Three Plus Two

A Simple Life?

A recent thread on the 4Real Boards has prompted me to think about "simplicity" and "simple" homeschooling.  Not "easy" homeschooling, but homeschooling that is simple, rich, and beautiful.  I sat down on Saturday and started to write.

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Here I am on a Saturday morning. It's after 9 AM and I am just now sitting down with breakfast: 2 fried eggs (fresh from the hen yesterday), a piece of toast, coffee.  I don't usually drink coffee, but I have had a cold all week, compounded by allergies and asthma, and Chipmunk woke up at 6:30 this morning and needed to be held.  So I held him and caught up on some blogs and boards (since the twins were still asleep), except I didn't have my glasses on and was apparently too lazy to go get them, so then my eyes started to hurt.  I'm hoping the extra dose of caffeine will help.  Really, though, I am a coffee weenie, and what I am drinking is half coffee, half light cream, with a generous amount of sugar. I don't normally like to start off my day with so much sugar, but when I came out with Chipmunk this morning and "had my hands full", as people like to say, there was a box of Fig Newtons on top of the microwave, so I ate two of them.  Do Fig Newtons count as First Breakfast?

Anyway, I meant to get up earlier because Andy and Gareth got up around 5:30 to go camping with Scouts. Andy was in New York City yesterday, for the second time this week, and to spend a little time with him I decided that we would go pick up all the last minute camping stuff at Wal-Mart and then meet him in town for dinner on his way home from the train station.  He got to Wal-Mart before we were done, and we split up to pick up supplies. I took the cart full of small children -- Chipmunk in the front seat, Pip and Pop in the cart's bucket.  (What do you call that part of the cart? The "cart" part? The buggy? The bucket? A dilemma.)  I then proceeded to whisk down the aisles picking up granola bars, juice, Cheddar Bunnies, bread, and bananas, trying to squeeze all this stuff in around two three year olds playing STRONG MAN! GRR! AND THE X-MEN in the bucket (or buggy) or whatever of the cart.  You should know that what STRONG MAN AND THE X-MEN really means is LET'S PUNCH EACH OTHER AND YELL REALLY LOUD.  It wasn't until we got home that I noticed I'd picked up 2 bottles of "Cherry Burst" juice instead of White Grape Cherry.  Cherry Burst proudly proclaims that it is "20% juice!"  The other 80% is water, high fructose corn syrup, and Red #40.  This is not exactly what I want STRONG MAN AND THE X-MEN to drink. 

In the interval between buying Cherry Burst and discovering that it was, in fact, Cherry Burst, we went to eat at Arby's.  We also dropped sandwiches on the floor at Arby's, screamed and stole our brother's sandwich at Arby's, yelled loudly whenever a truck passed by Arby's, and spilled a full cup of rootbeer all over the booth at Arby's. "Have a nice night!" the cashier yelled as we walked out the door, and I'm glad I had my hands full of toddler and couldn't turn around because I'm pretty sure he was smirking when he said it.  

So today, Saturday.  After starting this post this morning, I took a long break before picking it up again.  I broke up a squabble about a snorkel that Farmerboy lifted from his sister's room, and which he wanted to wear as part of his Digimon gear.

I took care of my seedlings, which are mostly holding up, although the watermelons are dying off one by one.  I was surprised to see Andy back home, but he said he came to help me out and Gareth was fine, so we spent a couple of hours attempting to make the house look less like it had been ransacked by a pack of thieves, and while we worked we had a discussion about how we were both aggravated by our inability to pare down various obligations so that the life we actually want to live -- chickens, garden, animals, and all -- wouldn't be so incredibly hard.  Andy mopped all the floors with a tea-tree spray I made yesterday; I cleared some clutter; Katydid did Gareth's kitchen chores; and the boys threw dirt at each other outside.

We decided to order a pizza for lunch and call it a cleaning expense.  Andy went to pick it up, and I went outside with the boys, who were by now finding Eastern tent caterpillars and dropping them into my freezer containers.  Farmerboy directed the twins to find crabapple and oak leaves for them to eat.  We walked over to the crabapple tree, which was loosing its petals like rain in every gust of wind.  "Winter!" Pip called out happily.  "Butterflies!"  The ground was pink with blossoms.  We stepped on them like a carpet and breathed in their perfume. 

At lunch we talked about mushrooms and discovered that Pip's caterpillar was different than the other boys', and possibly a Black Swallowtail caterpillar.  After we were done eating, we all headed back outside.  While I cleaned up the table, Andy cleaned out the back of the chicken coop while holding Chipmunk.  When Chipmunk finally got down, he ran back and forth by the new fence shouting, "Buck! Buck! Buck!"  The kids all picked up chickens while I admonished them not to hold them up to thier faces because a chicken pecked Farmerboy in the eye the other day, resulting in a trip to the doctor and eye drops for a scratched conjunctivum.  Then I attempted to sneak away to thin radishes, but Chipmunk found me out.  We all worked in the garden as best we could, until Farmerboy saw a delivery truck pull into the driveway.

"Our piano!"

We've been thinking about a piano for a long time. When we were in Tennessee Katydid spent hours playing my mother's piano, and Andy started secretly searching for one in earnest.  But everything he could find was too expensive.  I gave him the advice I had once heard given by a mother of 10 in our homeschool group: "You decide what you need, and then you pray." Two weeks ago one of Andy's coworkers was driving down a back road near her house and saw a sign for a FREE PIANO.  She thought of us, stopped her car, and went in to talk to the owners.  It seems that they were trying to clear out the house of their elderly parent.  The piano had not been played in three years, and they wanted it to go to a home where it would be played and enjoyed.  Well, we fit that bill.  We paid for the piano movers, but that was it.  And now we have a piano.

After the piano movers left, the kids messed around on the piano for a while (rules will have to be made about how to take turns, do not bang on the keys when your sister is trying to play, do not drop the keyboard cover on your brother's hands, etc., etc.), then I read a few picture books to the little boys (including a Magic School Bus book for Farmerboy), Katydid went back to her room to read, Andy went back outside to mow grass for an hour, and I put the little ones down for a nap. Chipmunk didn't lie down for long, and I was back where I began this post: reading on the computer and holding him while he slept.

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So.  Do I have a "simple" life?  Hmm.  Some of the accoutrements are there: the fresh eggs, the garden, the chickens, the crabapple.  But you can stop laughing now, because no, I don't think my life is very simple.  It's actually pretty darn complicated.  But as I was writing all this down and thinking about it, I began to ask myself the question, "Are my kids' lives simple?"

I think the answer is yes.  For starters, their parents are still married and enjoy each other's company.  For another thing, they do not have to deal with all the weird situations you hear about from people whose kids go to school.  (I'm not talking about academics; I'm talking about "socialization".  This has been particularly driven home to me lately whenever I hear about what other 12 and 13 year olds have to deal with.)  Starting from that base, what about the way we "school"?

To be honest, I just winced when I wrote that word, "school".  It's inadequate for the way my kids live their lives.  I've written before that my kids only think of the sit down work we do -- math, spelling, diagramming sentences -- as "schoolwork".  The rest of it -- reading books, drawing pictures, making volcanoes, collecting caterpillars -- is not "school".  It's life.  Without time to do those things, their lives would be diminished.  And I'm sure they would rebel.  In fact, they do rebel -- if "schoolwork" starts to crowd out what to them are the more meaningful pieces of their world. 

But they are not the kind of kids who, as a rule, will want to do math problems on their own.  And one of my kids would spend a lot of time setting up Lego armies and then wonder where all the time went, because there were other things he wanted to do, too, and now he's frustrated.  So I make some requirements.  Sometimes it's hard to resist just focusing on the basics. For the sake of "simplicity".  But that path only leads to burnout.  Because it's the rest of it -- the walks in the crabapple blossoms, the chickens, the garden, the piano, the sitting at a table on a Sunday morning and trying to build a ship out of a milk jug to go along with the Magic School Bus book you heard yesterday -- it's all that stuff that makes learning real.  Actually, that's not right.  It doesn't "make" learning real, because the learning is real already.  It's the way humans are built.  We were made to learn.

But it takes work on a parent's part to keep it that way. It takes a certain resistance to what everyone else is doing, in order to figure out what is best for your family.  It takes a certain courage, to ignore all the naysayers, and to fight one's own fears of failing one's children in various ways.  It takes a certain humility, to realize one's limitations -- and not to obsess over them.  And it takes a certain sense of humor, to realize that when your three year olds are playing X-Men in the cart at Wal-Mart and you come home with Cherry Burst instead of juice, it's not the end of the world.   

What I have come to believe is that "a simple life" is not really a destination, but a constant road one is always walking.  If I can keep my kids from some of the snares along the way in order to keep their childhoods "simple", then I'll be happy.

Was it a very good year?

Well, I think 2008 was a pretty good year, in any case.  We had some lingering medical problems above and beyond the typical viruses which were a little difficult to deal with, but other than that... we had the biggest garden we've ever had, we raised chickens for the first time, and we made the most progress school-wise I believe we've ever made.  The thing about life is that it's not really like a box of chocolates.  It's not like reaching in and pulling out a piece filled with coconut and you hate coconut, so you make a face and nibble away the chocolate on the outside and pop the offending coconuttish center in the trash can.  Life is more like... a garden.  It's a big, wild garden, tangled with weeds and hollyhocks and thistles in the hedgerow and the first tiny white blossoms of strawberries.  It's slogging through the muck of a thaw in December and freezing the tips of your fingers to pull leeks from the icy mud... but it's also resting in that moment between sunset and dusk as you stand to crack your back and watching the pink-rimmed silhouette of a pair of geese winging their way over the ridge.   

And so, yes, I would say that we had a pretty good year... not a perfect year, and sometimes things got tough, but the tough wasn't as tough as we've seen it before, and mostly we kept our heads above water.  And sometimes, life was even downright beautiful.  

A quick check of the archives reveals that I don't often do retrospective posts, probably because I generally lack the time to retrospect properly.  But this year I thought I would try to do better.  And you know what?  It's been helpful.  Because as I cruise back through my archives in search of posts to add to this retrospective, I realize the truth of what I wrote above.  There were some tough moments last year, but -- there were wild apple blossoms, too.  And the apple blossoms made me smile.

 

In January of 2008, we started off with a resolution to eat local and we made our first trip to a winter farmer's market.  As the year progressed, I kept meaning to post and update of our progress, but I never got around to it.  So how did we do last year?  Well, I think of goals like this as a spiral path.  Sometimes you go forward, and then there's an obstacle in the path so you loop back around, appearing as if you're going backwards, but then you finish that loop and come out ahead of where you started.  I think that probably most people are like this -- I mean, in the real world and not in the books you read about people who decided not to eat anything outside a 100 or 200 or 50 mile radius.  After all, we have 6 kids, and sometimes they're not on the same page as we are about eating turnips, say.  So when we started out we stopped buying bananas (for instance), but then we realized that our kids survive on fruit, so we added bananas back in.  But I recently realized that I've bought no grocery store meat for over a year, and I have a pantry full of our own potatoes and onions, local squash, turnips (yes, turnips), and sweet potatoes which will last us a while, and in the freezer we're still eating corn and beans from our garden.  So it's progress. 

February brought an early Lent, and Gareth made a King Cake for Mardi Gras all by himself.  We also celebrated Chinese New Year and participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count.  Then we packed for almost a month away from home, where we visited family in Tennessee.  Driving 2000 miles with 6 kids (3 under 3) is -- needless to say -- an adventure, but we were glad we made the effort... and more so now.  When we stopped in northeastern Ohio to see my aunt and uncle, we did not know that my uncle would pass away within a matter of months.  Being able to see the kids brought him a lot of joy, and I am grateful that we were able -- so simply -- to provide him that comfort at the end of his life.

We returned home to an early Easter, with patchy snow.  We tapped our maple trees again, started a mushroom kit, and I answered some questions about our "Choice Time".  Choice Time has continued to evolve at our house so that it now looks a little different than it did when I wrote about it in March, but that's to be expected as the kids grow and our lives change.  (And I'm not sure I've understood this until just recently, having searched so often for the "perfect" solution.  More likely, the solution is whatever works at this moment in time.)

In April, I had fun using my camera to capture all the small things, in a photography project initiated by Jennifer at the S/V Mari-hal-o-jen.  We ate the mushrooms we started in March (and they were yummy) and joyfully put many hours into planting onions, potatoes, spinach, and peas.  Farmerboy turned five and got glasses, which were just what he needed to conquer stairs and pedaling bikes.

May was a tough month.  Katydid turned 9 (and helped make her own Strawberry Heaven Cake, but she also got strep, and a headache that still hasn't gone away completely.  She suffered through tests for Lyme Disease, leukemia, and mono, which were all (fortunately) negative.  She sailed serenely through an MRI, which (fortunately) showed nothing abnormal.  She submitted to neurological medications which turned out to be worse than nothing at all.  Special tinted lenses in her glasses and vision therapy have helped more than anything else, but she is still enduring patiently and hoping the headache goes away on its own.  Katydid's trials are what I remember most about May, but a cruise through my archives reveals that May was the month we brought tadpoles home, the month we had a snake in my bedroom (how could I forget that???), and the month that the Baltimore orioles came to roost in the wild apple trees. 

June brought with it strawberry picking, fishing, and the packing away of the old school year (along with a discussion of file crate organization).  And -- how could I forget? -- June is when the chickens came!  (I have to tell you, though, I flinched a little looking at the picture of Katydid's rabbit... poor Zita, who was killed by raccoons.)

July is the month the garden finally starts to produce more than spinach and greens.  It's also the month the kids play summer soccer and hunt for crawdads down at the creek.  I did a litte more planning than usual this July... and I also started having problems with asthma.  July was a busy, tough month.  Our biggest accomplishment, I think, was finishing the chicken coop/tractor so that we could finally get the chickens out of the laundry room!

August... what I remember from August is wheezing.  But I did make a discovery.  And we went to the Syracuse Zoo.  And Chipmunk turned one!  (We also watched the Summer Olympics in Beijing, but I didn't really post about that much...)

September was our vacation month.  We took a trip to the North Country and the Adirondack Museum, the Wild Center, and Fort Ticonderoga.  When we got home, it was back to school... sort of. 

October is a big birthday month -- Pip and Pop turned three, and Gareth turned twelve (and made his own birthday cake, too.).  Fall foliage was spectacular this year, but we also got a big snow before Halloween.

November brought a few birding adventures, marshmellow constructions, and our very first eggs! Grandma and Grandpa visited for Thanksgiving. 

And then, to wrap up the year, December -- clay creations, an ice storm, and a white Christmas!

Shew.  Actually, 2008 was quite a year after all.

Major East Coast Ice Storm

... knocks out power to hundreds of thousands, strands father of six in Baltimore.  Arrives home just in time to avert milk emergency.

In other words, we're okay. Our power is still on, thanks to the fact that we were behind the snow line for much of the day yesterday and did not get the accumulations of ice that places like Albany did. (Were you watching Mike Seidel and that leaning telephone pole in East Greenbush this morning on The Weather Channel?)  The boys did insist on sleeping with flashlights last night just in case, and I don't think Pip has let go of his all day today.  And Andy finally did make it home, after two days of traveling home from California.

  

 

 

 

Around the House Thanksgiving Notes

Yesterday it was 65 degrees.  And we were under a tornado watch.  We ran around frantically all afternoon, stacking firewood by the house and cleaning up the yard.  Today it is 30-something-really-cold-feels-like-you-wouldn't-want-to-be-outside-windy degrees and it is supposed to snow most of the week.  And into next week.  (Hi, Grandma and Grandpa!  Aren't you excited about coming to visit?)

Since I'm having a hard time getting going today, and I certainly can't be counted on to actually organize my thoughts in any way that makes sense, I thought I would just set down some random, house-related tidbits today as we get ready for Thanksgiving.... and try to stay warm.

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I'm making chicken stock today.  If you had told me a few years ago that I would totally give up canned broth I would have laughed.  Our resolution to eat locally this year has gone better in some months and worse in others, but overall we are eating much more locally than ever before.  The one thing we have gone totally local on is meat.  I don't buy any meat from large chain stores anymore.  On the one hand, it takes a little more effort and time to work with what you've got in your freezer as opposed to heading out to the store to buy exactly what the easy recipe calls for (I know no chickens entirely composed of drumsticks, for instance).  On the other hand... I've generally always got something to make for dinner.

Anyway, it turns out that chicken stock is pretty easy.  All the chickens I buy are whole chickens, so usually I roast them in the oven.  After dinner, I take the rest of the meat off the bones to use in casseroles, etc. during the week, and I stick the carcass in the freezer.  I use two carcasses to make stock.  I fill a big stockpot up about 2/3 with water, then throw in whatever vegetables I happen to have around -- carrots, celery, onions, and kale today -- and the chicken bones. I season it with salt and pepper. I skim off any gunk that rises to the surface, but I find that with the roasted chicken carcasses I don't have to skim as much as if I use a whole, uncooked chicken.   Then I simmer it for a few hours.  When it's done, I let it cool for a little while, until I can strain it without splashing myself with boiling stock.  I usually try to put it in the refrigerator for a while so it's easier to skim off the fat.  Then I pack it in freezer containers and freeze it until I need it.  (I know that some people use ice cube trays for this, but I'm usually making recipes in large quantities anyway.  So freezing the broth in pints and quarts is not a big deal.) 

I find that paying an arm and a leg for local, humanely raised chicken encourages frugal practices such as making my own stock. ;-)  Next year we've decided to raise our own meat chickens (although we're too chicken *cough* to do the slaughtering ourselves and will probably take them to a local meat packer). 

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I'm also baking pumpkins today.  Back in July, it appeared that we were not going to get pumpkins due to cucumber beetles.  But somehow we ended up with 6 pie pumpkins.  We've been storing them on the front porch, but I don't want them to freeze solid.  Before I cook them, I mean -- once they've been baked, I'll scoop the flesh out of the shell, pack it into freezer containers, and freeze it.  Some I'm not going to freeze because I'm going to make pumpkin bread this week and freeze that, or at least as much of it as I can rescue from the starving hordes who inhabit my house.  The last time I made pumpkin bread I think I used this recipe, but I tripled it.  You'll notice that it calls for three cups of sugar.  I did not use nine cups of sugar for my pumpkin bread.  Instead I used 4 cups (total, while tripling the other ingredients) and the 5 or 6ish cups of pumpkin that I had.  I also used yogurt in place of the oil.  And it was so yummy I told my kids (and the other kids to whom I fed it) that it was cake.  (Tripling the recipe resulted in two 13x9 pans, by the way.)

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Getting some stuff out of the freezer is going to be necessary, too, though.  When we bought the freezer, the salesperson tried to talk us out of it because it was so big.  At that point, I was merely pregnant with twins; we really had no clue what life in a large family would be like yet.  But am I ever glad that Andy didn't listen to that salesperson.  Our freezer is so stuffed right now that we had to make room in the small freezer upstairs (the one attached to the refrigerator).  If I wasn't feeling so lazy, I would go downstairs and take a picture of it.  We've got a side of beef (and that cow must have been huge), 8 chickens, about maybe a little less than half a lamb, and most of the corn, green beans, peaches, squash, and berries we froze this past summer.  (To clear out some of the squash, I'm going to make yellow squash muffins.  My kids prefer squash muffins to blackberry muffins; go figure.  They are really good, though. )

I think we are going to have to put a turkey in there for a couple of days.  This is a new experience for us: going to a farm to buy a fresh turkey.  We're supposed to pick it up Monday, but I'm not sure... will fresh turkey keep in the refrigerator until Thursday? 

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Katydid and I picked up some yarn at Wal-Mart yesterday with the idea in mind that we would make a yarn wreath for Thanksgiving.  Yarn wreaths are probably one of the only real crafts I can make.  A mom came to my fifth grade classroom at Christmastime and showed us how.  As you might imagine, they are really easy.  I made one for Gareth when he was five or six... at that time he could count the wraps, but he didn't have enough fine motor control to actually do the wrapping.  I have no idea where that wreath ended up, though; we moved, and so it could be anywhere.  I keep trying to do another one with the kids -- or get the kids to do one themselves -- butI never seem to be able to sit down and do it. 

I also keep telling myself, this is the year I will learn to crochet, this is the year I will learn to knit, and we've seen how that goes.  But maybe this year...

 

First Day of Spring

Winter Break: 2000 miles and home

And... we're back!

(Warning: long post ahead!)

We got in last night around 11 PM after 14 or 15 hours on the road (plus 8 the day before), and we're spending a very groggy Palm Sunday trying to reorient ourselves.  Now, theoretically the drive from my mom and dad's house should take 16 or 17 hours, but this does not count for bored 4 year olds who say they have to go the bathroom every 45 minutes just so they can get out of the car. Or for lines at Old Country Buffet that wrap around those little golden poles and out the door when you have already gotten everybody's coat, shoes, and socks back on and unbuckled them from their car seats.  (Andy calls that restaurant "Old Crusty Buffet".  Do you know how hard it is not to just call it that as if "Old Crusty" was its real name???)  Actually, our dinner at Old Crusty Old Country was quite interesting in spite of the fact that it took an hour and a half to complete; we ended up in the back room, which was full of large families.  (Ok, so there were three families.  The room was full anyway.)  The family at the table next to ours also had six children, whom Pip kept entertained by brandishing his fork and saying, "I dot a knife!!"  Fortunately, when you encounter another mother of six out in the wide world, it is easy in such a situation to trade commiserating glances (both of you trying not to laugh) while you remove the weapon from your two year old's hand. 

This was a much better experience than the McDonald's where a man asked, upon seeing Pip and Pop, which one was "the mean one."  Apparently, he had a cousin who was a twin who came from a family of eleven kids.  Apparently, this cousin was also very easygoing until crossed, when he'd fight everybody.  Apparently, this cousin is now in prison. 

ANYway...

Now that we're home, I can put up a few pictures.  We took many, many pictures -- most of them from the beginning of the trip, when we were all well.  Unfortunately, we spent most of the time at my mom and dad's recovering from a fairly wicked cold.  Also unfortunately, Andy came down with this cold while he was flying cross-country on business.  By the time he was done traveling, he'd developed serious infections in both ears.  Several years ago, he flew with an ear infection and allowed it to get out of hand when he returned home, resulting in a mild hearing loss and a case of tinnitis, which has abated, but never really disappeared.  We didn't want any more damage done to that ear, so off he went to urgent care right away.  He spent a couple days on the couch, but thankfully, the antibiotics seem to be working now.  We didn't get to meet our friends as we had hoped, which was quite disappointing, but I suspect that this trip won't be our last.  Grandmas and Grandpas have that effect.

And now for our trip in pictures:

Remember the lunar eclipse in February?  We took a break from last minute packing to stand out on the deck in our pajamas in the cold and watch the moon turn red.  The next morning we were on our way.

Trying to get 6 kids to pose for a picture when they've just been running around the basement with their cousins is tough.  On the way to Tennessee, we stopped in northeastern Ohio and visited my dad's family.  Here we are with my Grandpa, who is 92 and still as spry as ever.  As it happened, however, our visit turned out to be fortuitous for a sad reason: my uncle (whose house was our gathering place) was recently diagnosed with lung cancer.  He really enjoyed seeing the kids, and I was glad that we were able to give him some happiness in what may become his last months.

While we were in Ohio, we made a quick trip to Lehman's in Amish country.  I bought some big wooden spoons.  The store is gigantic and amazing, full of even more interesting, non-electric, and "hard to find" merchandise than their catalog, but Pop was in the grips of an extended meltdown and we didn't have enough time to do it justice.  Still, it was an interesting side trip.

Then it was on to Memphis to see Andy's family.

The weather for the week was mostly good, and we enjoyed the opportunity to spend a spring day at the zoo.  The Memphis Zoo has an aviary where you can walk with the birds... otherwise known as "heaven" if you happen to be named Katydid.  I got no pictures of Katydid looking at birds because she immediately confiscated my camera for her own purposes.  I now have about 100 pictures of unidentified birds on my camera.  (She doesn't know what kind of bird this is either.  But it's pretty.)

The Memphis Zoo also has two pandas, which were on Farmerboy's list of animals-to-see.  I'm not sure if this is the male or female panda:

On our list of things to do while in the Memphis area was a visit to the Strawberry Plains Audubon Center in northern Mississippi.  In the fall, this bird and wildlife refuge is a waystation for thousands of migrating ruby-throated hummingbirds.  Since it was late winter, nothing much was going on, except for the daffodils (which I enjoyed.) 

There are advantages to being the only visitors to a wildlife refuge, however.  One of the naturalists invited the kids to watch as she fed their corn snakes and cleaned out the cage of their red-shouldered hawk.

Toward the end of our week, Uncle Rob took us to a Go Fish Guys concert at his church.  Pop looks a little confused, but really, their music's pretty good.

Then it was on to visit my family, where we all came down with colds.  Apparently, we also brought a little snow with us: after we left Memphis, they received 7 inches of snow, but at my parents' house, all we got was a dusting:

Katydid, of course, made the best of our 2 week quarantine with many short forays into the woods on warm days.  (My parents live on a wooded 3 acre lot out in the country.  Our old treehouse has long since fallen down, but the woods are still much the way I remember them, and like Katydid, I used to spend a lot of time back there, climbing trees and scrambling over rocks.)

Katydid made one very interesting discovery: a screech owl nesting in a hollow tree.

He let us come quite close.

Last but not least... Chipmunk hit a few milestones while we were gone.  He's *this* close to sitting independently (just a little wobbly), and for all intents and purposes, I'm classifying him as mobile.  He can roll nearly the length of a room, likes being on his tummy to play, can wiggle himself around in a complete circle... and I am holding my breath, waiting for him to crawl. 

Can you say, "yikes!"?  Yeah, me too.

More Busy Birding

Well, the Great Backyard Bird Count ended yesterday, and it was another busy birding day for us!  One of the highlights of the day: watching three crows run off a Northern Harrier at the edge of our field.  When I checked the New York state tally, I discovered that (at the time) only 49 had been seen across the state.  That was kind of nifty.

In the afternoon (as the temperature was dropping into the 30's, reminding us that it's still February LOL), Katydid filled the feeder by her window with black oil sunflower seeds, hiked off into the woods for a little nature walk, and when she came back, her feeder had been mobbed by finches.  She, of course, grabbed the camera:

 

The goldfinches look a little bright to me for this time of year.  (At least the male we saw on the clothesline did.  We're not sure if the birds pictured here are female or male.  Any guesses?)  The other birds at the feeder are house finches.  At one time, there were nine goldfinches at this feeder.

By the end of the weekend, my four year old was also getting into the act of bird counting.  He was so excited he even interrupted his brother's nap (not a good idea) to tell me he'd seen three chickadees and a white-breasted nuthatch. 

Counting this year was a lot of fun.  We're back to Project Feederwatch now and looking forward to counting birds in Grandpa's backyard soon.  We're also looking at e-bird, which we dropped the ball on last year.  With e-bird you can enter bird counts for anywhere you happen to be, all year round.  Just the thing for our little birder.

Weekend Bird Notes

It's a long President's Day weekend for us, and mostly this weekend has been all about nature.  Frankly, many of our days revolve around what's going on in the backyard, but this weekend the natural world has really taken center stage.  For one thing, the robins are back.  In three winters this is the earliest I've seen them.  We saw nine on Valentine's Day, and yesterday, Katydid counted twenty-three eating the old crabapples from the tree in the sideyard.  I have a feeling there were more like thirty or forty, but twenty-three was the best count we could get.  They even came up to the house and ate from the seed block, which they usually do not do, but we had quite a bit of snow and ice cover yesterday, and the ground is frozen.  I guess they'll take what they can get.

This weekend also happens to be the Great Backyard Bird Count.  Last night Katydid and I entered our count of the day (it was a busy counting day, happily) and spent some time fiddling with the data.  The robin map seems to confirm my unscientific observation that the robins are back earlier this year.  If you go back through earlier years, you'll see that the big flocks of robins appear mainly in the South.  But this year New Yorkers and New Englanders are reporting groups of 15 or more.  Do they know something we don't know?  Or is it just that with all the ice we've had lately, the food sources they use deep in the woods are inaccessible?

According to Mr. G, the naturalist at the arboretum who leads all the activities in which the kids participate (most recently, a Winter Ecology walk on Saturday), robins don't actually leave these cold places.  Instead they mass together in large flocks in the woods and only come out in the spring.  Apparently there are reports from Green Co., New York (in the Catskills, I believe) of a flock of 5,000 robins.  How they counted them, I have no idea. 

Here's the list from our busy bird count day:

• 23 robins
• 4 downy woodpeckers (2 male, 2 female)
• 1 red-bellied woodpecker
• 1 pilleated woodpecker (!)
• 4 chickadees
• 2 white-throated sparrows
• 4 juncos
• 4 starlings
• 1 white-breasted nuthatch
• 2 crows

We saw the pilleated woodpecker by chance, just as we were pulling into the driveway after Mass.  Andy saw something big and black flap through the woods.  We have a lot of crows around here, but this black thing was streaked with white.  Then it clung to a tree and showed its red head.  I didn't have my camera with me, but last year I did.  I wonder if it's the same bird?

Our usual cast of birds has been much smaller and more reliable.  We don't have too many feeders, and the only ones that are routinely visited in the winter are the seed block and a suet feeder which hangs over it.  Both are in the warmest, snow-free corner of our L-shaped house, which also happens to be right outside our large dining room window.  I recently bought a hanging feeder for black oil sunflower seeds on a tip from Dawn, but we haven't had a chance to hang it yet.  I set it out on the patio table anyway.  The chickadees and squirrels have found it, but it is my dearest wish to attract a cardinal. 

Here's a chickadee, one of our steadfast winter companions:

Photo credit: Katydid

We also see a pair of downy woodpeckers at the suet feeder:

Photo credit: Katydid

This morning it's 50 degrees and half our snow melted overnight.  The squirrels have taken over the seed block:

I suppose I am also feeding the mice, but you know... if the mice have food to eat outside, maybe they won't feel the need to come inside.

And besides, I like juncos, which are primarily ground-feeding birds :

 

Photo credit: Katydid

Icy February

Yesterday on our way to Mass, it was 40 degrees and raining.  The creeks were roaring with snowmelt, spilling over into the fields.  The Mohawk had risen up the very lip of its banks, and chunks of ice bobbed in its waters like shattered bits of raft.  The sky hung low, graphite-gray rubbed here and there with misty white.  It felt like Ash Wednesday -- March-like, somber, but with the promise of spring... eventually.

Then the temperature dropped, and this morning it is February again.

The squirrels have begun frequenting our feeders once again; their stores have run low and it is not so cold that foraging would prove dangerous.  The juncos are growing more numerous, and the chickadees are frequent visitors -- more of them than last year.  The pair of downy woodpeckers that visit our suet didn't venture out in bitter January.

There is spring in February, too.  But it's more subtle than a roaring creek.  You have to look hard, but out in the orchard, andy says our apple trees are beginning to grow buds.

A few random thoughts on being a snowbird

Is it still Monday?  Did Monday ever really end?  I can't tell.  Andy was out of town last night, and I think my sleep qualified as a series of naps.  When Gareth was born my mother-in-law told me that they used to torture prisoners of war by waking them up repeatedly through the night, just after they'd fallen asleep.

Um, yeah.

Anyway, I think it's supposed to be Tuesday.  In the dark of early morning, I turned on the Weather Channel and discovered that it's supposed to rain today.  Well, after the freezing rain.  But rain, at the end of January.  Strange.  We're supposed to go snowshoeing this weekend with our Little Flowers/Blue Knights group, but it doesn't look like the "Rain/Snow/Wind" coming on the heels of this Freezing Rain Advisory will put down enough snow for it.  Last year there wasn't enough snow either.  The 10 day forecasts are starting to inch closer toward the time when we will leave for our long trip to Tennessee.  A few thoughts have begun to plague me.  What if we get a snowstorm like the one we did last Valentine's Day when we're gone?  We won't be able to pull the van back into the driveway when we get home.  We won't be able to get into the garage to get the snowblower out.  What if...

The kids want to know what if the sap starts running; will we be able to make maple syrup before we leave for Tennessee?  Judging from the temperatures predicted in the next week or so... I'm not sure.  But we just received a postcard in the mail notifying us that one of the local saphouses will be hosting pancake breakfasts again, starting this weekend.  Last year our syrup didn't turn out too well because we didn't boil it long enough.  And the smoke from the outdoor fire made it taste... smoky.  If we do have the chance to make some this year, we'll be able to boil it on the woodstove.  That may prove stickier, but at least we'll be able to keep an eye on it more.

The trip has snuck up on us, and I really have to get going on the planning.  We're going to be gone for a little over three weeks (but, beware any Internet strangers who want to come take our Legos!  Andy will be popping back in for some work responsibilities mid-trip.  I guess when he does that he can dig a path to the snowblower.)  Taking this many kids on a trip this long is... well, daunting to say the least.  (Some would say insane, but I prefer to be optimistic.)  We made this trip two years ago when the twins were about the same age as Chipmunk.  Up till then, we had taken them out to places other than the doctor's office maybe... say... three times.  (No, really, I'm serious.  After they were born I thought I would probably be stuck in the house forever.)  We went to visit my mom and dad first, a drive of 16-18 hours, which we accomplished in two days.  The trip down was okay.  The trip back, from Andy's mom and dad's, was more like 20 hours (or more), and by the end of it we had a couple of sick kids on our hands.  Mostly what I remember about the return trip was being unable to find a hotel on the other side of Cleveland, and finally finding one with a huge jacuzzi tub out in the middle of the room.  Since various kids were sick and there was no pool, we let the kids play in the huge jacuzzi tub... and ended up with water all over the carpet.

I'm hoping to avoid that hotel this time.

So, things I need to do this week? 

• Make a "trip planner" -- "trip planner" being my fancy name for a place to write enormous lists of stuff to bring and do before we go.
• Order "surprises" to keep the kids busy on the way there and back.  (We put all the "surprises" in a bag and let the kids choose one per day in the car.  Usually they are things like coloring or sticker books, novels, travel craft kits or games, etc.  One time I bought the kids Silly Putty.  Not such a good thing, really.)
• Decide on seeds to buy.  Order seeds by next week.
• Start making "travel school" plans.  We can't afford to take three weeks off, so we'll be bringing books with us. 
• Have a trailer hitch installed on the van so we can get one of those luggage carriers that attaches to the back.
• Find one of those luggage carriers that attaches to the back of the van.

We're not actually leaving until the end of February, but things like trips planned well in advance have a way of sneaking up on me.  If I write this stuff down now... there may be slight chance that I will avoid paying rush delivery charges for surprises which I will undoubtedly have to order online (being out here in the bookdocks and all).