground called St Mary's park that had tons of steps, bridges, cubbies and monkey bars.  We loved go there and play a similar kind of tag where you had to always be touching the playground.

I think the best game that we played as kids was one that my brother P and I played a lot, especially on long car rides.  We called it the "what-if" game.   We each tried to think of fun or hard "what-if" question to ask each other.  P was really good at thinking of hard questions and we would talk through the pluses and minuses of each situation...  For example, "What if the car plunged off this bridge, what would you do?" or "What if you found a wallet full of money at the rest stop, what would you do?" and on and on.  Good situations and bad ones, we talked through what we hoped we could do, what would likely happen then, and how we would react to each result. Like a game of life. I still like talking to P about those kind of scenarios.  He is good at pointing out all the angles and really getting into a good exploration of all the possibilities with me, except now the scenarios are a lot more realistic.